Postby Mongrel » Tue Jan 02, 2024 3:47 am
So this new years had me wondering: Why the fuck is New Years NOW? Why is the first of January the first day of the year and why does that day fall on some midwinter day that seemingly has no clear connection to any historical Christian or even Pagan observance? Why not on a far more sensible date, like an equinox or solstice, which many non-western world cultures do in fact use to celebrate a new year? Was this a Julian Calendar thing? A pre-Julian thing? A Lunar thing?
Turns out the answer is kind of wild and also kind of absurd.
So, the oldest Roman calendar we have records of was purportedly lunar. But they had holidays and civil functions which were supposed to be fixed to solar astronomical events, so they needed a solar calendar. The "Roman Calendar" (as the pre-Julian calendar was called) was ten months. That fits with the normal Roman use of base-10 math and is why the later months still bear latin numeric names (September, October, November, December). Notably that calendar did still have the new year come in with spring, with March, named for Mars. However, it also treated winter as a sort of blob of days which was not assigned to any month and almost didn't really count as part of the year. It was just... Winter. This calendar ended up shifting around a lot and was at times suspended or had a bunch of extra rando days added in to shift things back into alignment. Months were often abrogated or extended and could be very informal. The eight day market-cycle week was the much more important datekeeping period.
After a while, the Romans figured they needed something a bit more practical. During the reign of Numa Pompilius, who was Romulus successor as the second king of Rome, the Romans decided to make two more proper months out of the winterblob and did so by adding two months to the previous beginning of the year. January was named for Janus, the two-faced god who was often the deity of beginnings and endings and cycles.
I have no idea why they were added to the beginning and not the end, though one theory states that they originally were added to the end (as winterblob had been), but Numa decided to move them so that Janus (a peaceful god) would be preeminent over Mars in the calendar. Whatever the reason, records of the era of the seven kings of Rome (and before it) are fanciful legends or speculation as often as not, but we can reliably date the twelve-month calendar introduction to that time, however it actually came about. Maybe they stole it from the Etruscans like they did a bunch of other shit.
So yeah that's why we still celebrate new year's on an essentially random-ass midwinter day.
Does this feel dumb to you? Cos it feels dumb as fuck to me, but at least it's in a silly mostly-harmless way.
Oh, and that was also still pre-Julian reform, which is its own funny story. The Roman Calendar of the Republic still had a handful of random intercalary days to even things out, partially because leap years and partially because the Romans were really superstitious about even numbers being bad, so they didn't have the months line up quite perfectly. It was the job of the Primate (Chief priest of the Roman state religion), to announce intercalary days and for most of the Republic's history this was done more or less properly. Critically, if he did not announce such days personally, they didn't happen.
Sometimes the Primate was away or being replaced. Later there were the late Republican civil wars which got in the way. More importantly, by the late Republic, the position was increasingly politicized (though it was never apolitical) and was often a post simultaneously held by a Consul. Because they had the freedom to remove - or add - intercalary days, nominally to even out dating, they increasingly did so to lengthen they and their allies' terms of office or curtail their political enemies' terms of office. Some years saw the calendar off by as much as an entire season. So ole Caesar asked some brains of the time for a solution. They offered the stable Egyptian calendar as an example and it was agreed to put an end to all the time-traveling shenanigans with a fully-fixed calendar of 365.25 days (which eventually needed adjustment with the Gregorian reform, by which time the calendar was again several weeks off date). Conveniently, ol' Julie's repair job meant that 45BC, his third year as Consul, was 445 days long. How about that.
Oh and don't even ask how the Romans numbered and counted the days of the month, geez.