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November, the eleventh month of the year, is actually named after the Latin word for the number nine, and is not unique in this sense. September, October and December are named respectively from the Roman numerals seven, eight and 10. July and August were called Quintilis and Sextilis, which means fifth and sixth month, before they were renamed Julius Caesar and his heir, Augustus. So why are these names all two months out of place?
There are two theories. The first would have us believe that there were only 10 months in the Roman calendar. At one point, when they supposedly changed it to 12, the Romans added January and February to the beginning of the year, which pushed the other 10 months and their names off course. The second would have you believe that there were always 12 months, but the first of the year was March 1st and the last month of the year was February. But over the course of many decades and centuries, through a series of bureaucratic and political changes, the New Year holidays simply went back in the calendar until January 1st.
Amelia Carolina Sparavigna is a physicist at the Polytechnic of Turin in Italy and has conducted archaeoastronomical studies to trace the precise moon phases of the calendars of ancient Rome. It is firmly in the range of 10 months. Interestingly, according to this theory, the 10 months were no longer: the Romans simply didn’t bother marking or measuring the days in what we now call January and February because there was little or no agriculture and calendars in those months. that time they were mainly developed for farmers. “After a break in the winter, the year started with Marius,” he told LiveScience.
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But the Romans were a notoriously organized group, so why would they introduce two new months and then just ignore the fact that many of their other named months no longer made sense? Well, the answer might be that naming conventions were a bit of a political quagmire back then: many people in power struggled to rename months to glorify their origins. Emperor Caligula, for example, tried to change September to “Germanic” in honor of his father, Sparavigna said. Even the emperor Domitian tried and tried to transform October into Domitian.
But none of this went very well with the Roman public, who as it turned out were quite conservative and didn’t take well to change for the sake of change. “These name changes apparently lasted for a very short time,” Sparavigna said. This aversion to change makes sense – after all, many of us today still resist changes in the way we measure things; the metric system is far from universal – and could partly explain why the authorities did not change the naming system when they introduced January and February.
Not everyone buys that fiction, though.
“Personally, I think it’s weird to invent a calendar in the first place that only leaves out two months and has an interval that no one has bothered to name,” said Peter Heslin, professor in the department of classics and ancient history at Durham University. in the UK. The 10-month theory was actually first proposed by late Roman thinkers, who were contemplating their own absurd ordering of months. “Some modern scholars agree and say that’s what must have happened because the Romans said so. But others are more skeptical because it all seems a bit bizarre,” Heslin said.
Instead, Heslin says there were probably always 12 months in the Roman calendar. The New Year was widely celebrated in March, but other bureaucratic institutions of the Roman Empire would operate with January as the start of the year. Even today, many countries, such as the United States, have a different fiscal year than the common calendar. “The Roman consuls began their year in office on January 1st, for example, so while March may have been considered the start by public opinion, the political year started in January so it was a bit messy. until they cleared it up., “He said. “This is all speculation, but I think there has been a series of slow incremental shifts where the March New Year has been rejected.”
According to Heslin’s calculations, because the change happened so gradually, no one really paid too much attention at the time. Many centuries later, Roman intellectuals then tried to rationalize why the names of the months made no sense. Their response, he says, was to wrongly conclude that at some point it must have been 10 months.
Originally published in Live Science.
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