Thread by @gdemaneuf

Classical boffins (🙋‍♂️) may know that today is the 2007th anniversary of the death of Augustus.

historysstory.blogspot.com/2014/08/august…

This happened on the month he named for himself, following in the immediate steps of his predecessor, Julius Caesar, who as first Roman dictator (however he may have tried to present it) had no problem being immortalised in ‘July’.

Only problem for Augustus was that the month after July had only 30 days and since July had 31, it would have not looked good.

Problem quickly solved by removing one day from February, the boring cold month at the end of the year, and transferring it to the newly minted August.

The old year was following an agricultural and military imperative.
Newly elected consuls would march their troops or sail out of Rome as soon as practical, which was March (from Mars, the god of wars).

Soon, with an expending empire, this was not practical enough.

So troops may start marching out with their Consuls to Syria, Spain, etc in January. That set the new start of the year (effectively following a political and military imperative).

As seen, during the Republic the years (in Rome at least) were defined in reference to the elected consuls, not in reference to a fixed date as today.

It must have enforced strong political history awareness amongst the elite, as the choice of consuls set the historical records.

A very different mental setup compared to the empire when dates were defined as ‘in the nth year of the reign of Emperor X’.

Not much different from the situation in North Korea with the Juche calendar that begins with the birth of Kim Il-sung, the founder of the DPRK.