Ever wondered why we start the new year (and why so many people consequently begin it with a horrific hangover) on Jan. 1? You can thank the most famous Roman emperor of all. It all started on this day in 45 B.C.
Julius Caesar looked at his calendar and growled. If modern slang had existed in ancient Rome, he would have called it a “hot mess.” Because that’s just what the Roman calendar of his day was, and it caused lots of problems.
For more than 500 years before Caesar became the big boss, the empire had relied on a calendar based on the lunar cycle. Following the moon instead of Earth’s orbit around the sun made for a shorter year — only 10 months annually instead of the current 12. That kept the seasons out of sync with the calendar. Some years, January fell in winter; in other years, it was in spring.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the pontifices monkeyed around with things. They were responsible for keeping Rome’s official calendar. Human nature being what it was then as now, they sometimes fudged the length of certain months to extend the terms of elected office illegally.
Caesar finally had enough. A world power needed a world-class calendar, he fumed, one as sturdy and reliable as the Colosseum. So, he brought in a consultant, an astronomer from Alexandria, Egypt, named Sosigenes, kind of the Carl Sagan on his day.
Sosigenes’s first piece of advice: Scrap the whole lunar thing and follow the solar orbit the way the Egyptians did. Caesar agreed. He added 67 days to the existing year to get the new 365-day calculation up and running. Then he proclaimed the next year would start on Jan. 1, 46 B.C., rather than in March as it always had before.
He even took Sosigenes’s advice and added an extra day every four years to make sure his new calendar kept in time with the Earth’s orbit, which is how we wound up with leap day.
The people of Rome quickly adapted to the new calendar. Since Caesar had wasted little time making himself dictator, they didn’t have much choice. But, it worked, and, eventually, everyone agreed the new way of keeping track of the days and months was a vast improvement over the old.
So, it was a fitting tribute when, after Caesar was assassinated two years later, Mark Anthony renamed the month of Quintilis in his honor as Julius, now our July. (Which was a good thing, too. Imagine how clunky it would be to ask a friend, “Are you doing anything for the Fourth of Quintilis?”) Anthony also renamed Sextilis as Augustus (our August), for Caesar Augustus.
The new method, called the Julian calendar, still had its flaws. Caesar and Sosigenes didn’t take into account the solar year’s correct value of 365.242199 days instead of the 365.25 figure they used, an 11-minutes-a year mistake that affected everything. I could explain why, but that would only mean more math. Suffice it to say the problem was rectified by the Gregorian calendar in 1582.
Still, what Caesar gave the world was light-years ahead of what it had known before.
Julius Caesar had no way of knowing, but he did us a huge favor with his calendar change. Can you imagine how busy it would have been celebrating both New Year’s and St. Patrick’s Day in March? That massive collective hangover would likely have lingered into April.
Thanks, Julius. And Happy 2020, everyone!
J. Mark Powell (@JMarkPowell) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He’s VP of communications at Ivory Tusk Consulting, a South Carolina-based agency. A former broadcast journalist and government communicator, his “Holy Cow! History” column is available at jmarkpowell.com.
