Talk:Roman calendar

Insertion of intercalary month "into" February
The idea that the intercalary month somehow slipped into February, with the last 5 days of February following it, appears to have returned to this page. The assertion is not supported by any citation.

Michels - who is the leading authority on the subject - disagrees, as do many other authorities, see: http://www.instonebrewer.com/TyndaleSites/Egypt/ptolemies/chron/roman/chron_rom_cal.htm so that making this assertion without qualification is rather misleading.

Also, the text says that the intercalary month was "always 27 days long" (a view of many scholars) but also that February was 29 days long in an intercalary year. That would make a 383 day embolistic year, which is too long. So there is an internal confusion by whoever wrote that section.

So, a view that was popular was that somehow a 23/24 day intercalary year was inserted into February, this is not the evidence of the Fasti and modern scholarship does not think this but thinks that February was shortened. The text of our article represents neither of those views properly.

Does anyone have strong views about my editing it to reflect modern scholarship, or is this something people feel strongly about? Francis Davey (talk) 08:55, 13 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Having looked at it, this seriously needs to be fixed and I have no idea where it came from. Would appreciate your help in dealing with this. Arcorann (talk) 00:13, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Someone spotted this recently and I made an effort to fix this a few minutes ago.  A revert has been made by an editor who, not being British, thinks I am the same person as the editor who fixed it before.   I am in London - the other edit is from the other end of the country.   People have been reverting because they claim the corrections are unsourced - but they removed the sourcing when they reverted.   If you think a source is defective please do not revert it but explain on the talk page what you think the defect is. 92.19.174.20 (talk) 18:43, 19 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Ancient authors are not considered reliable sources, see WP:AGE MATTERS. In particular, there are multiple modern theories about when leap years were inserted between 45 BC and AD 8. Jc3s5h (talk) 20:02, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

Time for end/beginning of day.
I wasn't able to read from the article what the time of day for the changing of dates was in the Roman calendar. Also i wasn't able to find this in the main article on »calends«. Maybe there is some knowledgable person here that can do something about that, alternatively tell me where i ought to have been looking. Julian calendar article also doesn't have this information btw. Itsameno (talk) 20:35, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

Missing Tutelary Deities in Roman Month Articles
I thought it would be best to put this here as it deals with multiple subordinate articles, but feel free to move it elsewhere if that's not appropriate.

I was going through the individual Roman month articles recently (the ones linked to in this article) to retrieve the names of tutelary deities for each month, which lead me to discover that some of them are missing from the articles, namely Maius, Iunius, Sextilis, and December. I don't know whether this is merely an editing lapse or a source issue, but in doing some light research into another matter, I may have discovered something that could be tentatively used to fill in these gaps, assuming the original sources don't already make mention of the tutelaries for those months which has merely been ommitted from the articles accidentally.

When reading the first page of an article on JSTOR here https://www.jstor.org/stable/41538820 about Manilius and his Astronomica, I noticed some astrological correspondences at the bottom of the page. I realised that, when you equate each zodiac sign with the month it begins in, the deity corresponding to that sign also happens to be the tutelary of that month in all eight wiki articles where a tutelary is listed for the Roman month, which seems certainly beyond a coincidence and tentative proof of an astrological correspondence to the monthly tutelaries. If this happens to also be the conclusion of the journal article (probably not, as it's about the Megalensia), I cannot see it as I only have JSTOR access at uni.

According to the astrological corresspondences, this reveals Apollo for Maius (Gemini), Mercury for Iunius (Cancer), Ceres for Sextilis (Virgo), and Vesta for December (Capricorn), providing a complete list of the twelve Dii Conscentes and their correspondences to the twelve Roman months. I thought I'd share this here because perhaps someone might want to update the four Roman month articles to include a tentative suggegstion of their tutelaries based on the astrological correspondences detailed in the JSTOR article. I'm not sure what the best and most appropriate way to do this would be, so I thought I'd best leave it up someone who has more experience with these articles. 124.197.44.175 (talk) 06:29, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

"The term sometimes includes"
In the highly prominent second sentence position, we have this strange assertion I can't see any body content it summarises (per WP:LEAD); it has no citation and no context. Can anyone see any reason to retain it?
 * The term sometimes includes any system dated by inclusive counting in the Roman manner towards the kalends, nones, and ides of the month.

(The article does have a whole section on "the kalends, nones, and ides of the month", so I wonder if an earlier version of the sentence was sensible but the sense has been lost in repeated edits that attempted to set the scope of the article? I'll have a search of the history...) 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 12:02, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

, I think this originates in your edits of April 2017, though it has changed somewhat since then [including by me, today]. Could you clarify your intent please? Had you intended to add some supporting body content? I certainly agree that that the Kalends, nones and ides should be summarised in the lead but it is not obvious that this is the best way to do that. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 12:15, 1 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Well, fair enough. It seems perfectly obvious to me—describing the general structure of the dating as opposed to the details of any particular instantiation of it—but, no, at this late date I couldn't hand you a cite to specifically support that exact formulation. Hopefully whatever shape the page ends up in would clarify how the system works and inclusive counting and kalends, nones, and ideas obviously belong in the lead somewhere, but feel free to rework that phrasing to match your vision for the page and its current sourcing. — Llywelyn II   06:15, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
 * The evidence I am looking for is one that supports "The term sometimes includes", as it is really rather open-ended. I'm not a subject expert and really not an appropriate editor to recast the article. But I'll see if I can come up with a draft for discussion that summarises the section. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 09:54, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

Draft for discussion
Here is my draft replacement for the first three paragraphs. I have made the paragraph "the term does not include" into a footnote. Comments and advice welcome: "The Roman calendar was the calendar used by the Roman Kingdom and Roman Republic. Although primarily used of Rome's pre-Julian calendars, the term often includes the Julian calendar established by the reforms of the dictator Julius Caesar and emperor Augustus in the late 1stcenturyBC.

The original calendar consisted of ten months beginning in spring with March; winter was left as an unassigned span of days. These months each had 30 or 31 days, and ran for 38 nundinal cycles, each forming an eight-day week (nine days counted inclusively in the Roman manner, hence the name) ended by religious rituals and a public market. The winter period was later divided into two months, January and February. The legendary early kings Romulus and Numa Pompilius were traditionally credited with establishing this early fixed calendar, which bears traces of its origin as an observational lunar one. In particular, the kalends, nones, and ides of the month seem to have derived from the first sighting of the crescent moon, the first-quarter moon, and the full moon respectively. The system ran well short of the solar year, and it needed constant intercalation to keep religious festivals and other activities in their proper seasons. This is a typical element of lunisolar calendars. For superstitious reasons, such intercalation occurred within the month of February even after it was no longer considered the last month."

Better? --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 20:59, 9 January 2023 (UTC)


 * Do historians have that much certainty about month lengths and market cycles during the era before the invention of January and February? I think that mention of the those details should be moved to a later place in the paragraph. Indefatigable (talk) 22:55, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
 * The second paragraph is unchanged from the original, except to replace "inclusive counting" with "counted inclusively in the Roman manner" and to wlink kalends, nones, and ides.
 * But I have no objection to your editing it further, but maybe best if you do so with a new draft rather than edit my first cut inline. It is not sacrosanct of course, I just think it will make it clearer what we are talking about. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 00:08, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

As there have been no further comments, I have applied my draft with the exception of deleting "For superstitious reasons, such intercalation occurred within the month of February even after it was no longer considered the last month." since it was uncited since March 2022.

, do you want to edit it further now to make the change you described briefly above? Open season to all, of course. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 21:19, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

Intercalation info still needs fixing
Read Michels properly, don't really have enough time to work on this right now, so I'll just put down some notes and hope someone else can help in fixing all this:
 * As posted above, Bennett's page on the topic: http://www.instonebrewer.com/TyndaleSites/Egypt/ptolemies/chron/roman/chron_rom_cal.htm - basically takes the fixed Intercalaris as given, though the interpretation of Fasti Antiates maiores seems to be based on pieces that were not there. Several citations are given of scholars who agree with fixed Intercalaris; to this may be added Sacha Stern in Calendars in Antiquity: Empires, States, and Societies (2012). Most of these should be useful for the article.
 * Michels (1967) has the most detailed arguments for the length of Intercalaris, dedicating Appendix A to it; all the historical evidence is there.
 * "No date is given for the Regifugium in 378-day years" - as per Michels the Regifugium is always on a.d. VI Kal Mart. which is inside the intercalary month. Not sure where this came from.

And so forth. Again, if I did do these fixes it'd have to be in chunks, so help would be appreciated. Arcorann (talk) 09:45, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

Day/month or month/day format
I pointed out that this article is currently inconsistent, with 19 dates in dm format and 2 in md format. I changed all to be dm, which is consistent with, say, "the 6th December Kalends" (VI Kalendas Decembres), and added the "Use dmy dates" template at the top.

User:Jc3s5h reverted my edit, with the explanation "Use MDY dates because the first version used month, day dates, and I found no discussion on the talk page expressing a desire to change the date format . Look more extensively for dates than previous editor." They also added a "Use mdy dates" template, without discussion.

I see no evidence that the first version (November 2001) used md format. Irrespective of that, the present article has an overwhelming number of dm dates (19 to 2 md), and dm makes more sense given the format of Roman days of the month, e.g. "The 6th day before the Nones/ante diem sextum Nonas". I propose my version should stand, including the removal of the still-current inconsistencies and the "Use dmy dates" template. Masato.harada (talk) 09:37, 14 December 2023 (UTC)


 * As for the first version of the article, there is a heading, "September", with dates like "September 1, September 2" and so on. If you look at the discussions in the archives of Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers you will find a number of suggestions that articles tied to a particular country should use the order of date elements customary in that country. The result of these discussions has been that the date order in a country is only taken into account if the native language of the country is English.
 * If you look at Manual of Style/Dates and numbers you will see that non-breaking spaces are not called for in dates, and such atypical spaces impede the use of tools to maintain the articles. So I have gone through and removed such non-breaking spaces, and corrected any inconsistencies I missed before on account of the atypical spaces.
 * I favor the mdy format because it was the first format. But if the result of the discussion is to use dmy, there is one sentence that will need to be rewritten so it does not start with a numeral. Jc3s5h (talk) 12:22, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
 * This article includes both Roman calendar dates and Gregorian calendar dates. The former must be written in the Roman calendar date format, obviously. The latter is subject to WP manual of style, which says to prefer the earliest form unless a consensus to the contrary arises through discussion. I think that md dates have the advantage not only if precedence but also of serving to visually distinguish clearly between when the text is referring to Roman dates and when it is referring to Gregorian (or Julian) dates. On this basis I would argue in favor of  md dates even if they did not have precedence in the earliest version of the article. YBG (talk) 16:05, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

Lead too long
I didn't consider it helpful to tag a lead too long in main space, but the lead is about twice as long as it should be. Would someone close to the subject wield the blue pencil, please? 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 15:50, 7 April 2024 (UTC)


 * Oh, is it considered more polite to put it on the talk page? I can gladly adjust if people find that more constructive. Remsense  诉  22:44, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
 * It's a 50/50 call really and personal preference. I prefer to avoid applying whole article tags because it begs the response WP:SOFIXIT. Well I had a look and concluded that it is above my pay grade, so concluded that a note here might be more effective. 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 23:09, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

There is room for an Artic Theory concerning the State/Democratic/Citizens Calendar of 10 months..
With the Roman Calendar December means 10th month? Why 10th month?. Answer says because it came from the old Roman Calendar brought in by Romulus, Rome's founder and that had only ten months not 12. The Greeks did it too with their State Calendar. Still why 10 months? The new calendar added two months to the beginning. Jan and Feb. Says earlier the winter months were not important as no farming took place in the winter.

A better answer might be found by examining the 1000's of things B G Tilak said in his "The Arctic home in the Vedas" Tilak made exhaustive arguments on why the ancient Aryan's once lived in the polar region near the North Pole. He address's the Roman Calendar in particular as one of his arguments in Chapter VIII, The Cows Walk. https://archive.org/details/b24864882/page/188/mode/2up?ref=ol

The gist of the argument is that like the Aryan's that moved to India, others eventually moved to Greece and Italy. At the very North on the pole, the sun takes a month to rise, followed by 4-5 months of Sun with out it setting and one month to set with the remaining time in darkness. They were not exactly at the pole so they saw two months of total night. It's this two months that was not part of the calendar which is his argument.

Tilak wrote his book in 1903 and basically did not get much support outside a small group of academics (British Rule and Tilak was one of India's founders of independence/6yrs jail once and 18mos another time for being vocal about it), however science has been slowly catching up with him as it is realized the climate at the North Pole has not always been as it is today. Tilak was also not the only one with these theories. They are also outlined in William Warren's 1885 book "Paradise Found", but Tilak was exhaustive in his theories and used ancient Vedic and Zoroastrian texts to back up his claims.

Tilak's theory really is the best answer, however there's such a long lapse of time on when ancient Aryan's had lived in the Artic according to his theory (appox 7000-8000 BC) Meanwhile the Roman calendar did not change to 12 months until appox 700 BC. That is large gap to explain. Where they always on the move when they left the artic regions and did no farming and had little need for knowing the seasons exactly? Maybe. They did settle in boot. Were the clouds too impenetrable during Jan and Feb to see the sun? Don't know but this theory should earn a place like any other. Tilak calls it a remnant that the priests would not let go of, and finally when they did they likely had totally forgotten their ancient home when they finally settled in one place and then and only then had a need for a new calendar as they became more sedentary.

The Greeks also had what was called the Democratic or Citizens Calendar that was 10 months long as their earliest calendrer. It's claimed this was because of 10 tribes sharing the rule. Calendar's are not supposed to be so fickle as to change for the number of tribes they once had. The argument seems flimsy. It's not even clear where they added the two new months in. Explanations appear to be rather speculative. Allow though that the 10 tribe theory is correct, you could still argue back why ten tribes? Could this go back to priests that officiated the ceremonies a month at a time, a set of priests from each tribe as each gave homage to 10 months of Sun? Para59r (talk) 00:33, 9 May 2024 (UTC)