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🌛 The oldest Roman calendars were lunar. Three lunar events within the month (moon-cycle) served as achors to locate all the days of the month: Kalends, Nones, and Ides.
All the days of each month were referred to by the number of days before the next Kalends, Nones, or Ides. Confusingly, the counting was *inclusive*, meaning that the day itself was counted.
So the day of Kalends March was "I Kalends March". It was one day (inclusively) before the Kalends of March. "IV Ides July" would be three days before (four, inclusively) the Ides of July, which was the day of the full moon in July.
Confusingly, all days after the Ides were named by their proximity to the Nones of the next month, so dates such as "III Nones February", would have been two days before the first day of January ("I Nones January", or just "Nones January"), meaning that "III Nones February" was actually in the month of *January*; not *February*.
🌑 The Kalends was the first day of the month *after* the new (dark) moon. The high priest (*pontifex maximus*) would watch for a thin sliver of a crescent moon, and that would be the start of the month.
The Kalends was generally sacred to Juno (Gr. Hera), wife of Jupiter (Gr. Zeus), and goddess of the new moon.
🌓 I believe the Nones was originally the day of the quarter moon (Gopherpedia), although it's hard to be sure because the date of the Nones was eventually changed to be eight days before the full moon (Bernstein 6) (nine days, counting inclusively, as the Romans did). The word "None" comes form the Latin word for "nine", and counting inclusively, nine days before the full moon does correspond closely with the day of the quarter moon.
Possibly, the nine-day definition of *Nones* became popular because it gave a fixed number of days before the Ides, and that simplified the calendar. I don't know; that's just speculation on my part.
Personally, I find setting the *nones* to the day of the first-quarter moon 🌓 makes the most sense for a lunar calendar, so that's where I place the *nones*.
🌕️ The Ides are probably familiar because of Shakespeare's, "Beware the Ides of March". They were the day of the full moon.
🌗 For whatever reason, the Romans didn't use the third quarter moon in their calendar system. It seems very asymmetrical, but that's the way it is.
After the full moon, or Ides of each month, all the remaining days of the month were named after their proximity to the Nones of the next month. "II Nones April", would be the last day in the month of March, not a day in the month of April.
I've never come across an explanation for this. Perhaps the Romans just didn't like the second half of the month as much. 😉
Lunar calendars don't fit evenly within a solar year, so the Romans originally inserted intercalary days at the end of the last lunar month before next year began. This kept the calendar aligned with the seasons. Since February was the last month of the year, this meant that the second half of February had a very inconsistent number of days.
Originally, March (the month of Mars) was the first month of the year. It's unclear to me exactly how the Romans decided when the new year began, but it was set to begin around the Spring Equinox. Few sources give details beyond this, but I have come across a claim that it began on the first new moon *before* the Spring Equinox (Quora, see Assaph Mehr's response). So that's what I go with.
🧮 The lunar cycle is about 29.53 days long, so twelve of these fit within 354.36 days, which is about 11 days short of a solar year. So if March begins anywhere up to ten days after the spring equinox, all 12 lunar months would end before the Spring Equinox of the next year.
Pushing the end of the lunar year as close as possible to start of the next Spring Equinox would make the lunar year align as well as possible with the solar year. As a consequence, the lunar months should fall in a somewhat more predictable time of the solar year.
This is the way I place the beginning of the year in my version of the Roman lunar calendar, that runs on "remind", the command-line calendar tool.
As the Romans used a lunar calendar, the traditional dates of many of their ceremonies relied on the moon being in a certain phase. When Rome transitioned to a solar calendar, these dates were fixed such that they were out of phase with the moon.
Roman women walked fifteen miles at night from the city of Rome, to Diana's [Gr. Artemis] sacred lake at Nemi on the Ides, or full moon, of the ninth lunation, or August. The full moon was a time of vibrant female energy. When Caesar made the calendar a solar one, he permanantly fixed the Ides on the fifteenth of the month. So Diana's ritual took place every August 13 and not necessarily on the full moon of August. Thus, after Caesar, these poor Roman women had to walk in the dark to honor the goddess on her holy day. (Bernstein 6)
Like Bernstein, I too have sought to return to the lunar calendar. To do that, I've used the wonderful "remind" application by Dianne Skoll.
The first key to getting this to work was to implement some way of finding Equinox and Solstice dates in remind. Amazingly, remind has great capabilities for finding moon phases already.
seasonDefs.rem: Remind File for Finding Solstices and Equinoxes
The above file must be loaded by remind before any files (such as the one below) that rely on it, so if placed in a directory of .rem files, it's best to rename it to something like 2.seasonDefs.rem so that it gets loaded before other files. Otherwise, you can use remind's INCLUDE statement to load it from within another reminders file.
Below is my implementation of a Roman Lunar Calendar in remind. Read the comments in the file to see what it does.
romanCal.rem: Remind File Implemestation of a Roman Lunar Calendar
If you'd like to just see a plain-text version of the calendar without having to set up remind, I have that too:
📕 Bernstein, Frances, _Classical Living: Reconnecting with the Rituals of Ancient Rome_. HarperCollins, 2000.
Gopherpedia, _Roman Calendar_. (accessed 2021-06-06)
Wikipedia, _Roman Calendar_. (the gopherpedia version has some missing numbers in a few places)
Skoll, Dianne. _Dianne Skoll's Personal Website - Remind_
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✍️ Last Updated: 2021-06-19