New Reply

Post a Reply

Thread: Why Leap-month/ year, What's the Rule??

Title: (100 characters at most)

Content: ( 3,000 characters at most, please )

You can add emoticons below to your post by clicking them.

[quote=PIKADIREN,382361]Leap
There is one more little complexity. What to do about February? It has a variable number of days. Today we cope with a leap year by adding an extra day at the end of the month - February 29th. The Romans did it differently. Julius added the extra day after the 23rd day of the month - the same place that the bi-annual extra month Mercedonius had been inserted. So the leap day was like a very short Merecedonius and familiar to Romans of the time. But if you are naming days by counting backwards from the next event, adding an extra day affects the names of the previous days as well. In February the ides fell on 13th day of the month. The next day was 16 days before the 1st of March in a normal 28 day February. If an extra day was added, then the day after the ides of February would be 17 days before the 1st of March. But that did not happen. Because - like Mercedonius - the extra day was not part of February. The counting missed a beat, like this.

Roman Calendar for last ten days of February 
Calendar for the last ten days of February
Not a leap year	Leap year
Our date	Roman date	Our date	Roman date
20	10 days before the start of March	20	10 days before the start of March
21	9 days before the start of March	21	9 days before the start of March
22	8 days before the start of March	22	8 days before the start of March
23	7 days before the start of March	23	7 days before the start of March
24	6 days before the start of March	24	6 days before the start of March
25	5 days before the start of March	25	again 6 days before the start of March
26	4 days before the start of March	26	5 days before the start of March
27	3 days before the start of March	27	4 days before the start of March
28	eve of the start of March	28	3 days before the start of March
		29	eve of the start of March
In other words the extra day did not alter the calendar until after the 24th day - a time

[/quote]

characters left

Name:

Get a new code