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Thread: Why Leap-month/ year, What's the Rule??
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[quote=PIKADIREN,382356]www.wilkiecollins.demon.co.uk/roman/calhis.htm. THE ROMAN CALENDAR Introduction Conversion Converting dates in the calendar we use into Roman dates is tricky and involves some degree of compromise. The Roman calendar was altered many times as errors in previous calendars were corrected and political considerations led to compromises in those changes. So whether it is the day, the month or the year we convert into 'Roman' the final result may end up overall as something a Roman would not recognise. If you want to know something of the history of the calendar read on. If you just want a potted version and instructions on converting dates go to the conversion pages. History Many things about the Roman calendar are still the subject of dispute. The original sources for the information are few. This guide is based on the best evidence and modern scholarship but it may be wrong in some details. There is a list of sources at the end and reading them will give some idea as to the problems. However, what is presented here is a coherent and self-consistent version which is close to the truth. The year In the early days, Romans denoted years by the names of the two Consuls who ruled each year and that system continued long after other ways of denoting the year were used. Later they began to count the years from the foundation of the City of Rome. There is no single agreed date for that but a Roman writer Marcus Terentius Varro fixed the date as what we would call 753BC and that is the standard I shall use here. Romans used the letters AUC after these dates (in Latin ab urbe condita - from the foundation of the city). Our own starting point for the calendar is no more certain. We count years from the supposed date of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. The letters AD after a date stand for Anno Domini - the year of our lord. This phrase was first used by a monk called Dionysius Exiguus in the year 531. But Dionysius was wrong about the date of the birth of Jesus - scholars now put that three years earlier in 4BC not 1BC. By the time of Dionysius, the Roman Empire was ending - in the West anyway - so any Roman expression of the date using a year dating from the birth of Jesus of Nazareth is not correct Roman form. Oddly, the most common use of Roman numerals today is to do just that - to give the year AD. There is a move to replace the letters AD for designating the starting point for our calendar. The phrase which they stand for, 'year of our lord', might offend people from other religions whose Lord, if they have one, was born in a different year. AD can now be written CE short for Common Era. And BC - which stands from Before Christ - can be written BCE. The length of the year had been correctly determined by astronomers in different parts of the world many centuries before the Roman empire. But it was not until 46BC (708AUC) that the Roman emperor Julius Caesar introduced a calendar reform to recognise that the year lasted almost exactly 365.25 days.[/quote]
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