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Thread: Why Leap-month/ year, What's the Rule??
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[quote=PIKADIREN,382358] However, there is some dispute about whether the months were put in their present form then or not. Modern scholarship suggests that the calendar introduced by Julius was in substantially its present form with February kept at 28 days (29 in a leap year) and that the other months were fixed at the lengths they nowhave. Earlier this century it was thought that January had 31 days and that short and long months alternated, making Sextilis (now called August), October and December short months of 30 days and September and November long months of 31. February was given 29 days to make a year of 365 days but every fourth year it had 30, thus adding the extra quarter day required to keep the calendar in tune with Earth's orbit round the Sun. But there is now evidence that this is wrong. One clue is that in a leap year, the extra day was added after the 23rd day of February, so the month in effect had two February 24ths. And the name for this in Roman times implies that February had 28 days. There is more on this later in the discussion on days. Within two years of the start of these reforms Julius Caesar was dead, assassinated on the steps of the Senate in Rome on 15 March 44BC (710AUC). To honour him, the Senate decreed that the seventh month, called Quintilis, should be renamed Julius. But Caesar was gone before he could see how his reforms were working and before the first leap year (not a term the Romans used) was due in 41BC (713AUC). And perhaps that is why, with no-one to correct them, the priests or Pontifices who were supposed to keep track of the calendar misunderstood Caesar's decree and added the extra day to February every three years instead of every four. The Romans counted inclusively so to them every fourth year meant 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10. As a result the first leap year was 42BC instead of 41 and they carried on with this error every three years until 9BC. It is strange that his instructions should have been misunderstood - he had been elected to the college of Pontifices himself two decades before his murder. [/quote]
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