City Guide
Answers
Login
Home
/
Community
/
Forums
/ Post a 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,382360]Days While we count the days of the month forwards starting, for example, with the first of April and ending with the 30th, the Romans counted the days backwards. And not just from the end of the month, but from the first quarter and the middle of the month and then from the first day of the next month. So the day we would call the 20th day of January Romans would call the 13th day before the first of February. That arithmetic only works with inclusive counting - count every day from 20 January to 1 February inclusive. This system harks back to the earlier Roman calendar based on the moon. The start of the month would be announced by the priest who saw the first faint sliver of light in the New Moon's black disc. He would call out - calare in Latin - and that is the origin of the Latin word for the first of the month the Kalendae or the Kalends. The next phase of the moon, the first quarter when it is exactly half a disc, were called the Nonae (usually Nones today) and the full moon was known as the Ides. The waning half was not marked. But even by the seventh century BC these divisions were formalised. The Kalendae were always the first day of the month. The Ides were fixed as the fifteenth day of a 31-day month or the thirteenth day of any other. The period leading up to the Ides was fixed as eight days and so the Nonae had to be on either the fifth day of a short month or the seventh day of a long month. At the time, only four months - Martius, Maius, Quintilis (Julius), and October had 31 days. The rest had 28 or 29. And these fixed dates were continued by Julius Caesar when he converted the calendar, even though other 31 day months were introduced. They remained in this form after the minor alterations of Augustus. Days were referred to as so many days before the Kalendae, the Nonae, or the Ides. So the 13th day of March was called ante diem tertium idus Martias literally before days third ides of March or the third day before the Ides of March on the fifteenth. The Romans counted inclusively so they count 13, 14, 15 to get three days. On the day itself they simply called it the ides of March or the kalends of May. And they referred to the day immediately before one of the three fixed dates as the pridie - the eve of. So the 14th of March was pridie idus Martias the eve of the ides of March. On inscriptions these words were all abbreviated which means that we can ignore all the complex Latin endings to words which change with its grammatical position in the sentence. So we can simply write A.D. III ID. MART. And that meant to a Roman 2000 years ago the day we would call 13th of March. [/quote]
characters left
Name:
Get a new code