The Year of Confusion

1

There was nothing wrong with our calendar. I didn’t think so, and the Roman people didn’t think so, but Caius Julius Caesar thought so. Besides, he was dictator and that was that. He was also pontifex maximus, therefore in charge of the Roman calendar, and this was one of his pet projects. When you are dictator, you can indulge your pet projects and hobbies and so forth and if anyone disputes your right to do so you can have them killed. Not that Caesar would kill people over anything so trifling. Quite the contrary. He pardoned persons eminently deserving of execution and might have lived for many more years if he had just killed a few men that I, personally, told him he needed to kill or exile. He wouldn’t do it. This lack of foresight got him killed.

That was Caesar for you. Always happy to exterminate whole nations of barbarians for the glory of Rome, or, rather, for the glory of Caesar, but ever reluctant to have Roman citizens put to death, even those who had proven themselves his enemies. Instead, he pardoned those who had taken arms against him, called back exiles, and would even have restored Cato to honor and position if he had just agreed to acknowledge Caesar’s primacy. When Cato so splendidly committed suicide rather than live under a Caesarian dictatorship, Caesar mourned him, and I happen to know that his grief was genuine, not a political pose—I was there.

Now back to the calendar. Caesar was master of the world, but one of the problems with conquering the world is that it tends to distract you from other tasks. One of Caesar’s tasks, as pontifex maximus, was keeping our calendar in order. By this time, when he was dictator and had (though he did not know it) but a very short time to live, it was terribly out of order with the natural year. It was as if we had lost three months. We were celebrating midwinter rites in late fall. We were sacrificing the October Horse in the middle of summer. It just seemed incongruous and made us embarrassed before the gods.

Caesar’s remedy to this situation was characteristically drastic. He was going to give us a whole new calendar. Not only that, but it was to be devised by foreigners. It was that last part that rankled the Roman public. They were used to taking instruction and orders from our priesthoods and our magistrates. To be told by a pack of Chaldeans and Egyptians how to conduct their duties toward the gods was intolerable.

Nevertheless, there were worse implications to this long-overdue reform, as I was soon to find out.

* * *

“Decius Caecilius!” Caesar shouted. I rushed to see what he wanted. There was a time when no senator rushed in this fashion to see what another Roman wanted, but that time was past. Caesar was king in all but name. I ran.

“Caius Julius?” I said. We were in the Domus Publica, the house in the Forum that was his official dwelling as pontifex maximus and overseer of the Vestals.

“Decius, I have a momentous change in the offing. I want you to administer this matter.”

“Of course, Caesar,” I said, “presuming, naturally, that this isn’t something likely to get me killed.”

“And why should that be?” he enquired.

“Well, Caius Julius, over the many years we have known one another, you have concocted more ways to get me killed than I can readily calculate. I could start with Gaul but that would be an almost random starting-point.…”

“Nothing like that,” he assured me. “This is just a trifling matter concerning the calendar.”

“Caius Julius,” I said, “the first word you used was ‘momentous.’ Now you use ‘trifling.’ I detect a certain rhetorical disjunction here.”

“I merely meant that, while my reform of the calendar will be far-reaching and its effects will be felt for all time to come, its implementation is a matter of the merest routine.”

That was more like it. I always like things to be as easy as possible. “What will be involved?”

“Sosigenes is supervising the project and you will be working with him.”

Sosigenes was Cleopatra’s court astronomer, and generally acknowledged as the most distinguished stargazer in the world. He was head of the school of astronomy at the Museum in Alexandria. By “supervising” I presumed that Caesar meant that the project was Sosigenes’ from beginning to end. That was fine with me. I had known the little Greek for many years and we got along splendidly. Caesar, on the other hand, was always an unsettling man to deal with.

“I know him well. Where am I to find him?”

“I’ve established offices for the astronomers in the Temple of Aesculapius. I want you to go there. Sosigenes will explain the project and you may decide whether you will require assistants to help you.”