The Year of Confusion(5)
“Unique is the word for it, all right. This is high-handed, even for Caesar,” I mused. “Just to wave his hand and say three months are not to be. Adding an extra month is one thing: it’s customary; but to eliminate one, not to mention three, seems unnatural. Then to compound it with an extended year containing not one but three extra months is, well, it’s radical!”
That afternoon the astronomers drew up a small calendar for me and I took it to the sign painters who painted the news and government proclamations on whitewashed boards and posted them in the Forum. I directed them to make a very large sign, twenty feet long and eight feet high, with the whole calendar written on it, showing every day of every month, with the calends, ides, and nones of each month written in red paint. This was to be raised in the Forum on the Rostra so that the whole populace could see the new calendar and understand it.
The next morning, dressed in my best toga, accompanied by my freedman Hermes and a few clients, I went to the Forum and ascended the Rostra. A crowd had already gathered, gawking at the huge calendar and wondering what it might portend. I was inordinately pleased with the thing, and pleased with myself for conceiving of such a device. The painters had outdone themselves, not merely writing the name and days of each month, but adding small figures performing the labors associated with that time of year, to make the new order more easily comprehensible. Thus little painted farmers plowed in winter and sowed in spring and harvested in the fall. Others picked and trampled grapes, soldiers built a winter camp, grain ships set sail, and slaves feasted at Saturnalia.
I raised my hands for quiet and when I got it I addressed the citizenry.
“Romans! Your pontifex maximus, Caius Julius Caesar, is pleased to announce a gift to you! It is a new calendar to replace the one which has grown so out of date. It is to commence in six days’ time. As you see, it has twelve months.” I gestured grandly toward the great board. “Each month will have either thirty—”
“What about Saturnalia?” someone shouted.
Barely launched into my oration, I was caught aback. “What? Who said that?”
The man who spoke was an ordinary citizen. “What about Saturnalia? If the calends of January is to be in six days, what’s happened to the month of December? How are we to celebrate Saturnalia this year with no December?”
“Good question,” Hermes muttered from behind me. “You should have thought of it.”
“Metellus!” shouted a man who was storming up the steps of the Rostra. I knew him vaguely, a senator named Roscius. “This is an outrage! For two years I have been planning the funeral games for my father! They are to be celebrated on the ides of December! I’ve bought lions! I have engaged fifteen pairs of gladiators! I’ve made arrangements for a public banquet! How am I to do all this if December is abolished?”
“Set another date,” I suggested.
“The ides of December is specified in my father’s will!” His face was scarlet with fury. “Besides, December is the traditional month for funeral games.”
“Next year will have a December,” I assured him. “Look,” I said, pointing at the board, “it’s right there in the lower right corner.”
“And I am to feed those lions all next year? Do you have any idea how much it costs to feed lions?”
I knew exactly how much, having put on munera myself, but I wasn’t feeling sympathetic. The crowd began to grumble, feeling they were being cheated of a good show and a banquet. Not to mention Saturnalia.
“Citizens,” I shouted. “Your pontifex maximus, Caius Julius Caesar, will have answers to all your questions.”
“We’d better hope so,” Hermes muttered.
“Be still!” I muttered back. Then, in my orator’s voice, “In the meantime, allow me to explain the many advantages of the new calendar. Some of the months will have thirty-one days, others thirty, and a single month will have twenty-eight.”
“Hold up there,” said another citizen. “I pay my rent by the month. Does this mean I’ll pay as much for twenty-eight days as for thirty-one? That doesn’t seem fair.” There was much nodding and agreeing with this.
“Oh, shut up,” I said intemperately. “You’ve never known exactly how many days any month might have until the pontifexes announced it. You thought that was fair enough.”
“Fair!” bawled an enraged voice. “Nothing about this is fair! Senator, I own five insulae in this city, and more of them elsewhere in Italy. What is to become of three months’ rent I am owed for this year if those three months are just abolished?” He was a fat, bald man in a dingy toga. Luckily, everybody hates landlords and he was quickly shouted down, but I foresaw great trouble from that quarter. Much of the great and powerful class of equites depended upon rents and they would all be furious.