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Next, I adopt yet another perspective and look at the relationships between three calendars that originate in Persia and which, although separated by centuries, are closely related. |
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The Baha'i calendar also originates in Persia, and although related in certain ways to the previous group, it displays some unique characteristics. |
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Next, I consider several calendars that are problematic for different reasons. The Greek Attic calendar illustrates the problem with arbitrary interference, whereas the Chinese calendar examines the problem of an observation-based calendar. |
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The following section considers a class of calendars that may be considered failures and examines the reasons for their collapse. |
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Following is a section which comes full circle and explores calendars that have been proposed as further reforms to the Gregorian calendar. |
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Finally, I literally go out of this world and examine a possible calendar for the planet Mars. At this point, the reader will have absorbed the background necessary to follow the construction of a calendar from the ground up. That is good, because there can be no reliance on comfortable, memorized values for the planet Earth. This last section can be considered a sort of self-test for absorption of the material. |
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The genius of Rome never lay in the area of intellectual accomplishment as much as in the area of organization. Rome was not the intellectual home of any significant calendric advances. In this area, as in most others, Rome borrowed from other cultures. The Roman Empire, however, provided a large territory with a common language and law for a long time and thus encouraged the spread of ideas from one area to another. |
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It is therefore both ironic and fitting that the calendar that has become a de facto global standard is, in its origins, a Roman calendar. |
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In this section, I examine the calendars claimed for Rome. |
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9.1.1
Calendar of Numa Pompilius |
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The first Roman calendar is historically attributed to Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome. This ascription is undoubtedly apocryphal. |
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The first Roman calendar is not well documented. According to Livy, Cicero, and other sources, in 304 B.C. the curule aedile, Flavius, posted in the Forum a calendar of the year designating the legal days for conducting business. This posting was a patrician response to a plebian demand for access to this information, which was previously jealously guarded by the priests and magistrates, and is the first known |
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