Roman calendar

The Roman calendar changed its form several times between the founding of Rome and the fall of the Roman Empire. The common calendar widely used today is known as the Gregorian calendar and is a refinement of the Julian calendar where the length of the year has been adjusted from 365.25 days to 365.2425 days (a 0.002% change).

From at least the period of Augustus on, calendars were often inscribed in stone and displayed publicly. Such calendars are called fasti.

History

The original Roman calendar is believed to have been a lunar calendar, which may have been based on one of the Greek lunar calendars. As the time between new moons averages 29.5 days its months were constructed to be either hollow (29 days) or full (30 days).

Calendar of Romulus

Roman writers attributed the original Roman calendar to Romulus, the mythical founder of Rome, though there is no other evidence for the existence of such a calendar and Romulus was often cited as the founder of practices whose origins were unknown to later Romans. According to these writers, Romulus' calendar had ten months with the spring equinox in the first month (likely based on the names of the last months of the year):

Calendar

A calendar is a system of organizing days for social, religious, commercial or administrative purposes. This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months, and years. A date is the designation of a single, specific day within such a system. A calendar is also a physical record (often paper) of such a system. A calendar can also mean a list of planned events, such as a court calendar or a partly or fully chronological list of documents, such as a calendar of wills.

Periods in a calendar (such as years and months) are usually, though not necessarily, synchronized with the cycle of the sun or the moon. The most common type of pre-modern calendar was the lunisolar calendar, a lunar calendar that occasionally adds one intercalary month to remain synchronised with the solar year over the long term.

The calendar in most widespread use today is the Gregorian calendar, introduced in the 16th century as a modification of the Julian calendar, which was itself a modification of the ancient Roman calendar. The term calendar itself is taken from calendae, the term for the first day of the month in the Roman calendar, related to the verb calare "to call out", referring to the "calling" of the new moon when it was first seen. Latin calendarium meant "account book, register" (as accounts were settled and debts were collected on the calends of each month). The Latin term was adopted in Old French as calendier and from there in Middle English as calender by the 13th century (the spelling calendar is early modern).

Roman

A Roman or Romans is a thing or person of or from the city of Rome

Roman or Romans may also refer to:

History

Gregorian calendar

The Gregorian calendar, also called the Western calendar and the Christian calendar, is internationally the most widely used civil calendar. It is named for Pope Gregory XIII, who introduced it in 1582.

The calendar was a refinement to the Julian calendar amounting to a 0.002% correction in the length of the year. The motivation for the reform was to bring the date for the celebration of Easter to the time of the year in which it was celebrated when it was introduced by the early Church. Because the celebration of Easter was tied to the spring equinox, the Roman Catholic Church considered the steady drift in the date of Easter caused by the year being slightly too long to be undesirable. The reform was adopted initially by the Catholic countries of Europe. Protestants and Eastern Orthodox countries continued to use the traditional Julian calendar and adopted the Gregorian reform after a time, for the sake of convenience in international trade. The last European country to adopt the reform was Greece, in 1923.