Roman Calendar - Converting Pre-Julian Dates

Converting Pre-Julian Dates

The fact that we use the same month names as the Romans encourages us to assume that a Roman date occurred on the same Julian date as its modern equivalent. This assumption is not correct. Even early Julian dates, before the leap year cycle was stabilised, are not quite what they appear to be. For example, it is well known that Julius Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March in 44 BC, and this is usually converted to 15 March 44 BC. While he was indeed assassinated on the 15th day of the Roman month Martius, the equivalent date on the modern Julian calendar is probably 14 March 44 BC.

Finding the exact Julian equivalent of a pre-Julian date can be very hard. Since we have an essentially complete list of the consuls, it is not difficult to find the Julian year that generally corresponds to a pre-Julian year. However, our sources very rarely tell us which years were regular, which were intercalary, and how long an intercalary year was. Nevertheless, we do know that the pre-Julian calendar could be substantially out of alignment with the Julian calendar. Two precise astronomical synchronisms given by Livy show that in 168 BC the two calendars were misaligned by more than two months, and in 190 BC they were four months out of alignment.

We have a number of other clues to help us reconstruct the Julian equivalent of pre-Julian dates. First, we know the precise Julian date for the start of the Julian calendar (although there is some uncertainty even about that), and we have detailed sources for the previous decade or so, mostly in the letters and speeches of Cicero. Combining these with what we know about how the calendar worked, especially the nundinal cycle, we can accurately convert Roman dates after 58 BC relative to the start of the Julian calendar. Also, the histories of Livy give us exact Roman dates for two eclipses in 190 BC and 168 BC, and we have a few loose synchronisms to dates in other calendars which help to give rough (and sometimes exact) solutions for the intervening period. Before 190 BC the alignment between the Roman and Julian years is determined by clues such as the dates of harvests mentioned in the sources.

Combining these sources of data, we are able to estimate approximate Julian equivalents of Roman dates back to the start of the First Punic War in 264 BC. However, while we have enough data to make such reconstructions, the number of years before 45 BC for which we can convert pre-Julian Roman dates to Julian dates with certainty is very small, and several reconstructions of the pre-Julian calendar are possible. A detailed reconstruction giving conversions from pre-Julian dates into Julian dates is available.