Who designed the Julian calendar?

The Roman calendar was a mess before the Romans adopted the Julian calendar in 46 BCE. It was ostensibly lunar, but months ranged from 28 days to 31 days, as they still do today, so the months didn’t line up with lunar phases. It had intercalary months to keep it in step with the seasons, but political intrigues resulted in it being nearly three months out of synch.

In 46 BCE, Julius Caesar cut through the political red tape and decreed a fixed calendar based on a 365¼ day cycle. To do this he had to draw on his powers as both dictator and pontifex maximus, or top priest. It was a phenomenal achievement. The calendar no longer even pretended to be lunar, but no one cared. It was the world’s first solar calendar. And that was even better.

Pliny the Elder claims that one of the experts Caesar employed as a consultant was an astronomer named Sosigenes. I’m here to tell you that while the Julian calendar is magnificent, Sosigenes’ role is overblown. Also, we have no idea where Sosigenes came from.

Sosigenes (Hume Cronyn) gives Cleopatra (Elizabeth Taylor) a biology lesson (Cleopatra, 1963). Perhaps she’s intrigued because he’s writing on paper, not papyrus.

We still use a slightly modified form of Caesar’s calendar today. The modification is so slight that no one alive today remembers the last time our calendar behaved differently from the Julian calendar, and hardly any of us will live to see the next time.

The new calendar was designed so that the equinoxes and solstices would fall on the same date every year. The traditional dates shown below are different from the modern ones, because the Julian calendar isn’t perfect. It’s based on a solar year of 365.25 days, but a solar year is actually 365.2422 days. As a result the solstices slip out of synch by one day every 128 years. To fix this, in 1582 the Gregorian calendar was instituted, as a slight revision to the Julian calendar. It was pinned to the equinox and solstice dates as they were in 325 CE, because 325 CE is when the Nicene formula for calculating the date of Easter was finalised.

Ancient authors give different dates for the solstices and equinoxes: the dates shown here are based on Pliny the Elder, and partly coincide with dates and intervals quoted by Columella and Ptolemy. Other authors — including Caesar — put the solstices and equinoxes on other dates: see below.

Ancient astronomers from Hipparchos onwards were aware that the solar year was slightly under 365¼ days. Ptolemy reports on two sets of observations, one made by Hipparchos, the other by himself, which calculated the error to be approximately one day every 300 years: that is, a solar year of 365.2467 days (Almagest 3.1; 204–206 ed. Heiberg). Caesar was unaware of Hipparchos’ observation, or he chose to ignore the discrepancy. Given that the true error is larger than Hipparchos or Ptolemy thought — one day every 128 years — that’s probably just as well.

Sosigenes of ... where, now?

Here’s what Pliny says about Sosigenes (Natural history 18.211–212):

... Caesar the dictator forced individual years back to the cycle of the sun, employing Sosigenes, who was an expert in his science. ... And Sosigenes himself, though more careful than others in his three treatises, did not stop questioning, since he corrected himself ...

Sosigenes appears in one other place, when Pliny cites him for the statement that the planet Mercury never appears more than 22° away from the sun (Natural history 2.39; actually the maximum elongation of Mercury varies between 18° and 28°).

Look up Sosigenes today, and you’ll often find him called ‘Sosigenes of Alexandria’.

But wait. Pause. Rewind. Take a look at Pliny, and let me remind you he’s our only source for Sosigenes. Do you see any mention of Alexandria?

No, you don’t. The idea that Sosigenes was Alexandrian is entirely a product of the modern imagination. I’ve found it in books as far back as the 1700s, so it’s not very recent, but it’s still a modern fiction.

Note. The misinformation doesn’t stop there. Wikipedia plasters fake Alexandrian and Egyptian connections all over the place, including in the article title, but also gives fake transliterations of his name into Greek — yes, his name is Greek in origin, but it isn’t attested anywhere in Greek, and he could for example be a Roman from southern Italy — and gives three totally fake titles for his lost works. A single editor invented these titles and their Greek versions out of thin air in March 2021, at the same time as adding spurious connections to the Antikythera device.

The tradition of calling Sosigenes ‘Alexandrian’ originates in indirect testimony — not about Sosigenes, but about Caesar himself.

Caesar was in Alexandria in 48–47 BCE, first hunting down Pompey, then bringing down Ptolemy XIII and setting up Cleopatra as sole pharaoh of Egypt. One mediaeval source tells us that he took a strong interest in astronomy during wartime —

(Caesar) says that it was in wartime that he focused on the study of astronomy: he put aside all other thoughts in the war. And the outcome proves that he meant this truly, since his book that he wrote about calculation is not inferior to that of Eudoxus.

Scholium on Lucan, cod. Lips. Rep. 1, N. 10 10.185 (p. 781 ed. Weber)

Note. I cannot trace Weber’s source for this scholium. ‘Lips.’ means that the manuscript is or was in Leipzig, but Weber’s edition dates to 1831, and manuscript shelfmarks at Leipzig no longer look anything like this.

And four ancient sources tell us that Caesar’s new calendar was based on ‘Egyptian teaching’.

And later, based on Egyptian teaching, Gaius Caesar appointed that the period (of a year) was 365¼ days, and that some months should have 30 days, others should have 31, and February should have 28. For in antiquity it was reckoned that each month had 30 days, and that 5¼ should be added to the total.

John Lydus, De mensibus 3.5–6 = p. 40,8–41,2 ed. Wuensch

Note. Similarly Appian, Civil war 2.154; Dion Cassius 43.26; Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.14.3, 1.16.39.

So this must be where the idea of Sosigenes being Alexandrian comes from. Even though none of these writers mentions Sosigenes, and even though no ancient writer connects Sosigenes to Egypt in any way.

Obviously that’s no basis for calling him ‘Sosigenes of Alexandria’. It’s a fabrication, and it needs to stop.

But come to that, should we even take them at their word that Caesar’s source of information was ‘Egyptian’?

According to Macrobius, Caesar drew attention to parallels in the Egyptian calendar himself. But the Julian calendar isn’t an Egyptian product in any sense. There are five reasons I say this:

1. As we’ll see below, one key principle of the new calendar was minimal alterations to the Roman calendar. The names and positions of the months remained the same, as did the key days of the Kalends, Nones, and Ides; the extra days were distributed across the months that had fewer than 31 days; intercalation took place in the same position as in the republican calendar, that is, after 23 February; and care was taken to make sure the positions of Roman religious observances were unaltered. The Egyptian calendar, by contrast, had 12 months of equal length, with Egyptian names and 30 days each, plus 5 epagomenal (extra) days.
2. Another key principle was the addition of one intercalary day (leap day) every four years. The Egyptian calendar didn’t have this — not until 17 years later, after the fall of the Ptolemies.
3. The reckoning of a solar year as 365¼ days originated with an astronomer from Anatolia and based in Athens, not Egypt.
4. Egypt’s calendar had 365 days because of physical reality, not local customs. Egypt didn’t have a monopoly on the fact that a solar year lasts roughly 365 days.
5. We have fairly extensive documentation of Caesar’s own work on the calendar and observations of seasonal phenomena, and that he wrote a detailed treatise on the subject.

Taking these points into account, the simplest reading is that Caesar and other ancient observers drew attention to Egypt because the Egyptian calendar was already close to the correct value, and not because the new calendar was based on it.

And if you look carefully at John Lydus’ account, above, you’ll see his story is clearly not true. The calendar of ‘antiquity’ that he describes is the Alexandrian calendar after 30 BCE. Caesar can’t have got the idea of a 365¼ day calendar from Egypt, as Lydus claims, because Egypt didn’t have a 365¼ day calendar at the time.

Note. Similarly Theodor Mommsen, writing over 160 years ago; ‘Sosigenes of Alexandria’ should have disappeared from the face of the earth after he wrote (1859: 295 n.22): ‘... scholarly opinion stamped Sosigenes as Alexandrian for lack of evidence. No ancient source is going to contradict my statement: I think unbiased judges will be persuaded that much older and weightier authorities characterise Caesar’s model as the Italian-Eudoxian calendar, and that this rules out the other proposition; that in real terms it is bizarre to bring from abroad what one has long had at home; that no direct borrowing from Egypt has yet been demonstrated in the organisation of the Julian year; and that it is therefore very difficult to understand why we must ‘in any case’ accept that Caesar’s advisers were Alexandrian. The consideration that the name Sosigenes — obviously a standard Greek name, and decidedly rare — also appears on Egyptian papyrus, and that there(?) it is probably derived from the deity Shu ... is so dubious that it suffices to mention it.’

Where did Caesar’s calendar really come from?

The astronomer who measured the solar year as 365¼ days was Kallippos of Kyzikos, who studied at Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lycaeum in Athens in the late 4th century BCE. Among other things, Kallippos determined exact periods between each of the solstices and equinoxes.

Previously Meton had measured a lunisolar cycle of 235 lunar months, corresponding to 19 solar years. Kallippos extended this to a cycle of 912 lunar months plus 28 intercalary months, or 27,759 days, corresponding to 76 solar years — an average of 365¼ days per year.

Note. For Kallippos’ 365¼ day year see Geminus, Phainomena 8.59–60; see further Neugebauer 1975: 615–624.

Meton’s 19-year cycle gave the year an average of 365 5/19 days, that is, 365.2632 days. Kallippos’ year of 365.25 days was an improvement on this. Later, as we saw, Hipparchos improved Kallippos’ calculation still further, to 365.2467 days.

And by the way, observe that Meton, Kallippos, and Hipparchos all lived in Greece, not Egypt. Alexandria has nothing to do with this story.

So, what should we infer: is it that Sosigenes made Kallippos’ work the basis for the Julian calendar? That’s a possible interpretation, except that it’s still missing a key fact.

You see, Caesar himself wrote a detailed treatise called De astris (‘On the stars’), on astronomy, on the length of the year, and containing a calendar with solar dates for numerous seasonal and astronomical phenomena, including solstices and equinoxes.

That is to say, it would appear that the Julian calendar is the result of Julius Caesar’s own research. He didn’t farm out the work to experts, he was the expert. When Pliny cites four schools of thought about measuring the sun’s progress around the ecliptic — the Chaldaean, Egyptian, Greek, and Italian schools — it’s Caesar himself that represents the Italian school.

The De astris doesn’t survive, alas. But the fragments, preserved in other extant sources, are collected in Alfred Klotz’s 1927 Teubner edition, and they strongly suggest that not only was Caesar knowledgeable about astronomy, his work was startlingly carefully thought out in other respects too. Caesar didn’t just lengthen the Roman year to 365¼ days. He had solid, specific reasons for the month lengths he adopted; he made his own observations of the stars and seasonal weather; he put a huge amount of effort into making the new calendar politically acceptable and into avoiding religious upsets; even more, he put careful thought into which days in each month were going to be the extra days.

Here are Caesar’s alterations:

	Republican calendar	Days added	Julian calendar
January	29 days	19 Jan, 20 Jan	31 days
February	28	bissextus (leap day)	28 or 29
March	31	—	31
April	29	26 Apr	30
May	31	—	31
June	29	29 Jun	30
Quinctilis/July	31	—	31
Sextilis/August	29	29 Aug, 30 Aug	31
September	29	29 Sep	30
October	31	—	31
November	29	29 Nov	30
December	29	29 Dec, 30 Dec	31
Total	355 (= 12 lunar months of 29½ days)	10¼	365¼

Note. For the exact dates Caesar added, see Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.14.7–9. Censorinus, De die natali 20.9, corroborates the number of days added to each month; the republican-era Fasti Antiates confirm Macrobius’ figures for months in the republican calendar (Degrassi 1957: 23–41).

In both systems, intercalations — extra days to make the year line up with the seasons — were in February. In the republican system, an intercalary month could be inserted after 23 February, and in the Julian system, every fourth year the 24th of February would last two days, which Caesar called bissextus.

Incidentally, for those who already know something about the Roman calendar, the pre-Julian month lengths are the reason that ‘July, October, March, and May / have Nones the 7th, Ides the 15th day’. It’s because those are the months that had had 31 days all along; the 29-day months had them on the 5th and the 13th, and Caesar didn’t change that. The extra days he added were towards the end of each month, so as to avoid altering the dates of religious observances.

The dates of the solstices and equinoxes

The diagram I gave above is based on Pliny’s dates for the solstices and equinoxes:

(Daylight) increases from midwinter, and is equal to the night at the spring equinox, 90 days and 3 hours later. Then it exceeds the night up to the solstice, 94 days and 12 hours later. * * * up to the autumn equinox. And then, after it is equal to the daylight, the night increases until midwinter, 88 days and 3 hours later.

Pliny, Natural history 18.220

Pliny’s figure for the period between the summer solstice and autumn equinox is missing, but a period of 92.5 days is implied by the other figures and by a 365¼ day year. It so happens that Ptolemy gives two figures that agree with Pliny, including the missing 92.5 day period —

[Hipparchos] assumes that the interval from spring equinox to summer solstice is 94½ days, and that the interval from summer solstice to autumnal equinox is 92½ days ...

Ptolemy, Almagest 3.4 (trans. Toomer)

The only date Pliny pinpoints is the winter solstice, on 25 December (NH 18.221). That implies the rest of the dates used in my diagram, above. Here are some other sets of solstice and equinox dates reported in the 1st and 2nd centuries BCE and CE.

	spring equinox	summer solstice	autumn equinox	winter solstice
Hipparchos	—	94.5 days after equinox	92.5 days after solstice	—
Caesar	— (25 Mar?)	24 Jun	24 Sep	—
Varro	90 days after solstice (24 Mar)	45 days after Favorinus = 92 days after equinox (24 Jun)	94 days later (26 Sep)	89 days later (24 Dec)
Hyginus, Columella	25 Mar	—	24 Sep	25 Dec
Pliny	90.125 days after winter solstice (25 Mar)	94.5 days later (27/28 Jun)	88.125 days before winter solstice (= 92.5 days after summer solstice, i.e. 28 Sep)	25 Dec = 88.125 days later
Ptolemy	22 Mar 140 CE	24/25 Jun 140 CE	26 Sep 139 CE	—

Notes. Sources: Hipparchos, reported by Ptolemy, Almagest 3.4; Caesar, reported by Pliny, Natural history 18.246, 18.256, 18.312 (in book 1 Pliny cites Caesar’s De astris among his sources for book 18); Varro, Res rustica 1.28; Columella, De re rustica 9.14.1, 9.14.10–11 (citing Hyginus); Pliny, Natural history 18.220–221; Ptolemy, Almagest 3.4. Parentheses denote information that the text does not state explicitly. In Caesar’s case, Pliny quotes the 25 March date in one sentence, then cites Caesar in the following sentence; it’s only Klotz’s edition that links the two. For Varro, the dates shown here are based on the inference that his date for Favonius (the west wind) coincides with the beginning of spring, which Varro puts on 7 February. See above on the 92.5-day period in Pliny. Some dates are widely mistranslated and/or misreported. In the Loeb translation of Columella, viii calendas Aprilis is mistranslated as 24 Mar. (for 25 Mar.), and viii calend. Ianuarii as 23 Dec. (for 25 Dec.); in the Loeb of Pliny, viii kal. Ian. is mistranslated as 26 Dec. (for 25 Dec.). In addition, Columella is widely reported as putting the winter solstice on 24 Dec., even by Neugebauer. I cannot tell how these errors have arisen. The text in each case is clear and unambiguous. Ptolemy’s measurements are a day later than modern reckoning, which gives the dates as 5:27 pm 21 Mar. 140 CE, 3:11 pm 23 Jun. 140 CE, and 10:41 pm 24 Sep. 139 CE (= Terrestrial Time plus 2 hours for the longitude of Alexandria).

There’s a substantial body of scholarship over these dates, but mostly about which coordinate system the ancient authors use for setting the points and divisions of the seasons against the sun’s progress through the zodiac (Neugebauer 1975: 593–600), and on what the above table may have looked like in the republican calendar (Mommsen 1859: 54–79 on the rustic calendar, tabulation at 62).

There is certainly more variation than you might think from looking at Christian traditions about the dates of Easter and Christmas. Christians from the 3rd century onwards consistently used the dates 25 March and 25 December for the spring equinox and winter solstice, as I described last year.

Those are the dates we find in Pliny, Columella, and (so Columella tells us) Hyginus, the most celebrated Roman astronomer of Augustus’ time. It’s striking that in Pliny these dates, which disagree with Caesar, are stuck in between two discussions of Caesar.

NH 18.210–211	Caesar’s solar cycle; Sosigenes’ involvement
NH 18.220–221	Pliny’s solstice and equinox dates (which disagree with Caesar)
NH 18.232 onwards	Lengthy catalogue of seasonal and astronomical phenomena, including some of Caesar’s solstice and equinox dates

Pliny’s solstice and equinox dates are of great interest. Given that they partially correspond to what Ptolemy says about Hipparchos, they could be derived from Hipparchos.

Actually I suspect they might be Kallippos’ own dates. Remember that the Julian calendar slips out of synch with the seasons by 1 day every 128 years. As a result, when ancient writers give us calendar dates for solstices, we can estimate when those dates were observed. We compare the quoted dates with the dates as calculated by modern astronomy, and see which period they’re valid for.

We do need to allow leeway. Ancient observers made mistakes measuring the equinoxes and solstices: Ptolemy himself erred by a day in 139–140 CE (see notes to table above). With that in mind, here are the date ranges where the quoted dates are valid, to varying degrees of tolerance.

Source	Dates quoted	Valid period, dates exactly as quoted	Valid period, ±1 day tolerance	Valid period, ±2 days tolerance
Caesar	24 Jun, 24 Sep	12 to 167 CE	121 BCE to 287 CE	253 BCE to 407 CE
Varro	24 Mar, 24 June, 26 Sep, 24 Dec	no valid period	165 BCE to 51 CE	289 BCE to 179 CE
Hyginus, Columella	25 Mar, 24 Sep, 25 Dec	no valid period	no valid period	261 to 26 BCE
Pliny	25 Mar, 27/28 Jun, 28 Sep, 25 Dec	429 to 298 BCE	557 to 162 BCE	689 to 26 BCE

Caesar’s and Varro’s dates could plausibly have been observed in their own lifetimes. But in Pliny’s case, that’s quite a stretch. Pliny’s dates look as though they come from observations made much earlier.

It has been suggested that the 25 March/25 December dates could come from Hipparchos (thus Hannah 2005: 151, following a suggestion of Christian Ludwig Ideler in the 1820s). I think the full set of Pliny’s dates points to an earlier origin. And, given that Kallippos, the discoverer of the 365¼ day cycle, lived slap in the middle of the valid date range for Pliny, I’m going to suggest that Kallippos could also be the originator of Pliny’s season lengths and solstice dates.

References

• Degrassi, A. 1957. Inscriptiones latinae liberae rei republicae, vol. 1. Florence.
• Hannah, R. 2005. Greek & Roman calendars. Constructions of time in the classical world. London.
• Klotz, A. (ed.) 1927. ‘vii. De astris.’ In: C. Iuli Caesaris commentarii, vol. 3. Teubner. 211–229. [Internet Archive]
• Mommsen, Th. 1859. Die römische Chronologie bis auf Caesar, 2nd ed. Berlin. [Internet Archive]
• Neugebauer, O. 1975. A history of ancient mathematical astronomy. Berlin/Heidelberg.

New Year's Day and the Roman calendar

Happy New Year! In early Rome, anyway. Well, maybe ... actually maybe not. Can’t be sure.

‘Date’ and ‘calendar’ are ambiguous words. They can refer to how we label years, but also to how we label days within a year.

But historically, these two things -- year labels and day labels -- haven’t had all that much to do with each other. The date of Julius Caesar’s assassination is the 15th of March, 44 BCE. The Romans called it the 15th of March too (or the equivalent, in Latin) -- but they didn’t call it 44 BCE.

We label years with a number, using the CE/BCE or AD/BC system. This system came into use with 7th-8th century English historians like Bede and Alcuin. It was based on chronological work done by Christian calendrical-liturgical scholars who put a lot of effort into reconciling several different calendar traditions, such as Dionysius Exiguus (‘Dionysius the Puny’) in 525, and going back at least to the 100s.

But we label days within a year using a slightly modified form of the Julian calendar, a system that was introduced under Julius Caesar’s dictatorship in 46 BCE. So these are two independent things.

Just to make things worse: even after both of these systems were in widespread use, from the 700s onwards, 1 January wasn’t necessarily the start of the year. New Year’s Day could be a variety of different days depending on when, where, and whom we’re talking about.

In England before the Norman invasion, the New Year began on 25 March or 25 December -- so the day after 24 March 1050 was 25 March 1051 in the calendar of the time. After 1066 the New Year shifted to 1 January, but was put back on 25 March on the accession of Henry II. It stayed there until switching to 1 January again in 1751. France and Italy also used 25 March or 25 December up until the late 1500s, when they too moved to 1 January. Russia used 1 September up until 1700; that’s still the New Year in the Eastern Orthodox liturgical calendar. In the Catholic church the calendar starts on 1 January for some purposes, but for others (like in lectionaries) it begins on the first Sunday of Advent, at some point in the period 27 November to 3 December. The tax year is out of synch with the calendar year in plenty of countries too. But all of these systems use, or used, the Julian/Gregorian calendar for telling which day it is.

And then we have the Romans. In the past we’ve looked at the myth that the Romans used an ‘AUC’ system for specifying the year (only after the time of Varro, and only rarely). Now let’s talk about the other calendar -- the one for telling which day it is.

The last four months of the year are based on Latin number words. One of the most common complaints about the month-names that we’ve inherited from the Romans is that they’re the wrong numbers:

Month	Month number	Meaning of name
September	9	septem = 7
October	10	octo = 8
November	11	novem = 9
December	12	decem = 10

A fair number of people have heard a story that these months were originally the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th months of the year. That’s what the Romans themselves believed. It may even be true. But there’s quite a lot of misinformation floating around as to how and when it changed (if it did change).

Inscription dating to ‘the 17th day before the Kalends of Germanicus’ (CIL XI 5745 = ILS 6644)

Myth #1: July and August

One myth I’ve seen around is that the Roman calendar had 10 months up until the invention of the Julian calendar, and on that occasion Iulius (July) and Augustus (August) were added, named after Julius Caesar and Augustus respectively, to make a total of 12.

That is where the names July and August come from, but it’s false that they were added. They were just re-named: the republican calendar had 12 months too. July had been called Quintilis or Quinctilis, but was renamed after Caesar’s death, partly to honour Caesar himself (whose birthday was in July) and partly because of the new solar calendar that he had instituted in 46; Augustus himself did the renaming of Sextilis, probably in conjunction with another small calendar reform to correct how the Julian calendar was implemented.

If you know your Latin, you’ll spot that these follow a similar pattern to the other ‘number’ months, just with ordinal numbers instead of cardinals:

Month	Month number	Meaning of name
Quintilis	7	quintus = 5th
Sextilis	8	sextus = 6th

Some later rulers in the principate tried to rename months after themselves too. Thankfully, they never stuck. Gaius (Caligula) renamed September Germanicus, after one of his surnames; Nero renamed April, May, and June all after himself, as Neroneus, Claudius, and Germanicus; Domitian renamed September and October as Germanicus and Domitianus; Commodus renamed all twelve months after his various adopted names. Shudder. (Still, if any of these had stuck, there’d be a bright side: imagine celebrating Nero Fool’s Day on the 1st of Neroneus.)

A passage from one of Cicero’s letters to his brother Quintus, written in 56 BCE, mentioning a few dates: highlighted is K. Quintilis (1 July).

Myth #2: January and February

January and February were put at the start of the year at some point. But we don’t have any real idea how, why, or when, except that it was pretty early.

Roman tradition held that the mythical king Numa, the second of Rome’s legendary seven kings, added them onto a pre-existing 10-month calendar. But even if Numa was ever a real person, which is vanishingly unlikely, the Romans certainly didn’t have any records of any kind from that period.

They didn’t have records from anywhere near that period. There’s no authentic Roman history at all before the reign of Tarquinius Priscus, the fifth king. Even after that point, it’s more myth than history up until the 300s BCE. (As for Priscus, the only reason we suspect he’s real is because of the criterion of embarrassment: we assume that people don’t like inventing embarrassing stories about themselves, and Priscus was a potential embarrassment because he was Etruscan, not Roman.)

Livy, one of Rome’s best known historians, tells us himself that no written records survived from before the 300s. He guessed that the records were all destroyed in the Gaulish sack of Rome, traditionally dated to 390 BCE. More likely, no records ever existed. If Numa had existed, he’d have been in the 700s BCE: four hundred years before any actual written records. For stories set in that period our default assumption has to be that they’re all completely false.

That includes the stories about Numa reforming the Roman calendar. And it also includes the idea that there were originally 10 months in the calendar.

Now, the story that January and February got added to the start of the year looks intrinsically reasonable. First, there ought to be an explanation for the number-names of Quintilis to December; the January-February story explains it nicely. Second, the idea that they were originally intercalary winter months -- adjusted each year to make the dates come out in synch with the seasons -- fits well with the fact that intercalation in historical times was done in February (and still is today). So it looks very plausible that they have a separate origin.

When we see Roman writers coming up with the same story, it’s not because they had access to some kind of secret knowledge from the 700s BCE: it’s because it’s a good theory and they thought of it too. It doesn’t follow that anything else they say about the early calendar is true.

So while it’s completely plausible that January and February were added on, we know nothing at all about how they were added, and nothing about how the early Romans compensated for their absence beforehand. Roman writers tell us stories of extra intercalary months in winter; stories that January and February were originally at the end of the year, after December; stories that the early Romans just lived with having only 304 days in the calendar and as a result it was sometimes summer in December. We can’t draw any conclusions from those, because they’re all just guesses.

Myth #3: the names of the other months

So months 5 to 10 had names based on Latin numbers: ‘fifth-ilis’, ‘sixth-ilis’, ‘seven-ber’, ‘eight-ber’, and so on. What about the other months?

Month	Meaning of name
Ianuarius (January)	‘month of the door’ (ianua ‘door’)
Februarius (February)	‘month of the februa’ (related to Lupercalia)
Martius (March)	‘month of Mars’
Aprilis (April)	probably Etruscan: ‘month of Fortune’ (from Etruscan afr, apru(n))
Maius (May)	‘month of the elder’ (mai- ‘older, greater’)
Iunius (June)	‘month of the younger’ (iuni- ‘younger’)

January. Popularly thought to be named for the god Janus, but there’s no real basis for that. There was a very minor festival called Agonalia on the 9th of January that some sources claim was in honour of the god Janus -- but Agonalia also took place on the 20th of May and the 10th of December. It looks pretty obvious that the link to Janus was invented in hindsight.

February. Not ‘month of fevers’ (febres), as I vaguely remember being told when I was younger, but month of the februa. These were purification offerings for the festival of Lupercalia, on the 15th of February. For the same reason we also occasionally see Lupercalia referred to as ‘the februated day’ (dies februatus).

March. Mars was always absolutely central to Roman state religion. He was one of the Big Three along with Jupiter and Ceres, and intimately tied to Roman foundation myths. His place here doesn’t need much explanation.

April. Ancient writers liked to think that Aprilis came from the Greek goddess Aphrodite (originally pronounced Ap‘roditē), and this story is still in circulation. But it’s obviously guesswork, and a late idea: Romans in the time of the principate may have liked to think of Latin as a Greek dialect (wrongly), but the early Romans certainly didn’t use Greek like that. Another possibility (De Vaan 2008: 48) is suggested by the fact that Aprilis shares a suffix with two number-named-months, Quintilis and Sextilis. Aprilis could in principle be another one: it would come from an early compound of Latin ab/ap- ‘away from, off’, as in the verb aperio ‘to open’: *ap(e)rus could be then be an ordinal, ‘the following, second in sequence’, with Aprilis as a month-name based on that. But most probably the name is a borrowing from Etruscan. We have the names of some of the months in the Etruscan calendar, and April happens to correspond to Etruscan apru, aprun, or apira. The Etruscan name is based on the word afr or apher ‘fortune’, indicating the meaning ‘month of Fortune’, where ‘Fortune’ was an Etruscan divinity.

May. Maius is sometimes linked to the Roman goddess Maia (not to be confused with the Greek Maia, who was one of the Pleiades and mother of Hermes -- though the Romans eventually came to identify them with each other). That’s the reason we sometimes see Maia equated with the bona dea (‘good goddess’), whose festival was on the 1st of May. But more probably May and June are a pair: May ‘elder’, and June ‘junior’. This too is an ancient theory -- it’s Varro’s idea -- but unlike many ancient attempts at etymology, this one looks pretty likely.

June. This one is often linked to the goddess Juno, but as we just saw it’s pretty likely to mean ‘younger’, paired with May ‘elder’. If the name had come from Juno it would have to be Iunonius, not Iunius. Some sources (like the Oxford Classical Dictionary) suggest that the name is Etruscan -- Juno’s Etruscan name was Uni, and it’s a lot easier to see Iunius coming from that -- but that theory doesn’t hold water. First, Juno is an Indo-European name: the Etruscans borrowed Uni from Iuno, not the other way round. Second, we know what the Etruscans called the month of June, and it ain’t related to Uni: they called it acale or acle.

May and June are still connected to Maia and Juno, just indirectly. The names are linguistic cousins, not linguistic parent and child. That is to say: Maia doesn’t come from Maius, but they do both come from the same origin, mai-, meaning ‘elder’ or ‘greater’. And it’s the same story with Iunius and Iuno. Presumably Maia would originally have meant ‘elder (goddess)’ or ‘greater (goddess)’, and Juno would have been ‘goddess of youth’ at some point.

Just to finish off, here’s Ovid, with a nice mixture of myths and accurate etymologies:

These were the things that Quirinus [= Romulus] paid attention to
    when he gave his laws for the year to the rustic people.
The first month belonged to Mars, the second to Venus [= Aphrodite];
    she was the author of the race, he its father.
The third got its name from old people, the fourth from the young,
    and the crowd that followed were known by number.

-- Ovid, Fasti 1.37-42

Ovid knew his Varro. So he’s got March, May, and June right; but he’s wrong about April, and we just don’t know if he’s right or wrong about March being the first month.

Reference

• De Vaan, Michel 2008. Etymological dictionary of Latin and the other Italic languages. Leiden/Boston: Brill.

Caesar’s birth and death

Caesar and caesarean section

This is how the entry for ‘Caesarean’ looks in the 1989 Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary:

2. (Also with lower-case initial): spec. (in Obstetrics) Caesarean birth n. (also Cæsarean operation, Cæsarean section) the delivery of a child by cutting through the walls of the abdomen when delivery cannot take place in the natural way, as was done in the case of Julius Cæsar. Also fig.

OED, ‘Caesarean’ 2

It’s basically unchanged since the original 1893 printing. Even the spelling ‘Cæsar’, as opposed to ‘Caesar’, is a bit of a giveaway as to how old-fashioned this entry is. The entry hasn’t yet been revised in the post-Second-Edition online revision.

The misinformation lies in the last nine words: ‘as was done in the case of Julius Cæsar.’

The myth arose because of an ancient story that linked the origins of the name ‘Caesar’ to a Latin word for ‘cut’, caesus. Pliny the Elder mentions the story that the first Caesar, Julius’ earliest ancestor, was born that way:

... primusque Caesarum a caeso matris utero dictus, qua de causa et Caesones appellati.

... and the first of the Caesars, who was said (to have been born) from cutting (caes-) his mother’s womb; the Caesones (family) also got their name that way.

Pliny, Natural history 7.47 (repeated in Solinus 1.68)

Later the story reappears in a commentary on Vergil’s Aeneid dating to around 400 CE, and two Byzantine encyclopaedias dating to the 900s and 1000s. By then, it’s turned into a story about Julius Caesar himself — or J.C., as Asterix sometimes calls him:

The emperors of the Romans receive this name from Julius Caesar, the one who was not born. For when his mother died in the 9th month, they cut her open, took him out, and named him thus; for in the Roman tongue dissection is called ‘caesar’.

Suda κ.1199 Καῖσαρ (similarly Servius on Aen. 1.286; Et. Mag. 498.27-30)

Probably the earliest printed illustration of a caesarean section, depicting J.C.’s birth: from the 1506 Venetian edition of Suetonius’ Lives (coloured in some copies). The accompanying notes mention several of the stories quoted here. Notice that, here, J.C.’s mother appears to have died — unlke the real Aurelia, who lived another 46 years.

This version of the story definitely isn’t true:

1. We know of people named Caesar going back many generations before J.C.: the earliest known Caesar is one Sextus Julius Caesar who held a praetorship in 208 BCE.
2. J.C.’s mother, Aurelia, lived until 54 BCE, just ten years before her son’s death; yet mothers undergoing caesareans had a near-100% mortality rate until the 19th century, 80-90% during the 19th century, and only started surviving routinely in the 1940s, after the advent of antibiotics. (To be fair, this 1961 article suggests an interpretation of some 2nd century CE Jewish texts which would put successful caesareans a lot earlier. Even if it’s right, still, it’s hardly typical.)
3. Neither of the ancient biographies of J.C., by Suetonius and Plutarch, so much as mentions his birth, let alone any unusual circumstances.

(If you’re observant you may have noticed that the Pliny text I linked to above has a footnote that also equates ‘the first of the Caesars’ with J.C. For the Suda that mistake might just be excusable, but the modern editor definitely should have known better!)

We can be confident that even Pliny’s relatively sensible version is pure fiction. There’s no shortage of origin stories for the name ‘Caesar’:

According to the most learned and erudite people, the person who was first called ‘Caesar’ got the name either (1) from an elephant, which in the Mauretanian language is reportedly caesai; or (2) because his mother died and he was born by cutting (caes-) open the belly; or (3) because he poured out of his parent’s womb with a thick head of hair; or (4) because he had pale grey (caesi-) eyes and thrived more than most people do.

Historia Augusta, Aelius 2.3-4

(Numbers 1 and 2 also appear in Servius on Aeneid 1.286: except that in Servius, it’s J.C.’s grandfather that killed the elephant — still not true; the name went back earlier than that — and the word supposedly comes from Carthaginian, not Mauretanian. Number 3 is inspired by the word caesaries ‘white hair’.)

With this context, it’s clear that all of the stories are inventions. They’re ‘just so’ stories, designed as guesses for how the name came about. Even if by some miracle one of them were correct, we’d never have any way of telling.

Having said that, there’s no doubt that the modern name for the life-saving procedure — ‘caesarean section’ — is based on the J.C. story. The illustration, above, from the 1506 edition of Suetonius, may even have been an inspiration. Some people suggest the name for the operation is linked to a (purportedly early) Roman law that mandated caesarean sections on women who died while pregnant, which came to be known as a ‘caesarean’ law in late antiquity, thanks to the J.C. story. That’s comparatively obscure, though: I find it easier to imagine 16th century physicians reading Pliny than the Digest of Justinian.

Another illustration of Caesar’s birth, this time from a manuscript dating to ca. 1376-1400, in a text titled Li Fet des Romains. Again, Aurelia appears to have died 46 years early. (British Library Royal 16 G VII, f. 219)

Caesar’s last words

Caesar. Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar!

Shakespeare, Julius Caesar Act III Scene 1

Calpurnia. Julie don’t go, I said, it’s the Ides of March, beware already!

Wayne and Shuster, Rinse the blood off my toga (1958)

This one’s relatively easy to dispose with. It’s only Shakespeare that has him saying ‘You too, Brutus?’ in Latin — or, to be strict: Shakespeare, and a few other 16th century plays.

The only ancient source to serve as a counterpart is in Suetonius, who has the following report of the assassination:

utque animadvertit undique se strictis pugionibus peti, toga caput obvolvit, simul sinistra manu sinum ad ima crura deduxit, quo honestius caderet etiam inferiore corporis parte velata. atque ita tribus et viginti plagis confossus est uno modo ad primum ictum gemitu sine voce edito, etsi tradiderunt quidam Marco Bruto irruenti dixisse: καὶ σὺ τέκνον.

And when he realised that he was surrounded by drawn daggers, he covered his head with his toga, and at the same time he drew its fold down to the bottom of his legs with his left hand, so that he should fall more decently, with the lower half of his body covered. Like this, he was struck with twenty-three blows in the same way; at the first stroke he gave a groan, but uttered no cry. Though certain sources have reported that when Marcus Brutus attacked, he said to him (in Greek) ‘You too, child.’

Suetonius, Life of Julius Caesar 82.2

Even Suetonius doesn’t quite believe the story of the last words, and he was more gossip columnist than historian. Other accounts — Plutarch Life of Caesar 66.7), Cassius Dio 44.19.4-5 — agree about many details, including the covering his face, and in Plutarch’s case, the toga gesture and the number of blows, but there are no last words: J.C.’s only response to seeing Brutus is to cover his face. Cassius Dio, like Suetonius, emphasises that he spoke no words at all.

So we’ve got plenty to reject the words to Brutus as spurious. There’s also the fact that Brutus was not Caesar’s ‘child’ in any way, shape, or form (the story that Caesar adopted him is an invention, based on this very passage).

But it’s especially weird how the words are given in Greek. Despite the opinions of certain pop historians, Greek was not anything like a common mode of speaking for aristocratic Romans: even Cicero, who was fluent, wrote to his best friend, who was an ardent hellenophile, in Latin with only sprinklings of Greek. Augustus never got comfortable enough in Greek to hold up a conversation; Marius knew no Greek at all.

That strongly suggests the possibility that the phrase is a quotation, perhaps from a poem. A. J. Woodman, drawing on work by Pascal Arnaud, points out that two related phrases spoken to the future emperor Galba suggest a context. Suetonius reports how the young Galba had an audience with Augustus, and Augustus pinched his cheek and said, in Greek, ‘You too, child, will have a nibble of our power’ (Life of Galba 4.1). Elsewhere, Tiberius addresses Galba with the line ‘You, too, will taste command one day’ (Cassius Dio 57.19.4; Tacitus Annals 6.20.2). Combining these, Woodman suggests the reconstruction

καὶ σὺ τέκνον ποτὲ τῆς ἀρχῆς ἡμῶν παρατρώξῃ.

You too, child, will one day have a nibble of our power.

Woodman, The Annals of Tacitus: Books 5-6 (2006) 183-4

In this form the line makes a dactylic hexameter, which would suggest an origin in Hellenistic epic or elegiac poetry (though it should be pointed out that the lack of a sense-break at the third-foot caesura raises grounds for doubt, and ποτέ doesn’t attach to τέκνον very comfortably).

If he’s right, that would make Caesar’s supposed phrase something along the same lines. He doesn’t mean, ‘Have you joined my enemies too? Woe is me!’ as in Shakespeare. Instead, it’s a statement of disgust at Brutus’ hypocrisy: ‘You’re no tyrant-slayer like your ancestor was — you really want power for yourself!’

The words may well be old, but the idea that Caesar spoke them is obviously a fictional invention. In the first place: Suetonius, Plutarch, and Cassius Dio all believe that he didn’t speak. And in the second place: who, while being stabbed 23 times, would offer a moral judgement on their slayer with an apposite epic quotation in a foreign language?

Jean-Léon Gérôme, La mort de César, 1859-1867.
(‘Stabbed? In the senate?’ ‘Yeah, they got him right in the rotunda.’ ‘Oo, that’s a painful spot. I had a splinter there once.’)

Did the Romans speak Latin?

Short answer: yes, of course they spoke Latin.

Longer answer: ‘Lindybeige’, an online personality fairly well known for his videos debunking bad history, had this to say about the elite of ancient Roman society last year --

Romans spoke Latin, right? Well -- not the educated rich ones, not the patricians, not most of the time. You see, Greek was the language of the educated elite, and when one very very posh patrician was having a word with another very posh patrician in the privacy of their own home, they would probably have been speaking Greek.

-- Lindybeige (a.k.a. Nikolas Lloyd), April 2015

That must be why Cicero wrote his letters to Atticus and his other posh friends in Greek, right? Not to mention the letters written by Seneca, Pliny, and Fronto to their very, very posh friends. (The imperial family, in Fronto’s case!) Right?

... clearly not.

Greek was the language of learning, of poetry, of medicine, of science, all those sort of things. It was the language for the elite ... [T]he servants very often would not have understood a word that their masters were saying...

Hey, did you know that poets like Vergil, Horace, and Ovid wrote in Greek? No? Well, that’s probably because they didn’t. Ever heard of Varro, one of the very greatest scholars of his time? Guess what language he wrote in.

The target of Lindybeige’s ire, HBO’s Rome: Calpurnia (Haydn Gwynne) and Julius Caesar (Ciarán Hinds) in private. No evidence exists to suggest that Caesar spoke Greek with Calpurnia. Nor with Servilia. Nor any other Roman for that matter. (With Cleopatra, though, possibly yes ... because she was Greek.)

All right then, let’s try technical writing. The most important surviving treatise on architecture from antiquity, by the 1st-century architect Vitruvius? Latin. How about Cato the Elder’s manual on farming? Yeah, not very surprising. Well, there may have been general manuals in Latin, but what about the really technical stuff? Take Roman agrimensores: treatises on the theory of land-surveying, the basis for city planning and Roman roads -- people like Frontinus, Urbicus, Balbus, and Hyginus. I wonder if they wrote in-- oh whoops it’s all Latin. All right, then: science! Another Hyginus, appointed by Augustus as curator of the Palatine library, wrote a treatise on astronomy which-- bother. Pliny the Elder-- nope. Well, medical writers-- aw, crap. Never mind, there’s always philologists-- dammit!

---

Lindybeige’s discussion isn’t completely divorced from historical reality. Bilingualism in the Roman world is an area of active research. (Take this 2002 book, for example, especially chapters 4 and 6.) Latin- and Greek-speaking communities blended and merged in places like central and southern Italy, Epirus (north-western Greece), and parts of what is now Serbia.

In Rome itself? Well, there were certainly Greek-speaking elements of the community in the city, but we’re definitely not talking universal diglossia -- Rome was not an ancient version of Luxembourg or Miami -- and where there was diglossia, it was definitely not in the aristocratic sphere. The epigraphic record shows that there were Greek-speaking immigrant communities, but there isn’t anything to suggest standard use of Greek among the elite.

A lot of elite Romans, including the Latin writers I mentioned above, were able to speak Greek, at least to some extent. Vergil and Ovid read lots of Greek poetry. Horace, Varro, and others studied at the Academy in Athens. And so on. Greek was, on the whole, the most widely spoken language of the Mediterranean, and there were loads of educators from the Greek-speaking world floating around Rome. ‘[S]peaking [Latin] was the mark of a Roman,’ but ‘Greek was also a vital component of elite Roman identity,’ as Siobhán McElduff has put it recently.

But to conclude that the Romans didn’t speak Latin, or even just elite Romans -- no, that’s pure fantasy. People who had Greek as their first language certainly preferred to speak and write in Greek: people like Polybius, Crates, and other hellenophones who moved to Rome for one reason or another.* But hey, most Norwegians can speak English. That doesn’t mean they speak it at home. Getting your higher education from people who speak Greek isn’t the same thing as preferring to speak Greek.

Note: There are exceptions: Livius Andronicus took to Latin like an archaeologist to drink, and in a previous post I’ve expressed a suspicion that the calendar-reformer Sosigenes wrote in Latin.

Anyway, if the Romans only used Latin because it was required for communication between cultures, where on earth do you imagine the requirement for Latin came from? Who do you imagine imposed Latin on the Romans?

And concerning the ‘servants’ -- what a horrible whitewashing word that is -- why on earth would they not have understood their masters? The slaves are precisely the ones who often came from Greek-speaking backgrounds.

---

OK, enough carping. What’s the origin of this fake factoid, that posh Romans didn’t speak Latin unless they had to? It’s on this Listverse page too (‘Greek was the dominant language in Rome’).

Is this just a case of looking at studies on bilingualism and suddenly deciding everything you ever knew was wrong? -- a drastic pendulum swing of opinion?

Well, there are Roman sources that could, in principle, be taken to support a decision like that. But only if they’re misread. Here’s one from Juvenal’s sixth Satire. In the midst of a truly loathsome misogynistic rant (yes, yes, even for its time), Juvenal comes up with this charming comment -- and I’ll adopt the old custom of translating Greek as French --

quaedam parva quidem, sed non toleranda maritis,
nam quid rancidius, quam quod se non putat ulla
formosam nisi quae de Tusca Graecula facta est,
de Sulmonensi mera Cecropis? omnia Graece,
{cum sit turpe magis nostris nescire Latine;}
hoc sermone pavent, hoc iram gaudia curas,
hoc cuncta effundunt animi secreta: quid ultra?
concumbunt Graece, dones tamen ista puellis
tune etiam, quam sextus et octogensimus annus
pulsat, adhuc Graece? non est hic sermo pudicus
in vetula: quotiens lascivum intervenit illud
ζωὴ καὶ ψυχή, modo sub lodice loquendis
uteris in turba.

And there are some things -- small, sure, but husbands can’t stand them --
for what’s more revolting than a woman thinking she isn’t
beautiful unless she turns from Tuscan into Greek?
From pure Sulmonian into Cecropian? Everything in Greek!
Their shrieks are in that language, their anger, joys, worries,
all the secrets of their soul that they pour out. But wait, there’s more:
they go to bed in Greek. Now, for girls, you might allow that.
But are you really still going to be Greeking when your 86th year
is knocking on the door? That language is obscene
in a little old lady. Every time you interrupt yourself with a lewd
’vie et âme!’, you’re taking things that should only be spoken
under the covers and using them in public.

-- Juvenal, Satires 6.184-196

(Modern editions bracket line 188 as an obvious scribal gloss; 195 loquendis is Nisbet’s suggestion for the nonsensical MS reading relictis.)

Do the last six lines show what Lindybeige claims, that Greek was the language of private discourse? No: for one thing, the people Juvenal’s complaining about aren’t elites, he’s looking down on them scornfully. For another, mocking Greek as the language of love doesn’t make it the standard language of private discourse. In the old Looney Tunes cartoons Pepé Lepew satirises French as the language of love as perceived by contemporary Americans, but that doesn’t mean that 1940s-1960s Americans actually spoke French in the bedroom.

Quintilian recommends starting a child’s education in Greek as early as possible:

I prefer that a boy start his education in the Greek language, because he’ll absorb Latin whether we want him to or not, since it’s used for most things ...

-- Quintilian, Inst. Or. 1.1.12

This certainly attests to the prestige of Greek. But: (a) he tells us outright that Latin is the language that people actually use, and (b) notice what language Quintilian himself is writing in! This is not a straightforward passage with a straightforward meaning.

Suetonius’ testimony is also mixed. He records how the emperor Claudius sometimes used Greek in diplomatic, judicial, and scholarly contexts:

(Claudius) was just as diligent in his study of Greek, and all the time he declared his love for the language and its superiority. When a certain barbarian spoke in Greek and Latin, he said to him, ‘Since you are accomplished in both our languages.’ When he commended Achaia (in Greece) to the senate, he said that the province was dear to him because of their fellowship in common interests. And often in the senate he replied to ambassadors with a set speech. Before the tribunal he regularly recited lines from Homer. Indeed, whenever he sentenced an enemy or a conspirator, and the guard asked for a password, he would habitually and casually give him none other than this:

pour repousser quiconque attaque le premier.
[= Iliad 24.369, Odyssey 16.72, 21.133; ≈ Il. 19.183]

Finally, he also wrote histories in Greek: twenty books on the Etruscans, and eight on the Carthaginians.

-- Suetonius, Claudius 42

But (1) note what he says: Claudius used a set speech and a repeated catchphrase in Greek; he’s not talking about any actual diplomacy in Greek. These stories don’t even necessarily support conversational fluency. And (2) I hope it’s not just me, but it is obvious, isn’t it, that Suetonius is reporting this anecdote as something noteworthy? That is, something that isn’t automatically obvious?

Elsewhere, he famously quotes Julius Caesar’s alleged last words in Greek (while doubting that there were actually any last words; Julius 82). But when he mentions that Tiberius spoke perfect Greek (Tiberius 71), he goes on to stress that he preferred Latin. He also tells us that Augustus never got comfortable enough in Greek to speak it conversationally (Augustus 87).

Besides, this is the exact opposite of speaking Greek in private.

Another ancient biographer, Plutarch, tells us that Marius never learned Greek at all (Marius 2.2: λέγεται δὲ μήτε γράμματα μαθεῖν Ἑλληνικὰ). Though that, too, is something out of the ordinary: one of the greatest Roman statesmen of all time not knowing any Greek must have seemed as striking as Claudius’ willingness to use the language.

Unusually fluent in Greek? The young Claudius (Derek Jacobi, right) has a chat with the eminent historians Pollio (Donald Eccles) and Livy (Denis Carey) ... both of whom wrote in Latin. (I, Claudius, BBC, 1976)

There is a handful of Romans who wrote books in Greek: aside from Claudius’ lost histories, there was a history of early Rome by Quintus Fabius Pictor (also sadly lost), and in philosophy there’s the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Among the many books written by Cicero’s friend Atticus, one was in Greek. Tertullian wrote a few things in Greek until he settled down to using Latin consistently.

But there’s a lot more who wrote in Latin. At recitals or concerts in Rome you could certainly expect to hear Greek poetry, just as you can hear Italian in modern opera houses. And yes, Greek was the most widely used language around the Mediterranean for scholarship, just as English is for modern scientists. That’s why modern scientists tend to publish in English, and why people like Claudius chose to publish in Greek. Except that Greek didn’t dominate in Rome to anything like the extent that English does in European academia: very nearly all Roman authors chose Latin. We can literally count the exceptions on one hand.

The first Roman emperors to have Greek as their first language probably weren’t until the 3rd century CE -- and that was only if they came from Greek-speaking places and didn’t come from a Roman background or a military family. After some poking around I suspect the first was Philip the Arab, who reigned 244-249. (Maximinus I, 235-238, was another non-latinophone, but his first language was apparently Thracian: SHA Max. 2.5.)

But when Vergil or Ovid were giving recitals of elite Latin poetry to audiences of elite Romans and Tuscans, you can be damn sure the conversations afterwards were in Latin. (Horace? Well, Horace was very much a hellenophile, so it is at least feasible that he might have liked doing Q&A in Greek. We don’t have any evidence to suggest that, mind: it’s just that it’s not a completely daft idea in his specific case.)

If you read Cicero’s letters you’ll get a pretty good idea of how a posh Roman used Greek domestically. When he’s writing to his close friend Atticus, he slips in occasional words or phrases here and there: it’s an in-joke between friends. Here’s a snippet I’ve had occasion to quote before, in a post on an unrelated subject:

unctus est, accubuit. ἐμετικὴν agebat; itaque et edit et bibit ἀδεῶς et iucunde, opipare sane et apparate ...

He got oiled, he reclined (for dinner). He was on a course of émétiques, so he ate and drank sans crainte and cheerfully, a very sumptuous and well-prepared meal ...

-- Cicero Att. 13.52

For communication, Latin; for camaraderie, a light sprinkling of Greek words. He uses Greek to build solidarity between friends with a common interest, no more, no less. Atticus spent more time living in Greece than in Italy, for heaven’s sake, but they still wrote to each other in Latin.

---

It’s a bit like reading a Russian novel and seeing aristocrats break into French. It’s something occasional, and -- more so for the Russians than for the Romans -- something ostentatious. Take the very first paragraph of Tolstoy’s War and Peace:

‘Eh bien, mon prince. Gênes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des estates, de la famille Buonaparte. Non, je vous préviens que si vous ne me dites pas que nous avons la guerre, si vous vous permettez encore de pallier toutes les infamies, toutes les atrocités de cet Antichrist (ma parole, j’y crois) -- je ne vous connais plus, vous n’êtes plus mon ami, vous n’êtes plus my faithful slave, comme vous dites! But how do you do? Je vois que je vous fais peur -- sit down and tell me all the news.’

It was in July, 1805, and the speaker was the well-known Anna Pavlovna Scherer, maid of honour and favourite of the empress Marya Feodorovna. With these words she greeted Prince Vasili Kuragin, a man of high rank and importance, who was the first to arrive at her reception. Anna Pavlovna had had a cough for some days. She was, as she said, suffering from the grippe; grippe being then a new word in St. Petersburg, used only by the elite. All her invitations without exception, written in French, and delivered by a scarlet-liveried footman that morning, ran as follows:

‘Si vous n’avez rien de mieux à faire, Monsieur le comte (or mon prince), et si la perspective de passer la soirée chez une pauvre malade ne vous effraye pas trop, je serai charmée de vous voir chez moi entre 7 et 10 heures. Annette Scherer.’

-- Tolstoy, War and Peace, book 1 chapter 1 (1865)

(English portions are from the 1922 Maude translation; French portions are from the Russian original.)

To open a major Russian novel with a couple of paragraphs of French -- that’s a bold, bold gesture. It evokes frightful snobbishness. And it colours Anna Pavlovna’s character. Notice how in the first paragraph, the torrent of French bewilders her guest (‘Je vois que je vous fais peur, I see I am frightening you’); later, in chapter 2, she forces all the aristocratic guests at her soirée to undergo the ordeal of a conversation with her aged aunt, that none of them know or want to know. Her salon may be where it’s all happening, but her bubbling energy and her social fastidiousness are comical and irritating. Anna Pavlovna isn’t a model to emulate, she’s cringeworthy.

Lindybeige mentions Russian aristocrats too, as it happens.

The Romanovs, for instance, the Romanovs of Russia, you may think that those people who were overthrown in 1917 in the Revolution and so forth, and slaughtered in the palace, that they all spoke Russian. Well, most of them knew Russian ... but actually, when speaking to each other, the main language that they spoke -- was French.

Annnnnd strike three! Take a look here, here, and here. It’s true that Nicholas and Alexandra both knew French. And it’s true that Alexandra’s Russian wasn’t great, and that Russian wasn’t their preferred language in their domestic life. But that may be less surprising if you bear in mind that Alexandra was German, and spent a lot of her youth in England. When she first met Nicholas she couldn’t speak Russian at all. Based on that, can you guess what their preferred domestic languages really were? Yup: English first, and German second. (The children? Russian.) By 1916, Alexandra wrote to Nicholas -- in English (and even her English wasn’t perfect!) -- ‘I am no longer the slightest bit shy or affraid [sic] of the ministers & speak like a waterfall in Russia[n].’

Having said all that, there are real cases of royal children learning a foreign language first. Victoria learned German from her nanny until she was three: after that, everything was in English. There’s no reason to imagine that kind of thing being the norm in ancient Rome. But when it was -- there must have been cases where aristocratic children had slave nannies who spoke Greek -- you can bet that, like Victoria, they had to switch languages pretty quick once they reached a certain age, and used Latin almost exclusively thereafter.

Vomiting Romans: or, were the Romans happy chuckers?

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

There was once a widespread idea that Romans would duck away from the dinner table to a vomit-room -- a vomitorium -- to make themselves sick so they would have space for more food. This supposed fact was a terrific illustration of how decadent the Romans were.

It has now transformed from a popular myth into a popular example of debunking a myth. Nowadays the word vomitorium is usually understood to refer to a passage in a theatre, through which crowds can be disgorged into the seating area.

In defence of those who believed the myth, the adjective vomitorius in Latin did, in fact, consistently refer to vomiting or emetics. Only one single ancient text ever used the word with the modern meaning of a passage in an amphitheatre (not in theatres) -- and that was only in late antiquity, and only metaphorical. That one text, Macrobius’ Saturnalia 6.4.3 (5th cent. CE), states that the idea originates in a poetic expression in Vergil:

‘mane salutantum totis vomit aedibus undam’ (Vergil, Georgics 2.462): pulchre ‘vomit undam’ et antique, nam Ennius ait: ‘et Tiberis flumen vomit in mare salsum’ (Ennius, Annals fr. 453 Skutsch = fr. 142 Vahlens). unde et nunc vomitoria in spectaculis dicimus, unde homines glomeratim ingredientes in sedilia se fundunt.

‘Each morning the whole building vomits a wave of clients’: ‘vomits a wave’ is a fine expression, and an old one, for Ennius says: ‘and Tiber’s river vomits into the salted sea’. This is why even now we refer to emetics (vomitoria) at the games, since people enter in a mass and pour into their seats.

(Ennius’ striking expression is in turn a borrowing from Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 2.744, describing a river in Turkey: ὅς τε διὲξ ἄκρης ἀνερεύγεται εἰς ἅλα βάλλων, ‘through the headland it vomits itself forth and casts into the salt (sea)’.)

In Macrobius it’s pretty obvious that this unique expression isn’t a technical term, but figurative, as in Vergil and Ennius. The architectural feature is real, but the word is a nickname. We don’t know what the 1st century BCE architectural writer Vitruvius would have called these passages, unfortunately, as he doesn’t discuss amphitheatres; but in theatres, he calls similar passages exitus ‘exits’ or itinera ‘ways’ (On architecture 5.3.5, 5.6.5).

Vomitorium only became a serious architectural term in the modern era.

So not only were vomitoria as vomit-rooms never a thing: vomitoria in theatres weren’t a thing either. Vomitoria weren’t a thing at all.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use the word when talking about modern theatres: whatever the word may or may not have meant in the past, that doesn’t dictate its present-day usage. It just means that, so far as we know, it wasn’t a standard term for the Romans.

Digression. For the record, ‘vomitorium’ first acquires its architectural meaning in English in 1722, in a translation of Dom Bernard de Montfaucon’s L’antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures vol. 3.2, book 2, chap. 1: p. 149 in the English translation, p. 233 in the French edition (also 1722). The OED records the word in a 1730 English translation of Francesco Scipione’s Verona illustrata. The architectural meaning appeared earlier in the modern era in Latin, in Philander’s notes on Vitruvius 5.3 (see footnote c; remarkably, the 1544 publication of Philander’s notes omits this specific line, perhaps because the term sounded too vulgar).

The Oxford Latin Dictionary (1968) has no entry for vomitorium as an architectural feature -- quite rightly -- and only gives meanings related to vomiting.

Most people’s awareness of the vomitorium myth can be traced back to a debunking by Cecil Adams in a 2002 post on The Straight Dope. Nearly all popular discussions of the subject in the last decade are derived from Adams, whether directly or, more often, very indirectly. Adams doesn’t look into Macrobius, but he does show clearly that there was no such thing as a ‘vomit-room’. He tries to console his readers by strongly suggesting that, even if the vomitorium wasn’t a thing, the Romans still happily vomited at banquets:

That’s not to say the Romans were unfamiliar with throwing up, or that they never did so on purpose. On the contrary, in ancient times vomiting seems to have been a standard part of the fine-dining experience. ... The Romans weren’t shy about vomiting, and they had vomitoria -- but they didn't do the former in the latter.

But even that’s granting too much to the myth. Adams supplies two pieces of ancient testimony -- Seneca (1st cent. CE) and Cicero (1st cent. BCE) -- to support his grudging admission that ‘The Romans weren’t shy about vomiting’. But actually there’s no reason even to admit that. We have very little reason to think of the Romans as happy chuckers, except in a medical context.

Exhibit A. Seneca, Moral letters 47.5

... ne tamquam hominibus quidem sed tamquam iumentis abutimur. [quod] cum ad cenandum discubuimus, alius sputa deterget, alius reliquias temulentorum <toro> subditus colligit.

... we treat (slaves) not even as men, but as cattle. (For) when we recline for dinner, one wipes up things that have been spat out; another gets down (under the couch) and gathers up the mess left by the drunken (diners).

See also the Loeb text and translation. A modern editor has added toro ‘under the couch’ to the text (plausibly: a scribe could easily have thought temulentorumtoro was an error and mistakenly ‘fixed’ it). Another modern editor has deleted quod (I don’t know Seneca’s style well enough to judge that).

Adams quotes the second sentence of this passage without mentioning the context. In addition, he adds the following gloss: ‘OK, it doesn’t literally say puke, but come on.’ Both of these are misleading. The context is important because Seneca’s complaint isn’t about how debauched the Romans are: it’s that slaves are often mistreated. Once you take debauchery out of the picture, there’s no motivation for us to read between the lines to supply ‘puke’. As for reliquias ‘leavings, things left behind’, there is absolutely no way that it specifically connotes ‘vomit’. Taken by itself, reliquiae means ‘remnants’ of any kind. If you’re talking about meals and you mention reliquiae, the most reasonable inference is that you’re talking about leftovers, or scraps that have fallen on the floor -- obviously the latter in Seneca’s case.

A blog post written in 2005 under the name ‘Anna’ takes Adams’ unwarranted gloss and goes a step further. This wouldn’t matter, except that Anna’s post has become weirdly influential. When Adams quoted Seneca, he gave it as

When we recline at a banquet, one [slave] wipes up the spittle; another, situated beneath [the table], collects the leavings of the drunks.

Now, there’s nothing very seriously wrong with this translation (sputa in the plural is more likely ‘things spat out’ than ‘spittle’, and there’s no ‘table’ in the text, but those aren’t major things). Anna, however, quotes it as

When we recline at a banquet, one [slave] wipes up the spittle; another, situated beneath, collects the leavings [vomit] of the drunks.

as though ‘vomit’ were an obvious gloss. Anna has obviously taken her cue from Adams, but she decides to embed the inference directly in the text. That gives the strong impression that Seneca’s choice of words is some kind of standard euphemism. And that ain’t true.

People have always been getting drunk and throwing up at parties ... but did the Romans do it for fun? (Attic Greek, Brygos Painter or Dokimasia Painter, ca. 500-450 BCE; Copenhagen Nat. Mus. 3880; image source: Wikipedia)

It wouldn’t matter, as I said. But many writers have taken the quotation from Anna’s 2005 blog post, and not from Adams’ 2002 The Straight Dope post -- even though Adams cites his sources (albeit not to a pro standard), while Anna doesn’t cite any (not even Adams). And I don’t just mean on the internet. Anna’s form of the quotation appears in this book published by Cambridge University Press, and in this book chapter written by a don at Cambridge who specialises in Greek and Hebrew language. So some people who really should know better are taking an unsourced blog post as a reliable authority on 2000-year-old practices. I mean, I know this is a blog post too ... but I do cite my sources. That makes it possible to weigh up the pros and cons of my argument. Just a tiny difference.

Exhibit B. Cicero, On behalf of king Deiotarus 21

‘cum’ inquit ‘vomere post cenam te velle dixisses, in balneum te ducere coeperunt: ibi enim erant insidiae. at te eadem tua fortuna servavit: in cubiculo malle dixisti.’

(The prosecutor) goes on, ‘When you (Caesar) said you wanted to vomit after dinner, they started to take you to the bathroom: because that’s where the ambush was. But your perpetual good luck saved you, because you said you’d rather be in your bedroom.’

Source. (To change languages, click ‘load’ or ‘focus’ at the right.)

This is from a speech made in November 46 BCE, when Julius Caesar -- both consul and dictator at the time -- sat as judge for the trial of Deiotarus, a client king, who was accused of trying to assassinate Caesar a few months earlier. Cicero defended Deiotarus in absentia, and won: he convinced Caesar that the accusations were made up by Deiotarus’ political rivals.

Supposedly this episode proves that the Romans -- or Caesar, at least -- left the dining table to vomit, and this was a habitual thing.

In fact it does not: the vomiting in question was for medical reasons. Caesar’s doctor had put him on a regime of emetics. How do we know this? Cicero himself tells us so, in a letter written a bit over a month later. (He writes of vomiting as providing medical relief for himself, too, in a letter to his wife three years earlier: Fam. 14.7.1.)

In the letter of December 46 BCE (Att. 13.52), Cicero recounts a dinner at a neighbour’s villa, which both Caesar and Cicero attended. He takes on the role of a gossip columnist. Here’s his lowdown on Caesar’s doings on the relevant day:

ille tertiis Saturnalibus apud Philippum ad h. vii, nec quemquam admisit; rationes, opinor, cum Balbo. inde ambulavit in litore. post h. viii in balneum. tum audivit de Mamurra, vultum non mutavit. unctus est, accubuit. ἐμετικὴν agebat; itaque et edit et bibit ἀδεῶς et iucunde, opipare sane et apparate ...

On 19 December, himself (Caesar) was with Philippus until the 7th hour. He didn’t see anyone -- accounts with Balbus, I think. Afterwards he walked on the beach. A bath after the 8th hour. Then he heard about Mamurra (probably his death; Mamurra was a friend of Caesar’s) -- he didn’t change his expression. He got oiled, he reclined (for dinner). He was on a regime of emetics, so he ate and drank unreservedly and cheerfully, a very sumptuous and well-prepared meal ...

Cicero’s gossipy tone has made this a famous letter. It certainly clarifies the passage in the speech for Deiotarus. Did Caesar enjoy a good meal without restraint because his doctor had prescribed something to make him vomit? Yes, absolutely, he did. Guilty as charged. Did he vomit in order to have a good meal? No, he most certainly did not.

So much for Adams’ evidence. But this doesn’t exhaust the case for the prosecution -- the case that Romans were decadent, and that being happy chuckers was a sign of that decadence. We have a couple more passages to look at.

Exhibit C. Seneca, Consolation to Helvia 10.3

undique convehunt omnia nota fastidienti gulae; quod dissolutus deliciis stomachus vix admittat, ab ultimo portatur oceano; vomunt ut edant, edunt ut vomant, et epulas, quas toto orbe conquirunt, nec concoquere dignantur. ista si quis despicit, quid illi paupertas nocet? Si quis concupiscit, illi paupertas etiam prodest; invitus enim sanatur et, si remedia ne coactus quidem recipit, interim certe, dum non potest, illa nolenti similis est.

From all over they (luxurious people) import everything known to a finicky taste. Things are brought from the furthest ocean that a digestion ruined by delicacies can hardly take. They vomit to eat, they eat to vomit: they don’t even see fit to digest the feasts for which they search the whole world. Now, for someone who loathes that kind of thing, what harm will it do him to be poor? And for someone who does want them, poverty would actually be a benefit! He gets cured, unwilling though he is: even if he won’t take his medicine without being forced, still, while he can’t get them, it is as though he didn’t want them.

See also the Latin text from Basore’s edition. Adams didn’t know this passage, so it doesn’t appear in most debunkings of the vomiting myth. (It does appear in a Wikipedia article, thanks to an aside in a 2007 book.)

This passage does -- potentially -- support the idea of recreational vomiting. However, it is the only passage in any ancient Greco-Roman text to do so. As such, it needs to be treated as the exceptional thing that it is. What that means is that if any more obvious explanation exists, then that explanation is going to be more economical than the happy-chucker interpretation, which we have seen is entirely uncorroborated.

Seneca could in principle be talking about recreational vomiting; alternatively, he could be expressing disgust at people on diet fads.

As we saw above, the dietetic interpretation finds support in Cicero; the happy-chucker interpretation finds no support anywhere. So the second is the more economical interpretation. Seneca was probably complaining about people on trendy diets.

Is it possible that the Romans indulged in recreational vomiting? Sure, why not, we can’t rule out the possibility that some people did. Is there any reason to think it was a common practice? No, none at all.

Exhibit D. Petronius, Satyricon: the dinner of Trimalchio

One final point to discuss. ‘Anna’, in her 2005 blog post, links Roman vomiting habits to their supposed decadence. She claims

Everyone knows how extravagant and decadent Roman banquets could be. There were multiple courses and loads of wine to be consumed and the feasting lasted all night. But how did these people manage to eat non-stop for so long?

Later on she mentions Trimalchio. So she was certainly thinking of an episode known as ‘Trimalchio’s banquet’, in Petronius’ satirical novel the Satyricon (1st cent. CE). Anna is not alone: Trimalchio’s banquet is very influential, an iconic depiction of luxury, excess, bad taste, and vulgarity.

There’s just one problem with taking Trimalchio’s banquet as exemplary of Roman decadence: the host, the setting, and most of the guests are Greek, not Roman.

Fellini Satyricon (1969), adapted from Petronius’ novel. In a widely quoted line, the main character Encolpius supposedly says, ‘Ascilto ... what does the poet say? Each moment presented may be your last, so fill it up until you vomit ... or something such?’ Did Fellini fall for the eating-and-vomiting myth?

Nope. Encolpius’ actual words are: ‘Ascyltos! Like the poet says, “As for me, always and everywhere I have lived in such a way as to enjoy the present moment, as if it was the last light that was appearing”!’ (‘Ascilto! Come dice il poeta, “Per parte mia, sempre e dovunque, ho visuto in modo tale da godere il momento presente come se fosse l’ultima luce che spuntava”!’)

The misquotation sounds like it’s actually someone trying to make out the line with inadequate Italian and not being too sure of themselves (and maybe mistaking spuntava ‘appeared’ for sputo ‘spit’). Here’s a copy on YouTube where the misinterpreted version has actually infected the subtitles! The vomiting myth has metastasised to a myth about Fellini ...

Trimalchio’s dinner is a satire of the vulgarity of ethnic Greeks who lived in central Italy, in and around Naples. Greek colonies were founded along the coast of central and southern Italy from the 8th century BCE onwards, and they dominated the cultural landscape. Naples was no exception: even the name is Greek (Νεάπολις ‘new city’). Naples allied itself with Rome from around 400 BCE onwards, but maintained autonomy and a strong Greek culture. It finally became a Roman municipium in 89 BCE, and later a colonia under Augustus. But even after that point the city remained proud of its Greek traditions.

In Petronius, some of the characters are characterised by a shaky grasp of Latin: they slip Greek words or Greek-ish malapropisms into their speech, as ongoing reminders of their un-Roman-ness. Trimalchio refers to people as propinasse ‘having drunk a toast’ (a Latinised form of προπίνω ‘drink to someone’s health’, 28.3), and mixes up Latin pono ‘to put’ with Greek πονέω ‘to work’ (vide ... ut ponas, 47.13); one of the guests refers to someone’s boyfriend as topanta (τὰ πάντα ‘his everything’, 37.4), calls Trimalchio saplutus (ζάπλουτος ‘ultra-rich’, 37.6) and malista dignitoso (for μάλιστα, ‘extremely dignified’, 57.10; following George’s emendation), and swears by Athana (not Roman ‘Minerva’, but Greek ‘Athena’ spoken with a Dorian accent, 58.7). When the guests shout congratulations, they cry out sophos (σοφῶς, 40.1). The mangled Latin made the episode of Trimalchio’s dinner a very difficult one for mediaeval scribes, who typically knew very little if any Greek. As a result the one surviving manuscript for this episode is corrupted in very many places.

Petronius isn’t a salacious Roman debauchee: he’s a Roman making fun of Greek nouveaux riches. He probably had in mind the decadent reputation of certain other Greek colonies in southern Italy, especially Sybaris (which gave rise to the word ‘sybaritic’).

And just for the sake of completeness, there is one mention of vomiting in Petronius’ novel ... in a passage describing someone being seasick (103.5-6). That character is emphatically not a happy chucker.