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.

The dates of Jesus (conference paper, ASCS 43, Feb. 2022)

A version of the conference paper on ‘The dates of Jesus’ that I presented at ASCS 43, Hobart, Australia, in February 2022. This is based on the material I gathered for a four episode sequence of pieces here on Kiwi Hellenist, in September to November 2021.

Easter, Yule, and the old English calendar

‘Easter’ and ‘Yule’ started out in English as month-names in the early mediaeval English calendar. They’ve taken on a life of their own, of course, and have become identified with Christian festivals: I’ve talked about Easter and Yule as festivals previously, looking at how much modern customs are linked to anything ancient (they aren’t). Here we’re only looking at the names.

The opening of Bede’s De temporum ratione in Brit. Lib., Royal MS 13 A xi fol. 32v (11th–12th cent.)

We have three main sources for month names in the Old English calendar: Bede’s Reckoning of time, written around 730 CE; the Old English Martyrology, a 9th century calendar of important days throughout the year; and the Menologium, a calendar poem dating perhaps to ca. 1000 CE (Karasawa 2015: 70–72). Bede wrote in Latin, the others are in Old English.

Bede	Martyrology	Menologium	Meaning given by Bede
giuli	æftera geola	—	giuli = ‘midwinter’
solmonath	—	solmonað	cake month
rhedmonath	hredmonað	hlyda	month of goddess Rheda
eosturmonath	eastermonað	eastermonað	month of goddess Eostre
thrimylchi	þrymylce	þrymilce (emendation)	three milkings
lida	ærra liða	ærra liða	lida = ‘gentle, good for sailing’
lida	æftera lyða	—	lida = ‘gentle, good for sailing’
weodmonath	weodmonað	weodmonað	weed month
halegmonath	haligmonað	haligmonð	month of holy rites (sacrifices, acc. to Martyrology)
winterfylleth	winterfylleð	winterfylleð	winter (moon) waxes, full moon that begins the winter half of the year
blodmonath	blodmonað	blotmonað	month of cattle sacrifices
giuli	ærra geola	ærra iula	giuli = ‘midwinter’

Sources in detail. Bede: De temporum ratione §15. Martyrology: entry for 1 Jan., and headings for Mar., Apr., May, June, July, Aug., Sep., Oct., Nov., and Dec. Menologium: lines 16, 37, 72, 78, 108, 138, 184, 195, and 221. For a reliable translation of the Menologium, see Kazutomo Karasawa’s superb edition (2015).

Some of the month names appear piecemeal in other sources. For example Hlyda — apparently unrelated to Bede’s rhedmonath — continued to be used for ‘March’ into the 17th century (OED s.v. ‘Lide’). And in Bede, the Latin spellings vary from manuscript to manuscript. Rhedmonath also appears as hred-, red-, redh-, and reth-; blodmonath can be blot- (just like in the Menologium); and so on. These variants are simply the result of scribes converting Old English to Latin. For simplicity’s sake we’ll just take one set of spellings as standard.

Months, solstices, and equinoxes

Bede tells us the calendar originally began on the winter solstice.

But they began the year from the eighth day before the Kalends of January, when we now celebrate the Lord’s birthday. And that night, which is sacred to us, they would call by the local name of modranicht, that is, ‘night of mothers’ ... and whenever it was a ‘common’ year, they would assign three lunar months to each season of the year.

Note. Mothers’ night, not mother’s night as it’s often mistranslated (including by Wallis 1999). Shaw and others link Bede’s modranecht to the ‘cult of matrons’ attested by ancient votive inscriptions, addressed to matronae, matres, or matrae, found sparsely around England and copiously on the mainland in the area around Cologne. See Shaw 2011: 41–47; 44–45 on modranecht.

In the Roman calendar, the solstice was traditionally reckoned as occurring on 25 December, eight days before the start of the Roman calendar. As a result, months in the two calendars did not originally line up. At the start of each month there would be an overlap. However, all three sources are happy to equate the Old English names with the Roman names Ianuarius, Februarius, and so on.

Note. For the traditional assignment of the solstice to 25 December in the Roman calendar, see Columella, De re rustica 9.14.12; Pliny, Natural history 18.221; and many later sources (including Bede himself at Reckoning of time §30). On the incorrectness of this date and possible sources, see this piece of mine from 2015, about halfway down.

Each solstice had two months surrounding it going by the same name: December and January were ‘Former Yule’ and ‘Latter Yule’ (Ærra Geola and Æftera Geola in the Martyrology), and June and July were ‘Former Liða’ and ‘Latter Liða’ (Ærra Liða, Æftera Liða). In years with an intercalary month — an embolismus, in Bede’s terminology — there were three months of Liða in a row.

Bede carries on:

Similarly they originally separated the year into two seasons, winter and summer, by assigning the six months with days longer than the nights to summer, and the other six to winter. As a result the month in which the winter period began was called Winterfylleth, the name made up of ‘winter’ and ‘full moon’, since the beginning of winter was marked from the full moon of that month.

The months were lunar, so we cannot assume that all of the solstices and the equinoxes were considered to fall on the first day of a month. Still, it is clear from Bede that the two solstices and one of the equinoxes were linked to particular months: Liða, Geola, and Winterfylleð.

Old English month names in a manuscript of Bede (Brit. Lib., Royal MS 13 A xi fol. 49r, 11th–12th cent.).

Yule

‘Yule’, as a name for the season around the winter solstice, is common to several mediaeval Germanic languages in a variety of local forms. The oldest is in a 5th century liturgical calendar in Gothic, as a month name: fruma jiuleis ‘Former Yule’, corresponding in meaning directly to Ærra Geola. Only a single palimpsested leaf survives of the Gothic calendar, but it is the last leaf, so there is no doubt that it, like Ærra Geola in English, was the last month of the year.

Gothic is an East Germanic language, while English is West Germanic, so this could well be a pan-Germanic name. The etymology is uncertain, but some later forms show it had a medial velar fricative: Old English geohhol, geochol, and Finnish (loanword) juhla. Koivulehto (2000) points out that this phoneme suggests an Indo-European origin.

Note. The full Gothic phrase is fruma jiuleis ·l· ‘Former Yule 30’, where ‘30’ could refer to the number of days in the month, or to a regnal year in Theoderic’s reign (i.e. December 522 CE). The palimpsested leaf is bound in a codex in Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana MS S 36 sup., known to scholars of Gothic as ‘codex Ambrosianus A’. Gothic jiuleis has often been misread as ‘July’ or something else; for many decades it was reported that the same line also mentioned November, using its Roman name, until Landau (2006) showed that that reading is completely imaginary. On the etymology: Koivulehto’s point about the velar fricative rules out Landau’s suggestion of a derivation from Greek Ἰωβηλαῖος, the biblical Jubilee.

The Old English sources and the Gothic calendar show that Yule started out as a season, not a festival, religious or otherwise. Evidence of customary celebrations linked to the name ‘Yule’ only starts to appear in 9th century Norse sources. I’ve discussed this more fully elsewhere. The seasonal name began to be used as a periphrasis for ‘Christmas’ in England as early as the 9th century.

Note. ‘Yule’ = ‘Christmas’ in 9th–10th cent. sources: the law-code of King Alfred, §5.5 (‘he who steals on Sunday, or at Yule, or at Easter ...’), §43 (‘twelve days [rest] at Yule, ... and seven days before Easter ...’); the Old English version of Bede’s History, 4.19 (318,17–18 ed. Miller: ‘she would seldom bathe in hot water, except at the highest festivals and seasons, as Easter and Pentecost and the 12th day after Yule’).

The Old English month names as they appear in the manuscript of the Menologium (Brit. Lib. Cotton MS Tiberius B I, fols. 112r–114v).

Easter and the goddess Eostre

My suggestion is this: Eosturmonað the month was named for the equinox, but that has no necessary bearing on Eostre the goddess.

Let’s look at the goddess first.

Bede’s testimony about Eostre the goddess has often been doubted, starting with Karl Weinhold. In the 19th century he called her ‘an invention of Bede’s’, and many scholars have followed suit. (Weinhold 1869: 52; see further Shaw 2011: 50.)

This scepticism arose in the first place because Bede is tangled in a long-running debate over Jacob Grimm’s reconstruction of a pan-Germanic past. When Weinhold described Eostre as an invention, he was arguing against Grimm, not Bede.

Grimm had proposed that Eostre was the English name for a pan-Germanic goddess which he named ‘Ostara’. In south-eastern Old High German, ostarun meant ‘Easter’ (the Christian festival); the corresponding month in Charlemagne’s calendar was called ostarmanoth; and then there’s Eostre in England. On this slender evidence, Grimm invented a goddess. (Grimm 1835: 180–182; English translation; see further Shaw 2011: 51–52.)

And it is slender. There’s no evidence that Old High German ostar- ever had anything to do with anything pre-Christian.

No evidence, except for its etymology. Linguists normally derive ‘Eostre’ from a Proto-Indo-European root *h₂eusṓs ‘east, dawn’. ‘Dawn’ goddesses in several other pantheons have names derived from the same root: Vedic Uṣas, Greek Eos, Latin Aurora, and Lithuanian Aušrinė (see West 2007: 217–227). With that Indo-European backdrop, it’s much easier to treat Grimm’s ‘Ostara’ conjecture as feasible.

But that assumes the goddesses are derived from a pan-Indo-European goddess. It’s much more likely that only their names come from a Proto-Indo-European word. The goddesses have nothing in common except their etymology. Uṣas has no similarity to Eos; Eos has no similarity to Aušrinė; we know nothing at all about Eostre and Aurora. Divine names in different pantheons don’t typically have names that are linguistically cognate — Zeus/Jupiter and Hestia/Vesta are exceptions, not the rule.

Shaw makes the compelling point that it’s especially difficult to treat Eostre as a ‘dawn’ goddess when Old English uses *ēast exclusively as an adverb, never as a noun (2011: 57). That is: Old English *ēast- didn’t mean ‘dawn’, it meant ‘easterly, eastward’.

Based on this, and based on a review of East- place names and personal names in Old English and Middle English, Shaw proposes (2011: 49–71) that Eostre was a local goddess, linked especially to Kent. Bede calls her Eostre, not Eastre, because Kentish sometimes used eo- spellings. Outside England, the only links Shaw finds plausible are to the matronae Austriahenae that appear in 2nd-3rd century votive inscriptions found near Cologne.

I find Shaw’s approach compelling, and well grounded in real evidence. I also wholeheartedly support his prioritising localised evidence ahead of Grimm’s reckless speculations about pan-Germanism.

Easter and the ‘eastward’ equinox

Shaw dismisses the idea of Eostre as a ‘spring goddess’ (2011: 55). I agree — in regard to Eostre as a goddess. But Eosturmonað as a month is a different matter.

Remember Bede’s outline of the calendar: two months of Geola surround the winter solstice; the months of Liða are midsummer; and Winterfylleð gets its name from the dividing line between summer and winter, that is, the autumn equinox.

That outline leaves a conspicuous hole at the spring equinox.

The months of the Old English calendar in relation to the solstices and equinoxes. The upper half of the diagram is Bede’s six-month summer season, the lower half is his winter season; Geola and Liða stand at the solstices.

Just to repeat, I’m not suggesting Eostre was a ‘spring goddess’. Only that, if Winterfylleð was effectively named after the autumn equinox, then there’s good reason to suspect that Eosturmonað as a month name had a comparable relationship to the spring equinox.

Shaw’s linguistic evidence shows that eostur- was a directional adverb: it meant ‘eastward’, not ‘dawn’. (Sunrise happens every day anyway, so it’d be strange to think dawn is specific to a time of year.)

But the direction of sunrise is linked to the time of year. If you’re in the northern hemisphere, from April to September the sun rises to the north; from October to March it’s to the south. But at the equinoxes, no matter where in the world you are, sunrise occurs exactly due east.

Shaw’s own linguistic evidence indicates that the most natural meaning of ‘Eosturmonað’ is ‘eastward month’. We know it marked a part of the year when sunrise is exactly eastward. It’s hard to imagine that’s a coincidence — especially when we have Bede telling us that the calendar was framed around the solstices, and that the other equinox has a month named after it.

There’s a cost to this interpretation: the link to the goddess Eostre. If the equinox fully explains the month name, and I think it does, then where does the goddess fit in? Maybe Bede’s right, and Eostre did have a festival in April. Or maybe she didn’t: maybe Bede knew of the goddess, and he knew the month name, and he assumed that one was caused by the other. Shaw has made a very compelling argument in favour of Eostre the goddess, but I think a name like ‘eastward month’ raises real questions about its relationship to the goddess.

The main consideration in favour of an Eostre festival in ‘eastward month’ is that Bede says the previous month, Hredmonað, was also named after a goddess. I won’t pretend to have a full answer for the relationship between the month and the goddess. But the meaning ‘eastward month’, and its position opposite Winterfylleð in the calendar, can’t be a coincidence. I suspect Eosturmonað was named more for the equinox than for the goddess.

References

• Grimm, J. 1835. Deutsche Mythologie, 1st edition. Dieterichsche Buchhandlung (Göttingen). [Internet Archive link]
• Karasawa, K. 2015. The Old English metrical calendar (Menologium). D. S. Brewer (Cambridge).
• Landau, D. 2006. ‘On the reading and interpretation of the month‐line in the Gothic calendar.’ Transactions of the Philological Socety 104.1: 3-12. [Wiley link]
• Miller, T. 1890–1898. The Old English version of Bede's Ecclesiastical history of the English people. N. Trübner and Co. (London).
• Sermon, R. 2008. ‘From Easter to Ostara: the reinvention of a pagan goddess?’ Time and mind 1: 331–343. [Taylor & Francis link]
• Shaw, P. A. 2011. Pagan goddesses in the early Germanic world. Eostre, Hreda and the cult of matrons. Bristol Classical Press.
• Wallis, F. 1999. Bede: the Reckoning of time. Liverpool University Press.
• Weinhold, K. 1869. Die deutsche Monatnamen. Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses (Halle). [Internet Archive link]
• West, M. L. 2007. Indo-European poetry and myth. Oxford University Press.

Concerning Yule

HO. HO. HO. 

Yule and Christmas have very different flavours. Yet it’s widely imagined that Christmas is derived from Yule, or that modern Christmas customs originated as Yule customs.

That idea is often motivated by anti-Christian sentiment. If Christmas is derivative, the idea goes, then that licenses a skeptic to treat it, and the people that celebrate it, as dishonest. But you don’t need to be a Christian (or a Neo-pagan, for that matter) to acknowledge that Christmas and Yule are very separate things.

Our earliest evidence on Yule and our evidence on Christmas come from different times and different places. Christmas originated as a Mediterranean festival, first attested in the 4th century but with a backdrop reaching back to the 2nd century. Yule pops up from the 6th century onwards in East Germanic and North Germanic sources as a season of the year. There’s only the faintest trace of Yule in modern Christmas customs.

In previous years, in 2015 and in 2017, I wrote long posts about supposed links between Christmas and pagan Roman customs and festivals. The short answer is: there aren’t any.

• Christmas has nothing to do with Mithras. Neither does Christianity in general. The supposed similarities are all imaginary, made up out of thin air, mostly in the 1990s.
• Christmas isn’t based on Saturnalia. Saturnalia is on 17 December, and ancient Christians celebrated it alongside Christmas for a long time. We haven’t inherited any customs from Saturnalia -- it’s just too far in the past.
• Christmas isn’t based on Sol Invictus. We have only one indication of a Sol Invictus festival on 25 December; it dates to 354 (not 274, as often claimed); it was celebrated in only one place (Rome); and it’s no older than Christmas, which is attested in the same document.
• The date of Christmas is linked to the winter solstice, indirectly. Ancient Judaeo-Christian custom reckoned that prophets and saints died on the same date they were born or, in later times, the date they were conceived. Jesus supposedly died at the spring equinox, so by custom, that was also the date of his conception. That put his birth nine months later at the winter solstice. Evidence of Christian interest in the link between Jesus’ death and the equinox goes back to the 150s, so Christmas has its background in that period, even if we can’t be sure it was celebrated at that time.
• The solstice is on 21 or 22 December these days, but in the Julian calendar, it was traditionally reckoned to be 25 December. 1st century pagan sources are very clear on this. That’s in spite of the fact that when the Julian calendar was first instituted, in 46 BCE, the solstice had already drifted a few days out of synch with that date. The solstice was on 25 December in the retrojected Julian calendar in the 4th century BCE, so that’s probably when the traditional date was fixed by Greek astronomers. (See this post, section 4, for more details.)

My older posts didn’t cover Yule. So let’s have a go now. Here’s a compressed timeline for quick reference.

The earliest evidence

The earliest source to mention Yule is a calendar of saints’ days dating to the 500s. This text, in Gothic, is in a palimpsest held at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. It contains the phrase fruma jiuleis, which means either ‘first part of Yule’ or ‘before Yule’. It’s often reported that the phrase is a gloss of the word ‘November’, equating the Roman month to a Gothic season: Landau (2006) has shown that ‘November’ doesn’t appear in the manuscript, though he accepts, on other evidence, that fruma jiuleis probably does refer to November or December anyway.

The earliest reference to ‘Yule’: Gothic jiuleis, in a 6th century palimpsest. A palimpsest is a manuscript that has been recycled by partly polishing off the original text: the calendar is in the earlier layer of text. At bottom is a filtered version of the image. At the left, in the box, is where the word Naubaimbair (November) was believed to be by an early 19th century scholar: in the view of more recent scholarship, that reading isn’t supportable. Source: Landau 2006, figures 3 and 8.

(Let me just repeat that this is a calendar of saints’ days. There’s no mention here of Christians killing people for celebrating a season observed in a Christian calendar, no mention of ‘woodland spirits, feasting, male fertility’, no Christmas trees. Why on earth would anyone expect any of these things? Well, some people do. Observe:)

Where does the word jiuleis itself come from? Its linguistic origins are disputed. Landau argues (2009) that it’s derived from the biblical Jubilee (via Greek Ἰωβηλαῖος), and that already in the Gothic calendar it’s used as a nomen sacrum to refer to Jesus. That neglects the fact that some later forms of Yule in other languages display a velar fricative: Old English geohhol, Old Finnish (loanword) juhla. It’s more usual to infer an Indo-European origin (e.g. Koivulehto 2000). On the other hand, Landau is right to point out that Gothic jiuleis appears in a firmly Christian context, and centuries before any evidence of a non-Christian festival. I don’t think we have enough evidence to draw a firm conclusion on this point.

Our next reference to Yule appears in Bede’s De temporum ratione (‘on time-reckoning’), written around 730 in northern England, two centuries after the Gothic palimpsest. At §15 Bede lists off names of the lunar months in the English calendar. He states that giuli corresponded to two months, not one, namely December and January, and mentions that the English calendar was reckoned as starting on 25 December.

By the time of the Old English Martyrology, around the late 800s, 25 December itself is referred to as ‘the first Yule day’ (þone ærestan geohheldæg: Martyrology 25 Dec.), and December and January are known as ‘former Yule’ and ‘after Yule’ respectively (ærra geola, æftera geola: Martyrology start of Dec., 1 Jan.).

The use of Yule for month names is perhaps more suggestive of a season than a festival. Bede does mention something that looks like a pagan festival, though. He tells us that the New Year in the English calendar, corresponding to 25 December in the Roman calendar, was called modranicht or mothers’ night. Not mother’s night, as it’s often reported: Old English modra is plural. Now, Bede can’t be trying to cast modranicht as a fixed date in the Julian calendar, or equate modranicht and Christmas in any religious sense. What he’s saying is that modranicht was the New Year; the New Year was reckoned as starting on the winter solstice; and the solstice is 25 December, which also happens to be the date of Christmas. (See above on the solstice being traditionally reckoned as 25 December in the Julian calendar.)

Evidence about Yule customs appears from the late 800s onwards, in Old Norse texts. At this point we also start to see distinctly pagan features. I don’t just mean Norse sagas: the sagas have tons of references to Yule (Old Norse jól), but they’re half a millennium after Bede. The earliest references are in poetry. The first is in the Hrafnsmál (raven’s song), reliably dated to the second half of the 800s. Stanza 6 refers to the custom of drinking a toast at Yule. Another less direct reference appears in the Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar (poem of Helgi Hjorvarth’s son), which is a patchwork of multiple sources, probably mostly dating to the 900s. This poem mentions the custom of drinking a toast too, along with a vow made over the pledging-cup, at stanza 32. The Helgakviða doesn’t name the festival: jól only appears in the prose frame-narrative, written later; it also refers to a ‘sacred boar’ (sónargölt-).

One of the earliest references to Norse Yule customs: the Codex Regius manuscript of the Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar, fol. 46. The first two highlighted passages are in the prose written around the verse as a frame-narrative: they refer to Yule (iola), the custom of making a vow over a pledging-cup (bragar fvll), and bringing in the sacred boar (sonar gꜹltr). The third highlighted phrase belongs to a verse section, and refers to the bragar fvll at the king’s toast (konvng borno).

The upshot of all this is that Christmas goes back centuries earlier than any of our evidence for Yule; the very earliest evidence for Yule is already in a Christian context; and Yule customs don’t show up until much later. Also, as I mentioned at the start, Christmas has its origins very firmly in the 2nd-4th century Mediterranean, while our only evidence for Yule is East/North Germanic.

With all this in mind it would be very weird to see Christmas as based on Yule in any sense. Christmas is a (2nd-)4th century Mediterranean festival; Yule is a season in eastern and northern Germanic calendars, linked to pagan customs by the 9th century, but of disputed origins.

Yule customs

Could we at least say that Christmas absorbed aspects of Yule over time? Well, what do we know about Yule customs?

• Making vows over a toast, attested from the 8th century onwards in Norse texts, as we saw above. In modern times, vow-making has become linked to the Gregorian new year (New Year’s resolutions), not Christmas. And fair enough too: Bede does after all cast Yule as a season centred on the New Year, not as a religious festival.
• A sacred boar is attested as early as the Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar (see above). It hasn’t left much trace in modern Christmas customs, but it has left some: most prominently, the 15th century ‘Boar’s head carol’, though even that isn’t exactly well known these days. An adapted version of the custom does appear in some Neo-pagan celebrations of Yule, and in Scandinavia, and apparently a number of the more extravagant American universities lay on a boar’s head celebration. But you couldn’t call it mainstream. Wikipedia claims that the modern western Christmas ham is based on the Yule boar, but doesn’t do the legwork to demonstrate continuity. Is there a line connecting the mediaeval boar’s head to the Christmas ham? Well I suppose there might be. Tracing it is beyond me, I’m afraid.
• Feasting: a parallel for sure, but this is hardly distinctive to any one festival.
• Spirits and hags coming out to wreak havoc: this happens at Yule an awful lot in Norse sagas. As a modern Christmas custom? Not so much. Not in the English-speaking world anyway. (Unless you want to count Tim Burton’s Henry Selick’s The nightmare before Christmas (1993) ... but it’s clearly not related, even though it is a great film.)

We’ve got one custom that has stuck to the modern western New Year, not Christmas; one doubtful case (the boar/Christmas ham); one that is typical of nearly every festival that has ever existed; and one that definitely is not represented in (most people’s) modern Christmas customs.

In Grettis saga, Yule is spent fighting berserks or getting all your bones broken by a draugr. In Nightmare, the Pumpkin King steals Santa’s sleigh. Not much in common, really. It may be that there’s more of Yule in The Elder Scrolls games than in modern Christmas customs.

But wait, I hear the protesters saying, what about the Yule log? That’s a pagan custom that has survived to the present day!

Oh no it isn’t.

Oh yes it is!

Oh no it isn’t.

The Yule log, it is usually claimed, is first attested in 1184. That’s kind of true. But I doubt anyone who has claimed this in the last 50 years actually knows what the evidence for this is. They certainly haven’t checked the original source. I had to go to an 1899 book just to find out what the source is. And, it turns out, it’s been drastically misrepresented.

The source is an edict from a Christian bishop outlining the prerogatives of the Christian parish priest of Ahlen. These prerogatives include ‘a tree at the Nativity of the Lord’ -- not Yule -- ‘to be brought for his own fire at the festival’ (& arborem in Nativitate Domini ad festivum ignem suum adducendam esse, Kindlinger 1790: 210). So

• the 1184 source doesn’t mention or allude to Yule;
• it explicitly and specifically links the log to Christmas;
• Yule sources belong to Britain and Scandinavia, but the 1184 edict is about Westphalia, in western Germany.

See further Tille 1899: 90-96, who cites more examples of early Christmas logs, and shows evidence that the fires are more utilitarian than religious.

In Britain, the earliest attestation is much later: the log first appears in the early 1600s, in a poem by Robert Herrick. He too calls it a ‘Christmas log’, not a ‘Yule log’. Don’t read too much into the fact that it dates to Protestant times: Herrick loved to troll Puritans.

Did the Yule log start out as a Christmas log, and only get rebranded as a ‘Yule log’ in later centuries? It looks that way to me. The best counter-argument Tille can find (1899: 88-89) is a letter written in 742 by a missionary in Germany, St Boniface, which tells of a disagreement over celebrating the New Year with pagan customs. People of formerly pagan German tribes had noticed

that on the first day of January year after year, in the city of Rome and in the neighborhood of St. Peter’s church by day or night, they have seen bands of singers parading the streets in pagan fashion, shouting and chanting sacrilegious songs and loading tables with food day and night, while no one in his own house is willing to lend his neighbor fire or tools or any other convenience. ...

-- Boniface, letter to Pope Zacharias (trans. Emerton)

Tille takes this as an indication that native German customs involved a sacred fire too. That’s a pretty thin argument. It’s not impossible: there’s a 400 year gap between this and the Christmas log of 1184, but it is the same part of the world -- Ahlen is in Westphalia, Boniface refers to western and southern German tribes. But even if Tille is right, we don’t have corroboration for Yule in Germany. I’m not inclined to believe the Yule log was originally a Yule log.

OK, how about Christmas trees -- the kind you decorate, not the kind you burn? They’re a Yule custom, surely? That’s another no: Christmas trees are another German custom. Even in Germany, we only start to see them in the 1500s, and they didn’t become popular outside Germany until the 1800s. (Famously, they were popularised in Britain by Prince Albert in 1840 -- though Queen Charlotte did set one up at Windsor in 1800.)

Gift-giving? Well, Christmas charity to the poor goes back to the 1200s or thereabouts, but gifts within the family are much more recent. Santa is based on an ancient Christian saint, St Nicholas, but St Nicholas had nothing to do with Christmas until Luther tried to suppress the cult of the saints in the early 1500s.

Is this all just Christian apologetics?

No. If we say there’s barely any trace of paganism in Christmas as practised in the English-speaking world, that isn’t the same as saying that there’s any authenticity about modern Christmas customs. At least, not ‘authentic’ in the sense of customs that have survived since antiquity.

There’s virtually nothing pagan about modern western Christmas customs. But at the same time, nearly all modern Christmas customs are exactly that -- modern.

The Christmas log, Christmas trees, and gift-giving all come from late mediaeval or early modern Germany. Santa went through several phases, starting out as St Nicholas with no connection to Christmas, then metamorphosing into the Christkind and Sinterklaas, before re-coalescing into Santa. Christmas trees only spread to France around 1830, and England in 1840 (1800 if you’re a Queen Charlotte fan). Santa’s flying reindeer were invented for the poem ‘’Twas the night before Christmas’ in 1823. Advent calendars only started to become popular in the early 1800s, Advent wreaths in 1839, Christmas cards in 1843 -- and it was also in 1843 that Charles Dickens published A Christmas carol.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. If Christmas customs are modern, well, so what? So are Neo-pagan customs relating to Yule and the solstice. There’s no rule that customs have to be ancient. Kwanzaa dates to the 1960s. The midwinter festival in my part of the world, Matariki, dates to the 2000s. They’re still real festivals.

The only bits of Christmas that are ancient are the bits that happen in church. A number of Christmas carols are pretty old: a handful are even ancient. Sizeable chunks of the liturgy are ancient.

The story of the nativity is certainly ancient. (Not that that implies it’s true, mind.) It’s a mash-up of the 1st century gospels of Matthew and Luke. Matthew has the star, dreams and prophecies, the wise men, the massacre of the innocents, and the flight to Egypt; Luke has the annunciation, the census, no room at the inn, the manger, and the shepherds. The idea of combining these separate stories in a mash-up is ancient too. Even some non-canonical parts of the story are ancient. The Protevangelium of James (early 2nd century) gives us the virgin birth, as opposed to the virgin conception, and the idea of Jesus being born in a cave. The ox and ass standing by, a standard feature of modern nativity displays, appear regularly in ancient iconography and in some ancient Christian writers.

The ox and ass are premised on Luke’s manger, and by analogy with Isaiah 1.3 and the Septuagint version of Habakkuk 3.2; see e.g. Benedict XVI 2012: 69. For ancient sources, see: Origen, Homily on Luke 13, xiii.1832c Migne; Prudentius Cathem. 11.81-84. (Also, at this point I have to mention that Prudentius is the author of my personal all-time favourite Christmas carol, ‘Of the father’s heart begotten’, Cathem. 9.10-24.)

If a 2nd century Christian were to time-travel to 2018, they’d definitely recognise the story and motifs in a Christmas pageant, and in films like Ben-Hur (1959) and The star (2017). They wouldn’t recognise anything else about Christmas in its modern form. But then again, neither would an 8th century Northumbrian who was used to celebrating modranicht. Nor would a 9th century Norse person who was used to jól.

References

• Benedict XVI, PP. (alias Ratzinger, J.) 2012. Jesus of Nazareth. The infancy narratives. Trans. P. J. Whitmore. London: Bloomsbury.
• Kindlinger, N. 1790. Münsterische Beiträge zur Geschichte Deutschlandes, hauptsächlich Westfalens, vol. 2. Münster: Friedrich Christian Theissing.
• Koivulehto, J. 2000. ‘Fest und Zyklus des Jahres: Jul und Kekri’ (subscription required). Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 101: 235-52.
• Landau, D. 2006. ‘On the reading and interpretation of the month‐line in the Gothic calendar’ (subscription required). Transactions of the Philological Socety 104.1: 3-12.
• ---- 2009. ‘The source of the Gothic month name jiuleis and its cognates.’ Namenkundliche Informationen 95-96: 239-248.
• Tille, A. 1899. Yule and Christmas. Their place in the Germanic year. London: David Nutt.

Why are there no Romans named ‘Quartus’?

Quintus, Sextus, and Decimus were common Roman personal names, or praenomina. They come from numbers: they mean ‘fifth’, ‘sixth’, and ‘tenth’.

But only some numbers are represented. Why don’t we see Romans named ‘Primus’, ‘Secundus’, ‘Tertius’, or ‘Quartus’? Or for that matter ‘Septimus’, ‘Octavus’, or ‘Nonus’?

Stardust (2007). (Sorry, too late for a spoiler alert.) The film bucks Roman custom and has the princes of a royal family named for Latin ordinal numbers from ‘first’ to ‘seventh’. Here they appear as ghosts: left to right are Quintus, Tertius, Primus, Septimus, Secundus, Quartus, and Sextus. Septimus, in the middle, is one of the main antagonists in the story.

Today’s post isn’t really a debunking of a popular myth. An unpopular myth, maybe. I’m posting it because it’s something I just learned this morning, and it shocked me. It’s one of those things that’s staring you in the face all the time when you’re reading about the Greco-Roman world. So when I found out the true explanation, I felt a little bit betrayed -- as though it was something I ought to have known all along.

I guess it’s hard to find the time to get around to thinking about why Romans had names that meant ‘fifth’, ‘sixth’, and ‘tenth’. If you do think about it, you’re likely to make the same assumption that I did: that children were named for the order in which they were born. The 1st son would be Primus, the 2nd Secundus, the 3rd Tertius, and so on.

But that isn’t the case. If it were, we’d see corresponding names for the first to fourth children. And they just don’t exist. We do find Primus, Secundus, Tertius, and Quartus as regular cognomina -- official nicknames -- but not as personal names, and not at an early period. They start to pop up in the imperial period, and they’re not in Rome: they appear in Celtic contexts, which tends to suggest contamination from Celtic naming customs (Petersen 1962: 349 n. 6).

What’s the solution, then? Should we assume that the first four sons would get ‘real’ names, like Marcus, Titus, Publius, and so on? And when the parents got to their fifth child, suddenly they’d be all like ‘Hey let’s start using numbers now.’

Nope. The scholarly consensus is that these names originally came from the names of the months in which they were born.

If that surprises you, you’re not alone. I was startled too. It was originally suggested by the 1st century BCE scholar Varro, and it appears he was dead right. The standard modern discussion is 56 years old, Petersen 1962, but Petersen’s argument hasn’t been superceded. If anything the argument has been strengthened by parallels that have been found in other ancient Italian languages.

There are a couple of complications. First: Quintus and Sextus don’t sound like month names. However, prior to the lives of Julius Caesar and the emperor Augustus, the Romans had different names for the 7th and 8th months of the year: Quintilis (‘fifth-ilis’) and Sextilis (‘sixth-ilis’). (see this previous post from March for more details, and for discussion of why the months’ names don’t match up to their position in the year.)

Second: it’s not just the number-months. March, May and June aren’t named for Latin numbers, but children born in those months got names related to the months anyway: not Martus, but Marcus; Maius is a rare name, but it exists; and June gave Iunius both as a praenomen and as a gentilician (family) name.

And third, there’s a semi-regular pattern of praenomina ending in -us with corresponding family names ending in -ius: hence Marcus ≈ Marcius. This helps fill in the gaps with some of the numbers. We don’t see Octavus as a praenomen, but we do see Octavius as a family name {edit, six weeks later: also ‘Octavianus’ as a praenomen, but that looks like it’s modelled on ‘Octavius’, not on ‘October’}; Iunius is rare as a praenomen, but common as a family name; Maius appears both as a praenomen and a family name.

Month	praenomen	gentilician name
Martius (March)	Marcus	Marcius
Aprilis (April)	--	--
Maius (May)	Maius	Maius
Iunius (June)	Iunius (very rare)	Iunius
Quintilis (July)	Quintus	Quinctius
Sextilis (August)	Sextus	Sextius
September	Septimus (rare, archaic)	Septimius
October	--	Octavius
November	--	Nonius
December	Decimus	Decius (Roman), Decimius (Samnite)

Varro, who first came up with this explanation, was bothered a bit by the lack of any names corresponding to April. But not enough to prevent him from proposing it anyway, and not enough to put off modern proponents. (The fact that the name ‘April’ appears to come from Etruscan may have a lot to do with this gap in the table. Maybe one of the other traditional Roman praenomina, like Gaius and Publius and Titus, was related to an older Latin name for April? Who knows.)

The Cambridge Latin Course, volume 1, stage 11. I think the appearance of ‘Quartus Tullius’ here is an unintentional error. In the story he has a brother, Marcus, and Marcus at least was a real historical person: he served three terms as a duumvir in Pompeii. (The lesson? Even textbook authors can jump to conclusions.)

What are the arguments in favour of Varro’s theory? Well, first is the fact that the number-based praenomina start with Quintus and end with Decimus, and this constraint corresponds tidily to the fact that month-names also start at ‘fifth’ (Quintilis) and end at ‘ten’ (December).

Second is the fact that we find some related names in two ancient Italic languages related to Latin, Oscan and Faliscan, in ways that suggest they’re also related to month names.

Oscan was spoken by the ancient Samnites, in the Appenine mountains south of Rome, and we have a Samnite family named Decimius attested in Roman sources. In Rome itself the corresponding name was ‘Decius’. In a study of the ancient Samnites, E. T. Salmon (1967: 53) cites the Oscan names Mamerkis ≈ Marcus, Sepis ≈ Septimus, and Dekis ≈ Decimus, and states that Mamerkis is actually formed from the Oscan name for the month of March. I haven’t been able to confirm the last point, but it’s certainly true that Mamerkis is related to the god Mars, who was called Mamertis in Oscan.

Petersen cites some parallels from Faliscan and Oscan too. Marcius only appears as a family name in Rome, but Petersen points to an example of Marcius as a praenomen in a Faliscan inscription (1962: 352 n. 16).

And most strikingly of all, he cites an Oscan family name Sehsimbriis. This is transparently based on an alternate formation for the name of the month of August. In republican-era Latin, August was called Sextilis (‘sixth-ilis’); Sehsimbriis must reflect an Oscan formation which would correspond to Latin *Seximber.

Note, a day later: I’m no longer too sure of this. If Sehsimbriis did correspond to *Seximber, it’d be an artificial formation, based on analogy with September, November, etc.: the Latin for ‘six’ is sex, not *sexem/sexim. A strict formation ought to be just *Sexiber. (Or in Oscan maybe something like *Sehsikbri-: sehsik- appears to be the Oscan for ‘six’.)

So there we have it: some of the most common praenomina in Latin, Marcus, Quintus, Sextus, and Decimus, come from month names. If your name is Mark, you’re named after the month of March. The idea must surely be that in the earliest times, the names would have corresponded to the month in which the boy was born.

There are some caveats and provisos, mind. First, customs changed over time. The practice of naming children directly for months was long gone by the historical period. And in the imperial era, some number-based names were formed by analogy with the traditional names: as a result we start to see some innovations like Decimius as a praenomen, as in the name of the poet Decimius Magnus Ausonius.

Second, women’s names are different. Men’s names followed a regular pattern of praenomen plus gentilician name; women’s names were much less regulated. And among women we do see Prima, Secunda, Tertia, and Quarta as personal names alongside Quinta. So however exactly the month-name custom worked originally, it didn’t work the same way for women’s names. It could be that for women these names did originally indicate order of birth.

And third: we do see some other number-names popping up as gentilician names which do not correspond to month names. These names seem to come from non-Roman contexts. For example, the Roman name Pomponius is based on a non-Roman word for ‘five’. ‘Five’ in proto-Italic was *k^wenk^we. Latin preserved /k^w/ sounds relatively faithfully, and so ended up with the form quinque ‘five’. But in many languages, /k^w/ transformed into /p/: so in Oscan the word for ‘five’ was pumperias or pompe. This or a related language must have provided the gentilician name Pomponius, basically an Oscan equivalent of Quinctius. In the same way proto-Italic *k^wetwōr ‘four’ ended up as quattuor in Latin, but pettiur or pitora in Oscan: a form related to these must be the origin of the Roman gentilician name Petronius.

Reference

• Petersen, Hans 1962. ‘The numeral praenomina of the Romans.’ Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 93: 347-354.
• Salmon, E. T. 1967. Samnium and the Samnites. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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.