Page:Chronologies and calendars (IA chronologiescale00macdrich).pdf/27

 began their duties in the preceding October. Festivals came to be held at unnatural seasons. The feast for Flora (the Goddess of Spring) was celebrated, for instance, in the middle of July; and a similar anomaly affected the festival of Vertumnus, which was latterly held long after its appointed day, 23rd August.

19. Julius Cæsar unmade this confusion. He decreed, by his imperial mandate, that:—

(a). That the year 46 B.C., then current, should contain 445 days. This instantly brought the year round to the solar year, and created a rational correspondence between the two.

(b). The year's commencement should be 1st of January instead of on 1st of March; that each of the next three years of twelve calendar months should contain 365 days. For a long time before 45 B.C., the supreme magistrates had entered upon their office on the Kalends of January, or rather, they were presumed to have done so.

(c). That the fourth, the 712th year of the city, should contain 366 days. This was intended to be the first leap year. The extra day came in February, for it was simpler to have February 29th than January or March 32nd, even assuming the verbal structure of the Roman calendar could permit this.

Before the first leap year came into practice, Cæsar had been assassinated, and an erroneous view was taken of his instructions—every third instead of every fourth year, for the next thirty-seven years, having been wrongly observed