Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/238

218 nized as impossible and abandoned after the lapse of many centuries—had already employed men's minds in Italy before the epoch at which their contact with the Greeks began; these purely national attempts to solve it, however, have passed into oblivion.

What we know of the oldest calendar of Borne and of some other Latin cities (as to the Sabellian and Etruscan measurement of time there is no traditional information) is decidedly based on the oldest Greek system—an arrangement of the year intended to answer both to the phases of the moon and to the seasons of the solar year, constructed on the assumption of a lunar period of 29$1⁄2$ days and a solar period of 12$1⁄2$ lunar months or 368$3⁄4$ days, and on the regular alternation of a full month or month of 30 days with a hollow month or month of 29 days and of a year of 12 with a year of 13 months, but at the same time maintained in some sort of harmony with the actual celestial phenomena by arbitrary curtailments and intercalations. It is possible that this Greek arrangement of the year in the first instance came into use among the Latins without undergoing any alteration; but the oldest form of the Roman year, which can be historically recognized, varied materially from its model, not in the cyclical result, or in the alternation of years of 12 with years of 13 months, but in the designation and in the measuring off of the individual months. The Roman year began with the beginning of spring; the first month in it, and the only one which bears the name of a god, was named from Mars (Martius), the three following from sprouting (aprilis), growing (maius), and thriving (junius), the fifth and onward to the tenth from their places in the order of arrangement (quinctilis, sextilis, september, october, november, december), the eleventh from opening (januarius) (P. 173), with reference probably to the renewal of agricultural operations that followed mid-winter and the season of rest, the twelfth, and in an ordinary year the last, from cleansing (februarius). To this series recurring in regular succession there was added in the intercalary year a nameless "labour-month" (mercedonius) at the close of the year, or after February. And, as the Roman calendar was independent as respected the names of the months which were probably transferred from the old national ones, it was also independent as regarded their duration: instead of the four years of the Greek cycle, each composed of six months of