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In the early Roman calendar—which was closely tied to the harvest—the winter
months went unnamed until the 7th century B.C. It would take several more
centuries to establish January 1 as the start of the new year. Early depictions
of the month typically featured feasts su...Read MoreRead More
Photograph via Bridgeman Images
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 * History & Culture
 * Explainer




THE NEW YEAR ONCE STARTED IN MARCH—HERE'S WHY

For starters, January didn’t exist for the ancient Romans. Here’s how their
calendar evolved into our modern system of marking time.


ByErin Blakemore
Published December 22, 2021
• 6 min read
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In the dark days of winter, a new year begins. But January wasn't always the
start of the new year. At the dawn of modern calendar-keeping, the winter months
went unnamed in the calendars that gave rise to today’s most popular system of
marking time.

Named after Janus, the god of time, transitions, and beginnings, January was an
invention of the ancient Romans. Here's the story of the month's wild ride—a
tale of astronomical miscalculation, political tweaking, and calendar confusion.


THE FIRST ROMAN CALENDAR

Humans have been marking time on calendars for at least 10,000 years, but the
methods they used varied from the start. The Mesolithic people of Britain
tracked the phases of the moon. Ancient Egyptians looked to the sun. And the
Chinese combined both methods into a lunisolar calendar that’s still used today.

(Why Lunar New Year typically prompts the world's largest annual migration.)

The modern calendar used in most of the world, though, evolved during the Roman
Republic. Though it was attributed to Romulus, the polity's founder and first
king, it’s likely the calendar developed from other dating systems designed by
the Babylonians, Etruscans, and ancient Greeks.

The first month of the new year is named for Janus, the Roman god of beginnings
and transitions. Janus is typically de...Read MoreRead More
Photograph via Bridgeman Images
Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.

As Romans' scientific knowledge and social structures changed over time, so did
their calendar. The Romans tweaked their official calendar several times from
the republic’s founding in 509 B.C. until its dissolution in 27 B.C.

The first iteration was a scant 10 months long and paid homage to what counted
in early Roman society: agriculture and religious ritual. The 304-day calendar
year began in March (Martius), named after the Roman god Mars. It continued
until December, which was harvest time in temperate Rome.



The Romans linked each year to the date of the city’s founding. Thus, the modern
year 753 B.C. was considered year one in ancient Rome.

The initial calendar included six 30-day months and four 31-day months. The
first four months were named for gods like Juno (June); the last six were
consecutively numbered in Latin, giving rise to month names such as September
(the seventh month, named after the Latin word for seven, septem). When the
harvest ended, so did the calendar; the winter months were simply unnamed.


ROME'S LUNAR CALENDAR

The 10-month calendar didn't last long, though. In the seventh century B.C.,
around the reign of Rome's second king, Numa Pompilius, the calendar received a
lunar makeover. The revision involved adding 50 days and borrowing a day from
each of the 10 existing months to create two new, 28-day-long winter months:
Ianuarius (honoring the god Janus) and Februarius (honoring Februa, a Roman
purification festival).

The new calendar was anything but perfect. Since Romans believed odd numbers
were auspicious, they attempted to divide the year into odd-numbered months; the
only exception was February, which was at the end of the year and considered
unlucky. There was another issue: The calendar relied on the moon, not the sun.
Since the moon's cycle is 29.5 days, the calendar regularly fell out of sync
with the seasons it was intended to mark.

February is represented by a scene of European peasants on their farm in this
15th-century calendar found in Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. The
illuminated manuscript is one of the most famous examples of a “book of hours,”
which includes the Christian prayers a...Read MoreRead More
Illustration via Bridgeman Images
Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.


In an attempt to clear up the confusion, Romans observed an extra month, called
Mercedonius, every two or three years. But it wasn't applied consistently, and
various rulers added to the confusion by renaming months.

"The situation was made worse because the calendar was not a publicly available
document," writes historian Robert A. Hatch. "It was guarded by the priests
whose job it was to make it work and determine the dates of religious holidays,
festivals, and the days when business could and could not be conducted."


THE BIRTH OF THE JULIAN CALENDAR

Finally, in 45 B.C., Julius Caesar demanded a reformed version that became known
as the Julian calendar. It was designed by Sosigenes of Alexandria, an
astronomer and mathematician who proposed a 365-day calendar with a leap year
every four years. Though he had overestimated the length of the year by about 11
minutes, the calendar was now mostly in sync with the sun.

(Leap year saved our societies from chaos—for now, at least.)

Caesar’s new calendar had another innovation: a new year beginning on January 1,
the day its consuls—a pair of men who constituted the republic's executive
branch—took office. But though the Julian calendar would stick around for
centuries, the date of its new year wasn’t always honored by its adopters.
Instead, Christians celebrated the new year on various feast days.

Aside from a few tweaks by other Roman rulers, the Julian calendar remained
largely the same until 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII adjusted the calendar to
more accurately reflect the amount of time it takes for the Earth to travel
around the sun. The old calendar had been 365.25 days long; the new calendar was
365.2425 days long. The new calendar also shifted the dates, which had drifted
by about two weeks, back in sync with seasonal shifts.



Only with Gregory’s 1582 reform did January 1 really stick as the beginning of
the new year—for many. Not everyone switched to the new Gregorian calendar, and
as a result the Christmas holiday falls in January for members of Eastern
Orthodox churches. 

(Here's why the Orthodox church rejected the Gregorian calendar.)

While the modern world mainly syncs to the Gregorian calendar, other calendars
have lived on. As a result, different cultures acknowledge different dates as
the start of the new year—and have festivals, rituals and holidays, like Nowruz,
Rosh Hashanah, and Chinese New Year—to celebrate.

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