I have beef with an ancient Roman emperor again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I thought I had gotten over this. With Nero I could look past the whole \u201cassassinating his mother, wife, and stepbrother\u201d thing because he was a fan of the arts. Appointing your horse as consul is probably not the best move politically, but Caligula\u2019s name means \u201clittle boot,\u201d and I can only hold so much hatred in my heart for a tiny shoe man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But now I\u2019ve found a new target for my antiquated ire: Julius Caesar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I had one reason for my distaste of Jules \u2013 the twelve month calendar.1<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n When I began writing this article, I was under the impression that Julius Caesar had added the months July and August to the calendar, and I was justifiably upset that he had disrupted the phenomenal naming scheme of months prior to his reform. Sept<\/em>ember was the 7th month, Oct<\/em>ober the 8th, Nov<\/em>ember the 9th, and Dec<\/em>ember the 10th. It all made sense before two months were added and shifted everything off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, the younger me was mistaken. I was a naive fool, a mindless idiot, a babulus stultus<\/em>. Jules didn\u2019t add any months, he just added some days. And he wasn\u2019t even the one to do the renaming; his predecessor, Augustus, was actually the name changer. No, the actual person that I hold my anger for is Numa Pompilius.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So we all know the story of Romulus and Remus, right? Two guys who got dumped next to a river when they were babies and raised by a wolf. They were best of friends until Romulus wanted to build Rome on this hill and Remus wanted to build Reme on that hill, some slight murder happened, and Rome was founded. Romulus is considered the first ruler of Rome and is also associated with the creation of the ten month Roman calendar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While I despise Numa and everything he did to the calendar, I will acknowledge that the calendar was not perfect prior to his intervention. It didn\u2019t exactly line up with the solar year and the winter months were not actual months; rather, they just represented a period of time each year that the Romans decided gave winter vibes. This might seem ridiculous, but it\u2019s actually a pretty clever way to get over imprecise measurements of the Earth\u2019s orbit around the sun. If your calendar is off by a few weeks, winter\u2019s just gonna be longer this year. This is still quite silly though. Now that we’re modern and civilized people with the tools of science on our side, we instead decide how long winter is by whether or not a rodent gets spooked by its shadow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After Romulus died, Numa Pompilius took over and made the dreaded changes to the Roman calendar that I still harbor sorrow over all these years later. I was not there in 715 BCE when Numa edited the calendar, but most accounts of Numa\u2019s entire existence are disputed, so I think I am warranted to carry on the legacy of Renaissance scholars and write some Roman Empire fanfiction on how I think it went down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ahem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Numa Pompilius awoke to a sunbeam inching its way across his eyelid. He looked at the clock hung on the opposite side of his room and a realization dawned on him like the rising sun. It was 11:00 \u2013 Numa had overslept!<\/em>2<\/sup> He had already missed his meeting with the cult of Mars, where he was supposed to help them brainstorm their new recruitment slogans, and if he didn\u2019t get ready soon, he was going to miss his inauguration as Supreme King of Rome! Oversleeping wasn\u2019t his only problem, though. Numa, being the incredibly humble and perfect [self insert] that he was, didn\u2019t really want to be king. Pythagoras, Numa\u2019s tutor who was definitely alive in 715 BCE and not over a century later, and also resided in Rome and not Metapontum, had taught him the philosophy of minimalism and piety.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Numa felt that being king would be far too garish and extravagant for him. Rome needed a real, strong leader, not a charismatic, courteous, and accomplished person like Numa. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n But then Numa remembered his dream. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ever since he was a small boy, the youngest of four brothers, Numa had one goal: he was going to ruin the Roman calendar. When he was six years old, Numa had traveled to an oracle for a school trip and was blessed with a vision.<\/em>3<\/sup> He saw a seventeen year old kid from two and a half millennia into the future who was maybe slightly too obsessed with uniform methods of tracking time, living a happy life with a neat ten month calendar that made intuitive sense, and in that moment Numa thought to himself, \u201cscrew that guy, I\u2019m gonna be king so I can wreck this calendar.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Driven by his greatest desire, Numa leaped out of bed, took a shower using Rome\u2019s sophisticated aqueducts and plumbing, and ran to the senate for his coronation.4<\/sup> Numa sprinted down the incredible municipal infrastructure of Rome, never having run so fast in his life. Numa burst through the senate doors dramatically and a hundred heads turned towards him. The augur who, in absence of a proper king to coronate, was just about to place the crown on a horse, stopped as soon as he saw Numa.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cGosh, thank Juno you\u2019re here, Numa. We were almost gonna have a horse as a member of the Roman senate! Can you imagine that?\u201d\u00a0<\/em>5<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n Numa dutifully made his way to the center of the room and donned the crown while the horse trotted off to eat some hay or something. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat is your first decree as king, great Numa Pompilius?\u201d asked the augur. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou know the ten-month Roman calendar?\u201d replied Numa.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou mean the calendar?\u201d clarified the augur.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYeah, that one. Let’s add two more months to that sucker.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Anyway\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n Numa died at age eighty-one from old age, and was not cremated, as was tradition at the time.6<\/sup> This means that somewhere in modern-day Italy, the corpse of my archnemesis is buried – and I intend to find it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An inquisitive reader may ask, \u201cwhat are you going to do with the corpse when you find it?\u201d And I would reply with a quote from the late great Pythagoras:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSnitches get stitches.\u201d7<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n Footnotes:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 1<\/sup> We\u2019re friends now, so I can call him Jules. It\u2019s a better nickname than \u201clittle boot\u201d, anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2<\/sup> I realize that since this story takes place in ancient Rome, the clock is maybe a little unrealistic. It should of course read XI, not 11:00.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 3<\/sup> Six years is VI years for our Roman readers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 4<\/sup> Ancient Rome had an incredible plumbing system, but the pipes were made out of lead, so that\u2019s my explanation for the more absurd elements of this story like a Roman transition of power without assassination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 5<\/sup> Dramatic irony was invented by the ancient Greeks decades prior to this story taking place, but it is one of very few things the Romans did not steal from Greece.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 6<\/sup> Eighty-one is of course LXXXI for the numerically challenged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 7<\/sup> Now may be too late for me to mention that this article is not particularly historically accurate. While it comes from a place of a probably concerning amount of historical knowledge, accurate application of that knowledge is irreverent and sardonic at best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bibliography:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Early Roman Calendar.\u201d Encyclop\u00e6dia Britannica, Encyclop\u00e6dia Britannica, inc., www.britannica.com\/science\/calendar\/The-early-Roman-calendar. Accessed 10 Apr. 2024. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Ouellette, Jennifer. \u201cDid Lead Poisoning Cause Downfall of Roman Empire? The Jury Is Still Out.\u201d Ars Technica, 5 July 2021, arstechnica.com\/science\/2021\/07\/did-lead-poisoning-cause-downfall-of-roman-empire-the-jury-is-still-out\/. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have beef with an ancient Roman emperor again. I thought I had gotten over this. With Nero I could look past the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":1420,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion-pieces","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blueandread.asbarcelona.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blueandread.asbarcelona.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blueandread.asbarcelona.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blueandread.asbarcelona.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blueandread.asbarcelona.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1419"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blueandread.asbarcelona.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1424,"href":"https:\/\/blueandread.asbarcelona.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1419\/revisions\/1424"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blueandread.asbarcelona.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blueandread.asbarcelona.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blueandread.asbarcelona.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blueandread.asbarcelona.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}