This article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: |
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
This article is written in American English, which has its own spelling conventions (color, defense, traveled) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus. |
Sections older than 180 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III. |
The idea that the intercalary month somehow slipped into February, with the last 5 days of February following it, appears to have returned to this page. The assertion is not supported by any citation.
Michels - who is the leading authority on the subject - disagrees, as do many other authorities, see: http://www.instonebrewer.com/TyndaleSites/Egypt/ptolemies/chron/roman/chron_rom_cal.htm so that making this assertion without qualification is rather misleading.
Also, the text says that the intercalary month was "always 27 days long" (a view of many scholars) but also that February was 29 days long in an intercalary year. That would make a 383 day embolistic year, which is too long. So there is an internal confusion by whoever wrote that section.
So, a view that was popular was that somehow a 23/24 day intercalary year was inserted into February, this is not the evidence of the Fasti and modern scholarship does not think this but thinks that February was shortened. The text of our article represents neither of those views properly.
Does anyone have strong views about my editing it to reflect modern scholarship, or is this something people feel strongly about? Francis Davey (talk) 08:55, 13 July 2019 (UTC)
I wasn't able to read from the article what the time of day for the changing of dates was in the Roman calendar. Also i wasn't able to find this in the main article on »calends«. Maybe there is some knowledgable person here that can do something about that, alternatively tell me where i ought to have been looking. Julian calendar article also doesn't have this information btw. Itsameno (talk) 20:35, 12 April 2020 (UTC)
I thought it would be best to put this here as it deals with multiple subordinate articles, but feel free to move it elsewhere if that's not appropriate.
I was going through the individual Roman month articles recently (the ones linked to in this article) to retrieve the names of tutelary deities for each month, which lead me to discover that some of them are missing from the articles, namely Maius, Iunius, Sextilis, and December. I don't know whether this is merely an editing lapse or a source issue, but in doing some light research into another matter, I may have discovered something that could be tentatively used to fill in these gaps, assuming the original sources don't already make mention of the tutelaries for those months which has merely been ommitted from the articles accidentally.
When reading the first page of an article on JSTOR here https://www.jstor.org/stable/41538820 about Manilius and his Astronomica, I noticed some astrological correspondences at the bottom of the page. I realised that, when you equate each zodiac sign with the month it begins in, the deity corresponding to that sign also happens to be the tutelary of that month in all eight wiki articles where a tutelary is listed for the Roman month, which seems certainly beyond a coincidence and tentative proof of an astrological correspondence to the monthly tutelaries. If this happens to also be the conclusion of the journal article (probably not, as it's about the Megalensia), I cannot see it as I only have JSTOR access at uni.
According to the astrological corresspondences, this reveals Apollo for Maius (Gemini), Mercury for Iunius (Cancer), Ceres for Sextilis (Virgo), and Vesta for December (Capricorn), providing a complete list of the twelve Dii Conscentes and their correspondences to the twelve Roman months. I thought I'd share this here because perhaps someone might want to update the four Roman month articles to include a tentative suggegstion of their tutelaries based on the astrological correspondences detailed in the JSTOR article. I'm not sure what the best and most appropriate way to do this would be, so I thought I'd best leave it up someone who has more experience with these articles. 124.197.44.175 (talk) 06:29, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
In the highly prominent second sentence position, we have this strange assertion
The term sometimes includes any system dated by inclusive counting in the Roman manner towards the kalends, nones, and ides of the month.[citation needed]
I can't see any body content it summarises (per WP:LEAD); it has no citation and no context. Can anyone see any reason to retain it?
(The article does have a whole section on "the kalends, nones, and ides of the month", so I wonder if an earlier version of the sentence was sensible but the sense has been lost in repeated edits that attempted to set the scope of the article? I'll have a search of the history...) 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 12:02, 1 January 2023 (UTC)
@LlywelynII:, I think this originates in your edits of April 2017, though it has changed somewhat since then [including by me, today]. Could you clarify your intent please? Had you intended to add some supporting body content? I certainly agree that that the Kalends, nones and ides should be summarised in the lead but it is not obvious that this is the best way to do that. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 12:15, 1 January 2023 (UTC)
Here is my draft replacement for the first three paragraphs. I have made the paragraph "the term does not include" into a footnote. Comments and advice welcome:
The Roman calendar was the calendar used by the Roman Kingdom and Roman Republic. Although primarily used of Rome's pre-Julian calendars, the term often includes the Julian calendar established by the reforms of the dictator Julius Caesar and emperor Augustus in the late 1st century BC.[a]
The original calendar consisted of ten months beginning in spring with March; winter was left as an unassigned span of days. These months each had 30 or 31 days, and ran for 38 nundinal cycles, each forming an eight-day week (nine days counted inclusively in the Roman manner, hence the name) ended by religious rituals and a public market. The winter period was later divided into two months, January and February. The legendary early kings Romulus and Numa Pompilius were traditionally credited with establishing this early fixed calendar, which bears traces of its origin as an observational lunar one. In particular, the kalends, nones, and ides of the month seem to have derived from the first sighting of the crescent moon, the first-quarter moon, and the full moon respectively. The system ran well short of the solar year, and it needed constant intercalation to keep religious festivals and other activities in their proper seasons. This is a typical element of lunisolar calendars. For superstitious reasons, such intercalation occurred within the month of February even after it was no longer considered the last month.[citation needed]
Better? --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 20:59, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
As there have been no further comments, I have applied my draft with the exception of deleting "For superstitious reasons, such intercalation occurred within the month of February even after it was no longer considered the last month." since it was uncited since March 2022.
@Indefatigable:, do you want to edit it further now to make the change you described briefly above? Open season to all, of course. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 21:19, 19 January 2023 (UTC)
References
Read Michels properly, don't really have enough time to work on this right now, so I'll just put down some notes and hope someone else can help in fixing all this:
And so forth. Again, if I did do these fixes it'd have to be in chunks, so help would be appreciated. Arcorann (talk) 09:45, 11 October 2023 (UTC)
I pointed out that this article is currently inconsistent, with 19 dates in dm format and 2 in md format. I changed all to be dm, which is consistent with, say, "the 6th December Kalends" (VI Kalendas Decembres), and added the "Use dmy dates" template at the top.
User:Jc3s5h reverted my edit, with the explanation "Use MDY dates because the first version used month, day dates, and I found no discussion on the talk page expressing a desire to change the date format . Look more extensively for dates than previous editor." They also added a "Use mdy dates" template, without discussion.
I see no evidence that the first version (November 2001) used md format. Irrespective of that, the present article has an overwhelming number of dm dates (19 to 2 md), and dm makes more sense given the format of Roman days of the month, e.g. "The 6th day before the Nones/ante diem sextum Nonas". I propose my version should stand, including the removal of the still-current inconsistencies and the "Use dmy dates" template. Masato.harada (talk) 09:37, 14 December 2023 (UTC)