The Calendar by David Ewing Duncan Read Free Book Online Page B

producing in due time a son that Caesar would later recognize as his own, calling him Caesarion. Hoping to float all the way to Ethiopia to discover the source of the Nile, Caesar during this trip undoubtedly continued his discourse with the sages of Egypt. These may have included a court astronomer named Sosigenes, who wrote several books about the stars, all of them now lost. But unlike those great stargazers whose works have been preserved, Sosigenes at some point during Caesar’s time in Egypt passed on something far more lasting than suppositions about the placement of stars and the distance of the sun and moon: a breathtakingly simple idea for reforming the Roman calendar.
     
    In June of 47 BC, Julius Caesar finally departed Egypt. As a parting gift he left the pregnant Cleopatra three Roman legions to protect her, but also to guard the interests of Rome against a woman Caesar clearly understood was as ruthless as he in her ambitions. Desperately needed in Rome to sort out the aftermath of the civil war, Caesar first launched two lightning-quick wars against an upstart king in Syria and against the remnants of Pompey’s army, which had fled to the north coast of Africa. He then returned to Rome, where the Senate named him dictator for ten more years, commissioned a bronze statue of him to be erected in the Forum, and ordered a celebration of forty days for his victories in Gaul, Egypt, Syria and Africa. This triumph became a legendary orgy of festivals, games and debauches that included the slaughter of four hundred lions in the Circus, and mock battles on land and sea in which hundreds of war captives and criminals died. For days at a time Caesar’s soldiers marched in parades leading into the Forum, carrying more than 20,000 pounds of captured treasure and leading in countless prisoners weighed down by chains. These included the young princess Arsinoe, a sister of Cleopatra who had sided with her enemies.
    Caesar’s supporters revelled in their triumph, though many Romans, raised in a republic that had for centuries despised the idea of a king, found the celebrations grossly ostentatious and an unsettling display of arrogance and personal power. The Roman historian Dio reports that people recoiled against the bloodshed and the ‘countless sums’ lavished on the shows. People also complained about the treatment of high-born prisoners, including Arsinoe. Demeaned in her chains, she ‘aroused very great pity’, to the point that Caesar released her rather than face the wrath of the populace. Not even a lavish gift of gold, grain and oil to every free person in Rome assuaged a general anxiety about what Caesar would do next. Already his enemies were talking darkly of a man whose success and virtually limitless power was turning him into a monster.
    The fact that Caesar governed mostly with energy and resolve after his infamous fete made his enemies revile him even more, since an able dictator set back the cause of those who longed for a return of the republic far more than if Caesar had been inept. He plunged into a dizzying series of projects ranging from a flurry of new temples and a planned canal across the Isthmus of Corinth to hundreds of new laws and reforms. He dissolved the corrupt guilds in the city; limited the terms of office for senior elected officials; forgave a quarter of the debts owed by all Romans, to stimulate the economy; awarded prizes to large families to increase the population, depleted by the war; and reduced the expensive subsidies of grain to the city’s paupers. He also consolidated power by naming his own men to key offices and by co-opting control of the Senate.
    But none of the measures taken by Caesar during his first months back in Rome was more dramatic than the one he decreed sometime in the first half of 46 BC; the reordering of the Roman calendar. More than a simple adjustment in the way days were counted, this reform was a potent symbol both of Julius Caesar’s newfound