Ahve, and welcome to Emperor of Rome, a Roman history podcast from Latrobe University.

I'm your host Matt Smith and with me today is Dr.

Rheannan Evans, senior lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at Latrobe

University. This is episode CX-V-I-I-I, The Roman calendar.

It's hard to imagine life without a calendar, but just think about it for a moment.

How would I work out when to get my scarves out of storage? How would I know that I'm another year older? How would I know that I'm exactly nine days away from scheduled leave?

Luckily Julius Caesar solved this problem.

Hail Caesar!

Although it took a bit of trouble getting it to that point.

Here's Rianna Evans.

The Roman calendar is important to us because often Roman texts will talk about when an event happened,

both in terms of the month that happened and the year, and so we need to understand what that means.

So by and large the months are very similar to us we've taken them from then

but their system of counting years was quite quite different.

Obviously they couldn't use B. C and C. E because for a lot of

Roman history, it hadn't happened yet, the event that that's based on. So it's important

to us for understanding how the Romans constructed time, where they constructed it from, what were the important

events for them?

So what do we know about the origins of the Roman calendar then?

Because this is an important step in the development of how we try and keep track of the passage of years

and months and seasons and those kind of aspects.

And I imagine that the reason that they came up with this had something to do with crop rotations.

...