Beyond the Play: Calendars, Beliefs, Religions

As part of my extended study of Coriolanus, my tenth Shakespeare play, I explored the lives of people in ancient Roman and imperial Roman times, and gained new insights from the aspects of calendars, beliefs, and religions that arguably have existed since prehistoric times but had puzzled me until recently. Though it is all common knowledge or history, I'm so excited because I feel like all the dots have connected, and felt compelled to document what I learned in this blog for internalization.

To start with, I had been confused about the various calendar systems but I had never taken a close look at it. Now I have learned that there are so many calendars, extant or not─approximately one hundred of them, according to Wikipedia. Calendars fall into four types: lunisolar, solar, lunar and seasonal. Most pre-modern calendars are lunisolar. The seasonal calendars rely on changes in the environment (e.g., "wet season", "dry season") rather than lunar or solar observations. The image shows a Hebrew calendar that dates back to earlier than 3000 BC.

After millennia of evolution, the Roman calendar emerged, which interested me as it is part of the background of Coriolanus that I was studying. From here I dived into the history of calendars, and learned that the Roman calendar was first established by Romulus, the legendary founder and first king of Rome, and was revised by his successor Numa Pompilius.

The Roman calendar was a lunar calendar. When first introduced, it consisted of ten months, beginning in spring with March and leaving winter as an unassigned span of days before the next year. This was addressed in the revised calendar that added the months of January and February to divide winter, shortened most other months accordingly, and roughly aligned the calendar with the solar year using a system called intercalation. 

Fast forward to 46 BC: Julius Caesar proposed a new calendar as a reform of the earlier Roman calendar. Effective 1 January 45 BC, the calendar later became known as the Julian calendar (named after Julius Caesar). It was a solar calendar and remained the predominant system in the Roman Empire and much of the Western world for over 1,600 years.

In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII, then head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States,  commissioned and became the namesake of the Gregorian calendar, which is a solar calendar that remains the internationally accepted civil calendar to this day. Behind the scene, however, it was Aloysius Lilius, an Italian physician, astronomer, philosopher and chronologist, who provided the proposal that became the basis of the Gregorian Calendar reform, and it was Christopher Clavius, a Jesuit German mathematician, an astronomer and a member of the Vatican commission that accepted the proposed calendar invented by Aloysius Lilius, before it was presented to Pope Gregory XIII.

The Gregorian calendar went into effect in October 1582 as a modification of, and replacement for, the Julian calendar. The principal change was to space leap years differently to make the average calendar year 365.2425 days long, more closely approximating the 365.2422-day solar year, which is determined by the Earth's revolution around the Sun. Most Catholic countries adopted the new calendar immediately; Protestant countries adopted it gradually over the next two centuries; most Orthodox countries retained the Julian calendar for religious purposes but adopted the Gregorian calendar as their civil system in the early twentieth century. Thus, the days across the continent were often out of sync, leaving some countries several days or weeks behind others. Therefore, puzzles were the norm, such as this one: "A woman sits down to write a letter in France on 8 November 1582. Three days earlier, the letter is received in England. What happened?"

Through studying the Roman calendar I also learned for the first time the origins of Roman festivals, which were associated with Roman gods. I noted with great interest that Roman gods were grouped broadly into three divisions─heaven, earth, and underworld─by Varro, the Roman polymath. Moreover, I was amazed by the historian Livy who grouped the twelve gods into six pairs: Jupiter–Juno, Neptune–Minerva, Mars–Venus, Apollo–Diana, Vulcan–Vesta, Mercury–Ceres.

Equally interesting to me is that these six pairs, also known as the Twelve Great Gods, are the Roman equivalent of the Greek Olympians, the twelve major deities of the Greek pantheon, commonly considered to be Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, Demeter, Aphrodite, Athena, Artemis, Apollo, Ares, Hephaestus, Hermes, and Hestia (or Dionysus). They were called Olympians because, according to myth, they resided on Mount Olympus. Now I can fully appreciate the term Greco-Roman, as the two cultures were intertwined in many aspects.

While the polytheistic Roman religion had thrived since ancient times, Christianity started spreading through the Roman Empire in the first century. It came into ideological conflict with the pagan practices, such as making sacrifices to the deified emperors or other gods, which were unthinkable for Christians as their beliefs prohibited idolatry. Consequently, Christians were punished for treason, illegal assembly, and various rumored crimes including introducing an alien cult that led to Roman apostasy. The persecution persisted intermittently within the Roman Empire in the following centuries and Saint Sebastian's story illustrates it well: "He was initially tied to a tree and shot with arrows, but this did not kill him. He was rescued and healed by Irene of Rome, and shortly after his recovery he went to Emperor Diocletian to warn him about his sins, and as a result was clubbed to death."

In 313 CE, the Edict of Milan, an agreement to treat Christians benevolently within the Roman Empire, was reached between Western Roman Emperor Constantine I and Emperor Licinius, who controlled the Balkans. They met in Milan and agreed to change policies towards Christians, following the Edict of Toleration issued by Emperor Galerius two years earlier in Serdica. The Edict of Milan granted Christianity legal status and a reprieve from persecution but did not establish it as the state religion of the Roman Empire. That occurred in 380 with the Edict of Thessalonica, when Nicene Christianity became the official doctrine.

Constantine I, also known as Constantine the Great, was a Roman emperor from 306 to 337 CE and the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. He played a pivotal role in elevating the status of Christianity in Rome, decriminalizing Christian practice and ceasing Christian persecution. This was a turning point in the Christianization of the Roman Empire. He founded the city of Constantinople and made it the capital of the Empire, which it remained for over a millennium. Constantine was the son of Flavius Constantius, a Roman army officer who later became one of the four emperors of the Tetrarchy. Constantine began his career by campaigning in the eastern provinces (against the Persians) before being recalled in 305 CE to fight alongside his father in the province of Britannia. After his father's death in 306 CE, Constantine was proclaimed Augustus (emperor) by his army at Eboracum (York, England). I visited York last October and had the pleasure of seeing his iconic statue near York Minster.

Finally, while I have learned something about Christianity, I know little about Islam, an Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the Quran, with the world's second-largest religious population after Christians. For me, this is probably a good starting point for learning: the Hijri calendar, also known as the Muslim calendar and the Islamic calendar. It is a lunar calendar consisting of 12 lunar months in a year of 354 or 355 days.  It marks the Hijri era, which begins with the Islamic New Year in 622 CE. During that year, Muhammad and his followers migrated from Mecca to Medina and established the first Muslim community (ummah), an event commemorated as the Hijrah. Today is March 22, 2025, on the Gregorian calendar, equivalent to 22 Ramadan (the ninth month), AH 1446, on the Hijri calendar (AH: After Hijrah).