Historiography, Antiquarianism, and the Calendar

This chapter examines the essential links between antiquarianism, the writing of histories, and jurisprudence, for all were concerned in varying degrees with clarifying the essential nature of institutions and with ordering the rules associated with them. Roman writers produced a history of the calendar which they tied to other crucial institutions and to the lunar and solar cycles. Close examination reveals that they knew only of the calendar that governed the republic’s last centuries and that they wrote of its links to celestial phenomena through the lens of Caesar’s reform and the resulting Julian calendar. In this way, core features of the structure of the republican calendar, such as its intercalary and nundinal cycles, remain unaddressed.