ET TU Part Six Ultimus annus

 

I don't wish to overstate things, so speaking conservatively, the year 45 B.C. was one of the most revolutionary years in all of human history. To begin with it was a last year of the old Roman calendar, and the first year in which Julius Caesar was dictator of Rome for life. And, the last year of Julius Caesar’s life.

When Cesar conquered Gaul the minute had yet to be invented, the second was a useless abstraction, and the hour a generality. The Romans marked time using the moon. The new moon was the first day of every month, on which bills were to be paid, known as the accounting book day - in Latin, the Kalends. 

Five to eight days later, on the half moon, was the Nones, and every day between was numbered as 'so days before' the Nones.  Eight days after the Nones came the full moon, which was called the Ides, or the half. The Ides was followed by a count down to the next Kalends.

The biggest problem with this seemingly simple system was that the months were of equal length, and the year was only 355 days long.  Even two thousand years ago the earth took 365 days to orbit the sun, and those ten missing days caused season creep. This was supposed to be addressed by adding a 13^th month, the Mensis Intercalaris, every other year, usually in the dead of winter. 

But the decision of when and where to add the Mensis Intercalaris was left up to the Counsels, who were the politicians who were elected each year to directly run the capital.  And being politicians, most managed to justify stretching out their terms in office for that extra month. So, Rome was soon suffering from additional seasonal creep. By the time Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, on 12 January, 49 B.C., instead of that date happening in the winter, it was just the middle of autumn. Something ought to be done.

The story goes that late in 48 B.C., at a party in Alexandria, Cleopatra 7 introduced Julius Caesar to her court astronomer, Sosigenes (above, center).  And it was during their conversation that Sosigenes suggested the Romans dump the moon and start telling time by the sun. 

Well, Caesar agreed in theory, but he was first and foremost a politician.  And politicians don't like making people change things if it can be avoided.  But he filed Sosogenes' suggestion away for future reference. After defeating the Senate aristocratic forces in Asia Minor and  Tunisia in 46 B.C., Caesar finally turned his attention to fixing things in Rome.

First he swamped the Senate with 300 new Senators, including some from outside of Italy. This gave him the votes to do just about anything he wanted. What he wanted and got was being elected dictator for a year. This position had been created before, but Caesar immediately used his new majority to make the jump to Sosigenes's new calendar.  So, as of 1 January, 44 B.C., instead of an intercalaris month inserted every other year, the new Julian Calendar required only one extra day be inserted every fourth, or "leap" year,

But in order to bring the seasons into harmony before switching to the new "Julian Calendar" Caesar inserted two adjustment months; Intercalaris Prior and Intercalaris Posterior. Adding these 66 days meant that Caesar's year as dictator lasted 445 days, giving him the longest year in Roman history during which he convinced the Senate to vote him dictator perpetuo - dictator for life - which they did in February of 44 B.C.

For the poor little rich boys, like Senator Marcus Junius Brutus (above, left), and his brother-in-law Senator Gaius Cassius Longinus (above, right), the changes were not so happy. So many aristocratic Senators had been killed trying to stop Caesar, that the blue blood in the Senate was running thin. Then Caesar had diluted the Senate membership by 50%, by appointing a bunch of rubes and boobs - at least it seemed so to Brutus and Cassius. The  Senate chambers had now acquired all the unpleasant aspects of the audience at the Red Neck comedy tour.

And then, even worse, Caesar cut the welfare rolls by half. Those tossed off the public dole were offered the chance to live overseas in new cites, like New Carthage in Africa and New Corinth in Greece, or Seville in Spain. You would have thought the aristocrats would have cheered this development, but they had gotten so used to denouncing the angry mobs of poor people right outside their doors, that almost in reflex they denounced the expense of building all these new “welfare” cities. Caesar was doing this, they said, just to increase his popularity.

But what Caesar did with the banking system in 45 B.C. really ticked off the aristocrats. The country was drowning in debt, mostly owed to the aristocrats in the Senate, who were about the only people with money.  

In a typical example, Brutus had made a loan to the town of Salamis in Sicily, charging 48% interest. The town could never pay that off. But in 45 B.C. the dictator Caesar had wiped out all interest due on any principle already paid. With that one decree, one quarter of the amount owed by the 99% of the population to the top 1% was wiped out. The economy took a big breath of relief. But the 1% were outraged. Caesar was a tyrant, they said. He wanted to be King, they said.

Caesar also rebuilt the Roman forum, including starting a new Senate House to replace the one burned down in 50 B.C. Nearby he built a new market that spurred business investment and profit in the city. He cleared out the vast wooden Subura slums and rebuilt them in cement, which put an end to the fires which regularly threatened to burn down the entire town. 

Caesar rebuilt the port of Ostia (above) into a vast grain store house, to stabilize the price of bread in Rome. This ticked off the aristocrats who had made money manipulating the price of wheat. 

He set term limits for Roman governors, and established new rules to reduce graft in the provinces. This ticked off the aristocrats who had made profited from that graft. 

He granted Roman citizenship to millions in Italy, Spain and North Africa, Illyricum, which made Rome something they would all fight for.  But that also gave these people rights and protections under the law against rapacious money lenders – also known as the aristocrats in the Senate. Caesar the tyrant not only wanted to be King, said the aristocrats,  he wanted to be made a god.

And then Caesar did the one thing which sealed his fate.  Cassisus (above), was expecting to be nominated for Praetor, or mayor of Rome, for 44 B.C.. Instead, Caesar nominated Brutus again. Cassisus was insulted and frightened. His veiled hatred of Caesar was well know in the Senate chambers, and now he must have suspected that Caesar knew as well. And Cassius knew what he would do if he were in Caesar's position.

Cassius knew if he struck back at Caesar by himself, he would have little support. Even his brother-in-law Brutus (above, left)) knew how much he hated and feared Caesar. But Cassius also knew Brutus could be led to act.  So Cassius took a coin out of his purse.

The design of Roman coins was determined by three men,  called the “tresviri monetales”, the 'three money men' (above)  who decided what face or images would be carved into the molds used for the aureus (gold), denarius (silver) and the "as" (copper) coins used in every transaction from buying political office in Judea to a loaf of bread in Gaul. One denarius was roughly the equivalent of fifteen U.S. Dollars, and traditionally they carried the images of gods and demigods representing traits the politicians wanted to be seen as embodying.

But in February of 44 B.C. a new denarius was released, bearing the face of Julius Caesar (above). It was the first coin ever created carrying the head of a living Roman. The coins were being stockpiled for Caesar's coming attack on Parthia. It had been almost ten years since Caesar's mentor and ally, Crassus, had been killed on the field of Carrhae. And it had been his death that destroyed the balance of power in Rome and brought on the civil war. 

It was common knowledge that Caesar was to leave Rome in a few short weeks to avenge Crassus' death by invading Parthia (above). And the coins bearing his face, would remind the local “barbarians” of the images of Alexander the Great who had swept aside the Persian Empire, three hundred years before. The coins were a bit of political-economic theater, and their intended audience was in Parthia, where the coins were going to be distributed.

But, to a Roman audience, such coins spoke of arrogance and presumption. Worse, it spoke of stupidity.

No Roman politician would dare to release such coins and then leave town.  Only a fool or a child would not realize Caesar's intended use for these coins was in Parthia. But remember,  Cassius target audience was Brutus, who had been described as having the mind of a man but the emotions of a child.

When Cassius pressed one of Cesar's new coins into Brutus' palm, his argument for the elimination of Caesar was easy to make. He just had to avoid giving Brutus time to think things through.

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CHRISTMAS -TAKE TWO

 

I'll bet few of you know that this year Christmas comes on Tuesday, 7 January.  This is good news if you can't wait for Thursday, 25 December 2025. I am, of course, speaking of the  “original" Christmas, the one 200 million Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians celebrate, 13 days after Catholics and Protestants make merry. Now, as to why there are two Christmases, well, that has to do with the way theology seems to have been invented specifically to start arguments.

The first successful calendar that we know of was adopted over 6,500 ago by the 18 amalgamated city-states we know as the Sumerians. Being farmers they started their year in the spring, with each of their months beginning with sunset on the night of the new moon. This lunar calendar proved so popular it was adopted with slight modifications by everybody, including a small group of highland Semitic sheep herders known to themselves as the Yehudi – modern English translation being “the Jews”.

The Jewish spring was marked by the birthing of their sheep, what they called the Pesach. Fourteen days into the first Hebrew month of Nisan, at the full moon, they drained the blood of one of their first born kids. That's a baby sheep. The body was then burned, the rising smoke being offered up as a sacrifice to their god Elohim or Yahweh, to ensure he would keep them in milk, wool and lamb chops for the coming year. But, just about the same time as the invention of the calendar, the flocks of many of these Hebrews started dying.

Maybe it was disease and maybe a drought, but these Jewish bands were reduced to seeking work around the Egyptian settlements in the Nile river delta, where they were forced to exchange their Sumerian lunar calendar for an Egyptian solar one, and their mutton for bread. And the first Egyptian bread grain which ripened each spring, about the Nisan full moon, was barley. Now, barley doesn't rise well with yeast. This meant that every spring, when the stockpiles of wheat and rye grains ran short, the Jews were reduced to eating the hard, flat, unleavened barley bread. After leaving Egypt, or, as the religious fanatics described it, “escaping”, the spring Pesach was relabeled the Passover Festival.

Over the next  couple of millennial the Jews established a homeland called Israel, where they were  attacked by the Philistines, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Akkadians, the Hittites, and eventually the Romans. Every new conqueror forced the Hebrews to adopt some of their culture and calendar. 

And as is common with occupied people, the common folk dreamed of a messiah or Christ, who would save them from their oppressors, foreign and Jewish. Over time this produced a seemingly endless stream of messiah candidates. Most were loonies, but a few were dangerous enough that the upper crust Jewish Pharisees felt forced to eliminate them. And it was because of those few that before we got two Christmases, we got two Pesach-es – later renamed Easter.

See, the Romans, who were occupying Israel in the first century, had just stitched together a combination solar and lunar calendar championed by Julius Caesar and enacted on The Kalend, or the first morning of the new month of January, 47 B.C.E.  By Roman law all debts and taxes were paid on the Kalends of each month, including the Temple Tax the Jews paid so they would be excused from sacrificing to the Roman gods.

This Temple Tax was paid to the Roman Governor in the capital of Jerusalem, a city of between 60 and 70,000 people. During Passover, the city had to accommodate another 5 to 10,000 pilgrims in town to sacrifice at their temple. This produced a lot of taxable income for everybody, but with a crowd that large, you were guaranteed at least one Christ-wanna-be a year. 

Which is why, the Christian holy book could be very specific about the date when the most successful Christ, Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth, was nailed to a cross. He was killed, theologians now figure, about 3:00pm on Friday in the 33^rd year of the common era,   or about 3 hours before the start of Passover that year.  Except killing this Christ only added to the Pharisse's problems.

These Christians kept insisting their dead guy was The Christ sent to reform Judaism which pissed off the Pharisee, who  saw no reason to reform a religion they were running.   Also, all reformers made the Romans nervous, which pissed off the Pharisee even more. A decade after Jesus' crucifixion, the Jewish King Agrippa beheaded the cult's new leader, Jesus' brother, James. 

The next leader, also named James but called "The Just" to separate him from James the dead,  tried to avoid giving the Pharisee any reason to cut off any more heads by strictly obeying Mosaic law for 20 years. However, the Pharisee eventually decided to kill James the Just anyway. So they threw him off the Temple roof. And when that didn't kill him, they had him beaten to death.

But there were other, even more disruptive zealots around, and in the year 66 C.E., bad Roman government and all these revolutionaries set off the First Jewish war, which lead to the Kitos War and then the Bar Kokhba revolt, which ended in 136 C.E. 

This 80 years of violence so pissed off the Romans they destroyed the Jewish temple, then burned and sacked the entire city of Jerusalem, and then outlawed Judaism entirely. The only way for Christianity to survive this Roman repression was to form their own religion, adopting the Julian calendar and inventing a new theology they called Christianity as they went along.

As figured by Professor Rodney Stark, of Baylor College, devotees of Christianity surpassed the “symbolically weighty figure” of 100,000 worshipers attending a hundred or so churches about the year 200 C.E., or 70 years after the last Jewish revolt. And yet, already, their new theology was starting to encounter problems. 

In the year 189 C.E., Rome, received a new bishop, or elder of this new quasi-Jewish church. We know him only by the name of Victor, and that he came from North Africa -  perhaps he was a Berber. We can assume Victor was devout, but we know he also was combative and arrogant. First, he had started calling himself “the Pope”. And secondly, was the way he tried to handle the Quarterdecimani debate.

In plain English, it was “The 14” - as in the 14^th day of Nissan, i.e. the date of Passover. Less than fifty years after the death of Jesus, Polycarp, the Bishop of Smyrna, reminded his fellow Christians that the Paesch was a life giving festival well before it became the Jewish Passover. 

This made 16 Nisson - the second day after Passover – the perfect day to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Which meant the common folk still had to know when Passover started. And Polycarp had been personally trained by the Apostle John, who had personally known both the living and the resurrected Jesus.  So, he ought to know when Jesus died and rose from the dead -at least to within a day or two.

But Victor and most western Bishops wanted to disconnect Christianity from Passover. Too Jewish, you know. That meant converting Jesus ben Joseph into a gentile, like the majority of the new Christian recruits. This was why the Sabbath was moved from the Jewish Friday at sunset and all day Saturday – the end of the week – to Sunday – the beginning of the week. And by using the Julian calendar, which most gentiles were familiar with, they could reenact the mystical Good Friday to Resurrection Sunday, every year. And that was something the “floating” Jewish Passover, which could come on any day of the week, and was favored by the eastern Christians, could not do.

So far, settling such theological issues had followed the example of the Pauline Epistles. The bishops exchanged letters arguing their case, until they were close to agreement. They then held conferences, called synods, which endorsed the new dogma. But bishops still within the Byzantine Empire, who spoke and read Greek, felt as qualified to determine dogma as the upstart Latin speakers from Rome. 

But Pope Victor, a Latin speaker,  now abruptly warned that any Christians who did not sever the direct connection between Passover and Easter would be excommunicated - thrown out of the church and denied Jesus' forgiveness.

Immediately a missive arrived from the proud Bishop of Ephesus. This was a large, wealthy city, so when Bishop Polycrates spoke, other Christians paid attention. He reminded Victor that many respected church leaders celebrated Easter on 16 Nisson, like, “...Philip, one of the twelve apostles....(and) John, who was both a witness and a teacher...and Polycarp in Smyrna...” and the seven bishops in his own family. Polycrates warned Victor. “ I...am not frightened by terrifying words.”  In other words, don't even think about excommunicating me.

Another dissent arrived from the Bishop of Lyon, France. Irenaeus was a Greek who had a strong record opposing “Judaizing” the new faith, which gave him street cred in this argument. Irenaeus cautioned Victor against asserting dominance, because that might start a civil war within the Church. Finally, Victor backed down. 

So,  for the next 800 years, everybody agreed to disagree on the date for Easter and about the power of one Bishop, whatever he called himself, to dictate to other Bishops. The eastern church read their liturgy in Greek, the Romans in Latin. And this divided church survived the fall of the western Roman empire and the rise of Islam, until 1053 C.E., when another hot head was elevated to Pope.

In that year, “Pope” Leo IX went nuclear on a small group of Greek Orthodox churches in southern Italy. Leo ordered them to either “conform” to the Latin Easter or close their doors. 

In Constantinople, the Ecumenical Patriarch, head of the local churches, Micheal I Cerularius, retaliated by dropping the same bomb on the Latin churches in his city.  And his city was far bigger than Rome.

The following year, 1054, Cardinal Humbert, led a Papal delegation to Constantinople to insist that Micheal reopen the Latin churches and acknowledge Leo IV as the supreme leader of the “Catholic”, meaning unified, church.

Oddly enough, Micheal said no.  Whereupon, everybody in sight excommunicated everybody else in sight. This exchange of “Ex” bombs escalated until it widened into the Great Schism, which has divided Christianity ever since. The two sides stopped talking to each other. The Latin churches continue to celebrate Easter on the first Sunday after the Paesch full moon, while the Greek Churches mark Christ's rising from the dead three days after Passover, whatever the day of the week that fell on.

A final bit of confusion was added in 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII introduced a new and refined calendar, which cut that year by 10 days. Initially it was recognized only in Catholic states. Protestant Britain did not make the switch until 1752, by which time the difference between the Julian and the newer Gregorian calendars had grown to 11 days. Russian, being Eastern Orthodox  did not accept the change until the revolution, in 1918, by which time the shift was 13 days. They were followed later by most secular governments.

But the Greek Orthodox Church, still pissed off about the Great Schism, have remained on the Julian calendar. Which is why we have two Easters, and why the Eastern Orthodox Christmas comes on  25 December, Julian Calendar, but also falls on 6 January, under the Gregorian calendar – 13 days later. Which gives us two Christmases.  Just remember that St. Nicolas, the inspiration for Santa Claus,  was a Bishop in the Eastern Orthodox Church. 

The Jews, of course, have stubbornly stuck to their own clock, insisting the year 2024 is actually the year 5785.  But that....is a story for another time.

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