From PESELYG@APSU01.APSU.EDU Sun May 20 19:19:49 2001 Received: from mxu3.u.washington.edu (mxu3.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.7]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.04) with ESMTP id f4L2Jk0120594 for ; Sun, 20 May 2001 19:19:46 -0700 Received: from apsu01.apsu.edu (apsu01.apsu.edu [198.146.56.9]) by mxu3.u.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.04) with ESMTP id f4L2JkX30480 for ; Sun, 20 May 2001 19:19:46 -0700 Received: from APSU01.APSU.EDU by APSU01.APSU.EDU (PMDF V5.2-31 #38960) id <01K3SU8RGY1C0005Q1@APSU01.APSU.EDU> for classics@u.washington.edu; Sun, 20 May 2001 21:18:30 CDT Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 21:18:30 -0500 (CDT) From: PESELYG@APSU01.APSU.EDU Subject: leap day To: classics@u.washington.edu, PESELYG@APSU.EDU Message-id: <01K3SU8RH1TE0005Q1@APSU01.APSU.EDU> X-VMS-To: IN%"classics@u.washington.edu" X-VMS-Cc: PESELYG MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII John D. Morgan of the University of Delaware (jdmorgan@udel.edu) gave a paper at the most recent APA annual meeting entitled "New Light on Augustus' Reform of the Julian Calendar." Unfortunately the abstract is not one of those available at the APA website, as far as I could tell. According to the paper version of the abstract, Morgan says that the _communis opinio_ has long been that Caesar intended the leap days to be inserted in 42, 38, 34, 30, 26, 22, 18, 14, 10, 6, 2 (etc.) B.C., but that the pontifices thought they were supposed to insert the leap days in 42, 39, 36, etc. (the leap day which was supposed to be inserted in 39 BC was inserted in 41 so that the Kalends of January in 40 BC would not coincide with the nundinae), and they actually inserted the leap day in 42, 41, 36, 33, 30, 27, 24, 21, 18, 15, 12, and 9, before their error was discovered, whereupon Augustus ordered that no leap days be inserted for 12 years. Morgan uses a decree first published by Mommsen and Wilamowitz in 1899 (republished as no. 65 in Sherk's _Roman Documents from the Greek East_) to argue that the years that the leap days were actually inserted were 43, 41, 38, 35, 32, 29, 26, 23, 20, 17, 14, and 11 B.C. (as was proposed by H. Matzat in 1883). He suggests that Paullus Fabius Maximus (consul 11 B.C.) was informed by a learned Greek of the error in the Roman calendar and wrote to tell Augustus. George Pesely, Austin Peay State University peselyg@apsu.edu .