How knowledge corrupts over time.

There is a new meme going around that points out something about the names we use for the last few months in English and how they don't make sense. Have a look:

The joke in the meme, if you missed it, is that pop culture blames Caesar for this month name mess up, and Caesar was assassinated by being stabbed a bunch of times in the back.

It's a fairly funny meme, but... it's wrong. Caesar is to blame for many things, but messing up the names of the months is not among them.

(actually I think this "meme" is from Tumblr. I don't know... or some social media thing that let's you "retweet" and comment. But still, it was collected into a meme, so we'll call it a meme!)

Let's back up and take an overview.

The Roman calendar originally had 10 months, beginning with March (Martius) and ending with December (December). It was a bit more complex than that, with an uncounted "dead" period during winter, but let's not worry about that right now.

These ten months were: Martius (March, from Mars), Aprilis (April, from Aphrodite), Maius (May, from the goddess Maia), Iunius (June, from the goddess Juno), Quintilis (lit "fifth month"), Sextilis ("sixth month"), September, October, November, December (seven, eight, nine, and ten). You can see they either ran out of gods to name the months after or they just got impatient with the entire system after Juno and decided to count instead.

There's a Monty Python sketch if I ever heard one.

The second king of Rome added January (Ianuarius) and February (Februarius), thus creating a 12-month calendar. The year still started in March.

Caesar did remodel the calendar, this is true. He introduced the Julian calendar, changing Rome from a lunar calendar to a solar one. He standardized the months to have 30 or 31 days, except Feb which had 29 (or 30 in a leap year). He introduced a leap year every 4 years. All that sounds familiar, I'm sure. He kept all the month names as is.

After he was assassinated, the Senate voted to rename the fifth month Quintilis to "Iulius" (July) in his honor. It was still the 5th month, not the 7th. Remember, the year started in March.

Then in 8 BCE, the Senate voted to rename Sextilis to "Augustus" (August) in his honor. (He was still alive so he might have been pulling the strings, but they made the vote.) It remained the 6th month, not the 8th. Remember, the year started in March.

So you see, even after renaming the 5th and 6th month for Caesar and Augustus, the last four month names still were accurately named. So no, despite the meme joke, it wasn't Caesar's fault.

So...

...when did January and February move to the start of the year, throwing the last four months out of sync with their name meanings? It was in 153 BCE. The Senate voted to make Jan 1st the official start of the year. This was mainly a political move, aligning the start of the year with the elections.

So you see, even back nearly 2000 years ago, politics was screwing things up.

Incidentally, after Rome fell, while Europe adopted most of the Roman calendar, they did not follow the 153 BCE change of making Jan 1st the start of the year. Most of Europe continued to celebrate March as the start of the year. England itself celebrated the start of the year as March 25th until 1752.

But by and by everyone eventually adopted that Roman change made in 153 BCE and switched to Jan 1st being the start of the year. They were only about 1500 years late to that particular change.

Anyway, the point of this info dump is that knowledge corrupts over time. I’m fairly certain most of this would have been common knowledge at one time—maybe not among the lower classes, but certainly among the educated. Even into modern times, classical education meant learning Latin and Greek, along with the history and culture of ancient Rome.

But now? People rarely learn this stuff. Instead, they pick up scattered bits and pieces, patch them together in a way that seems logical, but ends up wrong. And then they make memes, proudly showing off their bad history.

It’s a reminder that once knowledge slips from the mainstream, it gets reshaped by half-remembered facts and assumptions. And before long, the wrong version feels like common sense.

David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Mastodon. 【Support @dbooster with Hive SBI】