Wherein the Romans knew the best way to celebrate the new year was to get totally two-faced.
I remember big New Year’s Eve celebrations: parties and laughter and even singing and dancing beneath the Space Needle. Now, 53 and living in a small town, I spent last New Year’s Eve watching the Panther City Lacrosse Club lose, reading for a bit, and then it was light’s out for my wife, geriatric dog and me by 10:30. But don’t smirk too much, younger and more energetic people, because someday (pointing a wrinkled, shaking finger) it’ll happen to you, too!
I’ve actually never cared all that much about big New Year’s blowouts. Sure, I admire the Babylonian new year’s ritual—to be honest, I’d happily trade my memories of singing “American Pie” at the top of my lungs under the Space Needle for the opportunity to watch a king dragged by his ear until he cried—but unless a blubbering potentate is involved I’d probably prefer to stay home. What does interest me is how we settled on January 1st as the day on which we nurse hangovers, and for that we have everyone’s favorite follicly-challenged ruler to thank.
Two Faces Have I
To be honest, we’re jumping ahead a little by attributing the January appearance of Baby New Year to shiny-pated Gaius Julius. The crowning of January is traditionally attributed to Numa Pompilius (715–673 BCE), believed to be the second of seven kings who ruled Rome before the founding of the Republic. Romans believed their first calendar was implemented by Romulus, the founder of Rome, around 738 BCE (in reality, the calendar was probably derived from the Greek lunar calendar). This calendar consisted of 304 days divided into ten months, with the “missing” 61.25 days apparently going on holiday for the winter. Numa added January to the beginning of the year, and February to the end, to create a twelve-month year (February was moved to its current place in the calendar in 452 BCE).
The problem with this lunar calendar is that it was 10.25 days shorter than a solar calendar, meaning the Romans needed to add an occasional month of 27–28 days (called “Mercedonius,” from merces or wages, since workers were paid during this period) to keep things in sync. Things became even worse when leaders further altered the calendar to extend the political terms of their friends and shorten the terms of their enemies. Julius Caesar solved the problem by instituting the solar Julian calendar in 45 BCE, with the first day of the year being January 1st.
It might initially seem odd, given Julius Caesar’s far-from-shrunken ego, that July—named after him—isn’t the first month of the year. Even putting aside that the Roman month of Quintilis wasn’t renamed July until after his death, Caesar chose January because it is named after the god Janus, the god of beginnings. Janus’ two faces, pointing forward and backward, allowed him to look both into the past and the future, which would be handy for our temporal calendar-based scheduling: “Siri, remind me on January 5th to be freaked out by Janus’ creepy head”. The new year was celebrated by exchanging gifts, throwing parties and—most importantly—making offerings to Janus, who had a surveillance system surpassing Santa Claus’ (“He sees you when you’re offering, he sees what you offered him in the past, and he sees what you’ll offer him in the future…”).
The Julian calendar remained in widespread use until the current Gregorian calendar, instituted in 1582, changed the number of days from 365.25 to 365.2425 to keep the calendar in alignment with the solar year.
Face the Face
Our culture takes the image of Janus and employs the phrase “two-faced,” meaning to lie or be hypocritical, in ways that would have been foreign to the Romans. I nonetheless think it would put many things into perspective if certain activities were only allowed on January 1st, the day of two faces: politicians making promises, corporate CEOs engaging in labor negotiations, etc. Each of these could then be concluded with a toast, “Happy new year, ya lyin’ bastard!”
Image: Marble bust of Janus (photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen) (Source).
