The DRG says that today's entry, from our friend Plutarch, is how Julius Caesar came to come up with the Julian calendar. But it only gets a passing mention:
Cæsar called in the best philosophers and mathematicians of his time to settle the point, and out of the systems he had before him, formed a new and more exact method of correcting the calendar, which the Romans use to this day, and seem to succeed better than any nation in avoiding the errors occasioned by the inequality of the cycles.The rest of the passage is about Caesar's steady desire to be king, and the growing desire of some Senators to stop this. (They leave notes around Brutus's chair, says Plutarch:
Those who desired a change, and looked on him as the only, or at least the most proper, person to effect it, did not venture to speak with him; but in the night-time laid papers about his chair of state, where he used to sit and determine causes, with such sentences in them as, “You are asleep, Brutus,” “You are no longer Brutus.”-- proving that life not only imitates high school, but always has since before there was high school.) About the calendar, though, two things, and then I have to make potato salad for my guests:
• One can want to undermine the traditions of the Republic in favor of a unitary executive and still look favorably upon the leading scientists of the day. So you can't judge everything by our own time.
• I think if there were a modern history, instead of four and a half pages about the gathering storm over Caesar, and a paragraph about the calendar, the assassination would only be mentioned in the forward to a 300-page book about the calendar, which would be called something like 'July: The Invention Of The Month That Changed The World" or "Julian: How Caesar Dictated The Calendar That Changed The World." Something along those lines. Rest assured the world would be changed.
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