SPQR XIII: The Year of Confusion: A Mystery

"Readers looking for a crafty and entertaining journey to the past won't be disappointed." - Publishers Weekly on SPQR XI: Under Vesuvius Caius Julius Caesar, now Dictator of Rome, has decided to revise the Roman calendar, which has become out of sync with the seasons. As if this weren't already an unpopular move, Caesar has brought in astronomers and astrologers from abroad, including Egyptians, Greeks, Indians and Persians. Decius is appointed to oversee this project, which he knows rankles the Roman public: "To be told by a pack of Chaldeans and Egyptians how to conduct their duties towards the gods was intolerable." Not long after the new calendar project begins, two of the foreigners are murdered. Decius begins his investigations and, as the body count increases, it seems that an Indian fortuneteller popular with patrician Roman ladies is also involved. This latest in the acclaimed series is sure to please historical mystery fans.

1
THERE WAS NOTHING WRONG WITH our calendar. I didn’t think so, and the Roman people didn’t think so, but Caius Julius Caesar thought so. Besides, he was dictator and that was that. He was also Pontifex Maximus, therefore in charge of the Roman calendar, and this was one of his pet projects. When you are dictator, you can indulge your pet projects and hobbies and so forth and if anyone disputes your right to do so you can have them killed. Not that Caesar would kill people over anything so tri.ing. Quite the contrary. He pardoned persons eminently deserving of execution and might have lived for many more years if he had just killed a few men that I, personally, told him he needed to kill or exile. He wouldn’t do it. This lack of foresight got him killed.
That was Caesar for you. Always happy to exterminate  whole nations of barbarians for the glory of Rome, or, rather, for the glory of Caesar, but ever reluctant to have Roman citizens put to death, even those who had proven themselves his enemies. Instead, he par­doned those who had taken arms against him, called back exiles, and would even have restored Cato to honor and position if he had just agreed to acknowledge Caesar’s primacy. When Cato so splen­didly committed suicide rather than live under a Caesarian dictator­ship, Caesar mourned him, and I happen to know that his grief was genuine, not a political pose—I was there.
Now back to the calendar. Caesar was master of the world, but one of the problems with conquering the world is that it tends to dis­tract you from other tasks. One of Caesar’s tasks, as Pontifex Maxi­mus, was keeping our calendar in order. By this time, when he was dictator and had (though he did not know it) but a very short time to live, it was terribly out of order with the natural year. It was as if we had lost three months. We were celebrating midwinter rites in late fall. We were sacri.cing the October  Horse in the middle of summer. It just seemed incongruous and made us embarrassed before the gods.
Caesar’s remedy to this situation was characteristically dras­tic. He was going to give us a  whole new calendar. Not only that, but it was to be devised by foreigners. It was that last part that rankled the Roman public. They were used to taking instruction and orders from our priesthoods and our magistrates. To be told by a pack of Chaldeans and Egyptians how to conduct their duties toward the gods was intolerable.
Nevertheless, there  were worse implications to this long- overdue reform, as I was soon to .nd out.
“DECIUS CAECILIUS!” CAESAR shouted. I rushed to see what he wanted. There was a time when no senator rushed in this fashion to see what another Roman wanted, but that time was past. Caesar was king in all but name. I ran.
“Caius Julius?” I said. We were in the Domus Publica, the house in the Forum that was his of.cial dwelling as Pontifex Maxi­mus and overseer of the Vestals.
“Decius, I have a momentous change in the of. ng. I want you to administer this matter.”
“Of course, Caesar,” I said, “presuming, naturally, that this isn’t something likely to get me killed.”
“And why should that be?” he enquired.
“Well, Caius Julius, over the many years we have known one another, you have concocted more ways to get me killed than I can readily calculate. I could start with Gaul but that would be an al­most random starting-point . . .”
“Nothing like that,” He assured me. “This is just a tri.ing matter concerning the calendar.”
“Caius Julius,” I said, “the .rst word you used was ‘momen­tous.’ Now you use ‘tri.ing.’ I detect a certain rhetorical disjunction  here.”
“I merely meant that, while my reform of the calendar will be far-reaching and its effects will be felt for all time to come, its implementation is a matter of the merest routine.”
That was more like it. I always like things to be as easy as possible. “What will be involved?”
“Sosigenes is supervising the project and you will be working with him.”
Sosigenes was Cleopatra’s court astronomer, and generally acknowledged as the most distinguished stargazer in the world. He was head of the school of astronomy at the Museum in Alexandria. By “supervising” I presumed that Caesar meant that the project was Sosigenes’ from beginning to end. That was .ne with me. I had known the little Greek for many years and we got along splendidly. Caesar, on the other hand, was always an unsettling man to deal with.
“I know him well. Where am I to .nd him?”
“I’ve established of.ces for the astronomers in the Temple of Aesculapius. I want you to go there. Sosigenes will explain the proj­ect and you may decide whether you will require assistants to help you.”
“Help me do what?”
He waved a hand airily. “Whatever needs to be done.”
This did not sound good, but I could not imagine how the in­stitution of a new calendar could be the occasion of much trouble.
I was soon to understand the poverty of my imagination.
THE TEMPLE OF AESCULAPIUS ON the Tiber Island is one of Rome’s most unique places, the inevitable goal of the ailing and sightseers alike. The temple itself is beautiful and the island is uniquely disguised as a ship. I have always won­dered whose idea that might have been. On the island I found a priest and asked where the astronomers  were to be found.
“Those Alexandrians?” he sniffed. He wore white robes and a silver .llet around his temples. “The dictator has given them quar­ters at the downstream end.”
“You seem to disapprove of them,” I noted.
“Not just of them, but of their project. Nothing good can come of changing our ancient calendar. It is the sort of presumption that displeases the gods. It is an affront to our ancestors, who bequeathed our calendar to us.”
“I see no point in it myself,” I told him, “but I am not dictator, whereas Caesar is. Disputing with the master of the world is both futile and hazardous.”
“I suppose so,” he grumbled.
At the downstream end of the island I found that a courtyard formerly used as a venue for lectures had been converted into a small observatory, a miniature of the immense one I had seen at the Museum in Alexandria. It had a number of those mysterious instru­ments necessary to the art of astronomy: long wedges of stone, blocks with curved cutouts and bronze rods, everything carved all over with cryptic symbols and calibration marks. Sosigenes had tried to ex­plain these marvels to me, but I found the municipal sundial quite complicated enough.
The astronomers  were clustered on a platform at the “stern” of the island, the part that is carved to resemble that part of a gal­ley. I recognized Sosigenes immediately and one or two of the others looked vaguely familiar. Not all wore the usual Greek clothing. There were Persians and Arabs, and one man who wore a fringed, spirally wrapped robe that looked Babylonian. I had been in that part of the world and had seen such clothing only on old wall reliefs. I caught Sosigenes’ eye and he beamed broadly.
“Senator Metellus! You do us great honor. Have you come to refresh your study of astronomy?” He .attered me by referring to my discussions with him years before in Alexandria as “study.” I took his hands and exchanged the usual pleasantries.
“Actually, the dictator wishes me to work with you on imple­menting this new calendar. Exactly what he intends by that, I confess I cannot imagine. My ignorance of astronomy is vast, as you know.”
He turned to the others. “The senator is characteristically modest. You will .nd that he has a sharp and subtle mind, a quick grasp of new facts, and a very superior inductive style of reasoning.” Greeks are terribly prone to .attery. “Now, Senator, allow me to introduce the gentlemen with whom you will be working.”
There was an old fellow called Demades who hailed from Ath­ens, along with several other Greeks whose names I no longer re­member, an Arab whose name I could not pronounce, three Persians and a Syrian, a dark- skinned fellow in a strange yellow turban who called himself Gupta and who claimed to be from India, and the man in Babylonian clothing who called himself Polasser of Kish, but who, from his looks and speech, was pure Greek. I decided to watch out for that one. In my experience, people who affect the cloth­ing of an exotic land that is not their own are usually religious frauds of some sort.
“I really believe,” I told Sosigenes, “that my true task has nothing to do with helping you with the calendar, which I could not do anyway, but rather to convince the Roman people that it will be bene.cial. We are very attached to our ancient institutions, you know.”
“All too well. Well, let me explain a bit.” He took my arm and began to stroll among the instruments and the others followed us. Like a great many Greek phi los ophers, Sosigenes liked to expound while walking. This originated with the Peripatetic school of phi­losophy, but spread to many of the others. Among other advantages, it saved the rent of a lecture hall.
“For all of your history you Romans, along with most of the world, have been using a calendar based upon the phases of the moon.”
“Naturally,” I said. “It is a measuring of time observable by everyone as the moon waxes and wanes and disappears and reap­pears.”
“Precisely. As such it is what we might call an intuitive way to measure the year, and it works after a fashion, but far from perfectly. The moon has a phase of twenty- eight days, but, alas, the year cannot be divided into a certain number of discrete twenty- eight-day seg­ments. It is always off by a number of days because the year is 365 days long.”
“Are you sure? I always thought it was some number in that area, but I could never be sure exactly how many.”
“It is not easy to determine and a great deal of study went into ascertaining exactly that fact. It is now agreed by all astronomers
that the year is about 365 days long.”
“ ‘About’?” I said.
He looked at the others. “Did I not say that the senator is ex­tremely quick of apprehension?” Then, back to me, “Yes, no matter many experiments  were done, it was found that the year is never quite exactly 365 days long. It is always a few hours longer than that, about one-quarter of a day, to be precise.”
“So it cannot be divided evenly into any number of days at all?” I asked.
“Not with perfect precision. However, we have worked out a new calendar based upon the solar year, using the winter solstice as the beginning and ending point.”
“Everyone starts the year at the beginning of January or there­abouts,” I said.
“Yes, but using months of twenty- eight days, taken together with the fact that there are a few extra hours every year, means that if you use a certain number of months to the year, you always end up with a number of extra days. You Romans have made up this anom­aly by having the priests give varying numbers of days to the months and by adding an extra month from time to time.”
“We’ve found it a useful political tool,” I told him. “If you have an in with the pontifexes, you can get them to extend your term in of. ce by an extra month or two.”
“Well, yes. Useful for politicians and for generals looting prov­inces, I am sure, but terribly inconvenient for everybody  else.”
“You’ll .nd that Romans of the ruling class don’t care much what inconveniences other people.”
“It seems that Julius Caesar is an exception, then,” he said dryly.
“I can’t argue with you there, but I still fail to see how this can be an improvement. It is impossible to divide the year into an even number of months and the year in any case can’t be measured to the last hour.”
“That,” he said, “is where subtlety and unconventional think­ing are called for. You see, people have been so .xated upon the lunar phase of twenty- eight days that they have always wanted each month to contain the same number of days, even knowing that that is impossible. Upon re.ection, though, there is no necessity for this. Why should a month not be twenty-nine days? Or thirty days? And why should each month have exactly the same number of days?”
“Eh?” I said brightly.
“Think about it. Why should each month have the same num­ber of days?”
“Why, because it would be convenient, I suppose.”
“Exactly. People are bound by custom and tradition and con­venience. It is this sort of thinking we must avoid if we are to break new philosophical ground.” Here the crowd of astronomers made approving sounds, as if he were an advocate who had just made a telling point in court. “What is far more important, for everyday convenience and for the regulation of both public and agricultural life, is that the year start and end upon exactly the same day, and have exactly the same number of months as every other year, and that each month start and end on exactly the same days each year, with no variation.”
“I suppose that is logical,” I said, trying to get my mind around the concept of such a year. I, like everyone else, was used to the months wandering around a bit, and never knowing exactly how many days a month would have until the pontifexes announced the number.
“Very logical,” he concurred. “To that end we have devised a solar calendar based upon this concept. It consists of seven months of thirty-one days each, four of thirty days each, and a single month of twenty- eight days.”
I did some quick arithmetic in my head. “All right, that adds up to 365 days, but you still have that quarter day left at the end of each year.”
Sosigenes beamed triumphantly. “That is where that short month comes in. It will be the only month that does not adhere to the rule that each month have the same number of days every year. Every fourth year, it will have an extra day added, making it a twenty­nine-day month for that year.”
“And this structure will be stable, from year to year?” I asked him.
“Yes, with very slight discrepancies. That quarter day I spoke of is not precisely one-quarter of a day.”
“So adjustment will be necessary, from time to time?”
“Yes, but not as frequently as now. In about a thousand years it will be a few days off and require correction.”
“Oh. Well, let it be somebody else’s problem, then.”
“For the sake of convenience and respect for tradition, the twelve months will retain their customary names, even though some of these make little sense. Your most ancient calendar had only ten months, and those months named .fth through tenth are now the seventh through twelfth months.”
“True, ‘December’ just means ‘number ten,’ but  we’ve been us­ing the names so long that they are just sounds to us. Nobody notices the illogic.”
At that moment a slave summoned us to the midday meal, which was served on tables brought out from one of the temple buildings. We sat while one of the astronomers, who was a priest of Apollo, pronounced a simple invocation and poured a libation to that bene.cent deity, and we launched into an austere meal of bread,
cheese, and sliced fruit. The wine was, of course, heavily watered.
“Sosigenes,” I said, “something strikes me as odd  here.”
“What might that be?” he asked.
“The fact that the year is arranged so haphazardly. Nothing seems to be very precise or consistent. There are the seemingly ran­dom numbers involved. Why 365 days, of all things? Why not a nice, even number easily divisible by a hundred? Then, why the disparity in the very length of the day, so that you end up with a partial day at the end of each year? We expect sloppy work from our fellow men. You’d think the gods would do better work.”
“This is a topic much debated,” Sosigenes admitted.
“There is some belief,” said the old fellow named Demades, “that human convenience is not of great concern to the gods.”
“Yet,” said the pseudo-Babylonian, “the cosmos seems to work according to rules of great complexity and precision, if we can just discover what those rules are.”
“That is the task of phi los ophers,” said another.
“I thought,” I put in, “that phi los ophers  were primarily con­cerned with the correct way to live.”
“That is one .eld,” said Demades, “but from the earliest times, phi los ophers have delved into the workings of the universe. Even ancient Heraclitus speculated upon these things.”
“And,” said the would-be Babylonian, “even in that early time, phi los ophers concurred that the gods who created the universe are not the childish immortals of Homer, delighting in bloodshed and seducing mortal women and forever playing pranks upon each other. The true deity is far more majestic than that.”
“ ‘Deity’?” I said. “You mean there is only one? Yet our priest here just invoked Apollo.”
“What Polasser means,” said Sosigenes, “is that a great many  Excerpted from The Year of Confusion by John Maddox Roberts.
Copyright © 2010 by John Maddox Roberts.
Published in February 2010 by St. Martin's Press.
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