as a leap year. On discovery of these mistakes, a simple remedy was found in the suppression of the four (Julian) leap years then next ensuing. Nicholas specially notices this fact.
20. The Romans had three signal days in every month, and these were Kalends, Nones, and Ides—name-days still permissible to us in Britain under the forms of the Statutory Calendar, as contained in the revised statutes. The first of the month was called the Kalends, and Varro says this term originated in 'the practice of calling together or assembling the people on the first day of the month, when the pontifex informed them of the time of the new moon, the day of the Nones, with the festivals and sacred days to be observed.' In the 450th year of the city this custom lapsed, for lists of the Fasti were then posted in public. The Nones and Ides were in most months on the 5th and 13th days respectively, but in March, May, July, and October, these two name-dates fell severally on the seventh and fifteenth days. The other or intervening days were reckoned as being so many days before the Kalends Nones or Ides as the case might be.[1]
21. As for the annual date of any event, a Roman might refer thereto either (1) by citations of the names of consuls in office then—and the consuls' nominations have been recorded from 366 B.C. to 23 B.C., only two years showing none; or (2) to A.U.C. or the year of Rome; or (3) to a regnal year as, and from, the 732nd year of the city; but the notaries, it can be proved, used to mention the consuls in writings down to the third century A.D. Macaulay, it
- ↑ It should be remembered that the Greeks, unlike the Romans, had no Kalends.
