Some years seem to zip by in the blink of an eye, while others seem to drag on for far longer. But some, like leap years, can last a little longer than usual. And then there’s 46 BCE, which lasted 445 days, 80 days more than we are used to.
So, why did the year last so long? Years are how long the Earth takes to make one orbit around the Sun and return to the arbitrary point we have set as the beginning of the new year. Our calendars are an attempt to break the year down into chunks (months, weeks, days) for our own convenience. It’s pretty useful to be able to say “I’ll meet you on March 3 at 12:00” as opposed to “When the shadows of the mountain stretch to the hillock yonder, then we shall have brunch”.
While we have gotten better at getting the orbital year to match up with our calendar years, even adding “leap seconds” to keep things really synced up, earlier calendars were not so efficient.
Before the Julian calendar was introduced by Julius Caesar, the Roman year looked a lot different, containing just four months (March, July, October, and May) with 31 days each. The others were shorter, containing 29 days each, except for oddball February which had 28 days. As a result, the calendar fell quickly out of sync with the passage of the Earth around the Sun, and by around 200 BCE, the calendar was so out of whack that a near-total eclipse that took place on what we’d now term March 14 was recorded as taking place on July 11.
An “intercalary month”, called Mercedonius, had to be added in every few years in order to counteract the drift.
It wasn’t a great way to run a calendar. Though Mercedonius could be used to realign the calendar with the year, it was open to political abuse. The Pontifex Maximus and the College of Pontiffs (side note: great band name) were allowed to alter the calendar, and would occasionally use it for political purposes, such as extending someone’s time in office. If you think politics is bad now, imagine being sat in a blazing December sun so that Joeleticus Blogsicus could continue on for a few more days in the Department of Agriculture.
Julius Caesar later attempted to rectify the mess by introducing the Julian calendar in 45 BCE, adding one or two days to the end of all the short months (except for oddball, February) to make the total number of days in a year a more familiar 365.
“Then turning his attention to the reorganisation of the state, he reformed the calendar, which the negligence of the pontiffs had long since so disordered, through their privilege of adding months or days at pleasure, that the harvest festivals did not come in summer nor those of the vintage in the autumn; and he adjusted the year to the sun’s course by making it consist of three hundred and sixty-five days, abolishing the intercalary month, and adding one day every fourth year,” Roman historian Suetonius wrote in Life of Julius Caesar.
But before the new calendar (kinda) fixed things, there was still a problem to fix; the year was still out of line with the seasons. In order to rectify this, Caesar added several months to 46 BCE.
“Furthermore, that the correct reckoning of seasons might begin with the next Kalends of January, he inserted two other months between those of November and December,” wrote Suetonius, “hence the year in which these arrangements were made was one of fifteen months, including the intercalary month, which belonged to that year according to the former custom.”
As a result, 46 BCE became the longest year in recorded history at 445 days, and is sometimes referred to as annus confusionis, or the “year of confusion”.
