War on Janus

Romulus’s use of a 10-month calendar has long been one of the puzzles of early Roman chronology and history. Why would he introduce such time-keeping. The polymathic Guillaume Postel had a theory:

“Pretending that he wished to establish a beginning for the year in Mars’s honor, he stole January from the head of the year. He thus destroyed the memory of Janus, which was connected with the first degree of the sign of the sun returning to us. And thus that great rascal and tyrant completely overthrew the laws of time, by creating his new and impossible 10-month year. Hence it is his fault that the beginnings of the signs and the beginnings of months, which by Janus’s system always went together, are now 21 days apart” (quoted in Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800 , 112).

That’s interesting, and becomes more so when Grafton informs us that Janus was the name of Noah: Romulus thus changed the calendar as “an integral part of his campaign to extirpate the memory of Noah, known as Janus in Italy, where he had established a godly and virtuous society.”

Dear Reader,

Can I be direct with you?

War abroad. Socialists on the rise. AI upending human life. Endless uproar online. The modern attention economy doesn’t want readers — it wants users enslaved to the tyranny of the present.

First Things is the antidote: literary excellence, timeless truths, and a fixed point of reference in a culture that has lost its bearings.

But we can’t do it without readers like you.

Our goal: Raise $150,000 by November 1 to sustain First Things in the year ahead.


Your gift anchors readers in the permanent things.

Make your Fall Campaign gift now using the button below.

GIVE NOW

If you have any questions or would like more information, please contact Giovanni Del Piero, Director of the Editor’s Circle, at gdelpiero@firstthings.com or 212-627-1985.

Next
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

The Church in the Age of Therapy

Matthew Loftus

In 1966, Philip Rieff wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic that “Religious man was born to…

Canada’s Deadliest Blind Spot

Anna Farrow

On September 20, the Daily Mail ran a story with the provocative headline, “Our 83-year-old Christian grandmother…

The Faithful Joy of Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen

Mike Aquilina

Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen seem to have had little in common. She favored rhinestones; he wore…