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.”