Why Julius Caesar's Year of Confusion was the longest year in history
To tame a hopelessly disorganised Roman calendar, Julius Caesar added months, took them away, and invented leap years. But the whole grand project was almost thwarted by a basic counting mistake.
It was confusing enough when the harvest celebrations kept arriving in the middle of spring. It was the 1st Century BC and, according to ritual, there ought to be ripe vegetables ready for eating. But to any farm labourer looking around in the field, it was clear there would be many months before the harvest.
The problem was the early Roman calendar, which had become so unruly that crucial annual festivals bore increasingly little resemblance to what was going on in the real world.
This nonsensical system was something Julius Caesar wanted to fix. It was no small feat: the task was to heave the Roman Empire onto a calendar aligned with both the rotation of the Earth on its axis (a day), and its orbit of the Sun (a year).
Caesar's answer gave us the longest year in history, added months to the calendar, took them away, anchored the calendar to the seasons, and brought us the leap year. It was a grand project – and it was almost derailed by a peculiar quirk of Roman maths.
