Rome initially had a lunar calendar. To adjust for the discrepancy in the matching of months and seasons the Romans added an intercalary month of twenty-two days after a certain number of lunar years. In 45 BC Gaius 04Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) introduced a solar year of 365 days with an extra day every four years. It was actually devised by Sosigenes of Alexandria (1st century BC).
After some modification over the following decades the Julian Calendar in its final form was established under Julius (7) Caesar Augustus (76; r.31-00-14) in AD 8. The average length of the year was 365¼ days, which is ≈11¼ minutes longer than the seasonal year, i.e. it is too long by about one day in 128 years. Nevertheless, the Julian calendar survived to 1582, when ten days disappeared by command of Pope Gregory XIII (83, r.1572-85) and the Gregorian Calendar was adopted.
In 525 the biblical scholar Dionysius Exiguus (c.470-c.544) established the counting of years from the birth of Jesus c.5-00-c.33). In tying the new calendar to the old he miscalculated slightly and was a few years out, so that Jesus’ birth date is given as four years earlier. Use of the new calendar spread slowly across Europe, eventually being taken up by Bede (673-735) and Charlemagne (72; HRE: 800-814).
The Romans were not really interested in the advancement of science; they were far more concerned with its practical applications: military, civil and agricultural. Vitruvius Pollio (c.75-c.15 BC) was an architect and engineer who worked for 04Julius Caesar and Augustus but seems to have had no connection with any of the major projects of the time. His fame rests on his ten-book On Architecture, compiled partly from his own experience, and partly on similar works by Hermogenes of Priene (3rd-2nd c. BC) and other architects, mostly Greeks.
The Romans were, however, keen compilers of knowledge. Marcus 06Terentius Varro (116-27 BC) is credited with over six hundred volumes of which only two survive, On the Latin Language and On Farming. Lucius Annaeus (1) Seneca (c.4-00-65) wrote the seven-book Natural Questions, a compilation of natural science that formed the standard work on cosmology for the Middle Ages until the rediscovery of Aristotle. Pliny the Elder (AD 23/4-79) wrote thirty-seven books on Natural History, an encyclopaedia of all contemporary knowledge.
Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius (fl.399-422) wrote his Commentary on the ‘Dream of Scipio’ by Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC), in which he included a cosmology that had a spherical Earth at the centre of a spherical universe encircled by seven planetary spheres (the five known planets together with the Sun and the Moon). Martianus Minneus Felix Capella (c.365-440) in his On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury based partly on the works of Marcus 06Terentius Varro (116-27 BC) describes the theory, often attributed to Heraclides, that Venus and Mercury always appear close to the Sun because they circle the Sun while all three circle Earth. Anicius 20Manlius Severinus Boethius (c.480-524) was one of the last Roman writers to understand Greek. He spent much of his time translating the works of Aristotle, as well as composing commentaries on philosophy and science. During the second half of the first millennium AD the knowledge of astronomy among the Latins was poor compared with that in the Almagest. The works of Macrobius and others were not original, but their writings helped to preserve at least some Greek learning into the Middle Ages.
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