The Year of Confusion

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There was nothing wrong with our calendar. I didn’t think so, and the Roman people didn’t think so, but Caius Julius Caesar thought so. Besides, he was dictator and that was that. He was also pontifex maximus, therefore in charge of the Roman calendar, and this was one of his pet projects. When you are dictator, you can indulge your pet projects and hobbies and so forth and if anyone disputes your right to do so you can have them killed. Not that Caesar would kill people over anything so trifling. Quite the contrary. He pardoned persons eminently deserving of execution and might have lived for many more years if he had just killed a few men that I, personally, told him he needed to kill or exile. He wouldn’t do it. This lack of foresight got him killed.

That was Caesar for you. Always happy to exterminate whole nations of barbarians for the glory of Rome, or, rather, for the glory of Caesar, but ever reluctant to have Roman citizens put to death, even those who had proven themselves his enemies. Instead, he pardoned those who had taken arms against him, called back exiles, and would even have restored Cato to honor and position if he had just agreed to acknowledge Caesar’s primacy. When Cato so splendidly committed suicide rather than live under a Caesarian dictatorship, Caesar mourned him, and I happen to know that his grief was genuine, not a political pose-I was there.

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