Lord of the Leap Year

Whose seal is stamped upon this calendar?

It’s Caesar’s world: we’re just living in it. For all the time we spent last year thinking about thinking about Ancient Rome, I never heard anyone mention one of the Empire’s most lasting imprints on the contour of our daily lives: the leap year. Yet, after 514 of them, they endure. February will be one day longer than usual this year, all because of Julius Caesar.

In fact, Caesar’s slickest feat might have been making it so that we don’t think about the leap year every day, don’t count it among his achievements or take note of his hand pressing down on the wheel of time. It’s almost imperceptible, this stutter step we make to keep pace with the sun—an elongated beat in the tempo of human life, slipped in by a master improvisor so naturally that we hardly notice he’s fudged the rhythm.

He had to. There’s always slippage somewhere. No calendar can quite orchestrate our days so they align exactly with sun and moon alike, matching the steady inhale and exhale of the months to the yearly expansion and contraction of the light.

It takes roughly 29.53 days on average for the moon to lift her veil and drop it again, just shy of 30 earthly revolutions to make a natural or “synodic” month. But 12 of those months don’t quite fit into one trip around the sun—i.e., a “Tropical Year,” which takes on average 365.242 days. Not to mention the hairline difference between “solar” and “sidereal” days, the tiny mismatch in the time it takes from our perspective to watch the sun and the stars glide all the way around the Earth and back again.

Wheels within wheels, and each one counterpoised against the others by the space of a breath; delicate seams running almost invisibly along unfathomable enormities of space. But under the unyielding pressure of slow time, these slender gaps heave open into yawning chasms. The celestial bodies confound even our most precise measurements by their sheer patience, exhibiting something like calm satisfaction as they gradually scramble every system we devise. We pile calculation upon calculation, desperate to stuff the heavens into a mental contraption that we can grasp and manipulate. The stars smile, and wait.

The solution to this is called “intercalation,” an elegant word for a messy business. Rather than force the cosmos into our neat organizational schemes, we are forced to warp our schemes and jumble their arrangement just slightly so that January doesn’t end up falling in the spring. Before Caesar rose to power, this was done by jamming in an extra month twice every four years at the discretion of pontifices, or state-appointed priests.

This noisy invasion of human whim into the stately procession of time was too nakedly political for Caesar to countenance. As consul in 46 B.C. he put forward a sleeker model, fine-tuning the lengths of the 12 Roman months so that a normal year would last 365 days, as ours still does. One year out of every four would add a day to February, bringing the overall average to 365.25 days a year. Not perfect—never perfect—but just about right.

This “Julian” calendar has been tweaked and monkied with, most notably under Pope Gregory XIII in the 16th century, when updates in observation technology enabled a higher-resolution picture of the territory represented by the calendar’s map. But the bedrock principle of the Julian system remains firmly settled, as will be evident this year on February 29. Evident, but perhaps not more than passingly noticed—which may have been the point.

Because Caesar’s consummate triumph was to fade into the background, to make an intervention so smooth that it hardly counted as an intervention at all. It looked like simply the way things were. For all the fanfare and ostentation that would follow in the age of empire, the height of true power was then and always will be to seem inevitable. By aligning his program as closely as he could with the scaffolding of nature itself, Caesar placed the source of his authority as far beyond debate as the comet that would one day be said to hail his ascent among the gods.

“Between campaigns and skirmishes I filled the hours with gazing at the sky,” Caesar is made to say in Lucan’s epic poem, the Pharsalia. On his off-hours Caesar was supposed to have studied “The wandering of stars and gods” with more than idle curiosity. “What other guest of yours / Will be so poised to grasp the universe?” he asks an Egyptian priest: to know the secrets of the world means to seize them in hand, to clothe political whim with the ironclad certainty of heaven.

Much has changed since Caesar’s day and Lucan’s, but not this: the height of power is not to win a debate but to set its terms, to successfully pose as “neutral” and define the limits of acceptable options. Hence the ferocious battles we have seen fought over “the Science” of COVID or “community standards” on social media. Hence Joe Biden’s promise when running for president that he would rule unseen: “Remember when you didn’t have to think about the President every single day?”

The story goes that once we could all agree on certain absolutes, of which the president was merely the silent executor. “He will bring that back,” said Biden’s campaign. We are casting about for some person or organization who can legitimately arbitrate what counts as indisputable, and we recoil in fear and fury when we realize again and again that there is no merely human being who can do so.

This too was a truth already revealed, to those with ears to hear, during the days of the Roman Empire. It was under the rule of Augustus that another man walked meekly among a conquered people and made the audacious observation that Caesar did not, in fact, hang the stars. His will might be stamped on the calendar, just as Augustus’ face was stamped on the coins of the realm. But it was all just crude imitation and borrowed power: an emperor could dictate the conventions of the timekeepers. But no man, however great, could tell the sun when to rise. That word of supreme command belonged to another, who had stamped his image not onto metal or brass, but onto the human soul. It was his heirs, not Caesar’s, who would inherit the world.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer

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