The Longest Year in History

Having 80 extra days would certainly offer more time to think about those New Year's resolutions.

Howdy! It’s Joey, back with more Fun Fact Friyay. Today’s fact is ancient AND confusing. What a fun combo.

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

46 BC, the longest year in recorded history, lasted 445 days.

Many people do not live in the Eastern time zone of the United States. However, the various New Year’s Eve celebrations in Times Square are still consumed around the world.

Do some viewers only want to watch Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper be joyous drunk folks with rants about former mayors and quips on jacket fashion? Sure, but that’s part of the charm of ringing in the new year.

Even though it is not midnight for you when the ball drops, you can feel the energy of kicking last year to the curb and welcoming what lies ahead.

While the U.S. was counting down, people in Australia, Singapore, Kiribati, and many other places were well into January 1 already. Despite time zones separating us, we can all collectively agree that the year will last 365 days (or 366 on leap years).

There’s a bit of comfort in that consistency. But if you were alive in 46 BC, such comfort would turn into confusion.

The early Roman calendar used the cycles of the moon and the cycles of the agricultural year to determine what was what. It began in March and ended in what’s now called December.

Four months had 31 days; the rest had 30. Complicating matters even further, if work wasn’t being done, the day simply didn’t count on the calendar.

Numa Pompilius, Rome’s second king, tried to fix the calendar way back in 731 BC by adding two new months. The year jumped from 304 to 355 days, with every month having 31 days except for February, which adopted 28 days.

The 355 is in honor of the lunar year plus a little superstition. A lunar year lasts 354 days, but Romans thought even numbers could bring bad luck, so they added an extra day for good measure.

Things kept unraveling as the years passed. Harvest festivals that should be happening in the fall were being celebrated in the spring, various holidays felt out of whack, no one had a sense of timing, and sometimes leaders would introduce a rogue month called Mercedonius to try and get things back on track. Personally, I prefer Smarch as my extra month.

In 46 BC, Roman dictator and salad enthusiast Julius Caesar consulted with an astronomer named Sosigenes. Mercedonius wouldn’t suffice, the people needed MORE.

Caesar agreed and added a 33-day month and a 34-day month, bringing the calendar to 445 days and 15 months. It was such an unheard of move that the year is commonly referred to as the “Year of Confusion.”

The following year, however, the calendar aligned with both the Sun and the Earth, so we could finally cruise along to present day with no more complications.

Just kidding, the Romans had a basic counting error that threw things off for a couple more decades. Sosigenes noted that the Earth rotates about 365.25 times on an orbit around the sun. Adding an extra day in February every four years would help address that.

Alas, the Romans began counting with the current year. As Helen Parish, a visiting professor of history at the University of Reading, UK, explained: “They look at the years and they count, one, two, three, four. And then they start counting again at four, so they count four, five, six, seven. Then they start at seven, so seven, eight, nine, ten. So they’re accidentally double-counting one of those years each time.”

A later ruler, Augustus, eventually figured this out and corrected the situation with proper counting. There are still a few foibles around the calendar thanks to fun astrological quirks, but Caesar’s call to make an exceedingly long year seems to have paid off, even if it was mass chaos to live through.

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