Is there a way to convert our dates into a Roman format? I am specifically trying to convert October 19th, 2004 into a more Roman format, though I would obviously not be naming the year by the consuls.
I found [u]this website[/u], but I’m not sure how accurate it is.
Hi benissime,
First you want to convert the year. Supposing you want to express the date ab urbe condita, here’s how:
B.C.: Say you want the year 63 BC expressed ab urbe condita: take 754 and subtract 63.
63 BC equals 691 a.u.c.
A.D.: You want 2004 expressed ab urbe condita: take 2004 and add 753.
2004 AD equals 2757 a.u.c.
The year, then, is easy enough. In order to convert the date you must know this:
March, May, July, and October have 31 days, the rest 29, except February which has only 28 days.
There are three important days in the Roman calendar: Kalendae is always on the 1st day of the month. Nonae is on the 5th and Idus is on the 13th, except in March, May, July, and October where Nonae is on the 7th and Idus is on the 15th.
Any given date in a month is given by expressing its ‘distance’ from the following Kalendae, Nonae, or Idus.
Both days are included when calculating the difference between to dates.
Let’s try to convert October 19th:
October has 31 days.
Idus in October is on the 15th. The following Kalendae, Nonae or Idus is therefore the Kalendae of the following month, the Kalendae in November (November 1st).
What is the difference in days between October 19th and November 1st? I’d say 13 days, but as the Romans included both October 19 and November 1st, the difference amounts to 14 days.
Phew. All you need to do now is to say “the day which is 14 days before November 1st” in Latin. That is: ante diem XIV Kalendas Novembres (note: XIV is an ordinal: quartum decimum).
So October 19th 2004 would be:
ante diem XIV Kalendas Novembres MMDCCLVII a.u.c.
I hope this helps.
I wonder… is there an online tool that can do this? It doesn’t seem like it would be too difficult to write. Maybe I will give it a try if there isn’t one out there already.
I haven’t found any online tool, but only a small program. There is also a version for Windows. Have a look at:
http://directory.fsf.org/Kalendae.html
http://www.webalice.it/roberto.ugoccioni/kalendae/README
Regards
Misopogon
Hi edonnelly,
I share your sentiment. Actually, I started writing out the whole month of October, meaning to illustrate better how it works. One could write out the whole year – and then just look the dates up as they occur when reading. That way, one wouldn’t have to worry about the mechanics of the Roman calendar. Give me a couple of days 
The only problem is that the Roman year as outlined only had 355 days! As we well know a year has 365 days and app. 6 hours – Caesar reformed the calendar in 45 BC, which remedied the problem to some extent, I think (there was a another reform in 1582). I think it should, however, be possible to express modern dates in the Roman format as outlined.
October 1st: Kalendis Octobribus
October 2nd: postridie Kalendas Octobres
October 3rd: ante diem V Nonas Octobres
October 4th: ante diem IV Nonas Octobres
October 5th: ante diem III Nonas Octobres
October 6th: pridie Nonas Octobres
October 7th: Nonis Octobribus
October 8th: postridie Nonas Octobres
October 9th: ante diem VII Idus Octobres
October 10th: ante diem VI Idus Octobres
October 11th: ante diem V Idus Octobres
October 12th: ante diem IV Idus Octobres
October 13th: ante diem III Idus Octobres
October 14th: pridie Idus Octobres
October 15th: Idibus Octobribus
October 16th: postridie Idus Octobres
October 17th: ante diem XVI Kalendas Novembres
October 18th: ante diem XV Kalendas Novembres
October 19th: ante diem XIV Kalendas Novembres
October 20th: ante diem XIII Kalendas Novembres
October 21st: ante diem XII Kalendas Novembres
October 22nd: ante diem XI Kalendas Novembres
October 23rd: ante diem X Kalendas Novembres
October 24th: ante diem IX Kalendas Novembres
October 25th: ante diem VIII Kalendas Novembres
October 26th: ante diem VII Kalendas Novembres
October 27th: ante diem VI Kalendas Novembres
October 28th: ante diem V Kalendas Novembres
October 29th: ante diem IV Kalendas Novembres
October 30th: ante diem III Kalendas Novembres
October 31st: pridie Kalendas Novembres
November 1st: Kalendis Novembris
I guess the only question then is exactly how to handle the ambiguous dates. Not only would the 10 extra days (and the occasional leap year) be a problem, but so would all of the post-Ides days of the months with differing numbers of days. That is, if the Roman January has 29 days, then what is the correct way to write Jan. 28th? ante diem III Kalendas? and the 29th as pridie Kalendas? But then how would you handle the 30th and 31st? I would also assume that the Ides would stay where they are (13th or 15th respectively) even though the months are longer.
It would seem that coming up with the correct convention (which, I suppose, would have to be arbitrary since one could argue either way) would be the only difficult step. As you said, coding it would be fairly easy.
I suppose the ideal option would be to use the Roman method for years when that calendar was in use, and to switch to counting from “our” number of days for years after the calendar change. The link from benissimus seems to behave this way if you enter the date as a “Julian” calendar. It looks like it cannot handle B.C. dates, though.
http://www.guernsey.net/~sgibbs/roman.html is accurate and precise.
The discussions so far have ignored the conversion between Gregorian and Julian dates. I suppose there is nothing wrong with expressing our modern dates in the old Roman way. Today, the 22nd of July, would be xi ante kalends … of what? Augustus? Or Sextus? the year, would be MMDCCLVIII. (Even, that year, however, is not expressed in “Roman” numerals, but in their medieval even modern form, in which IV is IIII. (This gets into Roman numerals, q.v. in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals))
Be that as it may, we adjusted the calendar by 11 days 250+ years ago, and are now 13 days ahead of the Julian, making this still the 9th not the 22nd of July (Julius or Quintus to you?).
So, how much of a purist can you stand to be?
Actually, I believe amans was describing the Roman calendar that predated even the Julian calendar.
I think what Benissimus meant was, not “How do I convert ‘July 22’ into ‘9 Kalends’ and then translate that to Latin,” but rather, “How do I translate ‘July 22’ into Latin?”
As for me, I am all in favor of using modern dates in Latin.
Wunderground has modern dates in Latin, sort of: http://latin.wunderground.com/
Nuntii Latini seems to avoid the issue and just uses numerals: http://www.yleradio1.fi/nuntii/
The modern way of counting days is much better than the old Roman way. If any Romans resurrected and came back today, I’m sure they would be very happy to use the modern calendar, for precisely the same reasons we do.
People are quite picky about calendar date formats, though, aren’t they. I find it odd that pretty much every modern country agrees on what month and what day it is, but yet there is no agreement at all on what format is best to express the date. (7/22/05 or 22.7.05 or 2005-07-22, etc.) Quite strange.
Of course there is an agreement, it’s YYYY-MM-DD.
True, not everyone follows it, but there is one.
Click here.
Not much of an agreement if most people don’t agree, eh?
The bit about all months but February, March, May, July, and October having “29” days ought to be elaborated on: that may have been the case before Caesar, but the Julian calendar is identical to ours (excepting the Gregorian addition of the leapyear not being employed everything 1400 years or something like that). In short, we use the Julian calendar.
Though the Greek Orthodox use of the “true” Julian calendar is persuasive, I believe its inherent incorrectness to the nature of the true date is more than enough to ignore the “ten day difference” or whatever it is. If today is the 23rd of July, it is ante diem decimum kalendas Augustas. If today were the first of August, it should be considered the kalendae Augustae.
Well, yes. I really originally used the word “standard”, that would be more correct, but I changed after re-reading Democritus’s post and seeing he used “agreement”… So let me emend this: true; I think there should be an agreement; homever, there is a standard, and abiding by it may be the first step to an agreement.
Personally, I’ve written my dates year/month/day since middle school. I just thought it was a lot better, made a lot more sense. I preferred an order to the sequence that went from largest to smallest or from smallest to largest, if only for the sake of continuity; but the alien nature of the European standard of day/month would not do, so simply returning the year to its proper place at the beginning of the sequence became my pesonal standard.
The Chinese and Japanese also happen to compose their dates in this way.
Fair enough. That is a latinized modernism or a modernized latinism, or whatever. “Learning Latin” may or may not the same thing as “playing Romans.” (I have pointed to www.novaroma.org in another post.)
If my "ideal Roman time frame is the last generation of the Roman republic, then “August” is not the name of a month, and neither is July – and, I guess I’d have to make sure that January and February are in my experiential world because one old Roman calendar ignored the two dead months of Winter.
So, yes, it is fine to call August 1, kal. Aug. and we all know what you mean by that.