this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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It's honestly something I have trouble wrapping my head around as well. Just goes to show that many things we take for granted, like an unfucked dating system, are innovations of one sort or another!
Written latin was very, very different from day-to-day latin. I propose that this may have been one of those things that was done in a certain way in an official/cultured setting, where there was an expectation that the reader would be able to understand it, but not in daily life.
Asking a random farmer to count years based on consulship would be a tall order.
We know that a calendar dating sequentially from the founding of Rome existed and was occasionally used by writers, for example. We also know that many provinces maintained their own calendar, too, and sometimes other "landmark" years were remembered as well, such as the first Olympiad, or the Punic Wars.
It would not be a wild theory to say that common citizens counted years their own way, using familiar landmarks such as the founding of Rome, the first Olympiad etc, and counting from that. Maybe some landmarks were more popular than others depending in certain cities or provinces - I can see Greeks taking pride in remembering the first Olympiad, for example, while Italians would remember the Punic Wars, and Romans could easily produce the year the first plebeian consuls were elected.
Since I don't like theorycrafting without at least some source, I looked it up online and found this rather fascinating Reddit (I know, I know) thread from r/AskHistorians that has some written quotes on the matter. While not a definitive answer by any means (and, by the user's own admission, it's still theory without solid proof), I wouldn't say it's too farfetched to think that alternatives to consulship years existed for common citizens to use in daily life.
The alternative I've heard is simply that reconciling a local peasant's understanding of time and the greater historical context would be unintuitive. We are incredibly interconnected and immensely aware of the movement of history - such would not necessarily have been the case for rural folk in a pre-modern setting.
Even people in the remote corners of the modern world have a tendency of saying "many years ago, when I was around X stage of life, in Y season" instead of being able to date anything. Lots of people have no recorded birthday and no known age. Biological growth (and withering) is the only thing that imposes any kind of schedule in a simple society, so there's no reason to be more precise. Annual festivals can be based on a fairly arbitrary natural event, in addition to the famous celestial ones like solstice.
To organise trade they might still have a week cycle. IIRC in Roman times there was more than one competing system, 7 days had not been settled on. I'm not sure if any others survive today.
There's more evidence for rural usage of the Roman monthly dating system than the yearly - unfortunately, their monthly system is even more bizarrely fucked, even post-Julian reforms. "It is currently three days after the Ninth (this is the 7th day of the month, of course)" very intuitive
Still, considering the importance of the calendar to (as you mentioned) trade and the like, and the widespread distribution of monthly calendars, it, unlike dating the exact year, was clearly widely used.
When having his civil war against Pompey and the senate, Caesar did exploit the fact, that while he held the office of pontifex maximus, he was in charge of the Roman calendar, which by that time had begun to badly run out of sync with the seasons. (It had to be synchronised by adding in a number of days occasionally, this was one of the pontifex maximus' responsibilities) Thanks to his office, Caesar had not only a very good understanding of by how much the calendar had run out of sync, he could also keep it that way by simply not adding in the required extra days. His opponents weren't as well informed, which lead to a strategic advantage for Caesar, because waging war back then was pretty much a seasonal thing. Later in his careeer, Caesar actually introduced a calendar reform which lead to a much more accurate calendar that didn't need such a frequent resynchronisation.