this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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Rough Roman Memes
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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.