Calendrical Notes

[Clavdivs]

To-day has but a short note, it is the seventh day before the Ides of January (ANTE DIEM VII IDVS IANVARII), in modern reckoning the seventh of January. To-day is marked C., DIES COMITIALIS.

There are, however, two interesting historical notes, both fragmentary:

''Business in Assembly. Caesar Augustus [first took up the fasces], when Hirtius and Pansa [were consuls].
[Tiberius Caesar] was appointed to the board of seven epulones.''

The year of the consulship of Hirtius and Pansa was 43 B.C.E., of the City 711, a most significant year, being the year of the battles of PONTVS GALLORVM and of MVTINA, both part of the brief civil war., called by Suetonius that of Mutina (Suet. Aug. 9) between Mark Antony on one side and the Senate and the God Augustus (then Octavian) before the formation of the second Triumvirate.

The ''taking up of the fasces'' alluded to in the note must refer to his appointment as propraetor, which is described by Suetonius thus:

''Put in command of the army which he had raised, with the rank of propraetor, and bidden to join with Hirtius and Pansa, who had become consuls [both fell in the war of Mutina, one in battle and one either of a septic wound or by poison], in lending aid to Decimus Brutus [one of Caesar's assassins, in this war Octavian takes the part of the Optimates against Antony, who sought to seize Cisalpine Gaul from the aforementioned Brutus], he finished the war which had been entrusted to him within three months in two battles.''

This was the first office Augustus held that possessed IMPERIVM, the power to beat and, outside the POMERIVM or sacred boundary of Rome, to slay, and, as such, he was for the first time attended by LICTORS bearing the FASCES, the bundle of rods and, outside the city, an axe-blade that symbolised his power.

To my great annoyance I cannot find the year in which Tiberius was appointed one of the SEPTEMVIRI EPVLONES. These were a college of priests, originally three in number, founded in 196 B.C.E. (the year of the consulate of Purpureo and Marcellus, of the City 558) to attend to the EPVLVM IOVIS, the ritual feast offered to Jupiter on the Ides of September at the Roman Games, at which the statues of the gods reclined and were served a great feast, the lesser EPVLVM IOVIS on the Ides of November (during the Plebeian Games) and to the other banquets held in honour of the immortal gods. They succeeded the Pontifices in this duty.

At some period prior to the time of Caesar the number was raised to seven, and Caesar added three more (Cassius Dio, the fifty-first chapter of the forty-third book: ''For owing favours, as he did, to many persons, he repaid them by such appointments as these and by priesthoods, adding one man to the Quindecemviri, and three others to the Septemviri, as they were called.'' This increase was clearly of very short duration and the number of Epulones continued at seven (cf. e.g. the second-century antiquarian Aulus Gellius, in the twelfth chapter of his first book of Attic Nights: ''one of the Seven who oversee the banquets of the gods'').