Today is March the first, and if we were in ancient Rome, that would come with a "Happy New Year!" greeting. A couple of days ago, we learned that in the Roman calendar, they just doubled February 24th to have a Leap Day. That seems confusing and nonsensical, but you haven't heard the half of it. The Roman Empire had a real time trying to come up with a workable calendar. See, early calendars were decreed by absolute rulers instead of by astronomers and mathematicians, so correcting any anomaly was a political risk.
Ancient calendars only had ten months (304 days) because no one did any agricultural work in the midwinter. Yes, those days existed, but they just weren't counted. In 731 BC, King Numa Pompilius decreed two new months, but that only brought the calendar up to 355 days. No problem, they just added another month when needed, but that didn't work so well, either. A few hundred years later, the harvest festival was falling in springtime, so something had to be done. That fell to Julius Caesar in 46 BC. He created a new calendar for only one year that aimed to set everything straight, but it ended up being 445 days long!
That long year helped to set the calendar right by the seasons, but it wasn't perfect. In another few hundred years, it again had to be adjusted again. Read about the Roman attempts to create a calendar that made sense at BBC Future. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Leomudde)