There was a question a few days ago asking how people counted years using ancient dating systems,and how we go about 'translating' from ancient dating systems to our own. Unfortunately, the thread was deleted while I was in the process of writing out this answer from a Roman perspective, but somebody might find it interesting.

How Did the Romans Count Years?

A key issue here is the distinction between an absolute chronology (in which events are pinned down in a single, objective system) and a relative chronology (in which the timing of events is known only in relation to each other). The Romans, in common with most ancient peoples, generally operated by relative chronology, though there were attempts to create an absolute chronology from this, most notably with the institutionalisation of Christianity.

How Would the Passing of Years Be Counted?

Even without a numerical system, it’s still easy enough to count years – and hence Herodotus, when being told that Tyre was founded in what your translator gives as '2750 BC', probably actually heard something like ‘Tyre was founded two and a half thousand years ago’, or ‘Tyre was founded a thousand years before [a certain reference event].

The Romans kept public historical records – these included the Acta Senatus, the official record of senatorial business kept in the imperial archive, and the Acta Diurna, daily excerpts from it published in public. The most authoritative was the Annales Maximi, kept until 133 BC by the Pontifex Maximus and displayed in some sort of abridged form outside his official residence, the Regia, in the centre of Rome [1].

Critically, the Annales Maximi began each year with the major officials for that year (usually the two consuls, although some years in the earlier period had six ‘Consular Tribunes’ instead), and then briefly summarised the events of that year before moving on to the next one. All Roman history-writing descends fundamentally from that model (even as last as AD 116, we find Tacitus writing a history book and referring to it as ‘my Annales’), and crucially adopts the system of referring to the name by its key officials. So, for example, in Book 29 of his grand history of Rome, Livy sets the ‘date’ by telling us that ‘P. Sempronius and M. Cornelius entered upon their consulship in the fifteenth year of the Punic War’, and regularly referring in this manner to the consuls of the year is the standard way to do this in practically all Roman historians.

In most distant times, it was generally recognised that the consular lists descended into mythology, but Cicero in the 1st century considered the records accurate back to what we would call 400 BC – or ‘the Year of the Tribunate of Esquilinus, Capitolinus, Vulso, Medullinus, Saccus and Vulscus’. However, that didn’t mean that they were useless – even if you didn’t believe that L. Junius Brutus and L. Tarquinius Collatinus actually were the first consuls in what we would call 509 BC, you can still use that conventional nomenclature to identify the year.

This was how you would find the relative chronology of events – so you might know that a certain event happened ‘in the Consulship of C. Sulpicius Peticus and C. Linicius Calvus’, and that another happened ‘when C. Fabius Ambustus and C. Plautius Proculus were consuls’, and find that the second set of consuls are six rows down from the first – so six years later. You can then count down to the current consuls, or at least a ‘known’ date (e.g., you might remember or have been told that the entries stopped twenty years previously) to work out how long ago it was. For most practical purposes, that’s enough – a numerical system (ours would give those dates as 364 and 358 BC) is nice, but not necessary either for finding out how long ago something happened, or for working out the span of time between two events, and that was the most important thing for most people.

A fragment from Cato the Elder (in the mid-2nd-century BC) says that ‘I do not care to copy out what is on the Pontifex Maximus’ tablet: how many times grain became dear, how many times the sun or moon were obscured or eclipsed’ [2], which demonstrates that this information was available for people to refer to on demand, and also included supplementary information that might help people work out which year was which. Copies or similar documents may well have been kept in other Roman towns – there are a few inscriptions, for instance, which were put up in Rome and then copied and displayed in the forum in Pompeii [3]).

In the later Republic, the Annales Maximi lapsed (as above, the last record seems to have been in 133 BC), but historians kept the tradition alive by writing their own works of Annales – Cicero names Cato, Fabius Pictor and Calpurnius Piso as ‘not embellishers of facts, but mere narrators’ [4] in this tradition. At the end of the 1st century BC, Augustus revived the tradition by having the lists re-researched and written up as the Fasti Capitolini – as the name implies, on the Capitoline Hill. As well as being functional, practical documentation, this was also a work of propaganda, literally setting in stone the key myths of Rome’s early history (Romulus is there, entered simply and without comment as ‘son of Mars’) and asserting the continuity of the Republican system through the ages, eliding the chaos of the civil wars and less-than-legitimate rulers that had made up most of most Romans’ lives at that point in time. Of course, this could never be an exact science – the variation in the stories told and the competing claims to authority that had been made at many points in Roman history meant that some of the finer details of the Fasti were always up for debate, though this tended to be on nuances, such as whether a certain consul had the praenomen Titus (T.) or Tiberius (Ti.), which didn’t really matter for the practical business of using them [5].

Later on into the imperial era, and particularly in Christian contexts (Christians being particularly keen to fix, inter alia, the dates of the Nativity and of Easter, and so producing a great deal of the Late Antique literature on the calendar) it became more common to simply count years from an emperor’s ascension (e.g. 20 BC became ‘the seventh year of Augustus’ reign’), which could run depending on your taste even after that emperor’s death, particularly if you were talking about future events. So in the early fifth century, the patriarch Cyril of Alexandria commissioned a table of Easter dates that ran until ‘the 247th year after Diocletian’s ascension’, which would be AD 530/531 in our system.

Week 138

 

The month of August 1919 opened – at least in Mussolini's Popolo d'Italia - with “The end of a political system”.

The electoral reform approved with 277 votes vs 38

The second victory of the Nation over Giolitti's old Chamber

An event, more than in itself, worth celebrating for its symbolic value. As the piece, sent by Mussolini – by phone, from Rome, where he might have been sorting out certain matters with the leadership of the local Fascio - before the voting could take place, “lost nothing of its significance”. Indeed:

The honorable representatives, albeit reluctantly, have decreed the end of the system which brought them to Montecitorio.

The Country, like it swept away the wishes of Giolitti's majority in May 1915 at the time when the fates of the Nation were at stake, has swept away today the last resistance of the supporters of the majoritarian system. It's a new victory which the Country should take the full, and exclusive, credit for. We are glad we have been fighting on the right side.

The Italian Chamber – on July 31^st – had indeed concluded its general examination (July 9^th to July 31^st 1919) of the proposed electoral reform by approving both parts of a bisected order of business which stated “the necessity of the electoral reform...” - “based on the proportional system” (as customary, the first by stand-up, the second by individual call). With this vote, the Chamber accepted in substance prime minister Nitti's political line of coming to an expedient reform of the electoral law, in time for the elections of mid-November, with the introduction of proportional representation. In order to mitigate the more or less serious concerns of the opposition (a significant fraction either favoring a postponement of the reform to the next legislature or committed to at least partially neuter its impact existed both within the Government and outside of it) Nitti, who appeared more invested in the broad, symbolic value of the reform for his general policy of “democratization” of the national life, appeared willing to accommodate things on the technical side of the electoral law, starting from the crucial matter of definition the new electoral colleges.

After the wide-margin approval – Sonnino and Alessio, two of the main opponents of the reform, had asked to put their negative vote on record for the first part as well, as testament of their opposition – the technical contents of the law underwent examination during the first week of August, to be approved on August 9^th and August 14^th by the Chamber and Senate respectively. The law was consequently promulgated on August 15^th and eventually introduced by Royal decree on September 2^nd 1919, given the vacancy of the Parliament. The composition of the electoral districts was eventually finalized by Ministerial decree on the 10^th of September.

The far from unanimous and unambiguous support enjoyed by the new law found an obvious echo within the Chambers, where the electoral reform, with its technicalities and multi-faceted composition, could not stand up to the ideal principles and institutes of the Risorgimento maintained by the old liberal class.

No one has been following – explained the old Sardinian liberal, Francesco Cocco-Ortu, one of those exemplars which, in Modigliani's words, “had yet to find a classification in the new taxoloogy of Italian politics”, in his cautious declaration of vote – more sympathetically than I did the movement, at first philosophical and then political, towards an equality of representation […] But the debate of these last few days appears to have cooled down many enthusiasms, shaken more than a few beliefs, including my own, and quite.

I don't know if the ideal principle has been undermined […] by the long and erudite debate of these days […] But laws aren't philosophical systems. The controversial point […] is whether the reform answers to the state and needs of the Country in our present moment of crisis […] Another point of controversy is whether the reform actually helps establishing the desired discipline of parties built around ideas and programs, rather than around men […]

Not only such uncertainties came out of the debate increased, but the latter also brought to light […] the dissent existing [between those in favor of the reform]

So many divergences justify our concern that the reform isn't ready, not even in the souls of those who call for it, and leave very little hope that, out of the many, varied and conflicting proposals, one may be able to produce not just a law of sorts, but a law […] coherent with the purpose of the desired reform. […]

[Some] praised the reform on idealistic grounds for its inherent political significance. Exalting its transformation spirit […] offering the remedy of a perfect method, capable of awakening new energies, allowing our people to reaffirm the eternity of its life, without suffering revolutionary convulsions. […] Providing furthermore the electoral body with an instrument to […] restore the Parliament to its past prestige, impaired by both the injuries of time and the relentless assaults of a thorough disrepute.

It is true, as said by hon. Turati among others, that, in order to prevent revolutionary actions, it helps [to embrace] revolutionary ideas and systems which renovate the forms of institutions and society, in agreement with the laws of evolution and progress. […]

It's not enough, yet, for a grand idea to be exposed, that one must then adapt it into a legislative mandate […]

The example and precedent change of the electoral method [the electoral reform of 1882, from majoritarian with two-rounds, to majoritarian with list ballot] has been recalled already […]

Those same political figures who supported it, later censored it with equal enthusiasm, acknowledging that the insufficient education of the electoral body as well as the political customs had made it incapable of offering an adequate and coherent resistance to the influence of the governments, to the artifices of coalitions, whether of corruption or accommodation for the formation of majority, as well as minority lists. […]

I would have wished [for the relation committee] – continued Cocco-Ortu after briefly remarking on the variety of electoral systems adopted by the other advanced nations – to explain to us why the original design was favored over others […]

Is it a realistic evaluation, based on new data, on new elements, on new objective criteria, which led the committee to change, over and over again, essential points of its original project?

The large district, without which we were told it was pointless to expect any positive result, appears to be reducing into fairly more modest boundaries […] At times, it seemed that a shade of panachage could find its way into a closed list system. Other times, it looked like a return to the original design of a closed list, with its thaumaturgic power of disciplining parties, was regaining traction […] The last formulation, if destined to survive, again […] rehabilitates panachage […] but cut down to a few crumpled feathers; the elector's freedom of choice […] becomes a conditional, weighted freedom […]

The conceit [of the reform] is smothered in a series of corrections, which rather than bringing new life into it, diminish and disorganize it.

With regards to another essential point, that of districts, one day the idea of maintaining the unity of provinces seems to prevail, and the next day that of making the mandate more significant by increasing its territorial boundaries.

Without criticism, I must observe that the reform appears, vanishes and reappears once again changed and transformed […] in its essential characters. Is this change due to the need for adjustments to win over particular oppositions, or to the criterium of adapting it to the will and circumstances of the Country?