Time and holidays

Room 10

The Roman calendar distinguished between days in which legal and public matters could be carried out, known as fastum, and religious days of festivity – nefastum – in which such activities were prevented. With time, the term Fasti came to embrace the entire calendar of religious festivities and was overseen by members of the Collegium Pontificum college of priests. Within the cultural programme implemented by Augustus, the creation of a new era extended also to the organisation of time within the calendar – a radical change which followed a new way of thinking and living, and which affected every public, social and religious aspect of the Roman people. In his role as Pontifex Maximus, Augustus introduced structural changes to the annual calendar with the addition of festivities associated with the figure of the Princeps and his family. The calendar reform implemented by Caesar in 46 BCE, which had corrected the calculation of leap years and introduced the months of January and Febraury, was reviewed, changing the names of the summer months into Iulius and Augustus – respectively in honour of Julius Caesar and Augustus himself. The Feriae Augustii festivity survives to this day as Ferragosto, the August 15th bank holiday.