Leonardo Magini

ASTRONOMY AND CALENDAR IN ANCIENT ROME

The Eclipse Festivals

«L'ERMA» di BRETSCHNEIDER

ASTRONOMY AND CALENDAR IN ANCIENT ROME

The Eclipse Festivals

by Leonardo Magini

«L'ERMA» di BRETSCHNEIDER

CONTENTS

Foreword by Vit tor io Castellani 9

P R E F A C E : A S T R O N O M Y AND A S T R O L O G Y I N R O M E 13

PART I: T H E E C L I P S E C Y C L E 1.1. Solar eclipses and lunar eclipses 11 1.2 Ascending lunar node and descending lunar node, or Head and Tail of the Dragon 22 1.3 The Saros cycle 25 1.4 The period of revolution of the lunar nodes and the Saros cycle, w i t h the eclipse year 31 1.5 The Numan year and the 24-year cycle of intercalations 31 1.6 The Saros cycle and the festival of Anna Perenna, the peri­od of revolut ion of the lunar nodes and the festival of October Equus 38

PART II : ASTRONOMICAL C Y C L E S AND ROMAN F E S T I V A L S 2.1 . The solar eclipse of the first day of the cycle, 1 March of year 01 41 2.2. 15 March, Anna Perenna 46 2.3. 15 October, October Equus 59 2.4. 20 June, Summanus 67

PART IH: ECLD7SES AND T H E ANCIENT ROMAN C A L E N D A R 3.1. The cadence of the solar and lunar eclipses w i t h i n the Saros cycle 73 3.2. The cadence of the solar and lunar eclipses wi th in the Numan cycle 80 3.3. The cadence of the solar and lunar eclipses and the festivals of the Numan year 89 3.4. 24 February, Regifugium, and 9 June, Vestalia 93 3.5. Theoretical eclipses and real eclipses, eclipses of myth and eclipses of history 104

C O N C L U S I O N 109

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Appendix 1. Theoretical months and real months, theoretical lunations and real lunations 113 References 119 Index of subjects 123 Table 14: The solar and lunar eclipses of the first Saros cycle in the Numan cycle 127

FIGURES Figure 1. Eclipse of the sun 17 Figure 2. Eclipse of the moon 18 Figure 3. The piane of the apparent orbits of the moon and of the sun 19 Figure 4. The apparent orbits of the sun and moon and the two lunar nodes 19 Figure 5. The retrograde mot ion of the lunar nodes along the ecliptic 22 Figure 6. Sidereal month and synodic month 23 Figure 7. The Head and the Tail of the Dragon, i.e. the ascend-ing and descending lunar nodes 24 Figure 8. The so-called "Saros-Canon", Babylonian tablet dating from the th i rd century B.C. (From Pannekoek 1989) 29 Figure 9. The movement of the earth around the sun, w i t h the First Point of Aries, or Point Gamma, and the Point of Libra 68 Figure 10. The lunar nodes and the passage through the Points of Aries and Libra 69 Figure 11. The arresting points of the moon 72 Figure 12. Nundinal table of the market days of the cities of La t ium and Campania 112

TABLES Table 1. The Saros cycle 25 Table 2. The Numan cycle of 24 intercalated lunar years 35 Table 3. The Numan cycle and the motions of the sun, moon and Venus 36 Table 4. The Saros cycle, the revolution of the lunar nodes and the festivals of the Numan year 39 Table 5. The solar eclipses in the Saros cycle 76 Table 6. The lunar eclipses in the Saros cycle 78

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Table 7. The solar eclipses i n the Numan cycle 82 Table 8. The lunar eclipses i n the Numan cycle 84 Table 9. The Saros cycle in the first 19 years of the Numan cycle 88 Table 10. The solar eclipses and the festivals of Vesta and of the kingship 103 Table 11. The Eclipse Table in the Dresden Codex and the inter-vals between the festivals i n the Numan cycle 106 Table 12. The first new moons of the various years of the Numan cycle 115 Table 13. The first full moons of the various years of the Numan cycle 116 Table 14. The solar and lunar eclipses of the first Saros cycle in the Numan cycle 127

Note. I n the few cases in this book in which etymological questions are ad-dressed (especially chapter 2.2, on Anna Perenna), the author does not re-spect the universally accepted laws that regulate the phonetic correspon-dences between Indo-European languages. The author maintains that the Etruscan language is the bearer of an onomasticon and lexicon at least par-tially related to the Indo-Iranian group and that i t had a function, in late protohistoric times, of cultural and linguistic intermediary between the I n ­do-Iranian and Roman worlds. (See, most recently, the author's "L'etrusco, l ingua dell'Oriente indoeuropeo", communication to the Sodalizio Giotto-Io gico Milanese, 14 June 1999, in press.)

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FOREWORD

I n the Timaeus Plato relates how an Egyptian priest answered Solon, who was interrogating h i m about events of the past, w i t h the fol lowing words: "O Solon, Solon! You Greeks are s t i l i children, and there is no Greek who is old!" He went on to explain: "You are young in spirit . I n your souls you have no ancient opinion that comes to you from ancient t radi-t ion.", adding that Greek society was periodically overwhelmed by trau-matic events that "leave only those of you who are illiterate and ignoranti consequently you constantly start anew, like youths, knowing nothing of what occurred here or i n your own country in ancient times."

To our ears these ancient words should sound like a forewarning of what would occur i n times very near our own. Can we not perhaps con-sider our own society such a "child", having lost the memory of so many civilisations that went before, among them some of the greatest? I t is true that our society was born on the s t i l l -warm ashes of the Roman wor ld and that a sturdy umbi l ica l cord bound i t to that wor ld and, through it , to the Greek; but i t is just as true that what l i t t le remained of the broader cul­tural context of the ancient wor ld was fragmentary and confused. Our society developed in a cultural framework in which there was the widely-held belief that the entire wor ld , and wi th i t the entire human race, had come into existence just a few mil lennia before our own era, due to a pop-ular but incautious reading of the Bible.

Centuries were needed for archaeological research, which started from those few confused fragments, to be organised into a coherent ensemble, shedding light not only on the extreme antiquity of man but also on the great and forgotten development of many of the civilisations that preceded our own. The archaeologist's spade has thus brought back to l ight not only the glories of the Egyptian antiquities but also so many of the civilisations that have marked the stages on man's laborious path to the realisation, perhaps, of a more complete identity of his own. The Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Hittites, Phrygians, Mycenaeans, to mention a few of these way-stations at random, have thus often unexpect-edly re-emerged f rom the mists of the past, thereby winn ing the place that they too deserve in the history of the development of modem mankind. I t is becoming ever more clear that while civilisations and their empires may pass away, every one of them leaves a trace, almost a seed, that survives by

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mysterious and hidden means to reach m o d e m man. This investigation which , through the past, studies the roots of mod­

e m man is no longer l imi ted to the evidence that emerges from the soil turned over by the archaeologist's spade. Georges Duméz i l was one of the first to teach us that excavating among myths and legends can lead us to equally precious evidence about the th in 'red line' that runs through the times of history, connecting peoples who seem very distant from one another i n both t ime and space. I n this context, the author of this essay, Leonardo Magini , leads us through new, very fertile territory, showing us how the apparently chaotic assembly of the annual festivals of the Roman wor ld can conceal very different recollections and evidence of the cultural sphere in which early Rome moved.

Starting from a felicitous in tu i t ion , the investigation moves on to harsh and difficult terrain, where clues must be sought, meditated upon, weighed; where knowledge of astronomy is filled out w i t h the exegesis of poetic texts, opening the way to fascinating hypotheses, and shedding l ight at the same time on a great part of those same texts. Not least among the virtues of Magini's work is that we read ancient works w i t h new eyes, where the many apparent 'poetic flowerings' that weighed down our school translations suddenly transform into allusions of hi therto unsus-pected cultural significance; we discover a treasure-chest whose precious contents normally remain hidden to someone approaching from another context and culture. Once again we see how the ancient wor ld moved i n the context of unified knowledge that produced Lucretius' De Rerum Natura; a context unfortunately now unknown to our own society, where the average educated person often boasts his total ignorance of science.

Not Magin i . He manages to br ing together scientific knowledge and evidence from the past, thus fol lowing a line of research too rarely pur-sued, and from which we yet await many impor tant acquisitions. Fol lowing a thousand fragile clues, Magin i culminates his investigation i n br inging us face to face w i t h the evidence that behind the Numan calen-dar lies ancient and sophisticated astronomical knowledge whose roots may be in Mesopotamia. At the same time he throws convincing new l ight on well-known episodes in Roman history, such as the difficult and hard-w o n publicat ion of a public calendar, which can now be seen less as a result of an arbitrary decision of the patrician classes than as the end, the rejection, of the sacred l ink between the celestial sphere and the wor ld of human activities.

Once again we discover that in the history of human societies very l i t ­tle is born of that chance to which we often attribute what we do not understand. We are discovering that as biological research allows us to throw l ight on the phylogenetic lines of the animai species, and in partic-ular of the human species, the investigation of traditions brings us ever closer to the discovery of a cultural phylogenesis. A phylogenesis whose outlines we can already make out and whose development may st i l i be the

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most difficult but also the most fascinating task in the investigation of man's past. We thank Magin i for the step he has helped us take in this direct ion and for the poetry he himself lends to the task. Beyond our obvi-ous gain i n erudit ion, i t should be considered evidence that each of us is, for the moment albeit unconsciously, the point towards which a large por-t ion of the past events of the human race flows.

VITTORIO CASTELLANI

University of Pisa Centro Interdisciplinare Linceo

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PREFACE ASTRONOMY AND ASTROLOGY I N ROME

"Free ran the stars and unobserved, i n their revolutions" (libera curre-bant et inobservata per annum / sidera), says Ovid in the Fasti1 referring to the t ime of even more ancient Rome, the Rome of Romulus and Numa and of the other kings and of the early Republic. A Rome and an age which for the poet are now long ago in the dark, deep night of prehistory, i n which shine the lonely lights of myth , bright and resplendent like stars.

Focussing on those lights and, where possible, taking advantage of the inexhaustible reserve of "prehistoric memory" preserved by the myths and rites connected wi th the festivals of the calendar that t radi t ion attributes to Numa (circa 715-673 B.C.), in Le feste di Venere2 we began the recovery and interpretation of the traces of an astronomical science and of an astrologi-cai t radit ion already forgotten by the Romans of historical times.

Roman astronomy officially does not exist. Just open a handbook of the History of Astronomy: complete and detailed though i t may be, we w i l l search i n vain, leafing through chapters dedicated to Babylonian and Egyptian astronomy, Chinese and Indian, Greek and Arab, Maya and Aztec and Inca, Polynesian and Micronesian, for even a paragraph devoted to Roman astronomy. I t would be a great deal to f ind a mention of the name of Gaius Sulpicius Gallus, who passed into history, or perhaps only i n chronicle, as the first Roman able to predict eclipses.3

Before h im, there was no one; after h im, a all-encompassing sweeping fashion from afar invaded Rome, exciting their imaginations and upsetting their minds. I t penetrated so deeply that even today, at this great distance i n time, many people are unwit t ingly st i l i its prey.

In fact, of ali those who check in their morning paper or on the radio or tel­evision to see what the stars foresee for their sign—the loves of Aries, the mon-

1 3.111-2; translation by the author. 2 Le feste di Venere. Fertilità femminile e configurazioni astrali nel calendario di Roma anti­

ca ('The Venus festivals. Female fertility and astrai configurations in the ancient Rome calen­dar'), L'Erma di Bretschncider, Rome 1996.

3 In the recent, well-documented Astronomy before the Telescope, edited by C. Walker, London 1996, the chapter Astronomy in Etruria and Rome by T. W. Potter takes up 6 pages in a volume of 350 pages. On Gaius Sulpicius Gallus, see Cicero, de republica 1.23.

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ey of Taurus, the health of Gemini—how many know that astronomy and as-trology were born, grew up and developed hand in hand, coming to us first wi th the Roman conquest of Greece and then wi th that of Egypt and Mesopotamia? Who recalls that, in that epoch, not even the most miserable of slaves could live without consulting his personal 'Chaldaean' about everything; that the emper-or himself behaved the same; that Caesar and Augustus made ampie and unin-hibited use of astrology? Who now realises that the two divine arts, which lived side by side for thousands of years, have, since Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton, taken irremediably different paths? The first has remained prerogative of a handful of highly advanced experts in philosophical and scientific research; the second has become a refugium peccatorum of the worries and insecurities of life, a miserable heir, a pedestrian reworking, poor remains of what was orig-inally a glorious and glittering vision of man and the world?

"For I shall sing of God, silent-minded monarch of nature," writes Manil-ius, 4 "who, permeating sky and land and sea, controls wi th uniform compact the mighty structure; how the entire universe is alive in the mutuai concord of its elements and is driven by the pulse of reason, since a single spirit dwells in ali its parts and, speeding through ali things, nourishes the world and shapes it like a living creature..." Continuing "this God and all-controlling reason, then, derives earthly beings from the signs of heaven; though the stars are re­mote at a far distance, he compels recognition of their influences, in that they give to the peoples of the world their lives and destinies and to each man his own character ." And finally, "who after this can doubt that a l ink exists be­tween heaven and man?" (Quis dubitet post haec hominem coniungere caelo?)

Who, indeed, could doubt that the need to jo in indissolubly the life of man and life of the cosmos is a form of insurance against ali anxieties, yes-terday, today and forever? Or that the need to think that we come into the world under a certain star—with the sun and the moon in a certain sign, as well as Mercury and Venus and Mars and Jupiter and Saturn and the lunar nodes—is a way, and not such a primitive one at that, of seeking and defining one's own individuality and identity?

I n Rome, everyone was caught up in the fashion, including even the most difficult to catch: artists, writers and poets, either by their free choice or else by Imperiai solicitation. Cicero translated Aratus and dealt wi th the stars in his Somnium Scipionis and De natura deorum; Virgil sang of stars and eclipses in the Georgics; Ovid studied astronomy to write the Fasti and the Metamor-phoses; Manilius, wi th the composition of the Astronomica, realised the dream of being the first i n the West to teli of the motions of the heavens and the re-lationship between the life of the stars and the life of man, recounting "strange lore untold by any before me" (hospita sacra ferens nulli memorata priorum).5

The first in the West: i n perfectly good faith each of them could have sworn that, in Rome, never i n the past had anyone studied such questions as the mo-

4 Astronomica 2.60-6, 82-6 and 105. 5 Astronomica 1.6.

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t ion of the stars and the signs of the zodiac, the cycles of the planets and the eclipses of the sun and the moon. "Free ran the stars and unobserved..."

Hence the general conviction that the Romans—not only the Romans of archaic Rome, but also their successors un t i l almost the beginning of our era—did not know astronomy. Wi th time this conviction became a conven­t ion. For example: "Ti we can speak of Greek astronomy, it is not possible, however, to speak of Roman astronomy; the Greeks—wrote Soubiran— knew how to describe the heavenly phenomena acting at once as observers and theoreticians. I t is sufficient to recali Aristarchos, Eudoxos, Hippar-chos, Ptolemy; ali wrote treatises that, i n content and form, are true scien-tific works. I n Rome, however, i t is difficult to cite the name of one au-thentic astronomer; i f Sulpicius Gallus knew how to predict eclipses, that d id not make h i m a man of science but a generally educated man, lover of literature, sciences and the arts. Caesar, in fact, consulted the Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes for the reform of the Roman calendar."6

But then, i f Caesar needed Sosigenes, to what unknown astronomer of what unnamed school did Numa turn, centuries earlier, to construct "his" cal­endar? To whom belong those "happy souls, who first took thought to know the stars, their risings and their settings, and scale the heavenly mansions"? Who are those who were able "to lift their heads above the frailties and the homes of men" and to bring "the distant stars within our ken, and heaven itself made sub-ject to their wit"?

Ovid 7 —it seems—refers to the Chaldaean astronomers and astrologers who, i n his day or a little earlier, introduced the new science to Rome, studied and organised by their already distant predecessors. The poet does not seem to know of—and certainly does not teli us of—other nearer precursore, true astronomers of Roman proto-history whose names are probably lost forever.

Yet one of them suggested to Numa the existence of a cycle of 8766 days, i n the course of which the sun completes 24 of its annual revolutions, the moon 297 lunations and Venus 15 synodic periods. And someone else saw the possibility and the necessity of linking the motions of the stars in heaven to human events on earth, in particular the motions of Venus and the moon to female fertility.

The readers of Le feste di Venere have been introduced to the relation-ships between astrai motions and earthly cadences which we see reflected in the festivals of the Numan calendar. Accordingly between the festival of the Veneralia of 1 Apr i i and the festival of the Matralia of 11 June—that is be­tween wedding and conception—there are the 71 days 8 that the planet Venus i n heaven takes to move from its inferior conjunction wi th the sun to its

6 Liuzzi 1989, p. 13; who cites Soubiran, "L'astronomie à Rome", in L'astronomie dans l'antiquité classique, Paris 1979, p. 169 f.

1 Fasti 1.297-306. 8 AH the intervals of time are calculated inclusively, that is, counting the first and last day,

in keeping with the Roman method of counting. In the Numan year between 1 Aprii and 11 June there are the 29 days of Aprii plus 31 of May plus 11 of June for a total of 71 days.

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greatest western elongation. Similarly, i f we take intercalation into account, between the festival "of the mothers", the Matralia, and the festival "of the children", the Liberalia of 17 March—that is between conception and bi r th— on average 281 days elapse, in other words the "forty weeks" of pregnancy.

I am wi l l ing to leave to others, i f they want it, the job of reconciling the irreconcilable: that a science of the stars did not exist i n Rome wi th the fact that the Numan calendar is constructed on the basis of ancient astronomical and astrological knowledge.

I mention only that a similar situation is seen in Greece too, and in re­lation to astronomical knowledge. True science begins wi th Thales in the sixth century and continues w i t h the great names that we have cited above. But an ancient t rad i t ion 9 would have it that, six centuries earlier, the com-petit ion between Atreus and Thyestes for the kingdom of Mycenae was re-solved in favour of the first for his demonstrated ability to predici eclipses.

Another six centuries, or perhaps a little more, separate the two solar eclipses that occurred at the death of Romulus and at that of Julius Caesar-thus at least myth and history, for once in agreement, would have it. Plutarch writes, "(Romulus) died on the nones of July... suddenly there occurred in the sky ex-traordinary and indescribable phenomena, incredible alterations. The light of the day is said to have darkened, a night fell that was neither placid nor serene, but agitated by terrible thunder and shaken from ali directions by gusts of wind and pouring ra in ." 1 0 He almost repeats Virgil: "Who dares cali Sun a liar? He i t is / Who often warns of dark revolts afoot, / Conspiracy and cancerous growth of war. / He too, when Caesar fell, showed pity for Rome, / Hiding his radiant head in lurid gloom, / That a guilty age feared everlasting night." 1 1

Thus, this book aims to ascertain whether, in addition to recognising the 24-year cycle that unifies the motions of sun, moon and Venus, and the cycle of that same planet, someone in earliest Rome already knew the regularity of the cadences of the motions of the two largest heavenly bodies and the peri-odic repetition of solar and lunar eclipses, in relation to what modem as­tronomy calls the Saros cycle and the period of revolution of the lunar nodes.

I f and when such knowledge is demonstrated, we should not marvel that the people who historicised its entire mythical universe also "calendarised" —so to speak—the entire body of astronomical knowledge, crystallising in the myths, i n the rites and in the cadences of the festivals the eternai return of celestial events. They did this in such a way that the small annual circle of time encloses not only the memories, the histories and the lives of men, but also reflects the perennial motions of the heavenly bodies and their life i n the immensity of the celestial sphere. Thus the calendar reveals itself for what it originally was: the meeting point between microcosm and macrocosm.

La Maddalena, 21 July 1996 -Torrinpietra, 20 July 1999

9 Hyginus, Fabulae 258. 10 Life of Romulus 27.4-7. I I Georgics 1.463-8.

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