The Longest Year

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a clock ticking slightly wrong, and a calendar page not turning)
Forty-six BCE lasted four hundred and forty-five days.

[Verse 1]
The Roman calendar had drifted. It was three months out of true,
because it ran on a lunar year and somebody was supposed to fix it
by inserting an extra month, by hand, when it got bad —
and that somebody was the Pontifex Maximus, a political office,
who could lengthen a year his allies were in power for
and shorten one they weren't. So of course it went wrong.

[Chorus]
So Caesar fixed it. And to fix it he had to ABSORB the drift,
which meant one year had to swallow all of the error at once,
so forty-six BCE got two extra months and twenty-three days —
four hundred and forty-five days long. They called it the year of confusion.
The longest year in recorded history. On purpose. As a correction.
Imagine being told, in autumn, that autumn is not over.

[Verse 2]
Everything moved. Every contract, every rent, every festival,
every term of office, every debt that fell due on a date
that now arrived two months later than anybody had planned for,
and there is correspondence about it, people complaining,
and Cicero made a joke about a constellation that used to rise
"by decree," which is exactly the joke I would have made.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And it worked. That's the thing. It was crude and enormous and it worked,
and the calendar he installed ran for sixteen centuries
before it drifted enough to need the Gregorian correction,
which cost ten days, and which people rioted about,
because taking days out feels like theft in a way adding them doesn't.
Nobody riots about a long year. Everybody riots about a short one.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the clock, righting itself)
Four hundred and forty-five days.
And then, mercifully, January.