Altars and temples afforded an asylum or place of refuge among the Greeks and Romans, as well as among the Jews, chiefly to slaves from the cruelty of their masters, and to insolvent debtors and criminals, where it was considered impious to touch them; but sometimes they put fire and combustible materials around the place, that the person might appear to be forced away, not by men, but by a god: or shut up the temple and unroofed it, that he might perish in the open air.
CHAPTER XIV.
The Roman Year.
Romulus divided the year into ten months; the first of which was called March from Mars, his supposed father; the 2d April, either from the Greek name of Venus, (Aφροδιτα) or because trees and flowers open their buds, during that month; the 3d, May, from Maia, the mother of Mercury; the 4th, June, from the goddess Juno; 5th, July, from Julius Cæsar; 6th, August, from Augustus Cæsar; the rest were called from their number, September, October, November, December.
Numa added two months—January from Janus, and February because the people were then purified, (februabatur) by an expiatory sacrifice from the sin of the whole year: for this anciently was the last month in the year.
Numa in imitation of the Greeks divided the year into twelve lunar months, according to the course of the moon, but as this mode of division did not correspond with the course of the sun, he ordained that an intercalary month should be added every other year.
Julius Cæsar afterwards abolished this month, and with the assistance of Sosigĕnes, a skilful astronomer of Alexandria, in the year of Rome 707, arranged the year according to the course of the sun, commencing with the first of January, and assigned to each month the number of days which they still retain. This is the celebrated Julian or solar year which has been since maintained without any other alteration than that of the new style, introduced by pope Gregory, A. D. 1582, and adopted in England in 1752, when eleven days were dropped between the second and fourteenth of September.
The months were divided into three parts, kalends, nones and ides. They commenced with the kalends; the nones occurred on the fifth, and the ides on the thirteenth, except in March, May, July, and October, when they fell on the seventh and fifteenth.
In marking the days of the month they went backwards: thus, January first was the first of the kalends of January—December thirty-first was pridie kalendas, or the day next before the kalends of January—the day before that, or the thirtieth of December, tertio kalendas Januarii, or the third day before the kalends of January, and so on to the thirteenth, when came the ides of December.