The New Year has come. This time of the year serves as a period for renewal and new beginnings for law students like myself, who have survived the previous semester. New classes, professors, and classmates provide us with an opportunity to feel rejuvenated ahead of the remainder of the spring semester. 

However, after 3 years of being a Massachusetts resident, I’ve found that the weather of this winter season fails to produce the same vibration of revival that is felt upon campus. It seems that spring fits the theme of the new year much better than the snow and 4pm nightfall that this dead period brings. Curious as to why the weather and seasons misalign, I took a quick look into history and found answers within the civilizations of classical antiquity, particularly the Romans.

The modern calendar used in most of the world evolved during the Roman Republic. Although being attributed to Romulus, the polity’s first founder and first king, it’s believed that the calendar likely developed from other systems designed by the Babylonians, Etruscans, and Ancient Greeks. According to Macrobius, Roman author of the Saturnalia, a compendium of ancient Roman religious and antiquarian lore, the Egyptians were the first to divide the year into definite periods. Over time, different civilizations followed suit in dividing the year, though they varied in the number of months they recognized.

The Romans followed the advice of Romulus, and divided their year into ten months, beginning it with March. Macrobius writes that Romulus named March after his father, Mars. Other sources attribute the origin of the month’s name to the Roman god, Mars.  At the time, each year amounted to 304 days, 30 each in the six months of April, June, Sextilis (the early name for August), September, November, and December, and 31 each in March, May, Quintilis (the early name for July), and October. 

King Numa, Romulus’s successor, added January to the calendar and named it after Janus, the double-faced god who looks to both past and future, the end of the old year and the start of the new. The ancient Romans held feasts and offered sacrifices to Janus, promising more virtuous behavior in the hope of receiving favor in the new year.  Numa recognized that Romulus’s 304-day year was too short. Drawing from the sciences of the Greeks, he added fifty days so the year would contain twelve full moons rather than ten. He distributed six of those days by taking one from each thirty-day month: April, June, August, September, November, and December.

After Numa’s death, the Romans followed his calendar but alternated thirty and thirty-one day months. This produced a 354-day year, which soon drifted out of sync with the seasons and the sun’s path through the zodiac. In 45 B.C., Julius Caesar ordered a calendar reform that became known as the Julian calendar. Sosigenes of Alexandria, an astronomer and mathematician, designed the system with 365 days and a leap year every four years. Although it overstated the length of the solar year by about eleven minutes, the calendar thus far, most aligned human timekeeping with the sun. Caesar’s new calendar had a new year beginning on January 1, the day its consuls—a pair of men who constituted the republic’s executive branch—took office. 

Coincidentally, March used to be when the U.S. Presidents were originally inaugurated. This was because March 4th, the anniversary of the Constitution replacing the Articles of Confederation as the law of the land, was celebrated as the beginning of a new political season. The 20th Amendment changed inauguration to January 21st in 1933. Four months between election and inauguration was considered to be too long. History seems to repeat itself.

Aside from minor changes by later Roman rulers, the Julian calendar remained mostly unchanged until 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII reformed it to better match the Earth’s orbit around the sun. The old system measured the year at 365.25 days, while the new calendar set it at 365.2425 days. The reform also reset the calendar by nearly two weeks, bringing dates back into alignment with the seasons, particularly the spring equinox. Moving forward, the 1582 reform established January 1 as the start of the new year for many.

Learning this information has cleared up some of the dissonance that I noticed between the seasons and the calendar. It also enlightened me to a new perspective to have this new year. The Roman belief in Janus, the god also known for gates and doorways, taught me the importance of having a well-balanced perspective of the past and future. An awkward gap exists between the past and future, where our experience, in the present, resides. As expressed by Friedrich Nietzsche, in On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, cheerfulness, good conscience, and joyful action for an individual depends on the following, “that there is a line which divides the observable brightness from the unilluminated darkness, that we know how to forget at the right time just as well as we remember at the right time, that we feel with powerful instinct the time when we must perceive historically and when unhistorically.” 

Learn from last semester and apply those lessons to the new days that 2026 has gifted us. Look to celebrate the new year by approaching this semester with a renewed mindset about yourself as a virtuous law student blessed with favor in all your endeavors. Happy New Year!

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Staniel Brutis is a third-year student at BC Law. Contact him at brutis@bc.edu.