The Attic calendar or Athenian calendar is the lunisolar calendar beginning in midsummer with the lunar month of Hekatombaion, in use in ancient Attica, the ancestral territory of the Athenian polis. It is sometimes called the Greek calendar because of Athens's cultural importance, but it is only one of many ancient Greek calendars.
Although relatively abundant, the evidence for the Attic calendar is still patchy and often contested. As it was well known in Athens and of little use outside Attica, no contemporary source set out to describe the system as a whole. Further, even during the well-sourced 5th and 4th centuries BC, the calendar underwent changes, not all perfectly understood. As such, any account given of it must be a tentative reconstruction.
Local focus The Attic calendar was an exclusively local phenomenon, used to regulate the internal affairs of the Athenians, with little relevance to the outside world. For example, just across the border in Boeotia, the months had different names, and the year even began in midwinter. In Athens, the year began six months later, just after midsummer. Furthermore, while Greek months were supposed to begin with the first sighting of the new moon, it was determined locally and with a degree of variability. In many years, the months in the two communities would have more or less coincided, but there is no sign that they tried to keep the days of the month exactly aligned, as they would have seen no reason to do so.
The divide between these neighbouring calendars perhaps reflected the traditional hostility between the two communities. Had the Boeotians been speakers of an Ionic dialect, the one spoken in Athens, there would have been overlap in the names of months. An example is the island of Delos, where the calendar shared four out of twelve month-names with Athens, but not in the same places in the year. There, even though the island was under some degree of Athenian control from around 479 to 314 BC, the year started, as with the Boeotians, at midwinter.
More than one calendar Athenians lived under a number of simultaneous calendars that were used to fix days for different purposes. How much each calendar meant to individuals probably depended on how they lived. They may be set out as follows:
A lunisolar festival calendar of 12 months based on the cycle of the moon and accommodating the solar year A democratic state calendar of 10 arbitrary months An agricultural calendar of seasons using star risings to fix points in time
Festival calendar (lunisolar)
Intercalation The year was meant to begin with the first sighting of the new moon after the summer solstice. Ideally, the solstice would occur toward the end of Skirophorion, the final month of the year.
The new year would then begin on the day after the first sliver of the new moon was seen (or presumed to be seen). However, because the relation of these two events, solstice and new moon, is variable, the date of the new year (in relation to a Gregorian date) could move by up to a month.
This linking of solar and lunar years defines the calendar as lunisolar. Because 12 lunar months are approximately 11 days shorter than a solar year, using a purely lunar calendar (such as the Islamic one) removes any relation between the months and the seasons, causing the months to creep backwards over the seasons. By tying the start of their year to the summer solstice Athenians forced the months to relate, with some elasticity, to the seasons.
In order to deal with the 11-day difference between 12 lunar months and 1 solar cycle, when it was judged that the months had slid back enough (roughly every three years), an extra month was intercalated, leading to a leap year with about 384 days in it. The extra month was achieved by repeating an existing month so that the same month name was used twice in a row. The sixth month, Poseideon, is most frequently mentioned as the month that was repeated; however months 1, 2, 7, and 8 (Hekatombaiōn, Metageitniōn, Gameliōn, and Anthesteriōn) are also attested as being doubled.
Various cycles were in existence for working out exactly which years needed to add a thirteenth month. A nineteen-year cycle, the Metonic cycle, was developed in Athens by the astronomers Meton and Euctemon (known to be active in 432 BC), and could have been used to pattern the insertion of leap years to keep the lunar and solar years aligned with some accuracy. There is, however, no sign that any such system was in fact used in Athens, whose calendar seems to have been administered on an ad hoc basis.
Names of months The primary function of this calendar was to set the days for the religious festivals. In a county fair role, they encompassed a much broader range of activities than the word "religious" suggests and were central to the life of the city.
The Athenian months were named after major festivals. In this the calendar differed from the Mesopotamian models that lie behind all Greek lunar calendars. In the Sumerian and Babylonian prototypes, for instance, the months were named after the main agricultural activity practiced in that month. Many Athenian festivals had links with different stages of the agricultural cycle, such as festivals of planting or harvest. It perhaps added to the need to keep lunar and solar calendars roughly aligned. The farming year, however, was not the primary focus of the calendar.
The sixth month and its festival – Poseideon and Poseideia – took its name directly from the god Poseidon. More commonly, gods appear under epithets, e.g. Maimakterion and Maimakteria, named after Zeus Maimaktes ("Zeus the Stormy").
Many of the naming festivals quickly lost importance or stopped being celebrated altogether, and some of the grandest celebrations in the life of the city are not recognised in month names, e.g. Great Dionysia, held in Elaphebolion. The months also changed names with time, e.g. Hekatombaion used to be called Kronios, after the festival Kronia.Plutarch. Theseus, 12.
The calendars of the Ionian cities of Asia Minor (along the western coastline of modern Turkey) often share month names with Athens. For instance, at Miletos four of the same month names were in use, namely Thargelion, Metageitnion, Boedromion and Pyanepsion, and the last of these even occupied the same position as month four in both communities. Traditionally, these Ionian cities were founded by colonists from Attica (perhaps around 1050 BC). It may be then that the Athenian month names refer to a festival schedule some hundreds of years out of date.
List of months The correlation suggested here between the Athenian months and those of the Gregorian calendar is loose, and, in some years, it might have been off by over a month.
Summer (Θέρος)1Hekatombaiōn (Ἑκατομβαιών)July/August2Metageitniōn (Μεταγειτνιών)August/September3Boēdromiōn (Βοηδρομιών)September/OctoberAutumn (Φθινόπωρον)4Pyanepsiōn (Πυανεψιών)October/November5Maimaktēriōn (Μαιμακτηριών)November/December6Poseideōn (Ποσειδεών)December/JanuaryWinter (Χεῖμα)7Gamēliōn (Γαμηλιών)January/February8Anthestēriōn (Ἀνθεστηριών)February/March9Elaphēboliōn (Ἐλαφηβολιών)March/AprilSpring (Ἔαρ)10Mounuchiōn (Μουνυχιών)April/May11Thargēliōn (Θαργηλιών)May/June12Skirophoriōn (Σκιροφοριών)June/July
Days of the month The months were 29 or 30 days in length, loosely in alternation, since the Moon orbits the Earth in roughly 29.5 days. However, rather than following a set scheme (such as the popular rhyme "Thirty days hath September..."), the duration of each month was declared just before month's end in an attempt to latch the first of the following month onto the upcoming new moon. The short months of 29 days were known as "hollow" and the ones with 30 days as "full".
Each month was divided into three phases of ten days associated with the waxing moon, the full moon and the waning moon. The naming of the days was complex. The first day of the month was simply noumenia or new moon, a name used in virtually every Greek calendar. From there the days were numbered up to the 20th day. For the final third of the month the numbering turned around to do a countdown from ten to the last day. Only the middle phase had numbers for the days running higher than 10 and even these were often phrased as "the third over ten" and so forth. In the wings of the month, the numbered days ran 2–10 and then 10–2. Days in these sections were distinguished from each other by adding the participle "waxing" and "waning" to the month name. In the centre of the month with its unambiguous numbering there was no need for this, though later the term "of the middling month" was used. The final day of the month was called henē kai nea, "the old and the new". Peculiar to Athens, this name presents the day as bridging the two moons or months. Elsewhere in Greece this day was usually called the 30th.
Athenian festivals were divided between the 80 or so annually recurring celebrations and a set of monthly holy days clustered around the beginning of each month. They were often the birthdays of gods, the Greeks thinking of birthdays as a monthly rather than a yearly recurrence. Every month, days 1–4 and 6–8 were all sacred to particular gods or divine entities, amounting to some 60 days a year:
Day 1: The day the moon (waxing cressent) is first visible after the New Moon, Noumenia. Day 2: Agathos Daimon Day 3: Athena Tritogeneia's Birthday Day 4: Heracles, Hermes, Aphrodite and Eros Day 6: Artemis' Birthday Day 7: Apollo's Birthday Day 8: Poseidon and Theseus Day 9: Rhea and Muses Day 20: Apollo Eikadios (of the twentieth) and Athena 29th or 30th day (depending on the month being hollow or full): Hekate ( Hekateia or Hekate's Deipna ) and the dead ancestors ( Nekysia ) Monthly and annual festivals were not usually allowed to fall on the same days so every festival month had an opening phase with exactly recurrent practices and celebrations while in the body of each month was a unique schedule of festival days.
A parallel function of this calendar was the positioning of the perhaps 15 or so forbidden days on which business should not be transacted.
Rather than considering the month as a simple duration of thirty days, the three-part numbering scheme focuses on the Moon itself. In particular the waning days 10–2 and the waxing days 2–10 frame the crucial moment where the moon vanishes and then reappears.
A date under this scheme might be "the third (day) of Thargelion waning", meaning the 28th day of Thargelion.
+Names of the days of the monthMoon waxing Moon full Moon waning New Month 11th later 10th 2nd waxing 12th 9th waning 3rd waxing 13th 8th waning 4th waxing 14th 7th waning 5th waxing 15th 6th waning 6th waxing 16th 5th waning 7th waxing 17th 4th waning 8th waxing 18th 3rd waning 9th waxing 19th 2nd waning 10th waxing earlier 10th old and new [moon]
To summarise the days with special names. The first day: noumenia, or first visible waxing cressent after the new moon. The last day: henē kai nea, the "old and the new". The 21st day: "the later tenth". The Attic month had three days named "tenth" (equivalent in a straight sequence to the 10th, 20th, and 21st days). These were distinguished as 10th: "the tenth (of the month) waxing" 20th: "the earlier tenth" (i.e. waning) 21st: "the later tenth" (i.e. waning) This strange juxtapositioning of the two days called the tenth, the earlier and the later, further highlighted the shift into the moon's waning phase.
When a month was to last 29 instead of 30 days (a "hollow" month), the last day of the month ("the old and new") was pulled back by one day. That is to say, the "second day of the waning month" (the 29th in straight sequence) was renamed as month's end.
State calendar