ABSTRACT
Greek and Roman calendars variously made use of the cycles of the sun, moon and stars.1 The moon formed the basis of all Greek city-state festival calendars, and originally underlay the main divisions of the Roman months. ‘Star calendars’ helped time agricultural activities in both the Greek and Roman worlds, and – in the form of the parape¯gmata – could have assisted in regulating some Greek civil calendars. The sun, after initially loosely helping mark out seasonal periods in the agricultural cycle, eventually formed the basis of the Roman civil calendars and from them, in a nice touch of reciprocity, many Greek civil calendars.
