Fasti | Page 7

assigning any particular day to its place in the month, according to the modern mode of reckoning. We must, therefore, always diminish the given number by one, or we shall be a day behind. Thus, the 5th of June being the Nones, the 3d is III. Non. but if we subduct 3 from 5 we get the 2d instead of the 3d of the month. The rule then is, as we know the days on which the Nones and Ides fall in each month, to subduct from that day the Roman number minus 1, and we have the day of the month. For days before the Kalends, subduct in the same manner from the number of days in the month.
The days of the Roman year were farther divided into _fasti_, nefasti and _endotercisi_,[8] or _intercisi_, which were marked in the Kalends by the letters F. N. and EN. The dies fasti were those on which courts sat, and justice was administered; they were so named from fari to speak, because on them the Praetor gave judgement, that is spoke the three legal words, Do (_bonorum possessionem_), Dico (_jus_), Addico (_id de quo quaeritur_); the _dies nefasti_, were festivals, and other days on which the courts did not sit; the dies intercisi were those days, on only a part of which justice might be administered. Thus, we are told that some holidays were _nefasti_, during the time of the killing of the victim, but _fasti, inter caesa et porrecta (exta)_, again nefasti while the victim was being consumed on the altar.
Manutius, by merely counting up the number of the dies fasti in the Julian Calendar, found that they were exactly 38 in number. This strongly confirms what has been said above, respecting the division of the cyclic year into 38 weeks, and is one among numerous instances of the pertinacity with which the Romans retained old forms and names, even when become no longer applicable; for as 38 days were quite insufficient for the business of the Forum, a much larger number of other days, under different appellations, had been added to them long before. The making the market days fasti was, we are told,[9] the act of the consul Hortensius.
§ 4.
Of the Roman Fasti.
The Roman patricians derived from their Tuscan instructors, the practice, common to sacerdotal castes, of maintaining power by keeping the people in ignorance of matters which, though simple in themselves, were of frequent use, and thence of importance. One of the things, which such bodies are most desirous of enveloping in mystery and confining the knowledge of to themselves, is the Calendar, by which religious rites and legal proceedings are regulated. Accordingly, for a long time, the Roman people had no means of learning with certainty what days were fasti and what not, but by applying to the pontiff, in whose house the tables of the fasti were kept, or by the proclamation which he used to make of the festivals which were shortly to take place. As we have seen above, the knowledge of the length of the ensuing month could only be obtained in the same manner. This, and the power of intercalating, gave a highly injurious degree of power to the pontiffs.
Accordingly, nothing could exceed the indignation of the senate when, in the year 440, Flavius, the clerk or secretary of App. Claudius, as a most effectual mode of gaining the popular favour, secretly made tables of the Calendar and set them up about the Forum.[10] Henceforth the dies fasti and _nefasti_, the stative festivals, the anniversaries of the dedications of temples, etc. were known to every one. The days of remarkable actions, such as the successes and reverses of the arms of the republic, were also noted. Copies for the use of the public and individuals were multiplied; the municipia and other towns of Italy, as the fragments which have been discovered shew, followed the example of Rome, and the colonies, in this as in every thing else, presented the mother-city in little. The custom was transmitted to modern Europe, and, in the Calendar part of our own Almanacks, we may see a copy of those Fasti, which once formed a portion of the mysterious treasures of the patricians of ancient Rome.
These were the Fasti Sacri or Kalendares, but the word Fasti was applied to another kind of register, named the Fasti Historici or Consulares, which contained the names of the magistrates of each year, especially the consuls, and the chief events of the year were set down in them, so that they formed a kind of annals of the state. When we read of the name of any consul, as was the case with L. and M. Antonius, being erased from the Fasti by a senatusconsult, it is always these Fasti that