वेदों की प्राचीनता एवं काल-निर्णय / ओरायन (लोकमान्य बाल गंगाधर तिलक - खगोलीय वैदिक शोध)

COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY. 395 which was the twelfth and the last." But immediately afterwards Plutarch says, "Many, however, assert that two months of January and February were added by Numa, where- as before they had reckoned ten months in the year"; and in the next paragraph gives his own opinion, "That the Roman year contained at first ten months only and not twelve, we have a proof in the name of the last; for they still call it De- cember, or the tenth month; and that March was first is also evident, because the fifth from it was called Quintilis, the sixth Sextilis, and so the rest in their order."* I have re- ferred to this passage previously and shown that Plutarch's rea- soning about the order of the months as indicated by their nu- merical names cannot be lightly set aside. If January and Fe- bruary were the last two months in the ancient calendar of the Romans, we should have to assume that the numerical order from Quintilis to December was abruptly given up after De- cember which does not seem probable. It is, therefore, more reasonable to hold that Numa actually added two months to the old year, and that the story of the transposition of the two months of January and February from the end to the begin- ning of the year was a later suggestion put forward by those who knew not how to account for a year of ten months, or 304 days only. But besides Plutarch, we have also the testi- mony of Macrobius, who, as stated before, tells us that Romulus had a year of ten months only. There can, therefore, be little doubt about the existence of a tradition of the ancient Roman year of ten months, and we now see that it is thoroughly intel- ligible by comparison with the annual sacrificial sattras of ten months mentioned in the Vedic literature. The names of the Roman months from Quintilis to December further show that the months of the year had no special names in ancient times, but were named simply in their numerical order, a fact which

• Vide Langhorne's Translation of Plutarch's Lives, published by Ward, Lock and Co., London, pp. 53, 54.