Days the State Could Use, and Days It Could Not

A Roman calendar was not a neutral grid of dates the way a modern wall calendar is. Every day carried a legal and religious classification, dies fastus, on which a praetor could hear a case and public business could be transacted, or dies nefastus, reserved for the gods and closed to civic business by the same stroke that made it a day the state could not touch. Feriae, the fixed festival days of the state cult, sat on top of that basic division, each with its own sacrifices and rites specified by the pontifical calendar the priestly college maintained, from Saturnalia in December, with its temporary inversion of social roles between master and slave, to the winter solstice festival for the unconquered sun, Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, that later Christian tradition situates near its own December feast.

What survives today is not a single master fasti from the city of Rome but multiple versions inscribed on stone in towns across Italy, at different dates and reflecting some local variation in which festivals a given community chose to mark, which together make the Roman religious calendar one of the most thoroughly documented in the ancient world despite the absence of one complete official copy.