All open opposition to Cæsar’s power was now put down. The Senate
vied with the people to do him honor. He was first made consul for
ten years, and then perpetual dictator. They conferred upon him the
title of “The Father of his Country.” Cæsar now began to form plans
for immense improvements which should benefit his empire. He completed
the regulation of the calendar. “The system of months in use in his
day corresponded so imperfectly with the annual circuit of the sun,
that the months were moving continually along the year in such a manner
that the winter months came at length in the summer, and the summer
months in the winter. This led to great practical inconveniences.
For whenever, for example, anything was required by law to be done
in certain months, intending to have them done in the summer, and
the specified month came at length to be a winter month, the law
would require the thing to be done in exactly the wrong season. Cæsar
remedied all this by adopting a new system of months which should
give three hundred and sixty-five days to the year for three years,
and three hundred and sixty-six for the fourth; and so exact was the
system which he thus introduced that it went on unchanged for sixteen
centuries. The months were then found to be eleven days out of the
way, and a new correction was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII., and it
will now go on three thousand years before the error will amount to a
single day. Cæsar employed a Greek astronomer to arrange the system he
adopted, and for this improvement one of the months was called July,
after Julius Cæsar. Its former name was Quintilis.”
Cæsar commenced the collection of vast libraries; formed plans for
draining the Pontine Marshes, and for bringing great supplies of water
into the city by an aqueduct; and he intended to cut a new passage
for the Tiber from Rome to the sea. He also planned a road along the
Apennines, and a canal through the Isthmus of Corinth, and intended to
construct other vast works which should make Rome the wonder of the
world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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