08/15/18 — Awwww, halfway into August and not a single “search term” entry. Is that a good sign, i. e. visitors are familiar with our format and don’t need assistance in finding posts that address their query? Or . . . a bad sign, meaning, there are no visitors?
But there are visitors that do show up on our daily statistics, we even know how many posts they click, which specific articles they checked out, how many times they returned within a time frame, and so on. Our format is pretty simple; and we have over a thousand posts listed under 22 categories.
So, it must be the first—nobody needs our assistance to get around in our website. That is what we’d like to believe!
08/01/18 – This monthly post started out as an aid for searchers who might be looking for specific posts that would address/answer their query but since we hardly have “search terms” landing on our website as of year 2018, we’ve decided to turn it into a blog. And for lack of topics to deal with at the beginning of each month, we focus on background information about the month. But surprisingly, of all the months of the year, August seems to be the most boring month in terms of “fun facts” or “interesting facts” that usually are not wanting in all other months. For lack of anything interesting to say about August, the usual “Ten Interesting Facts You Should Know About [any month]” ends with this 10th item for August: “Still looking for a tenth fact”, haha, imagine, that boring!
August is the eighth month of the year, has 31 days, and is named after Augustus Caesar.
August is the eighth month of the year in our modern day Gregorian calendar.
Naming August – Augustus Caesar
August is the eighth month of the year in the Gregorian calendar and its predecessor, the Julian calendar. The month of August was originally named Sextilis in Latin since it was the sixth month in the ancient Roman calendar. The name of the month was changed to August in honor of Augustus Caesar in 8 BCE.
- Latin name – Augustus mensis – Month of Augustus
- Latin – sextilis mensis – Sixth month
- Anglo-Saxons – Weod Monath – Weed month
History of August
August was originally Sextilis, the sixth month in the Roman calendar and consisted of 31 days. It became the eighth month with a length of 29 days around 700 BCE when Januaryand February were added to the year. Julius Caesar added two days to the month around 45 BCE. It was later renamed to honor Augustus Caesar in 8 BCE.
Eighth Month in the Year
August is the eighth month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendar and is 31 days long. It is considered the busiest time for tourism because it falls in the main school summer holiday period. It is the seasonal equivalent of February in the Northern hemisphere.
August does not start on the same day of the week as any other month in the year in common years, but ends on the same day of the week as November every year. During leap years, August starts on the same day as February and still ends on same day as November.
Augustus for ‘August’
After Julius’s grandnephew Augustus defeated Marc Antony and Cleopatra, and became emperor of Rome, the Roman Senate decided that he too should have a month named after him. The month Sextillus (sex = six) was chosen for Augustus, and the senate justified its actions in the following resolution:
Whereas the Emperor Augustus Caesar, in the month of Sextillis . . . thrice entered the city in triumph . . . and in the same month Egypt was brought under the authority of the Roman people, and in the same month an end was put to the civil wars; and whereas for these reasons the said month is, and has been, most fortunate to this empire, it is hereby decreed by the senate that the said month shall be called Augustus.
Not only did the Senate name a month after Augustus, but it decided that since Julius’s month, July, had 31 days, Augustus’s month should equal it: under the Julian calendar, the months alternated evenly between 30 and 31 days (with the exception of February), which made August 30 days long. So, instead of August having a mere 30 days, it was lengthened to 31, preventing anyone from claiming that Emperor Augustus was saddled with an inferior month.
To accommodate this change two other calendrical adjustments were necessary:
- The extra day needed to inflate the importance of August was taken from February, which originally had 29 days (30 in a leap year), and was now reduced to 28 days (29 in a leap year).
- Since the months evenly alternated between 30 and 31 days, adding the extra day to August meant that July, August, and September would all have 31 days. So to avoid three long months in a row, the lengths of the last four months were switched around, giving us 30 days in September, April, June, and November.
Among Roman rulers, only Julius and Augustus permanently had months named after them—though this wasn’t for lack of trying on the part of later emperors. For a time, May was changed to Claudius and the infamous Nero instituted Neronius for April. But these changes were ephemeral, and only Julius and Augustus have had two-millenia-worth of staying power.