February only has 28 days. You know that. Well, I hope you know that. But why? What godforsaken individual decided that it’d be a bright idea to give February 28 days whilst every other month has 30 or 31? As with most things in life, we must travel back into the past. This time, however, instead of going to Anglo-Saxon England like the last post, we have to travel back to the glory days of Ancient Rome. Well, actually a bit further back than the glory days. More like the baby days where Rome was just learning to walk and annihilate (and then copy) their enemies.
And here we are in Rome, circa 8th century BCE. Prior to this point, the Romans had been running on a very peculiar calendar system. The kind that only has 10 months that consist of a total of 304 days. Calendars had originally been invented to keep track of the best time to plant and harvest crops, so there was no need to have any months in the place of January and February, so they simply didn’t exist. Not much happens during those months (except for the glorious birth of a very special human being on the 9th of January), and quite frankly nobody really likes them anyway. However, the king of Rome, Numa Pompilius, decided to redo the calendar system so it made more sense. His new calendar had 355 days (see, they’re getting there!) and added two months, January and February. Because the Romans thought that even numbers were unlucky, each month had either 29 or 31 days with a bunch of leap days thrown in to make things complicated. One month, however, had to have 28 days to make the calendar work, and February was chosen as that month.
However, Julius Caesar had to come around and mess everything up again, and reorganised the calendar to have 365 days. February, however, was cast as a 29 day month with 30 days on a leap year. When emperor Augustus came around, he wanted to rename a month after himself (like Julius and July), so he choose August (which was previously named Sextilis). However, it wouldn’t suit Augustus for August to only have 30 days and be less than July, which was Caesar’s month, so he stole a day from poor old February. And that, my friends, is why February only has 28 days.
