Note 3654 — THE JULIAN CALENDAR AND THE CHRONOLOGY OF CAESAR’S INVASIONS OF BRITAIN

‘Caesar,’ writes Cicero, ‘wrote me a letter from Britain on the 1st of September, which reached me on the 27th’ (Ex Britannia Caesar ad me K. Septembr. dedit litteras, quas ego accepi a. d. IIII K. Octobr. [Q. fr., iii, 1, § 25]). ‘Your fourth letter,’ he tells Quintus, ‘reached me on the 13th of September, dated on the 10th of August from Britain’ (Quarta epistola mihi reddita est Idibus Sept., quam a.d. IIII Idus Sext. ex Britannia dederas [ib., 1, § 13]). And, as we have already seen, letters from Caesar and Quintus, written on the British coast on the 25th of September, reached Cicero on the 24th of October. The extraordinarily long time—33 days—which Quintus’s ‘fourth letter’ took to reach his brother may easily be accounted for: Cicero was not at Rome when he received it, but at Laterium, near Arpinum, about 70 Roman miles E. by S. of Rome (ib., in, 1, § 4).

Napoleon insists (Hist. de Jules César, ii, 196, n, 3) that, in favourable circumstances, letters only required 20 days for transmission from Britain to Rome. This view is based upon a passage in one of Cicero’s letters (Q. fr. iii, 1, § 17) which, in the MSS., runs as follows:—tabellarii a vobis venerunt a. d. XI K. Septembr. vicesimo die (‘letter-carriers arrived from you and Caesar on the 22nd of August after a journey of 20 days’). It is obvious, and is universally admitted, that (unless Cicero made a slip) Septembr. is wrong, and that Cicero meant ‘the eleventh day before the Kalends of October’, that is to say, September 20. It is equally obvious that he did not write vicesimo, or that, if he did, he made a mistake. For, at the end of the letter, he says (as we have already seen), ‘Caesar wrote me a letter from Britain on the 1st of September’; and, as the letter from Quintus reached him on the 20th of September, it must have been dispatched, if it really arrived vicesimo die, on the 1st of September, that is to say, on the same day as the letter from Caesar. But this, as Dr. Vogel remarks (Neue Jahrbücher für Philologie, &c., cliii, 1896, pp. 273-4), is disproved by the fact that Caesar, in this very letter, begged Cicero not to be alarmed at not having received a letter from Quintus by the same messenger, as Quintus was not with him when he reached the coast (Ex Britannia Caesar ad me K. Septembr. dedit litteras ... quibus, ne admirer, quod a te nullas acceperim, scribit se sine te fuisse, cum ad mare accesserit). As it is clear, therefore, that vicesimo is wrong, various attempts have been made to amend the MS. reading. Bergk (Jahrbücher für classische Philologie, 13 Supplementband, 1884, p. 622) arbitrarily changes vicesimo to tricesimo. The most satisfactory conjecture, in my opinion, is that of C. Bardt (Quaest. Tullianae, 1866, p. 32). He believes that what Cicero wrote was a. d. XI Kal., septimo vicesimo die; that a copyist abbreviated this into a. d. XI Kal., sept. vicesimo die; and that this was corrupted into a. d. XI Kal. Sept., vicesimo die.

If Professor Tyrrell, who reads a. d. XI Kal. [Sept.] vicensimo die (Correspondence, ii, 1886, p. 150), reads this note, I am confident that he will allow his text to be emended in the next edition of his and Dr. Purser’s great work.