'July' is for Julius
The Roman Senate named the month of July after Julius Caesar to honor him for reforming their calendar, which had degenerated into a chaotic embarrassment. Bad calculations caused the months to drift wildly across the seasons—January, for example, had begun to fall in the autumn. The high priest in charge of the calendar, the pontifex maximus, had become so corrupt that he sometimes lengthened the year to keep certain officials in office or abbreviated it to shorten an enemy's tenure.
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