When did we start counting years in our current calendar? Did Jesus die and people just said “ok we are now in 33AD and there will be 12 sections every year, each with around 30 days”.
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The Roman Calendar was based on the lunar cycle which is 29.5 days, and so for that reason the calendar was alternating between 30 and 31 days. The Roman Calendar was also only 10 month long so December was the 10th month of the year since Dec is the suffix for 10 in Latin.
The rest of the year was just winter, people were mostly staying inside, there was no war, no agriculture, etc so keeping track of the days wasn’t really a priority. Later as administration become more important, they added the month of January and February as the months of winter. The Lunar year is 355 days while the Solar year is 365 and a quarter, when they didn’t count the months of winter it didn’t really matter, but since they started doing it, it became an issue. They was a lot of weird experimentation with the calendar, January and February had 28 days, another time the 30 days months become 29 days, etc. Then in 46 BC Julius Cesar reformed the calendar to the structure we have today with 12 months of 30, 31 days and a leap day each 4 years.
Some minor changes still occurred after that like changing the month of Quintillis to July in honor of Julius Ceasar, or the month Sextillis renamed August in honor of Augustus. The Starting year of the Roman Calendar was the founding of Rome, but later the Byzantines used the same calendar but starting from ”the Creating of the World” which was in 5509/08 BC according to them. During the Roman Calendar, the week was 8 days, but after the Julian Calendar the 7 week started to be used until it became law under Emperor Constantine.
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