I’ve mentioned before that February is a weird month with only 28 or 29 days and a weird spelling. It has a weird history too.
In ancient Rome, there were only ten months, March through December. There was a gap in the wintertime that had no dates. (How weird is that?) The year was reset on the spring equinox.
Around 713 BC, Numa Pompilius added two months. These months were not added before March. They were added after December, making February month twelve. (Weird, right?) The Roman Empire was agrarian, so spring was more important than winter.
February became the second month around 450 BC when a council of ten men called the decemvirs tried to fix everything that was wrong with Rome. (Cool, yet weird.)
All these changes did not fix the calendar. There were twelve months, but February varied from 22 to 28 days. To make March line up with the Spring Equinox, a thirteenth month called Intercalaris was occasionally added after February.
It’s amazing how the scribes knew what date to write on their work. And how annoying it must have been for the average Roman to have days added or removed from the calendar. Most people probably ran their lives by the seasons, but all these calendar changes probably affected things like tax due dates.
Julius Caesar did a mostly good job of fixing the calendar. He got rid of the thirteenth month, made February a steady 28 days, and added a leap day every four years. It wasn’t Caesar’s fault that he had too many leap days. He probably never thought that his calendar would be used for so long that it would become out of sync with the sun.
The Gregorian calendar finally fixed February’s problems and gave us the calendar we use today, with its weird second month.