Quote:
Originally Posted by GirlySports
If the concept of the Leap Year was never created in the Julian/Gregorian calendar, we'd be about 500 days ahead of where we are now. Today would be July 13th, 2013. We'd have the 1-21 Memorial in NYC. More tragically, I would have been born in the 80s.
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The Julian Calendar didn't introduce the concept of the leap year, it simply formalized it. If Julius Ceasar hadn't inflicted his calendar system on us, we could be happily right in the middle of Mercedonius right now, which was an entire leap month. All our regular years would be 355 days long, but then once every three years or so, we'd get a year with Mercedonius, and the year would be about 375 days long!
As far as what year we'd be in, that's really hard to say, because it was really up to the discretion of the Pontifex Maximus whether any given year had a leap year. Typically, he'd use it to make the years when his political rivals were in power shorter, while making the years when his political allies were in power longer. It was a really screwed up system, because they had neither a true solar calendar or a true lunar calendar.
I sort of wish we still had that system, just for how much it would piss off all the computer programmers I know.