OVER the years, it has been claimed online, in books and magazines that the month of January is named after a Roman god. Is this true?
VERDICT:
TRUE
January is in fact named after the Roman god Janus; this god – depicted with a face looking forwards and another looking backwards – was believed to be the god of doorways, gates and thresholds. As such, Janus was also seen by the ancient Romans to be the god of transitions, endings and beginnings.
As for Jan 1 being the start of the new year, we have Julius Caesar to thank for that as one of his first moves after becoming the dictator of Rome was to reform the calendar.
He then invented the Julian Calendar in 46BC, and decreed that Jan 1 would be the official start of a new year.
However, the new year's celebrations fell out of practice during the Middle Ages when scholars found that Caesar failed to calculate the correct value for the solar year, which is 365.242199 days and not 365.25 days.
As such, an 11-minute-a-year error added seven days by the year 1000, and 10 days by the mid-15th century.
This in turn led to Pope Gregory XIII commissioning Jesuit astronomer Christopher Clavius to come up with a new calendar in the 1570s, and this is how the Gregorian calendar we use today came into being.
The Gregorian calendar works by removing 10 days for that year and establishing the new rule that only one of every four centennial years should be a leap year and since then, people around the world have gathered on Jan 1 to celebrate the arrival of the New Year.
Sources
2. https://www.britannica.com/
