Yes but we live in an era of the Gregorian calendar and widely tracked calendar years–I literally see the calendar year all day on my computer at the bottom right. If I was a peasant farmer in ancient Rome I imagine I would think more in terms of “this is my 60th winter” or some such.
I regularly don’t “instantly” remember my age in years and have to think for a second, but I also don’t make a big to-do about my birthday and never have. I think in lots of pre-modern societies (and even some modern ones), people are a little more in tune with some of these things–maybe not the specific birth day, but the knowledge that you’ve crossed through another year (I think in some cultures people increment their conception of how “old” they are, with the New Year, not with the specific anniversary of their birth date, and that probably comes from such a tradition in the past of mostly tracking your annual cycles through life.)
It’s probably what such a person would do but the older they get the more likely it is that they would be wrong.
People who don’t calculate their age based on the year they were born are notoriously inaccurate. We’ve all heard of places were people are extremely long lived and we try to understand what makes them live so long. Inevitably, people in these place start keeping accurate records of births and deaths and life expectancy falls in line with other places where conditions are similar.
That isn’t really true, I think there’s substantial evidence the studies you are referring to actually point to (relatively) higher rates of pension claim fraud in places with poor recordkeeping.
This assumes that the Romans valued dealing with other cultures on their own terms, rather than saying “We are Romans, here is how we do things, get on board or get wrekt”.
The story about the consul Popillius and the Seleucid king is probably apocryphal but I think it still gets the Roman attitude across - when asked for time to consider his proposals by the Seleucid king, Popillius allegedly drew a circle in the sand around the king and said “have your answer ready for me before you leave the circle”.
In the early '70s there were many regions that were reported to have unusually large numbers of people over 100 years old. The claims were touted by various groups for various reasons but were not able to withstand scientific scrutiny. That’s the only claim I’m making but it goes far beyond higher rates of pension fraud.
That’s pretty funny - I think it’s in accord with intuition, right? I retired early, so 65 won’t have much significance for me. But I think if I make it to 70, my awareness of my exact age might well kick in again - either because I’m proud that I can still do X and beat the youngsters, or because I’m worried that the aches and pains mean I’m about to die.
I’m aware–but I’m also saying my interpretation of it is that a lot of these claims (especially of high rates of centenarians) often seem to frankly be pension fraud.
Something to keep in mind with statistics on extreme age–at very high age levels, the natural rate of such people is so low, that even a handful of pension fraudsters can make for a big difference in the rate of centenarians (and even super-centenarians) in a population. Several of these regions are associated with broader regions of relatively high life expectancy (Okinawa:Japan, Sardinia:Mediterranean coast), but are also known to be relatively worse at keeping records than the broader country itself (which itself may keep records worse than other places.)
While I 100% share your sentiment, it raises the controversy of whether “COVID-19” started in 2020 or 2019. For sure 2020 was the first year of widespread social disruption. But recent analysis has shown lots of excess death in later 2019 in the localized areas where it was gathering speed. Death that was not yet identified as novel as to volume or as to cause. But certainly was novel in both aspects.
And we’d also want to explicitly address the question of whether to interpose a year zero between PC (prior to COVID) and WC (with COVID). I suspect that “After COVID” will be sometime around 5000 CE if even then. So labeling the current era with “after” seems premature.
Since 2020 was such a case of suspended animation worldwide, I propose “year zero” is a pretty good moniker for it. So 2019 would be 1PC, 2020 would be 0C and 2021 would be 1WC.
I can just see the foaming conspiricists going apeshit if this modest proposal got any traction in the real workd.
The Romans had no problem dealing with subjugated peoples on the latters’ terms, as long as Rome’s political supremacy was acknowledged. Keep in mind that the eastern half of the Empire, i.e. pretty much everything east of the Adriatic Sea, including Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt, retained its Hellenistic heritage throughout Roman rule. Latin as a vernacular never took root there - the Romans who were sent there as soldiers or administrators spoke it amongst themselves, but for the locals Greek remained the lingua franca (which educated Romans were expected to know anyway). With that in mind, I don’t see why the Roman administrators would not, pragmatically, permit the use of local dating systems in the provinces instead of forcing the Roman consular years upon the peoples of these territories.
Or they just don’t care precisely how old they are, once they’re into adulthood. You hear a lot of stories from less-modernized parts of the world about someone estimating their age to be about 80, or the like.
And it shows how spoiled we modern folks are, if we think that covid is such a significant event that it’s worth restarting the calendar over. There have been plenty of other pandemics in the past two thousand years that were a much bigger deal, such as the flu pandemic of 1919, or the measles pandemic that ended in the 1960s.
I don’t think they WOULD care what the provincials do, but I also don’t see them taking great pains to ensure that the provincials have an easy time understanding Roman dates.
Do those people also change the names of the days of the week? Thursday=Thor, etc. Or are ancient pagan religions = Cool, which the Christian one= Bad?
I mean AUC is just as bad or good.
Some modern scholars are starting to think differently. The Herod question is not a simple one. Probably will never be 100% settled.
Yeah, just ignore the literal meaning of BC and AD and get on with life.
Even the naval observatory still talks about “sunrise and sunset” although those are outdated terms before we knew the Sun didn’t go around the Earth.
Yeah, watching Escape to the Country, it is always “Georgian”, “Victorian” and sometimes “Regency”.
Re “modern examples,” eg Covid dating, as mentioned above [I forgot how to do selective quotes, and as usual can’t find the damn SDMB help pages–any help?] the greatest ever, I would imagine, was the Y2K Happening, which pitted the majority of celebrants in 2000 vs the the know-it-alls who said the millenial event should be in 2001.
Just recently, by coincidence, I had a heated debate with my friend (a Classics scholar, as it happens) that by the plain meaning of the words “BC”/before Christ and its non-equivalent but accepted “A[fter]C” (AD leads to the “year of the reign of” path) demands a year 0.
Given: only unit numbering is allowed.
In a numbering system in which negative units are allowed, and 0 a member of the series, the numeric distance between -1 and +1 is two. When 0 is not a paying member (ie our dating system) it is 1.
Aalso true, overlaid on this system, is that the defining unit time spans of Christianity are symboliccally determined (33 years of life, 3 days of before Ascension, 3 hours of Transfiguration). To the faithful Christ appeared and there was no longer a “before Him.”
A simple challenge is then “well, either he died when he was 33 or one of those years was not like the others” (ie, in our BC/AC). Although I stuck to my guns that today the plain meaning of BC/AD is simply ignored, given the “fixed” timing of events, I responded as well with a devil’s argument: “the time of Birth was no different than what many nowadays call a singularity, in the spiritual space-time: zero-hour, fair and square.”
An addition to the historical citations of “doing the math” by a faithful Christian for a Christian audience: Dante himsel, as the character within the Divine Comedy itself, dates his journey with Vergil by stating it took place in x years since the since the Crucifixion. It comes out to 1300, on Good Friday (the night before that event), and demands a year 0; he knew how to add, but he needed 1300 and Crucifixion at 33 years and the symbolism of the date of his journey to match.
There have to be mathematicians who deal with this problem formally as a rudimentary exercise in number theory.
I would love to hear their simple wham-bam formal summation of this issue. Anyone know it?
PS: I have no idea how those indents came. Something to do with my numbering no doubt stupidly auto-formatted as a “help” by software, no doubt. Don’t see how to undo it.
@Leo_Bloom: To selectively quote, highlight the portion of the post you wish to quote, then wait a moment and a [quote] button will appear nearby. Click that. You can do that repeatedly from the same source post or in multiple people’s posts. All the chunks you quote will appear in one new post by you.
I’m not clear precisely what problem you’re describing, but off-by-one problems are fairly common in math, and even more so in computer science. Which leads to things like C programmers and Fortran programmers disagreeing on whether array indices start at 0 or 1: There are arguments to number them either way (but the arguments for the C style of starting with 0 are better).
