Transcript: Major calendar reform occurred around the time of Julius Caesar in 44 BC.  The early Roman calendar was very imprecise.  The Romans were superstitious. They disliked odd numbers, for example.  In their calendar February was the month with the fewest days; it was essentially the "bad luck" month.  Julius Caesar rationalized the calendar.  He added a leap year giving an average length of 365 and a quarter days, a good approximation, within one-hundredth of a day, of a solar year.  He also decided, because he had a fairly large ego, to take the next month that was not named after a god and name it after himself, and so we had July named after Julius Caesar.  The Emperor that followed, Augustus, actually messed up the nice pattern of Caesar’s calendar.  Augustus wanted a month named after himself, and so he took the next numbered month and named it August.  Noticing that his month had fewer days than Cesar's month he added a day to it and then messed with the rest of the sequence thereby making it relatively difficult to remember.  The Julian calendar sufficed for hundreds of years in keeping track of the seasons and keeping track of time, but eventually even it got out of sync with the seasons.