Talk:Ab urbe condita

message: Error in: "Livy (I, 60) gives almost the same, 240 years for that interval". Livy gives 244 years
Well, A.U.C. continued in common use despite Divus Julius - Livy, for instance, used it.  The Roman calendar article, which I linked, is a different issue from the year-count, but it's relevant, I guess. --MichaelTinkler
Eutropius and other authors also used ab urbe condita in their works. True, naming the years of the consuls was much more common, it is inaccurate to say that auc was only a modern reckoning. Chris Weimer 07:25, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No. No year zero requires 2006 + 753 = 2759. The year before AD 1 is 1 BC and progresses backward to 753 BC. Invert this number sequence so that 1 is at 753 BC and 753 is at 1 BC. Then the years AD progress from 1 to 2006. The two number sequences are added by 753 + 2006. If there was a year zero between BC and AD, then the sequences would be 753 + 1 + 2006. Be that as it may, because the article gives two possible years for the founding of Rome, 753 BC and 745 BC, no modern conversion should be given, especially not in the section arguing that it was founded in 745 BC, so I removed it. — Joe Kress 06:01, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The issue is when you cross that BC-CE line things don't line up.  2759-2007 gets you 752 AUC by the math but 1 BC is actually 753 AUC ie you lose a year crossing the boundary.  As long as you are on one side or the other the math works but the moment the calculations cross that boundary things go pearshaped.--Professor Phantasm (talk) 00:24, 18 August 2018 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: *When used at last the AUC ofical time?
The auc have many misstakes. Like time calendar are not correct basis, (month and year days are wery strange).
*J.C. Reformered the calendar.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.92.192.100 (talk) 14:42, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  AUC from Rome setlement to J.C.1 is  AUC709 

message: The "alternate calculation" section is very confusing.  It might also describe more clearly how much the "normal" calculation predominated vs. any others in usage at different times. Foogus (talk) 21:32, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  so what AUC year is it really 

message: How would years before the founding of Rome under the AUC system be recorded as? For example, under the BC-AD system of tracking years, anything that occured before the birth of Christ (or then at least what Dionysius Exiguus believed to be his birth date (1 AD) at the time it was created) is recorded as BC, any thing after his birth as AD. Under the AUC system, how would events such as the Trojan War, the voyage of Aeneas following the war, and other events preceding the founding of Rome be recorded as? I think this is something that should be addressed in this article which, as of 6/4/09, nothing has been stated regarding this. Fuelsaver (Fuelsaver) 6:48 PM, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
:Ante Urbem Conditam. See also here. Wakari07 (talk) 10:37, 21 April 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Years Before the founding of Rome 

message: I left this page as the dominant meaning. The other page is now at Ab Urbe Condita (book). Anthony Appleyard (talk) 04:57, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Ab urbe condita → Ab Urbe Condita (AUC) —
* What do you say we move this to "Ab Urbe Condita (AUC)"? Having the difference between article names as insubstantial as a single capital letter strikes me as an insubstantial idea - too confusing. Do reply, will you? If not or if agreement I will just move it.Dave (talk) 02:10, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: I suggest a move

message: Why condita ? It's a passive participle. Why not the gerundive condenda ? Why not even a gerund: ab condendo urbis ? --209.201.114.50 (talk) 02:30, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Latin just works that way. Literally it means 'from the founded city (onwards)'. It has to be in a past tense to refer to the right time. The gerundive refers to the future, so ab urbe condenda would imply 'after the city will be built'. I suppose the gerund would work, but adjectival phrases are much more common in Latin. It is a bit similar to summus mons meaning 'the top of the mountain' instead of just 'the highest mountain'. –Radulfr (talk) 22:40, 17 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ancient grammatical fluke? 

message: I do understand that the BC/AD distinction is necessary to make, but I feel it would be better to actually use (or at least indicate) the BCE/CE pair instead. I don't want to get into an edit war, so I'd rather just ask here if anyone objects to such changes before I go ahead with it.George Adam Horváth (talk) 14:10, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Although I have no preference, I note that the Manual of Style states "AD and BC are the traditional ways of referring to these eras. CE and BCE are becoming more common in academic and some religious writing. No preference is given to either style. ... Do not change from one style to another unless there is substantial reason for the change, and consensus for the change with other editors." What "substantial reason" can you give? — Joe Kress (talk) 06:31, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  BC/AD vs. BCE/CE 

message: There are a number of dates listed in the article without a year-number system abbreviation. As this article is about a different system than the traditionally used BC/AD, they should be marked in order to clearly show when these dates were.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.186.14.6 (talk) 15:05, 10 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Year-numbering for all listed dates 

message: The celebration of Antonius Pius in 148 AD makes sense, the 900. anniversary. But what was Hadrianus celebrating in 121 AD which was the rather unremarkable 873. anniversary? 157.157.184.146 (talk) 21:00, 26 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  What was Hadrianus celebrating? 

message: :748 AUC = 6 BC (real birthday of Jesus Christ on April 17) ref: Star of Bethlehem, Michael Molnar http://MichaelMolnar.com . I'm currently watching History Channel's History's Mysteries "In Search Of Christmas" which includes an interview with the astronomer Michael Molnar who discovered Jesus' real birthday of April 17, 6 BC / 748 AUC. - Brad Watson, Miami 71.196.11.183 (talk) 22:43, 23 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry: that's a self-published web page, which can't be used to reference material contained in Wikipedia articles. --Old Moonraker (talk) 08:52, 24 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: The book the site advertises, though, was published by Rutgers University Press, which isn't a vanity printer, so it should probably be an acceptable reference.  Does anyone have it to dig up references to it? --Wtrmute (talk) 18:41, 16 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  748 AUC = 6 BC (real birthday of Jesus Christ on April 17)  

message: All the analysis of the ecclipse dates appears to be OR.  (It is also almost identical to material included in the Founding of Rome, under Date, which I have also flagged as OR.
Havelock Jones (talk) 09:43, 23 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Original research? 

message: Some of the dates are BC/AD and some are BCE/CE this needs to be corrected.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 114.74.223.225 (talk) 09:46, 28 August 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed.  There was just one date which was BCE, which I've reverted, as per discussion above.Havelock Jones (talk) 12:54, 28 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  The dates are not constant! 

message: ab urbe condita: Suppose that this year is 1 AUC (ab urbe condita). It's one year from the founding of the city. In other words, this is the year that follows the year during which the city was founded, no? So what year was the year of the founding of the city? If the calendar has no year zero, then that year was -1 AUC (ab urbe condita).
anno urbis conditae: Suppose instead that this year is 1 AUC (anno urbis conditae). Is it the year of the founding of the city? If so, then what was the prior year, a year prior to the year of the founding of the city? If the calendar has no year zero, then that year was -1 AUC (anno urbis conditae).
According to these meanings of the two phrases, -1 ab urbe condita was 1 anno urbis conditae. Likewise, 1 ab urbe condita was 2 anno urbis conditae. Now, which of the years, -1 ab urbe condita or -1 anno urbis conditae, is 753 BC? It cannot be both, though I won't argue for one or the other here. (Really, now. The arithmetic is fairly simple.) However, as I recall, the word conditae is, in part, an interesting play on words, not that this should have anything to do with our choice of which phrase, ab urbe condita or anno urbis conditae, we prefer when using the abbreviation AUC. After all, the root of condita is present in both phrases. 50.194.104.82 (talk) 23:57, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Replying to a very old post here, but the year 1 ab urbe condita is the year Rome was founded. When counting intervals, the people of that time included both the start point and the end point. Similarly, Jesus was said to have resurrected on the third day after his death. He died on Long Friday, and rose on Sunday, which to them was the third day. It's also the same with the year 1 from the birth of Jesus, which was the first year of his life, not the one that started when he turned 1. Anno urbis conditae, on the other hand, I have only encountered on Wikipedia, but I suppose it uses the same logic. Which means that 1 AUC = 1 AUC = 753 BCE. Radulfr (talk) 21:20, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, the name looks wrong but the Romans used inclusive counting in this situation. — LlywelynII 23:20, 18 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  What is ab urbe condita? What is anno urbis conditae? 

message: User:95.112.54.39 changed incarnation to birth of Jesus in this edit, with the edit summary
I have reverted the edit, because the Incarnation (where the capitalized Incarnation refers specifically to the incarnation of Jesus) is not just a theological issue, it also involves a date issue. Due to the date issue, "birth of Jesus" is too precise.
Some ancient authors thought the Incarnation occurred when Jesus was born; this date is not known, nor do we know what date Dionysius Exiguus had in mind when he created the Anno Domini year numbering system. Some authors, including virtually all modern authors, think the Incarnation occurred when Jesus was conceived. That is why Western Christian churches celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation nine months earlier than the Feast of the Nativity (Christmas).
But we don't know which viewpoint Dionysius held, and thus we don't know if the origin of our year numbering system is 25 March or 25 December. (We also aren't sure if the year Dionysius had in mind for whichever event was what we now call 2 BC, 1 BC, or AD 1, but that's a different problem.)
So we should stick to "Incarnation" in the article to reflect our lack of exact knowledge, rather than pretend we have knowledge that we don't. Sources for the information in this paragraph may be found in the footnotes to the Anno Domini article.
In addition to the correct degree of precision regarding dates, the Incarnation was the event that Dionysius wanted to memorialize by his choice of year numbering system. So it is more accurate to refer to the event that inspired the inventor, regardless of our opinions about the event. Jc3s5h (talk) 13:31, 3 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Incarnation or Nativity?

message: One point this article over looks -- but needs to address because it seems to be a widespread misconception to the contrary -- is that the Romans rarely used a.u.c. dating; the usual dating schemes were consular dating (naming the 2 consuls in office at the time), or by the year of the Emperor (in the Principate this was the anniversary the Emperor was granted tribunicia potestas; in the later Empire, it was the actual year of his reign), or by the indiction. This really needs to be stressed: I can easily provide hundreds -- if not thousands -- of example of consular dating (Cicero used it, the laws in the Codex Theodosianus used it, countless papyri & inscriptions used it), several examples of tribunican dating (e.g., it appears on many coins, while military diplomas used tribunican & consular dating), & at least as many examples of dating by indiction (its use was widespread from the 4th century on); however, while I know I've seen a.u.c. dating used by the ancient Romans, I would need to do some serious research to find any examples of a.u.c. dating used in daily or official life.
Yes, a.u.c. dating by the ancients was that uncommon. And various parts of the Empire continued with their traditional dating systems (e.g., dating by Olympiads, or Athenian eponymous archons) well into Byzantine times, so using a.u.c. would be practically an entry in the "Other" category. -- llywrch (talk) 15:52, 3 June 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: There's a trope about it, if that helps. — LlywelynII 23:19, 18 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  a.u.c. dating never really caught on 

message: If urbe means Rome, should it be capitalized as the proper name of a city, as Wiktionary does: ab Urbe condita – wbm1058 (talk) 19:29, 20 November 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: The "urbs" is neither here nor there. It should be in all caps since it's the proper name of an era. That said, Googling "ab urbe condita -Livy" pulls up a laundry list of major dictionaries who have adopted the lower-case convention (the sole exception capitalizes it for the page name but then lists it in lower-case on the actual page) and we shouldn't buck them. — LlywelynII 23:18, 18 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Capitalize Urbe? 

message: Ab urbe condita was the phrase used to refer to a given year in Ancient Rome in the classical period, say up to the fifth century AD. To include random dates from the modern era just to show what the AUC date would be seems WP:OFFTOPIC and I propose a trim. Comments, and suggestions as to any later circumstances where "AUC" was still used, welcome.--AntientNestor (talk) 20:44, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Good. The idea was mistaken: Ab urbe condita (particularly Varro's exact number) was an era used by practically no one in the classical period and one much discussed in modernity. Anachronistic application to the moon landing is entirely appropriate and, if anything, more appropriate than using it for events from the year of the consulship of Julius Caesar and that other guy. — LlywelynII 21:02, 5 June 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  In classical antiquity 

message: I'm sure the article has gone through several processes of expansion and curation by this point. It needs to go back to one of the earlier ones in part or toto. Founding of Rome#Chronological disagreements &c. and Secular Games currently handle this topic better than its own article does. Varro's number isn't the only one; it wasn't the only one in antiquity; it wasn't the exact one used by the fasti; and the article shouldn't  by pretending any of those were true. 
Rephrase to make both the varied start points and the varied computations clearer, pointing out that Varro's number was notable but 753 BC became the single fixed date only in modern scholarship. Add the chart of other dates in other sources from Founding of Rome here. 
Restore/add discussion of how to use the system for dates before the foundation of Rome, even if  unhelpfully also abbreviates as AUC. (No, it doesn't matter that such dating is an anachronism. Using the system at all is largely anachronistic.) — LlywelynII 21:18, 5 June 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: Cleanup