The Attic calendar was an exclusively local phenomenon, used to regulate the internal affairs of the Athenians, with little relevance to the outside world.
For example, just across the border in Boeotia, the months had different names, and the year even began in midwinter.
Furthermore, while Greek months were supposed to begin with the first sighting of the new moon, it was determined locally and with a degree of variability.
An example is the island of Delos, where the calendar shared four out of twelve month-names with Athens, but not in the same places in the year.
There, even though the island was under some degree of Athenian control from around 479 to 314 BC, the year started, as with the Boeotians, at midwinter.
By tying the start of their year to the summer solstice Athenians forced the months to relate, with some elasticity, to the seasons.
In a county fair role, they encompassed a much broader range of activities than the word "religious" suggests and were central to the life of the city.
While the month-naming festivals of Pyanepsia, Thargelia and Skira were relatively important, some of the grandest celebrations in the life of the city are not recognised in the name of the month.
The calendars of the Ionian cities of Asia Minor (along the western coastline of modern Turkey) often share month names with Athens.
Rather than considering the month as a simple duration of thirty days, the three-part numbering scheme focuses on the Moon itself.
This strange juxtapositioning of the two days called the tenth, the earlier and the later, further highlighted the shift into the moon's waning phase.
(For instance, the 10 generals leading the 10 regiments, the 10 sets of public arbitrators, the 10 treasurers of the Delian league and so on.)
Each year, each tribe contributed 50 members to the council of 500 (boule), which played an important role in the administration of the city.
For one tenth of the year, each tribal fifty was on duty, with a third of them in the council chamber at all times as an executive committee for the state.
From several synchronized datings that survive, it is evident that the political and the festival years did not have to begin or end on the same days.
As a result, the meetings were bunched slightly toward the end of the month and made to dodge especially the larger festivals.
A date under this calendar might run "the 33rd day in the 3rd prytany, that of the tribe Erechtheis", the style used in Athenian state documents (surviving only as inscriptions).
In Athens in 271 BC, just before the Great Dionysia, four days were inserted between Elaphebolion 9 and 10, putting the calendar on hold.
A similar story comes from the 5th century BC but at Argos: the Argives, launching a punitive expedition in the shadow of the holy month of Karneios when fighting was banned, decided to freeze the calendar to add some extra days of war.
[3] Aristophanes' Clouds, a comedy from 423 BC, contains a speech whose complaint is brought from the Moon: the Athenians have been playing round with the months, "running them up and down" so that human activity and the divine order are completely out of kilter: "When you should be holding sacrifices, instead you are torturing and judging.
Within the broad divisions of the seasons, it relied on star risings and settings to mark more precise points in time.
[verification needed] Different star risings were keyed to various farm tasks, such as when to harvest: Hesiod in the Works and Days urges the farmer to harvest when the Pleiades rises (an event which elsewhere is set to mark the end of spring).
[6] The older tradition as seen in Hesiod's Works and Days was extended by astronomical research to the creation of star calendars known as parapegmas.
Lines of bare peg holes were used to count the "empty days" between what were taken as the significant celestial events.
Often set up in town squares (agoras), the tablets put the progression of the year on public display.
This system would have been fundamental to an individual's sense of the advancing year, but it barely intersected with the festival or state calendars.
As both narrowly local and cyclical in focus then, the calendar did not provide a means for dating events in a comprehensible way between cities.
A dating system using the four-yearly Olympiads was devised by the Greek Sicilian historian Timaeus (born c. 350 BC) as a tool for historical research, but it was probably never important on a local level.