About the Month of October

This passage comes from pages 762 to 763 of Curiosities of Popular Customs and of Rites, Ceremonies, Observances, and Miscellaneous Antiquities by William S. Walsh (1925).

October. This month was so named because it was the eighth month in the primitive Roman calendar ascribed to Romulus. It became the tenth month in the calendar as revised by Numa, who added January and February, but it retained its original name, the more readily, perhaps, because it once more became the tenth month when the year commenced, as it did in early Christendom, with March. Julius Caesar in his revision of the calendar gave it thirty days, which number was changed to thirty-one by Augustus. As was the case with September, many Roman Emperors sought to change its name in their own honor. It was successively Germanicus, Antoninus, Tacitus, and Herculeus, the latter a surname of the Emperor Commodus. But none of these names clung. The Roman Senate had no better luck when they renamed it Faustinus, in honor of Faustina, wife of Antoninus.

The Anglo-Saxons called October Winterfylleth, a name which indicated that winter approached with the full moon of the month. In old almanacs the sport of hawking is adopted as emblematical of this which was accounted the last month of autumn. On October 23 the sun enters the sign Scorpio, the astronomical emblem said to typify, in the form of a destructive insect, the increasing power of cold over nature. In the same manner the equal influences of cold and heat are represented by Libra, or The Balance, the sign of the preceding month of September.

Hedge-crickets sing; and now, with treble soft,
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft.
(Keats.)

The warm sun is failing; the bleak wind is wailing;
The bare boughs are sighing; the pale flowers are dying.
(Shelley.)

The rivers run chill; the red sun is sinking,
And I am grown old, and life is fast shrinking.
(Hood.)

Yet for ever and aye I will bless his name,
While his winds blow fresh and his sunsets flame,
This prince of months, — October.
(Hayne.)