As the 21st century proceeds we will begin to pass the 2000th anniversary of events that had a date AD.
Of course we have already had plenty of 2000th anniversaries of events BC (and 2500th, for that matter – as when in 1971 the Shah of Iran celebrated the supposed establishment of the Persian Empire in 530 BC). But these anniversaries based on intervals which straddle the BC/AD divide are less obvious, as the numbers don’t echo in the same way. For example, 1970 AD doesn’t “rhyme” with 31 BC in the way that 2009 AD “rhymes” with 9 AD. There is also the additional nuisance that there was no Year 0, which means that (for example) midsummer AD 1 was one, not two, years after midsummer 1 BC, so to calculate the separation between two dates, one BC and the other AD, after adding the figures you then have to remember to subtract 1 from the total.
Nowadays, however, we are moving into real “+2000” territory, when just adding or subtracting 2000 will bounce the imagination back and forth between two historical dates.
Perhaps the first great dramatic one of these is the bimillennial anniversary of the disaster that befell three Roman legions in the Teutoburger Forest in Lower Saxony, Germany, 9 AD. Trapped in the forest by an alliance of tribesmen under the leadership of Hermann, the Romans under Publius Quinctilius Varus fought for three days. Varus, facing defeat, killed himself; the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Legions legions were annihilated; and Germany, because of this decisive event, remained outside the Roman Empire.
2014 will be an exceptional year for anniversaries. Besides the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War, the bicentenary of the burning of Washington, the tercentenary of the death of Queen Anne and the end of the Stuart period, and the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn, we will be treading the thicker carpet of thousands – both the bimillennium of the death of the Emperor Augustus and the accession of Tiberius (AD 14), at which point Tacitus begins his Annals, and the millennium of the battle of Clontarf (1014), in which Brian Boru, perhaps the greatest king of Ireland, was killed – and of the savage revenge taken on the Bulgars by the Byzantine Emperor, Basil the Second, also in 1014.
