While your story hardly happened at the time you imagined, you might have hit the right place. Quite possibly, a roman priest (pre-christian) may have been involved in such a conversation:

From what I have heard/read (I wasn't around at the time, so this is all hearsay, obviously) - both the Egyptians and the Mesoamerican people knew the correct year length (the Mesoamerican even at least as precise as our 365.24219 days) - not due to precise instruments, but through patient long-term observation. But they refrained from modifying anything in their calendar, for fear of invoking the wrath of some god or another - well, one Pharao tried, but his priests didn't follow.

Much later (but earlier than any pope), the romans had a god named Terminus, who was the god of border stones and limits (yes, the word "terminal" is derived from his name, an airport terminal is at the boundary between "on the ground" and "up in the air", and someone terminally ill is at a boundary, too). The romans didn't even dare to move an altar dedicated to him (or maybe it was a mere border stone, as all border stones were kind of an altar for Terminus), at a place where a Zeus temple was about to be constructed, instead they left a hole in the roof of Zeus' temple, to fulfil the condition that Terminus' altar remain under the open sky.

This god, as most others, had a festival, and his, of course, was under no circumstances to be moved, either. So, when the romans noticed that - with a fixed-number-of-days year length - the year would move through the seasons, they feared that might invoke the wrath of this god, and so they did opt to use leap days.

In order to maintain the correct distance between the day of Terminus' festival, and both the beginning and the end of the year, they inserted any correction days (at least once even a whole month) at that specific date, which is the reason why most popes observed their leap days on February 24 (with any festivities between Feb.24 and Feb.28 in leap years moved by a day). Not before 1969 did the Pope have his leap day on February 29.

In reply to Re: Leap years? How does that work? by soonix
in thread Leap years? How does that work? by talexb

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.