November 7, 2019 29
The Invention of Time
G. W. Bowersock
Time and Its Adversaries
in the Seleucid Empire
by Paul J. Kosmin.
Belknap Press/Harvard University
Press, 379 pp., $55.00
Calendars are the bones of history.
They fortify the memory of individuals
and societies, and they suggest expla-
nations for documented events. With-
out them there would be no structure
to what happens apart from sequential
order. All calendars depend on astron-
omy and the cycles of the seasons, but
fixing a starting date is
unavoidable.
The history of the
Greek and Roman world
is full of different calen-
dars, often called eras,
which served states and
rulers as a means of com-
memorating them for
good or ill. Eras fur-
nished a commonly ac-
cepted chronology, often
with more than local rec-
ognition. The Romans
dated their republic from
the foundation of the
city (ab urbe condita),
which had a traditional
but fictitious date of 753
BCE, supported by the
first-century BCE scholar
M. Terentius Varro. The
Athenians dated by the
year of individual magis-
trates known as archons;
the Jews used traumatic
events such as the Babylo-
nian exile. Many individ-
ual cities had their own
calendars, which began
with the tenure of specific
magistrates or priests and
restarted at the beginning
of a new tenure.
An event could thereby
be dated in many ways. In
trying to locate the precise
time of the outbreak of the Pelopon-
nesian War, Thucydides, with his char-
acteristic thoroughness, offers a bouquet
of dates—the fifteenth year after the
conquest of Euboea, the forty-eighth
year of a priesthood at Argos, the year of
Pythodorus’s archonship at Athens, and
six months after the battle of Potidaea.
So it is hardly surprising that the
first king of the Seleucid monarchy in
Syria started a new calendar for his
empire from the time he moved into
Babylon in 311 BCE. He did not actu-
ally set up this new calendar until he
had eliminated all his rivals in 305,
but he retrojected his first year by six
years, so that his new era began in 311.
This move to establish his claim from
the earliest moment of his uncontested
authority in the region might easily be
understood as yet another attempt to
hitch a calendar to the reign of a king.
But through a dense and wide-ranging
study, grounded in the languages of the
region (Akkadian and Greek), Paul
Kosmin has brilliantly demonstrated in
his new book, Time and Its Adversaries
in the Seleucid Empire, that Seleucus
did much more than that.
Kosmin has seen, as no one before
him, the chronology and consequences
of the chaos that followed the death of
Alexander the Great in 323 BCE. His-
torians have, of course, recognized for
centuries that Alexander’s conquests
transformed the eastern Mediterra-
nean world, extending from the Middle
East all the way to the Ganges. His
achievements and his sudden death left
the Persian empire of the Achaeme-
nids on the brink of dissolution and the
whole of Syria and Palestine, as well as
western Asia Minor, open to competing
claims from the generals that survived
him, known as Diadochoi (“succes-
sors”). Alexander and the Macedonianarmy he brought with him left irrevers-
ible traces of Greek culture in the lands
through which he passed. The realms
over which his successors contended
were very different from what they had
been before he marched through them.
Alexander was not just another con-
queror in the ancient world. He severed
that world from its past. He hellenized
it, and at the same time he delivered a
lethal blow to its traditions. In secur-
ing an eastern empire Seleucus not only
brought an end to the squabbling over the
succession in the region: he inaugurated
a new era, as might have been expected.
But more than that: the era he inaugu-
rated was not to end with his death but
would continue to provide a calendar for
centuries afterward. Kosmin observes,The Seleucid Era was a continu-
ous, unbroken count of years....
At Seleucus I’s death in 281 BCE,
his son and successor, Antiochus I,
did not restart the count, and the
subsequent kings let it continue
unbroken. Accordingly, the Seleu-
cid Era’s time reckoning was unin-
terrupted, irreversible, paratactic,
cumulative, endless, and direc-
tional.... This Seleucid Era was
the world’s first continuous tally ofcounted years and the unheralded
model for all subsequent era sys-
tems, including the Common Era.The continuity of the Seleucid cal-
endar has been known since antiquity
and has been repeatedly emphasized in
studies of ancient chronology, but it is
Kosmin’s achievement to draw out the
implications of this new calendar for
subsequent time-keeping. It is by no
means clear that Seleucus saw himself
as the architect of a radical change in
recording time, but he undoubtedlywanted to ensure the continuity of his
dynasty. The Seleucid era, being open-
ended, overshadowed and superseded
the eras that his rivals established in
Egypt, Macedonia, and Asia Minor.After describing Seleucus’s initiative
Kosmin develops a powerful argu-
ment about how it influenced memory
of the past before Alexander. It is not
certain that Seleucus had this in mind,
because even without Seleucus Alex-
ander himself had already transformed
the nations he conquered, by importing
Greek culture and language along with
his Macedonian soldiers. But Seleucus
undoubtedly did more. He altered the
perceptions of the long past that ex-
tended from the Minoans and Myce-
naeans through the Persian Wars and
the age of Pericles all the way to Al-
exander. Among the Jews it was a past
that extended from Moses through the
Babylonian exile. Kosmin emphasizes
the historical fissure that Alexander
had opened up, and the way Seleucus
exploited this to solidify his power. The
centuries that followed until Pompey’s
arrival with Roman troops in the first
century BCE were inevitably different
in many ways, but above all they wereconspicuously disconnected from what
had gone before.The new Seleucid era proved to be the
first of the regional eras that eventually
proliferated all over the lands east of
the Mediterranean. These sprang up
largely from commercial and adminis-
trative contacts, not through conquest.
Many began as local city eras. In the
Roman provinces in the East various
cities adopted local eras on the Seleucid
model. After they took hold they were
often used beyond the cit-
ies where they began. For
example, the era of Bos-
tra, in northern Jordan,
became the era of the
entire Roman province
of Arabia—an era that
lasted into late antiquity.
In an excellent 1972 book
on Greek and Roman
chronology, which Kos-
min oddly omits, Alan
Samuel declared, after
describing Seleucus’s cal-
endar, “The number of
eras which came into use
and then expired to be
replaced by yet other eras
during Hellenistic and
Roman times is probably
not infinite, but I have not
been able to find the end
of them.”^1 One sympa-
thizes. Samuel’s frustra-
tion with the profusion of
post-Seleucid calendars
justifies Kosmin’s view
that the Seleucid era was
something new and that it
constituted, accidentally
or by design, a definitive
break with the past.
As Kosmin acutely ob-
serves, the memory of
the ancient Middle East
grinds to a halt after Al-
exander, and the past,
including the Babylonian captivity, be-
came frozen in time. The severing of
the past from the Seleucid era, Kosmin
argues, was a goal of the dynasty, which
tried to erase all that had come before it:This temporal field, generated
at court, propagated throughout
the empire, and reenunciated by
subject communities, took as the
limit point of appropriate histori-
cal reference the Seleucid Era....
The Seleucids’ pervasive and ex-
clusive orientation to their dynas-
tic present meant that they owed
no historical or moral debt to their
predecessors. The empire was
grounded only in itself.Since the Seleucid era, unlike for-
mer regnal eras that ended with the last
year of a monarch’s reign, did not end
with Seleucus’s death, his dating sys-
tem continued for centuries, long after
the demise of his family and kingdom.
It not only altered ways of reckoningA portion of a mosaic excavated this year from the Huqoq synagogue, likely depicting the resistance of the Maccabees to
the Seleucid king Antiochus IV in the mid-second century BCE, Lower Galilee, Israel; photograph by Jim HabermanJodi Magness(^1) Alan E. Samuel, Greek and Roman
Chronology: Calendars and Years in
Classical Antiquity (Munich: Beck,
1972), p. 246.