Caesar\'s Calendar. Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History (Sather Classical Lectures)

(“When at the appointed time the longed-for lights/day arrived,” 31). Commenta- tors tell us that finito tempore= definito tempo ...

even imagines calendars in operation at the epoch when gods still mingled with humans, even though, as we saw above, the usual t ...

ination, as Seneca attempts the impossible task of projecting oneself back into the period before the Iron Age of sailing and ag ...

tion of the agricultural with the natural life. A telling quotation from a modern his- torian, Ernest Gellner, illustrates how i ...

(omnia ista... hominis... non sapientis inuenta sunt,24), he says — at which point he does at last produce his swerve into the l ...

letter so far: non enim dat natura uirtutem: ars est bonum fieri(“For nature doesn’t just givevirtue; it is an artto become a go ...

ascent from Iron to Gold by representing a movement “downwards.” The repeti- tion backwards of this progression through time inv ...

merely repeated, with cycles of civil war, instead of potentially glamorous Trojan wars, cycles that can never escape from their ...

had spent a lot of his career discoursing on the moral problems of gold in its lit- eral, physical sense, and it is perhaps no s ...

state was one for bumpkins: simplicitas rudis ante fuit; nunc aurea Roma est (“Uncultured simplicity existed formerly; now there ...

Myth into History II: Ages of Gold and Iron ence on his property of a vast cave stuffed with bullion (16.1.1). In accordance w ...

out to and grasp. Calpurnius Siculus, writing in an age even more fallen than Nero’s, has given a cruel extra twist to this appr ...

five. Years, Months, and Days I Eras and Anniversaries 138 STARTING POINTS In the first four chapters we investigated the ways i ...

is at stake in the recurrence of days. In the next, and final, chapter, we continue to investigate the power of the Roman Fasti, ...

numismatic.^8 I do not mean to imply that the system of honorific exchange is not worth the serious attention of any historian, ...

the foundation of the city, but their motive in each case is always something more than just providing a date, and they do not d ...

There is much debate about Flavius’s method and purpose, and even about whether with this terminology he was referring to an agr ...

frontations between the East and the West, culminating, as it began, in Greek vic- tory.^34 Such historiographical constructions ...

major Roman time machine, for it almost certainly housed, and almost certainly for the first time, both kinds of Roman Fasti, a ...

tianity produced many variations of significant multiples of the talismanic “1,000.”^47 Other groupings of units of one hundred ...