terms — this is when humans enter upon patterns of life that are still current, and
begin living a knowable and familiar life, continuous with ours. The terms of this
currently lived experience are radically different from those imagined before the
tipping point. As we shall see, according to this way of thinking the movement of
historical time has taken human beings out of a state of harmony with nature and
locked them into a place in nature unlike that of any other animal.^1
Troy is not the only moment of rupture in this tradition, and for the Romans it
is not even the single most significant one. The placing of the demarcation line
itself could vary widely, but wherever it fell, it created a traumatic fault line in
experience.^2 On the other side of that divide everything is different, “unlike,” and
fundamentally unknowable. Not the least significant of the categories of unlikeness
are the very contours and reliefs of time, and we shall pursue the question of how
differently time behaves on either side of that divide. What role do the various rep-
resentations of time play in the function of discriminating between the experience
of prehistory and the experience of history? Further, what happens to time right
on that moment of divide? What kind of temporal net can be thrown over that
transition? Other forms of temporality come into play here, differing from the
quotidian flow of ordered time; especially when we come to consider the possibil-
ity of a return to the previous state, the fantasy of turning back time will call into
question the basic structures of Roman time.
BEFORE THE FALL
The idea of a formerly happy time, when life was simpler and freer, before civi-
lization, before the decline, is one deeply embedded in ancient thinking, as it still
is in modern.^3 It is a variety of the myth of the fall from innocence, which appears
to be more or less universal, even if it can take on all kinds of forms in different
specific contexts. In the contemporary West the most prevalent form of the myth
involves the loss of community, after our supposed fall into the fractured and
atomized modernity of globalization.^4 Each modern subcommunity may have its
own variation on this basic theme. Within the discipline of classics, the common-
est variation is closely related to the myth of the loss of community, for it involves
lamenting the transition from the oral to the literate, the fall from a natural state of
orality into an estranged world of writing.^5
In such models of fall from innocence, the quality and nature of the experience
of time itself is regularly claimed to be different on the other side of the divide be-
tween innocence and contemporaneity. Anthropologists are still working through
Before the Fall. 109