Cal rugby game (they lost, but only just). Crawford Greenewalt, my neighbor
across the corridor in Dwinelle Hall, allowed me to borrow from his personal
library and was always happy to help me find my way through the labyrinth of that
building. The graduate students in my “Aetiologies” seminar were a delight to
work with, and my Sather assistants (Chris Churchill, Athena Kirk, and Antonia
Young) were models of patience and efficiency. Mark Griffith’s daughter, Zoe,
kindly lent me FAJ so that I could commute. My old friend Magen Solomon gen-
erously invited me to stay in her house in Oakland during my visit; my warm
thanks to her for her kindness and thoughtfulness, and her great company. Until
the last minute, my wife and I had hoped that all of us could come to Berkeley for
the semester; I must thank Jude and my children for putting up with my absence
when that proved impossible.
This book is fundamentally still the six lectures I gave at Berkeley. Even though
I have documented and expanded the arguments, I have held on to the great oppor-
tunity the Sather Lectures provide of writing a book that maintains the freedoms
of the lecture format. Without, I hope, falling into irresponsibility or cutting too
many corners, I have tried to exploit the opportunity of opening up subjects that
interested me even though I could not be comprehensive or exhaustive. Even so,
at times I have felt overwhelmed by the magnitude of the subject, and by my sense
of inadequacy in the face of all the skills that one really needs to work properly on
the topic of time. I kept thinking of the savage attack that A. E. Housman makes
on one of his predecessors, C. M. Francken, in the preface to his edition of Lucan:
“The width and variety of his ignorance are wonderful; it embraces mythology,
palaeography, prosody, and astronomy, and he cannot keep it to himself ” (Hous-
man 1927, xxxiv – v). Astronomy I must certainly count as one of my many areas
of ignorance for the task before me, and I must include others too — astrology,
mathematics, epigraphy, philosophy. I am all too aware that the great figures in the
field of historical chronology and astronomy have established unmatchable stan-
dards of scholarship. I have still not fully recovered, for example, from the shock
of realizing that when Felix Jacoby published Apollodors Chronik,a study that
appears to embody a lifetime ’s learning, and that shows no areas of ignorance, he
was twenty-five years old. Likewise, for someone who thought he knew something
of Roman studies, it was a sobering experience properly to encounter the work of
Mommsen for the first time.
I have, then, picked many brains. It is a pleasure to acknowledge and thank Bill
Anderson, John Bodel, Ted Champlin, Emmanuele Curti, Emma Dench, John
Dillery, Harriet Flower, Michael Flower, Tony Grafton, Erich Gruen, Tom Hare,xii. preface
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