against the man who first “invented the hours” (primus qui horas repperit), the one
who first set up a sundial (solarium);when he was a boy, says the parasite, he fol-
lowed natural time, for his belly was his one true sundial, but now the sun, as mea-
sured by the sundials all over town, dictates when he, and everyone else, can eat.^44
The ordering of time is a foundational element of what it takes to live in the Iron
Age. It is not just an appurtenance, but a basic enabling constraint of civilization,
and its absence is therefore a defining characteristic of the previous age.
Such a picture of a pre-Promethean time before time dovetails with the views of
mythic time we examined in the previous chapter. In the time of myth the applica-
tion of chronology cannot get any traction: in the age of heroes there are no wall
charts that really work. In the Greek tradition in particular, the fall of Troy was
the most important of the possible moments of rupture, when a qualitatively
human time began to emerge from the twilight zone of the earlier chronology of
gods and heroes. Hesiod memorably expresses the conception that once upon a
time humans and gods dined and sat together (fr. 1.6 – 7). The notion that in the
ancient times people were somehow nearer to the gods persisted strongly:
Dicaearchus, for example, held that originally men were close to the gods, and the
Stoics also maintained that in the beginning men were more intimate with divinity,
having a consequently more intimate knowledge of divine things.^45 It is generally
the Trojan War that brings an end to this phase of human existence, because that
is when the gods stop mingling with humans, and, above all, that is when they stop
mating with them: it is here that the race of demigods ceases.^46 The gods of myth
have genealogies and progressions, but they all stop with the Trojan War demar-
cation. This is where the onward narrative of the gods stops, where narrative time
ends for them, right where the narrative of human historical time begins.
The other main divine plot stops here too. The overarching theogonic superplot
of the gods is essentially a story of recurrence, in which succession is followed by
succession, with sons overthrowing fathers only to be overthrown in their own
turn by their own sons. The gods embody a plot of potentially endless recurrence
and repetition, and this fundamental narrative momentum is halted only by
Jupiter’s refusal to mate with Thetis, in the generation before the Trojan War, to
stop the possibility of repetition of the divine plot.^47 Jupiter coveted the sea nymph
Thetis, but Themis’s prophecy said that the son of Thetis would be mightier than
his father, so with a unique act of self-control Jupiter managed to restrain himself
and married Thetis offto Peleus, who could afford to have a son stronger than
himself, Achilles.^48
Once Jupiter stops the plot of succession coming around yet again, and once the
Time before the Fall. 117