five. Years, Months, and Days I

Eras and Anniversaries

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STARTING POINTS

In the first four chapters we investigated the ways in which Romans and Greeks
worked together to construct significant temporal patterns as Roman horizons
moved out to embrace the Mediterranean. The horizons of Roman time were pro-
gressively extended, reaching backwards to Troy and sideways to assimilate the
synchronistic time systems that the Greeks had devised as an indispensable part of
their own contentious historical sensibilities; further, key transitional moments in
Greek mythology became a tool for the Romans to use in order to reflect on their
status as an imperial people, guilty masters of nature and of technology. The final
pair of chapters will adopt a more Romanocentric focus, concentrating on the time
machines of the city itself. Here we shall consider distinctively Roman modalities
for shaping time — their cult of the anniversary, their internal dating systems, and
their molding of the temporal patterns of the year, especially in the form of that
great Roman monument that we still inescapably inhabit, the Julian calendar.
We begin with eras, which mark offwatersheds from which time may be
counted, and with anniversaries, which link points in time. Often, anniversaries
make their connections between points in time through symbolic totals of years
(twenty, one hundred, and so on), but what most Roman anniversaries connect are
significant days, so that already in this chapter we shall consider the beguiling
intricacies of the mechanisms of the Roman calendar, in order to understand what