is at stake in the recurrence of days. In the next, and final, chapter, we continue to
investigate the power of the Roman Fasti, the monuments by which the city’s time
is organized and memorialized.
ERAS
The contemporary world takes the use of a particular era in dating so much for
granted that surprisingly many people can be startled when they are reminded that
the date “2007” is precisely the product of an era, a count from the watershed of
the birth of Jesus Christ.^1 A less secularized Islam can less readily overlook the fact
that the Muslim tally of years goes back to a specific event, the Hegira, or “depar-
ture,” of the Prophet from Mecca in 622 c.e.Modern b.c./a.d.dates are so “nat-
ural” to us in all their utility and convenience, allowing projection forward into the
future as easily as tracking back into the past, that it may seem automatic to assume
that the Greeks and Romans would use the mechanism of orienting themselves in
time by counting from an agreed mark in past time. As we have already seen in the
first two chapters, however, eras hardly figured even in historiography, where the
Olympiad system might appear tailor-made to assist historians, and outside these
learned circles even the Olympiad system had no impact.^2 In general, the concept
of the era had a circumscribed role to play in the life of the societies of the pre-
Christian Greco-Roman Mediterranean.
There were certainly a great number of eras deployed by individual cities,
provinces, and kingdoms.^3 Yet the only era that broke out of the commemorative
or scholarly domain to impose itself on official practice and daily life was the
Seleucid era.^4 This era was used as a dating system by the inheritors of Alexander’s
Persian domains, taking as year one the year we call 312/11 b.c.e., the year that
Seleucus I reconquered Babylon. Strictly this only became an era (rather than sim-
ply a traditional regnal year count) when Seleucus’s son Antiochus I succeeded
him and continued the enumeration instead of beginning anew for his own reign.^5
The Seleucid era was a prominent feature of their empire, regularly used for
official purposes of all kinds, and forming an integral part of their coercive appa-
ratus.^6 The era was very tenacious, continuing in use by the Arabs after the Arab
conquest — they called it the “era of the Romans,” the “era of Alexander,” or the
“era of the two-horned one [Alexander].”^7
With this sole, if important, exception, the eras are not really dating systems in
any significant sense. The eras supplement, rather than replace, existing dating
systems, and their status is honorific, so that often the only evidence for them is
Eras. 139