their historical (and aetiological) clock; he and his rites mark the starting-point of
Arcadian history.”^148
What happens when time hits space, as Katherine Clarke has shown us in her
studies of history and geography, is that space becomes place: mere area becomes
significant locality once it becomes a historical venue for agents moving in plotted
time.^149 When Aeneas meets Evander, Rome becomes a true “place” for the first
time as it is fixed in a grid of meaningful time, and the anchoring of time and place
in the ritual calendar intensifies the effect, since the annotations for the festivals on
the calendar prescribe a day and almost always a place as well (usually a temple).^150
The two poles of time and place meet at the Altar of Hercules. Here Evander tells
Aeneas how they instituted the cult of Hercules: they have kept the day (seruauere
diem,269), and the first priest of Hercules has fixed the altar in a place, a grove
(hanc aram luco statuit,271).^151 These words refer back to the first glimpse of the
cult, when Aeneas first arrives, for these two key words of time and place are
already present there, die(102) and luco(104): the place word lucois carefully
placed in exactly the same place in the line on each occasion.^152 The festival’s
evocative sense of contiguity in time, providing a link across great lapses of time,
is powerfully reinforced by the persistence of the monument in its immovable loca-
tion: “periodic fusion with the past” provided by anniversaries “is even more evoca-
tive when synchrony is combined with constancy of place.”^153 Historical time and
mythical time are fused in the recurrent time of the festivals, and given a ground-
ing in the sacred places of the city.
REVOLUTIONS OF TIME
As Aeneas surveys the city’s landscape he is able to catch glimpses of the past
Golden Age of Saturn, seeing the wreckage of Saturn’s city (8.355 – 57). At the
same time, he is providing a focus for Virgil’s readers to contemplate the nature of
their own Age of Gold, and to envision the unknowable but inescapable future pat-
terns of imperial succession. For Virgil’s way of representing the layering of time
has a vertiginous dimension to it. The calendar allows for connections between
widely separated epochs, but the identity of the day always allows for thinking of
the gap between the days, and the massive gaps between past and present are insis-
tently making themselves felt all through the book. Further, in Aeneid8 another
way of reaching the past is presented as well, in the form of a return to the Golden
Age.^154 If you can conceive of a revolution of time, you can potentially conceive of
a revolution that keeps on revolving, not just back up to the Golden Age, but back
Revolutions of Time. 163