out in dialogue with Greek schemes of time, I have found myself once more
returning to the problem of cross-cultural comparisons between Greece and
Rome.^7 Indeed, comparison turns out to be the main theme of the investigation, for
almost all the schemes I discuss have an element of comparison of like and unlike
inherent in them — between Greece and Rome, myth and history, past and present,
city and country, nature and culture.
I do not promise to find a unifying holism behind these topics. I do not aim to
reconstruct a unitary Roman temporal worldview. Various schools, especially that
associated with Lévi-Strauss, have advanced the idea that cultures do operate with
incommensurable, wholly culturally determined worldviews, and by this model
each culture will have its own unique and distinctive way of configuring time.^8
Since such approaches tend to share a holistic tendency, the society’s distinct view
of time will often be presented as a unitary one, and its quintessential expression
will regularly be sought in a ritual context, held to embody the core of the society’s
beliefs. Yet the multiplicity of any group’s possible constructions of time is more
striking than its uniformity;^9 and ritual constructions of time are only one of many
sets, not enjoying any necessary primacy over the others.^10
An example of a supposedly distinctive cultural time-view that will be familiar
to classicists is that of the Greek “circular” conception of time, as opposed to the
“linear” or teleological conception of the Hebrew Bible. It has, however, been
repeatedly demonstrated that this is a misconception as far as both the Greeks and
the Jews are concerned, mistaking occasional or circumscribed or dialectical usages
for some holistic mentality.^11 As A. Möller and N. Luraghi well put it, “We cannot
label one culture cyclical, another linear, because most people perceive time in
different ways according to their context or situation, with the result that any one
culture is characterized by a range of different perceptions of time.”^12 In any soci-
ety individuals are liable to inhabit different frames of time, often simultaneously —
cyclical or recurrent, linear, seasonal, social, historical.^13 The earliest study I know
of that explores the experience of dwelling in such different frames of time is that
of Le Goff(1960). Here we meet the bicameral mind of a medieval merchant, who
occupies his own mercantile time horizon while still intermittently engaging with
the Church’s time horizons; he is engaged throughout in a dialectic between two
different temporal calculi, of profit versus salvation, of time to be used as a com-
modity versus eternal time as the goal of his earthly existence.
If this interest in internal diversity and multiplicity is a challenge to the model
of unitary and discrete worldviews, then so is the growing tendency to see more in
common across different societies than was the case in past scholarship, as some
Introduction. 3