anthropologists have become more and more interested in what human beings
share after so many years of concentrating on what they do not share. A number
of recent anthropological studies have argued that the human experience of time
has more in common at fundamental levels of cognition than has generally been
allowed.^14 Gell, for example, reacts against the claims that other people inhabit
thought-worlds “where there is no past, present or future, where time stands still,
or chases its own tail, or swings back and forth like a pendulum”; such claims mis-
take ritual stagings for universal and radical understandings.^15 Adam (1990) goes
farther, seeking to ground the experience of time in the natural rhythmicity of
humans as organic life-forms: we do, after all, have circadian rhythms built in to
our biology, just as oysters and potatoes do.^16 But Adam herself argues that human
conceptualizing of time is, as she puts it, “irreducibly social since human culture is
a pre-requisite to the development of concepts.”^17
However this particular debate may develop in the future, it seems to me that
we may resist the deep relativism of the Lévi-Straussian model while still allowing
plenty of room for cultural specificity.^18 It still makes a difference whether you have
clocks or not, or whether you have written calendars or not, or whether your main
crop is rice in the plains of central India or sago in the forests of New Guinea, to
take the example used by Gell to illustrate the different pressures of time facing
cultivators in different parts of the world.^19 We shall be concentrating throughout,
then, on what is distinctive about Roman representations of time, without attempt-
ing to reduce the complexity of their different strategies into a holistic view. In
investigating the Romans’ assumptions about the workings and constructions of
time, it will also be important to keep facing the challenge of uncovering our own
assumptions about time.^20 We “know” what a date is, or a year, or a calendar; it is
all the more important to keep reminding ourselves of how often our understand-
ing of such apparently obvious concepts will completely misrepresent the Roman
equivalent — if indeed there is an equivalent. Studying Roman time becomes an
exercise in trying better to understand our own.
The book follows the structure of the six lectures in being divided into three
pairs of chapters, on three main topics. The first two chapters treat chronography,
through the focus of synchronization. Without a universally accepted dating
scheme, the societies of the ancient world had to chart past time by a complex sys-
tem of correlation, lining up significant events in the distinct time-columns of dif-
ferent cities, each of which had their own calendars, dating systems, and eras. The
historians of Greece had perfected a Panhellenic framework of cross-reference by
the time the Romans came onto the stage of Mediterranean history. The first two
- Introduction