city of Rome, an event that is surprisingly mobile, and that becomes a focus of
obsessive interest in the historiographical tradition. Even today there is dispute
over what it means to speak of the beginning of Rome as a mythical or historical
event, and in the ancient world there was even more at stake: the claims of the
Romans to status as full participants in the civilized world were involved in their
claims to a connection with Greek schemes of myth and history. Chapter 4 con-
siders a related demarcation moment in time, the division between the times of the
Gold and Iron ages, which could sometimes be seen as a kind of transition from
myth to history. For the Romans, this is the point at which organized time comes
into being along with the other appurtenances of civilization. Here we consider
also the related topic of the Romans’ long-standing fascination with the possibility
of a return to the lost Age of Gold.
The final two chapters turn to the Romans’ own distinctive indigenous charts of
time, the schemes of organization seen in the consular lists and in the calendar. The
lists of past consuls were the principal mechanism for charting the past time of the
city and provided a base for the Romans’ distinctive form of annalistic history. As
Rome went through the traumatic transition from Republic to Principate, the pres-
entation and function of the consular lists were transformed along with all other
aspects of public life, and the norms of historiography were correspondingly
redrawn in the process. The calendar likewise underwent radical changes as part of
these transformations. Totally remade by Julius Caesar, the new calendar’s power
and reach were unrecognizably different from those of its Republican predecessor.
We shall investigate the impact of the reformed calendar on the way the Romans
conceived of time ’s recurrence, and of the mesh between the time of the imperial
city and the time of the natural world. As the regulator of the city’s festival life, the
calendar had always provided a backdrop against which the Romans could reflect
on the meaning of the festivals and commemorations inscribed there; as the mean-
ings were transformed under the new regime, and especially as new festivals and
commemorations were added, the calendar became a different kind of document in
this regard as well. The calendar also provided a platform for connection between
past and present in the form of anniversaries, linking significant days and events
across time so as to throw into relief the question of the relationship between the
past and the present. The discussion of the calendar in these last two chapters will
complete a piece of intellectual ring-composition for me, since it was Ovid ’s cal-
endar poem, the Fasti,that first hooked me, almost twenty years ago, on the sub-
ject of Roman time.
- Introduction