THE CIVIL AND THE NATURAL
The kind of distinction Pliny is working with is one that matters profoundly to
many Romans who write on the calendar. It would have made instant sense to
Varro, for it fits into his favorite polarized pair, the “civil” and the “natural,” which
we have already observed in his antithesis in De Lingua Latinabetween “the divi-
sion made by nature” (naturale discrimen) and “the names of the days as given by
the city” (ciuilia uocabula dierum,6.12). This pairing likewise figures heavily in the
work of Censorinus, who is greatly indebted to Varro’s work. Much of the organi-
zational backbone of Censorinus’s De Die Nataliis provided by the interplay
between the civil and the natural, especially in terms ofsaecula(17.1), years (19.4),
months (21.1), and days (23.1). The working method is to establish that in each case
there is a measurable unit of time “out there” in nature, which different societies
approximate or represent in different ways.^157 Whether the issues are framed in pre-
cisely this Varronian manner or not, the fascination of the interplay between the
natural and the constructed underpins much of the Romans’ engagement with the
Caesarian calendar, which invited appraisal as the most successful attempt by any
society to capture the natural world ’s rhythms in a human construction. The calen-
dar thus becomes indispensable to Roman thinking on the problem of culture. The
calendar can seem like the quintessential cultural product in its profound construct-
edness andits inextricability from realms of nature that are ultimately independent
of human control; its shaping of natural experience can seem so successful that its
shaping power is naturalized. The debate the Romans conducted about the natural-
ness or conventionality of their representations of time is, as we saw in the intro-
duction, one that continues to be conducted today, even if in rather different terms.
It is not surprising that Ovid is the author who responds with greatest zest to
the challenge of exploring these problems, in his calendar poem, Fasti.In his
treatment, to which we now turn, the Julian calendar feels at once profoundly nat-
ural, for it tracks the seasons and cycles of the natural year with unprecedented
success, and profoundly conventional, since it is up to society’s interpretation to
impose meaning upon these cycles and to mark them out in language and symbolic
representation.^158
Ovid represents the development of Roman time as the cumulative construction
of an ever tighter mesh between civil and natural time, culminating in Caesar’s
reform. At first “the stars ran free and unobserved through the years” (libera curre-
bant et inobservata per annos/sidera,3.111 – 12); astronomy assisted the early Roman
calendar, he continues (3.151 – 54), “but the times were still wandering around, until
- Years, Months, Days II: Grids of the Fasti