Caesar took charge of this along with many other things” (sed tamen errabant etiam
tunc tempora, donec/Caesaris in multis haec quoque cura fuit,3.155 – 56). The Roman
calendar is a microcosm or even an allegory of the Roman world, moving from a
ramshackle freedom to increasing regulation under the Caesars. Here again we see
the force of the “fall from grace” template we investigated in chapter 4, as humans
move from a supposed time before time into the increasingly tight control of the
conditions of modernity. Ovid sees very clearly the ideological motivation behind
Caesar’s reform, as is revealed by the way he describes Caesar “taking charge of
the times along with many other things”: shortly thereafter, the point is reinforced
when Ovid says that Caesar “wanted to know in advance the heaven that had been
promised to him; nor as a god did he want to enter, a guest, into homes he didn’t
know” (promissumque sibi uoluit praenoscere caelum/nec deus ignotas hospes inire
domos,159 – 60).
For all the success of Caesar’s harmonizing procedures, Ovid knows, just as
Pliny does, that the controlling power of the grid falls short of controlling nature,
or of ultimate success in tracking its day-to-day unpredictability. The inherent
arbitrariness of the human plotting of time is an important theme in Ovid ’s poem,
highlighting the way in which the Romans could appreciate that even the web that
Caesar had thrown over the flow of time was fundamentally a convention, a
human grid for human convenience, ultimately incommensurable with the phe-
nomena it purported to capture.^159 The first line of Ovid ’s poem announces his
subject matter as Tempora cum causis Latium digesta per annum(“Times arranged/
organized/ classified through the Latin year, along with their causes/origins”),
and in line 27 he mentions the first Roman to start this arranging process, Romulus
(tempora digereret cum conditor Urbis,“when the founder of the city was arranging/
organizing the times”). The tempora,“times,” announced as his subject in the first
line are humanly determined time units, as is clear from the fact that they have
causae,human “causes” or “origins.” Naturaltime, however, is not arranged
by human agency through the year but is indivisibly continuous: ter sine perpetuo
caelum uersetur in axe(“Let the heaven revolve three times on its perpetual/
unbroken axis,” 4.179).^160 The flow of time and the human grid can never finally
be one and the same. Ovid reminds us early on that there are gaps between the
times of the year and the days of the calendar, when he is searching for the “Day
of Sowing” (dies Sementiua)in his book offasti(1.657 – 58). The Muse intervenes
to tell him that this is a movable feast, to be announced by the priests; as she says,
temporaand dies,season and day, are sometimes disjointed (utque dies incerta sacri,
sic tempora certa,661).
The Civil and the Natural. 203