tings beneath the earth and their risings” (lapsaque sub terras ortaque signa). These
“signs” look at first like a natural system in contrast to the human ordering of the
first line, and so, in an important sense, they are;^169 yet Ovid works at breaking
down this distinction too. The signaare themselves in fact the product of human
ordering and distinction, part of a signifying system, as Ovid implies when he
points out that the early Romans of Romulus’s time did not recognize the patterns
in the sky that were picked out by Greek astronomers (3.105 – 12). The early
Romans, according to this highly tendentious representation, are as ignorant as
men in the Golden Age, who just look up at the sky and see pretty dots, not semi-
otic patterns.^170 Both as celestial patterns and as indices of such foreign myths as
Andromeda or Arion, the signaare Greek. Here we catch a glimpse of the invet-
erately schizophrenic Roman attitude toward Greece, as the land of culture and
learning and as the land of a natural, especially mythic, existence.^171 Both these
ways of thinking underpin Ovid ’s signa,which are marked out by Greek astro-
nomical science and are simultaneously the repository of Greek natural myth as
opposed to the arranged human time units, tempora digesta,of the Roman fasti
grid. This Roman double perspective on the Greeks likewise finds expression in
the Greek zodiacal and seasonal annotations to the meridian line of Augustus’s
horologiumon the Campus Martius. In the excavated portions, the names of
the zodiacal constellations are in Greek, together with the phrases ETHSIAI
PAUONTAI(“the Etesian winds stop”), or QEROUS ARCH (“the beginning of
summer”).^172 Greek is the language of science for the Romans, and the horologium
complex recognizes and celebrates the way that Rome now controls the Greek
knowledge systems that made the new calendar possible; yet Greek is also the
“natural” language for marking the passage of the natural year.^173
THE COUNTRY’S TIME
AND THE CITY’S TIME
The binary opposition between natural and civil, then, is the default mode for ex-
ploring this conundrum of culture, however much someone like Ovid may decon-
struct it. With the Romans, a discussion of the interplay between natural and civil
will almost inevitably be filtered through the lens of the rural and the urban. It is
interesting to observe how carefully Roman authors could keep the prerogatives of
the city’s fastifrom encroaching upon the world of the country; here we may see
the limits of the reach of the city’s fasti,and these limits throw into relief the power
of other forms of time representation, which are not inscribed in the fasti.
- Years, Months, Days II: Grids of the Fasti