Epilogue
213The reach of the Romans’ time schemes was very great. They extended to heaven
to chart the constellations, in the knowledge that the constellations are the result of
human work. They extended back to the fall of Troy when the Roman story could
be said to begin, and sideways to take in the developments of the empires of
Greece and the Near East. Working in history, or operating synchronistic com-
parisons with other contemporary time schemes, required genuine sophistication
of a kind from which our universalizing and homogeneous schemes shield us.
Simply living at anything beyond subsistence level required operating with a cal-
endar of genuine complexity and dense semiotic power. The Romans created time
machines that we still inhabit, and they were working creatively on time from the
beginning of our historical understanding of their culture, in formats that I have
not been able to touch on. A chronologically organized study of Roman time
would perhaps begin with the layout of the comitiumarea in the Forum, with its
lines of sight used for determining and announcing sunrise, noon, and sunset; it
might then continue to investigate the use of buildings and of sundials to organize
the timely routines of law, politics, and commerce.^1
As I said in the introduction, I have on the whole excluded from the survey the
ways in which the individual person experienced and constructed the passage of
time. A powerfully condensed sequence of lines from Horace will have to atone for
this omission, since they itemize all of the principal time schemes that enfolded an
individual’s progress through time. The frames of time alluded to by Horace here