tion era in Emendatio Temporum;and 676 – 77, for its appearance as an era in Isagogici
Chronologiae Canones,which formed the armature of the later Thesaurus Temporum
(1606). Grafton regularly and defensibly inserts b.c./a.d.dates in parentheses when
quoting Scaliger’s text.
- Grafton 1993, 133.
- Wilcox 1987, 207; cf. Zerubavel 2003, 52, 92.
- E.g., Gomme 1945, 7: “Numbering years was a device half adopted by the
Romans (A.U.C. together with the consular names), but, by one of the curiosities of
history, it long eluded the Greeks.” As we shall see in chapter 5, counting years A.U.C.
was never an official or even historiographically canonical practice in Rome; similarly,
as we shall see throughout the first three chapters, while the Olympiad dating system
was an important one for the Greeks and Romans, it never came close to being a uni-
versal and self-sufficient era like our c.e.system, even among historians, who always
used it as only one of a number of ways offixing events in a temporal network. - A question addressed principally by Hunter (1982) and Wilcox (1987).
- Wilcox 1987, 9 (on centuries); Zerubavel 2003, 96. The saeculum,as Nicholas
Horsfall reminds me, is an important unit for the Romans, especially in prophetic or
religious contexts, as the longest life span of a human being, regularly rounded to one
hundred years (see Censorinus DN17 for a long discussion of various possible lengths
for the saeculum); as such, the saeculumcould be used for “interval-counting” to give
a sense of depth in time (e.g., Cic. De Orat.2.154, duobus prope saeculis ante). Vance
Smith points out to me that Dante similarly counts back “venticinque secoli” from his
own time to the sailing of the Argo in the final canto of the Divina Commedia(Paradiso
33.95). But the distinctive power of the modern “century” comes from the fact that it
is not a mobile unit, to be used as an interval marker from any ad hoc point of depar-
ture, but locked in to a preexisting grid. - From “The Sydney Highrise Variations” (L. Murray 1991, 177); quoted with
kind permission of Carcanet Press. - Note, for example, the “short twentieth century, 1914 – 1991” of Hobsbawm
(1994); the “long nineteenth century, 1780 – 1920” of http://www.kennesaw.edu/hss/
wwork/overview.htm; the “American century” of Slater and Taylor (1999); the “Ger-
man century” of Fukuyama (1999). - Shaw 2003, 29; cf. M. L. West 1978, 376: “Our system... appears to us to have
an almost objective validity, to be etched into the design of the universe.” - Such considerations go a long way to explaining why ancient societies did not
take up as a universal time chart the system of the astrologers, which, as Tony Grafton
points out to me, really did provide a supranational and agreed-upon scheme of time.
If (per impossibile) someone had wanted or managed to impose a universal time scheme
on the Empire, this would have been the best candidate. - Whitrow 1989, 159. Until the rapid transport of the last two centuries, far more
notes to pages 8 – 10. 219