Caesar\'s Calendar. Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History (Sather Classical Lectures)

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“race” to “age” represents a Roman politicizing and historicizing of an originally more
anthropological framework; cf. Momigliano 1987, 33 – 34.



  1. Gatz 1967, 229.

  2. See Campbell 2003, 345 – 49, for a fuller conspectus. Aratus is an interesting
    exception to the universal ban on plowing in the Golden Age: see Phaen.112 – 13, with
    D. Kidd 1997, ad loc.; cf. Kubusch 1986, 89 – 90.

  3. Blundell 1986, 104 – 5, 135 – 36; Versnel 1994, 106 – 7; Most 1997, 114.

  4. The omission of any word for “before” is idiomatic, but here the omission of
    the time word reinforces the complete absence of time divisions before Prometheus’s
    intervention. Greek sources usually attribute to Palamedes the credit for inventing
    nocturnal astronomy, and the sundial as well: Gratwick 1979, 311.

  5. See Murgia 2000 for a defense of the transmitted propter odoresin 5.1445, and for
    a clear statement of Lucretius’s antipathy to sailing (a topic to which we return
    shortly): my thanks to Charles Murgia for discussion of this passage.

  6. Quoted by Gell. NA3.3.5; my thanks to Stephen Hinds for pointing out to me
    the relevance of this fragment. Gratwick (1979) identifies Menander as Plautus’s
    model, writing at a time when the sundial was indeed a recent introduction to the city
    of Athens.

  7. On Dicaearchus fr. 56A Mirhady (2001) ( = Porph. Abst.4.2.1 – 9), see Della
    Corte 1976, 128; on the Stoics, Boys-Stones 2001, 18 – 43.

  8. Important discussion in Clay 1986, 166 – 68, identifying Aeneas as the last
    demigod; cf. Scodel 1982, 35 – 36, and Burkert 1995, 143, on the crucial significance of
    Troy as the cut-offpoint; cf. Clauss 2000, 24, on this theme in Apollonius’s Argonau-
    tica.In general, on the theme of the gods hiding themselves after the Golden Age,
    “ever since the world became real,” see Veyne 1988, 72.

  9. I am indebted to the thought-provoking remarks of Janan 1994, 109, discussing
    Catullus 64, to which we turn in the next section.

  10. Canonical version of the myth in Pind. Isthm.8.26 – 48; see Slatkin 1991, 70 – 77.

  11. Cf. van Groningen 1953, 97 – 100, on the static quality of the gods’ narrative time.

  12. Suggestive observations on these strategies of accommodation in Ando 2001,

  13. Veyne 1999 is an interesting discussion of these issues in Plutarch; I thank Peter
    Brown for the reference, and for discussion of the topic.

  14. Well stressed by Mazzoli 2001, 138.

  15. Jackson 1997, 249 – 51. As Jackson well shows (253 – 55), the “firstness” of the
    Argo in pre-Apollonian versions consists in its being the first Greek ship to penetrate
    the Black Sea; Eratosthenes, in Catast.35, written probably after Apollonius, “is the
    first Greek writer, so far as we know, to have referred to Argo as the first ship” (255).
    Ovid wittily combines the Greek version of the Argo as the first to enter the Black Sea
    with the developed Roman version of the Argo as harbinger of the Iron Age, when he


notes to pages 116 – 118. 263

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