famous: “The war is what a.d.is elsewhere: they date from it. All day long you
hear things ‘placed ’ as having happened since the waw; or du’in’ the waw; or befo’
the waw; or right aftah the waw; or ’bout two yeahs or five yeahs or ten yeahs befo’
the waw or aftah the waw.”^24 One of my favorite modern examples is the ghastly
moment in Joy in the Morningwhen Bertie Wooster comes within an ace of losing
the brooch entrusted to him by Aunt Agatha to deliver to Florence Craye at
Steeple Bumpleigh. If he had lost it, he says, “the thing would have marked an
epoch. World-shaking events would have been referred to as having happened
‘about the time Bertie lost that brooch’ or ‘just after Bertie made such an idiot of
himself over Florence ’s birthday present.’ ”^25
The examples of Damasio, Twain, and Wodehouse can serve to remind us that
b.c.e.and c.e.dates do not speak for themselves, even if it usually feels as if they
do. The numbers are not just numbers. We may feel as if we orientate ourselves in
European history since archaic Greece on an axis of pure numerals, but those num-
bers are charged with event-laden significance, and the emptiness of a merely
numerical time grid comes home to someone like me as soon as I read a history of
a country about whose past I am relatively ignorant, such as premodern China. If
I open a book on China before 1500 c.e.I am immediately adrift in an ocean of dig-
its, for the events that have generated those numbers have no instinctive signifi-
cance to me. The only way the time lines of Asian history can come to make sense
to a novice like me is after a process of immersion in the events, so that the num-
bers are more than numbers, or else, as I find in my case, precisely through a pro-
cess of synchronism: the date of an event in Asian history may stick in my head if
I can find a link with a contemporary event in European history, so that the num-
ber thereby becomes meaningful, and memorable.
If modern Westerners operate in this way, then it is even more the case that
within a society without our b.c./a.d.axis people will almost inevitably organize
their perception of past time by relation to a striking event, involving well-known
people, shared in the memory of the peer community. An excellent early example
from Greece is in Xenophanes, who asks at dinner, “How many years do you have,
my good man? How old were you when the Mede came?’” (in “546/5 b.c.e.”).^26
What eventually comes to underpin the entire ancient project of organizing
historical time is precisely the use of such canonical events as hooks from which
intervals forwards or backwards could be counted; these intervals provided a way
of dividing the past, giving a kind of map, making it possible to develop a sense of
contours, large-scale and small-scale.^27 The backbone to the scheme of Eratos-
thenes’ Chronographiaeshows this very clearly. The first of Jacoby’s fragments
Every Date a Synchronism. 13