Champlin 2003b, 53 – 54, for the way that Nero forced a unique postponement of the
Olympic Games (from 65 to 66) to coincide with his tour of Greece.
Even the consuls’ value as a date is called into question at Ann.4.1.1, as Mar-
tin and Woodman (1989) point out ad loc.; here the consuls’ names are followed by the
emperor’s regnal year (nonus Tiberio annus erat); cf. Morgan 1998, 587.
Morgan 1998, 586; as he remarks, “with the privative se‘Sejanus’ is almost lit-
erally ‘lacking in Janus’ ” (587 n. 8).
Grafton 1993, 233, referring to Scaliger 1583, 157.
117.Post hominum memoriam nulla gens in terris ineptiore anni forma usa sit,Scaliger
1583, 126 (trans. Grafton 1993, 233).
Respectively, Livy 37.4.4, 44.37.8; Michels 1967, 102 – 3.
Stern 2003, 59 – 60.
Modern science ’s measurements of years and days and minutes and seconds
has recast even this conception of the relationship between the thing being measured
and the units being used to measure it (Burnett 2003, 9 – 10; Holford-Strevens 2005, 15).
For most of modern scientific history, the movement of the earth through space in rela-
tion to other bodies has been both the phenomenon we wantto measure and the phe-
nomenon we useto measure. Scientists eventually reached such accuracy in the mea-
surement of other time-lapse intervals that their calibrations have outstripped and
become independent of the astronomical relationships that the process of measuring
was originally designed to capture. See Holford-Strevens 2005, 15, and Benson 2005 for
the hard case of the “leap second,” the unit that is periodically inserted into interna-
tional time measurement in order to calibrate between time measured as a function of
the earth’s rotation (“Universal Time 1,” U.T.1) and time measured as vibrations of the
cesium atom (“International Atomic Time,” T.A.I.). As Benson shows, to use only
T.A.I. as the standard, and omit the leap second as a way of calibrating the two mea-
sures, would be “to uncouple our time-keeping from the rotation of the earth” — to
him, a perilous step. In November 2005, after considerable debate by the responsible
body in Geneva, it was decided to insert a leap second after all, so that our measurement
of time continues to be linked notionally to the movement of the earth through space.
Stern 2003, 60.
Cf. Dunn 1998a, 224: “We tend to think, with our modern prejudices, that a
calendar should somehow be regular or precise, and that an irregular calendar must be
diverging from a more regular or more accurate counterpart. But there is no reason to
imagine that Greek festival calendars were ever designed to be, or were ever expected
to be, precise. Their purpose was to schedule monthly and annual festivals, and to
allow these to be performed at a regular or convenient time.” Cf. Michels 196, 16 n. 19,
on the Roman Republican calendar as a “purely civil calendar, designed to guide the
religious, political, legal, and business activities of Roman citizens.”
Dunn 1998a, 224.
notes to pages 192 – 195