can calendar to assume that it posited a primitive one-to-one correspondence between
the performance of a particular festival and the desired effect in the natural world.
- The author’s eightieth year (Rust.1.1.1).
- Rüpke (1995c, 298) remarks on the significance of these words but misinter-
prets them as a result of placing the date of the De Re Rusticabefore, rather than after,
the Julian reform. - Cf. Brind ’Amour 1983, 15 – 21, on this section, and on how the hard work of
synchronization between the seasons and the civil year must have been done by Sosi-
genes and Caesar. - So Lehoux (forthcoming), chap. 3. Gee (2001, 520 – 21) attractively suggests
that Cicero’s Arateamay be similarly used as a control for attitudes to natural time
before and after the reform. When Cicero translated Aratus in his early youth, the ratio
of the heavens was inspiringly ordered, but it was, as it were, self-contained, for the
regularity of celestial processes was its own clock; when the character Balbus quotes
from the Arateain De Natura Deorum,after the reform, his comments show a new
apprehension of a new kind of harmony, for the ratioof the heavens is now measura-
ble by a calendar for the first time: as she says, Pease (1955 – 58, ad loc.) drew out the
implications of Balbus’s comments on how “day, month, year have been given bound-
aries by humans” (ab hominum genere finitus est dies, mensis, annus,2.153). - E.g., Rust.1.29.1, on the things to do “between the onset of the west wind and
the vernal equinox”; 1.30, on the things to do “between the vernal equinox and the ris-
ing of the Pleiades.” - Note especially 18.234 – 37 for the dates of various constellations’ and stars’
risings and settings. - The framework is still useful: cf. Whitrow 1989, a valuable study of concepts
of time through history, which begins with a discussion of “conventional” and “civil”
time in relation to perceived “absolute” time (3 – 4). - I am indebted here to Marie Louise von Glinski and Martin Sirois, students in
a Princeton seminar on Ovid ’s Fasti,who wrote fine papers exploring these questions
in the context of Romulus’s construction of the calendar (Ov. Fast.1.27 – 42). - Cf. Hinds 1992, 148 – 49, on Ovid ’s questioning of the degree to which Augus-
tus’s “version of the calendar” is “natural and ‘given.’ ” After all, as Gosden 1994, 122,
points out, “there are no natural patterns of time” for humans. - On these different concepts of time in Ovid, and their interaction, see the
important discussion of Newlands 1995, esp. 27 – 50. - Cf. Censorinus DN21.12 – 13; Blackburn and Holford-Strevens 1999, 784 – 85.
- Samuel 1972, 16 – 17.
- Ov. Fast.1.39, Martis erat primus mensis,with Bömer 1957 – 58, 1:39 – 44.
- In Britain and the Empire until 1752, the year didbegin in the spring, on 25
March — a “natural” beginning date for another reason also, in that this day, the Feast
notes to pages 200 – 204. 297