Introduction
1Someone writing a book on “time” is well advised not to type the word into a
library catalogue search early on in the process. According to the bibliographic
guide of S. L. Macey, some 95,000 books were published “on time-related sub-
jects” between 1900 and 1990; in the fifteen years since then, boosted by the mil-
lennium, there have no doubt been at least another 35,000 at the rate of increase he
charts.^1 As “the most widely used noun in the English language,”^2 “time” can take
you in any direction, and it continually involves other subjects as it goes. “Place”
and “space,” to take just one example, are words regularly twinned with “time,”
producing titles such as What Time Is This Place?or Timing Space and Spacing
Time.^3 We shall, accordingly, see throughout this study that Roman conceptions of
time and of space are inextricably linked. When the Romans first started trying to
map themselves into the larger Mediterranean world, their sense of where they be-
longed and how they fitted in was a challenge simultaneously to their sense of time
and their sense of space; the charts they needed were geographical and chronolog-
ical at once. Providing such charts was harder than it may appear, not least because
charts of time and space do not always overlap harmoniously. Different parts of the
world can appear to occupy different dimensions of time, “allochronies,” as
Johannes Fabian (1983) calls them, niches where the quality of time appears to be
not the same as “ours,” where the inhabitants are stuck in the past or are perhaps
already ahead, in the future.
Roman society is a rich test case for the student of time, straddling as it does