some of the usually accepted divisions in sociology. Rome was as highly developed
in terms of social and technological organization as a premodern society could
possibly be, with an accompanying battery of elaborate calendars, astronomical
knowledge, and records and monuments of the past. At the same time, in its lack
of clock regulation for synchronizing mass labor and travel, or of particular divi-
sions of daily time beyond the fluctuating hour, it was a society that remained pro-
foundly premodern and preindustrial in terms of the impact of time structures on
the individual’s lived experience.^4 Further, one may observe without undue
romanticizing that even urban Romans were aware of their society’s agrarian basis
and of the patterns of recurrent life in the country, in a way that few modern city-
dwellers are. Roman time structures, then, like so many other features of Roman
society, are premodern and modern at once, resisting “the simple dualisms that
have been used to characterise societies, including industrial versus pre-industrial,
agrarian versus urban, cyclical versus linear time.”^5
Faced with a society so distinctively responsive to any avenue of inquiry within
this large and all-embracing subject, I have had to be highly selective, concentrat-
ing on some clusters of interest and shutting out many others. In particular, I have
deliberately concentrated on the more public as opposed to private dimensions of
Roman time. This is of course a rough-and-ready division, which I shall follow the
Romans in infringing at will, but it means that the book does not have much if any-
thing to say about the rhythms of daily or weekly life, astrology, metaphors of
experienced time, or individual memory, transience, and mortality. I have thought
of these areas as the Bettini-Ker-Putnam terrain, in deference to three scholars
whose stimulating work I have used as a kind of fence from my own.^6 The present
book concentrates rather on investigating the contours and reliefs in the patterns
that the Romans imposed on the time of the city and the empire. The systems
under investigation include their calendar, which is still our calendar, with its near-
total perfection in capturing the progress of natural time; the annual rhythm of
consular government, with the accompanying annalistic frame of historical time;
the plotting of sacred time onto sacred place; the forging of significant links across
time so as to impose meaningful shapes on the past in the form of anniversary and
era; above all, the experience of empire, by which the Romans took the temporal
consciousness of a city-state and meshed it progressively with foreign time sys-
tems as their horizons expanded to embrace the entire Mediterranean, and beyond.
This is a process that touched on practically every dimension of their experience,
as they had to establish links and connections backwards and sideways, to fix them-
selves within a worldwide web of time. Since so much of this process was carried
- Introduction