The consuls in this passage are no longer the ones who “open up” (recludant)
shrines and altars, but prisons instead (4.70.3). Exactly as in the Nero passage we
have just discussed, this derangement of the traditional fastiis closely associated
with a self-referential comment on the confines of annalistic historiography, for
immediately after the death of Sabinus comes another letter from Tiberius, at
which point Tacitus makes one of his most famous remarks about the restrictions
imposed by his conventions: ni mihi destinatum foret suum quaeque in annum referre,
auebat animus antire statimque memorare exitu(“If it had not been my design to
refer events each to their proper year, by inclination I would be anxious to antici-
pate and immediately to recall the outcomes,” 4.71.1). Once again, all of the fun-
damental categories of Roman time are being subjected to destructive pressure.
A CALENDAR THAT MEASURES TIME
We turn now to the impact of Julius Caesar’s reformed calendar. So far we have
focused on the ideological power of the revolution in representations of the calen-
dar, with all the additional exegesis and imperial commemoration that adhered to
the new fasti.Yet the mechanism of the 365¼-day calendar was itself a revolution,
one that had wide-ranging repercussions for the Romans’ apprehension of time in
many guises. Caesar’s new calendar, perfected by Augustus, represents a huge
watershed in the organization of time not just in ancient Rome, but in post-Roman
Europe, and eventually the whole modern world. In the late sixteenth century,
Joseph Scaliger was still extraordinarily impressed by the improvement Caesar’s
reform represented over the ramshackle Republican calendar it superseded: “The
Julian calendar... marked a victory in the realm of culture more lasting than any
Roman victory on land or sea.”^116
The mesh between civil and natural time that the reformed calendar provided
was one that had never before been seen in the Mediterranean, and never before
aimed at. No civil calendar in the Mediterranean world before 1 January 45 b.c.e.
had pretended to approximate a harmony with the high degree of astronomical
accuracy that scholars had achieved in their construction of observation-based cal-
endars. The pre-Julian Republican calendar was certainly no better offthan any
other in this regard — indeed, according to Scaliger, it was considerably worse:
“No nation in human memory has used a worse calendar than theirs.”^117 Astro-
nomical observations show how adrift the Republican dates often were from the
natural year. The solar eclipse of 190 b.c.e.that can be given the Julian date of 14
March was observed in Rome on the fifth day before the Ides of Quintilis, that is,
A Calendar That Measures Time. 193