cal phenomena: when the calendar has such an unprecedentedly tight bond with
the movement of the sun, then there is no longer any need to make the rising and
setting of constellations the organizing principle of time.^154
Varro’s adaptation to the reform and its implications is still not complete. When
he continues from the section we have just investigated to give information on
when to perform various agricultural activities, he is still working from the data of
a parapegma, and not giving calendrical dates.^155 It is fascinating to observe the
elder Pliny, some hundred years after Varro, plotting the natural rhythms of the
agricultural year systematically against the Roman calendar itself. Here we see the
fully developed mentality of someone utterly at home in the Julian grid, able to
comment shrewdly on the implications of the exercise of harmonizing the calendar
and the natural world. Pliny devotes a long piece of book 18 of his Natural History
to a discussion of the rhythms of the seasonal — especially agricultural — year
(18.201 – 320). He pays regular attention to the issue of how these rhythms relate to
the calendar, going much farther than Varro in systematically giving calendrical
dates for the risings and settings of the various constellations and for many other
associated meteorological phenomena.^156 The entire section begins as an inquiry
into the right time to sow crops (18. 201), and for many pages we are instructed on
all kinds of natural phenomena in their rhythmically occurring, and datable, pat-
terns. Pliny remains perfectly well aware, however, that this is not a watertight
grid, and he repeatedly comments on the fact that meteorological and calendrical
patterns have a complex interrelationship. In an important section at the beginning
of his treatment he discusses the different dates for sowing different crops and opens
up a crucial question in the process. Some people, he remarks, say you should use
seasonal signs such as the arrival of the west wind or the spring equinox to deter-
mine times for sowing (201 – 4). Some, however, pay no attention to the fine points
of meteorology and lay down guidelines by means of calendrical time (quidam
omissa caelesti subtilitate temporibus definiunt,205): they will bluntly give calendri-
cal prescriptions for the times appropriate for sowing different crops. These people,
according to Pliny, pay no attention to nature, while the first group pay too much
(ita his nulla naturae cura est, illis nimia,205). In other words, it is as much an error
to pay no attention to natural phenomena in such matters as it is to pay no attention
to the calendar. In the end, however, the world of nature will not submit to the cal-
endrical constraints. Pliny uses a deft legal metaphor to drive this point home,
introducing a reference to a realm where the calendar really did have a prescriptive
force: “We cannot expect changes of weather to answer to bail on dates fixed in
advance” (non ad dies utique praefinitos expectari tempestatum uadimonia,231).
The Harmonies of Caesar’s Year. 201