markers, including especially the days of the fastithat Virgil (and Horace) had so
carefully avoided: Roman calendar and festival days (405 – 6), birthdays (405, 417 –
18), astronomical markers (409 – 10), the black day of the Allia (413 – 14), and even
the Jewish Sabbath (416). This is an international panoply of civilized time divi-
sion, all to be found in the metropolis, the heart of ordered and conventional time.
THE CITY’S TIME
AND THE EMPIRE’S TIME
As Beard (1987) has shown, the distinctive power of the Roman calendar derives
overwhelmingly from its specificity to the culture, since it is a religious and polit-
ical instrument for shaping Roman cultural memory before it is an instrument for
measuring time.^184 We can gauge this specificity by reflecting on the question of
why the Romans did not make an imperial machine out of the calendar. Once the
Romans had organized this extraordinarily successful instrument of time control,
it might seem natural to us that they would impose it on their subjects as a means
of facilitating worldwide communication and administration. One might expect
them to do this not solely on grounds of “utility,” which is so often a snare for the
modern observer of ancient instruments of time. Αfter all, the organization of time
is one dimension of the organization of power, as we have seen very clearly with
the case of the Caesarian reform, and the calendar is a necessary medium for reg-
ulating and controlling human activity in any empire.^185 Alfred Gell relates an
intriguingly revealing fact concerning the Muria, a people of central India among
whom he did fieldwork. According to him, only three words from English have
entered the normal Muria vocabulary: one is “time,” and “the others are ‘power’
and ‘officer.’ ”^186 In other empires, the calendar has served as a universalizing grid
for the whole of the imperial dominions. The ancient Chinese term for incorpo-
rating some new region into the empire was to say that its inhabitants had “re-
ceived the calendar.”^187
In the light of this comparative evidence, it is very striking that the Romans did
not attempt to make all the inhabitants of the Empire “receive the calendar.”
Dating by the consuls was the imperial norm, used together with the regnal year
of the emperor, but there was no systematic effort made to impose the calendar
itself as a standard throughout the Empire, and many cities that already had their
own calendars continued to use them.^188 In the originally less urbanized Latin
West the Roman calendar rapidly became normative, but especially in the long-
established civil culture of the East local calendars in all their discrepant variety
The City’s Time and the Empire’s Time. 209