continued in use.^189 Numerous Eastern calendars did adapt themselves to the Julian
calendar, sometimes doing no more than taking over the Roman names for
months, and sometimes harmonizing more systematically;^190 yet many remained
unaltered. The Romans’ Greek or Egyptian or Syrian or Jewish subjects had to
work with the Roman calendar at the level of interface with the imperial authority,
yet they tended not to abandon their own calendars but to synchronize them with
the Roman one as needed.^191 Complex negotiations went on as the presence of the
imperial system settled, and many local initiatives have left their traces in recast
local calendars, but the imposition of a centralized empire-wide system was not at
issue. Partly this is a reflection of the Romans’ general administrative preference
for laissez-faire and subsidiarity, and the lack of interest in imposing the calendar
is related to a wide range of similar policies in other spheres.^192 Partly, however,
this hands-offtendency reflected the way that the Roman calendar itself continued
to be a distinctive marker of Romanness. Its reach was not universal: it was not
meant to be a unifiying grid for all the peoples of the Empire, but it retained its
specific power for Roman citizens as a context for apprehending and exploring
Roman identity.^193
This irreducibly Romanocentric dimension of the calendar potentially enabled
any Roman anywhere in the Empire to feel part of a shared community of citizens.
In this way the calendar comes close to enabling the “homogeneous” time that
Anderson picks out as so crucial to the formation of the consciousness of modern
nationalism: Anderson’s “homogeneous” time fosters the feeling that disparate
individuals are part of a community that is connected laterally, sharing a jointly
mapped-out grid of connected time.^194 This sense of shared time is vividly present
in the numerous coordinated sets offastithat were erected throughout Italy in the
early years of the Principate; Italy had a particularly close relationship with the
metropolis, reflected in the display of shared religious cult and synchronized time
that was embodied in the fasti.^195 These links stretched throughout the diaspora of
Roman citizens across the Mediterranean, above all in the case of the colonies,
whose cults and calendars linked them back to the center of the Empire, in Rome.^196
Especially within the army, the calendar discharged an important acculturating
function as it massaged the diverse recruits into an empire-wide unit through
shared anniversaries and festivals. Where the army went, the calendar went too.^197
Despite all these tendencies toward homogeneity among a widely dispersed cit-
izenry, the Roman calendar, like all other ancient calendars, continued to derive a
great deal of its symbolic power from its local grounding, as we saw in the case of
Virgil’s presentation of time and place in Aeneid8.^198 Even Roman imperial time
- Years, Months, Days II: Grids of the Fasti