had a localized dimension. The festivals that mark each month were in many cases
cloned and reproduced in other places, but it is not certain that all of them could
be, especially if they were related intimately to particular places and buildings in
the metropolis.^199 The degree of synchronized homogeneity, then, must have been
qualified to some extent by the apprehension that not all of the Roman times could
elicit the prescribed responses outside the city itself. Rome ’s greatest authority on
time, Ovid, draws out the full consequences of the localized aspect of the city’s
time when he writes his exile poetry.^200 For Ovid in exile, the usual contours even
of natural time are blurred and become increasingly meaningless;^201 especially,
Ovid ’s banishment to the very fringe of the Roman world has made his participa-
tion in Roman time tenuous.^202 In Tristia3.13, when his birthday comes around,
Ovid rejects it, in a kind of “inverse genethliakon.”^203 As Williams well puts it, “the
Roman birthday as a marker of time and progress in life is... redundant in exile,
where [Ovid ’s] existence lacks all positive development and the years merge into
each other without meaningful distinction.”^204 Ovid ’s identity as a Roman is inti-
mately bound up with the calendar — and not only because he is a poet of the
Roman calendar. His estrangement from the city threatens to put him outside
Roman time as well as Roman place.
The special importance of the calendar in the Romans’ work on their identity is
nowhere more clearly visible than in the outsider’s view provided by Plutarch in
his so-called “Roman Questions.” Plutarch composed two sets ofAetia(Origins
or Causes), one Greek, one Roman, commonly called the “Greek and Roman
Questions” after their Latin title Quaestiones Graecae et Romanae.A dozen of
Plutarch’s 113 Roman aetiaconcern calendrical questions, beginning with the one
we discussed above: “Why do they adopt the month of January as the beginning
of the new year?” (Mor.267F).^205 Plutarch has 59 Greek questions, and only one
of them refers to a calendar.^206
The disparity is partly due to the fact that the Greeks did not have a single cal-
endar for all Greeks, in the way that the Roman calendar can embrace all Roman
citizens. Plutarch could, one imagines, have posed more than one question about
individual Greek calendars, but the Roman calendar provides more of a unifying
focus for inquiry.^207 Still, the disparity goes much farther. The exercise in compar-
ison brings out how deeply Roman culture is implicated in the temporal and cal-
endrical. For Plutarch, it is not possible to talk about Roman culture without
engaging with the Romans’ representations of time. What was true for Plutarch
remains true for us.
The City’s Time and the Empire’s Time. 211