Horace ’s generation, and the ones immediately before and after it, are the ones
to which I have returned repeatedly in this book. This was a period when things
were changing fast, and many people were actively engaged in creative work with
Roman time. Caesar’s calendrical reform was only part of a revolution in the rep-
resentation of time under the evolving new order, with all the inherited forms
undergoing profound change. All of this work went hand in hand with revolutions
in the organized and encyclopedic representation of knowledge systems of many
kinds, especially those to do with space.^6 Ovid, as usual, puts his finger on the point
when he tells us that Roman space and natural space are merging in the same way
as Roman time and natural time (Fast.1.85 – 86, 2.683 – 84).
To quote a scholar whose work on chronology has been indispensable to me
over the last few years, Anthony Grafton: “The Romans of the late Republic and
early Empire were as obsessed with time, in their own way, as the Europeans of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”^7 The Romans’ obsession in that period de-
rived above all from their attempts to digest their conquest of most of the known
world and their transformation from a republic to a monarchy. Most of the impe-
tus for the later European obsession with time came from their stunned discovery
of new parts of the world, ones that had their own ancient time systems, and ones
that imposed new time systems on navigators if they were going to sail to and
return from them without dying.^8 But part of the impetus for the Renaissance
obsession with time came from their own new reengagement with the Romans. In
the Romans who were emerging from the new work of contemporary chronogra-
phers and historians, they could see a society that looked uncannily modern in the
work it devoted to the control and representation of time in all its aspects.
The Romans’ chronographic perspectives were in many respects superseded by
their successors in the Renaissance, but not before they had contributed funda-
mentally to the creation of a new set of instruments for the charting of time. If we
use the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a perspective for comparison, we
may see that the Romans’ special obsession with time had itself also been the prod-
uct of encounters with new parts of the world and with new technologies. The
work they performed to assimilate these novelties transformed their world in the
process and turned them into something close to the first modern society.
Epilogue. 215