| Caesar's Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History (Sather Classical Lectures) | 
 enlarge | Author: Denis Feeney
Publisher: University of California Press
Category: Book
List Price: $18.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 314631
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 392
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6 x 1.1
ISBN: 0520258010
Dewey Decimal Number: 930
EAN: 9780520258013
ASIN: 0520258010
Publication Date: December 1, 2008
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Product Description
The ancient Romans changed more than the map of the world when they conquered so much of it; they altered the way historical time itself is marked and understood. In this brilliant, erudite, and exhilarating book Denis Feeney investigates time and its contours as described by the ancient Romans, first as Rome positioned itself in relation to Greece and then as it exerted its influence as a major world power. Feeney welcomes the reader into a world where time was movable and changeable and where simply ascertaining a date required a complex and often contentious cultural narrative. In a style that is lucid, fluent, and graceful, he investigates the pertinent systems, including the Roman calendar (which is still our calendar) and its near perfect method of capturing the progress of natural time; the annual rhythm of consular government; the plotting of sacred time onto sacred space; the forging of chronological links to the past; and, above all, the experience of empire, by which the Romans meshed the city state's concept of time with those of the foreigners they encountered to establish a new worldwide web of time. Because this web of time was Greek before the Romans transformed it, the book is also a remarkable study in the cross-cultural interaction between the Greek and Roman worlds.
Feeney's skillful deployment of specialist material is engaging and accessible and ranges from details of the time schemes used by Greeks and Romans to accommodate the Romans' unprecedented rise to world dominance to an edifying discussion of the fixed axis of B.C./A.D., or B.C.E./C.E., and the supposedly objective "dates" implied. He closely examines the most important of the ancient world's time divisions, that between myth and history, and concludes by demonstrating the impact of the reformed calendar on the way the Romans conceived of time's recurrence. Feeney's achievement is nothing less than the reconstruction of the Roman conception of time, which has the additional effect of transforming the way the way the reader inhabits and experiences time.
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Attitude Adjuster for Us Ignorant 21st Century History Buffs December 3, 2008
My specialty area is theology and church history (I teach graduate students at a Lutheran seminary) and I'm always looking for good academic resources to help relieve my (relative) ignorance outside my own field. Feeney's book does a superb job of helping readers like me realize that we often misunderstand history and voices from the past because we unthinkingly presuppose our own mental conventions inappropriately. For example, in this day of atomic clocks, micro-computers, and universal (or at least world-wide) calendar reckoning, we often fault ancient writers for their seemingly imprecise (we even label them inaccurate) date citations. Feeney explains how often our critique is flawed because of our presuppositions. He shows that ancient Romans (indeed,the whole world in that age) had no non-local, 12-month-equal-year calculations, but instead designated events by synchronicity to local seasons and corresponding events. Therefore, to chronologically link the battle of Thermopylae (300 Spartans against the huge Persian army of Xerxes) with the event of a Roman battle in which a small, underdog Roman force successfully repelled a much larger invading force, even though the events in "calendar time" were 100s of years apart, made more "historical" sense to the Romans than assigning some mathematically accurate year-measurement date to the Roman event. This is just one of the insights Feeney's research has given me that I will apply repeatedly in my studies. This book is academically documented and comprehensive but very readable for the motivated non-professional history enthusiast.
Tempus fugit. Time is fleeing. September 24, 2007
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
I'll read almost anything about ancient Rome, and the catchy title of this book certainly caught my eye. The Roman calendars before Caesar's reform was extremely cumbersome. Note that I deliberately used the word "calendars" because Rome had more than one. There was a political calendar keyed to the consuls, a sacred calendar denoting religious festivals, and a seasonal calendar keyed to agricultural activities. Too make things more confusing, the political calendar and the seasonal calendar were seriously out of synch by Caesar's time. Bringing some order out this chaos was Caesar's greatest, and longest lasting, accomplishment--though far less mentioned than his military or political exploits. As mentioned above, what made the Romans reflect so on their calendarical system was their encounter with the Greeks, a people they greatly admired. So greatly did the Romans admire the Greeks that they wanted "in", so to speak, to the Greek system of myths and measuring time.
I won't go into details (read the book), but they eventually did this by way of the myth of the founding of the Latin people by Aeneas, a refugee from Troy. While various provinces and cities continued their use of local calendars, it eventually became the mark of a Roman citizen where ever he lived, to use the imperial calendar. The Roman calendar was adopted by the Catholic Church, although with the very useful adaptation of a seven day week (following Jewish practice), and eventually the use of numbers to designate the days of month.
One of the most interesting points made in this book (and very needful since we moderns are so imbued with the idea that calendars are fixed and objective) is that the Romans even had to deal with the basic question of when the year begins. At one point in their history it began with the Kalends (1st) of March and because they were using a lunar calendar, this did not mesh with the solar calendar. Every year they had to add extra days or even months to make things come out right. Very confusing. Anyway they eventually settled on January, though even in Augustus's time poets like Ovid were critical of this decision, considering the advent of spring a more suitable time. If you are at all interested how our calendar was invented, you'll like Caesar's Calendar.
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