Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History (review)

We all know, or should know, that the Greeks and Romans had no agreed era from and before whose epoch all years were numbered (not even the era of Rome, beloved of nineteenth-century Germans); but few of us stop to ponder what that meant for their thinking about time, or even for relating past events to one another. We also know that every Greek city had its own calendar and that the Roman calendar was reformed by Julius Caesar to make it match the natural year; but how often do we pause to consider the implications of these facts? These are the subjects of Feeney’s valuable and stimulating book.

He begins by reminding us that whereas we think of dates, the ancients thought of synchronisms: this event happened at about the same time as that. It was with the aid of synchronisms such as those in Gellius 17. 21 (of which he offers a perceptive exposition) that the Romans were accommodated within civilized, Greek history even as the Siceliotes had been accommodated within a predominantly Athenocentric narrative, in particular through the concocted synchronism between Himera and Salamis. (Here we might note that even if a Syracusan and an Athenian had discovered that the battles were fought on the same-numbered day of notionally corresponding months, there is no guarantee that they were even as close as the deaths of Shakespeare and Cervantes on the same date ten days apart, April 23, 1616, Old and New Styles respectively.)

Feeney next considers the datings of wholly unjustifiable precision assigned by chronographers to the Trojan War and the establishment of the Olympic Games; if Rome and Carthage were to be accepted as respectable cities, they needed foundation dates, which must perforce be related to one or other of these events, and which, he rightly insists, the Greeks made up without reference to any native traditions. In the case of Rome, the early association through Aeneas with the Trojan War, and therefore with myth, was disjoined by Timaeus, who made the two cities historical and coeval (though still older than the Western Greek colonies); later authors, beginning, so Feeney suggests, with Diocles of Peparethos, preferred to locate the foundation firmly in the historical period after the first Olympiad. These datings were no mere pseudo-scholarly musings, but had ideological implications exploited by Roman authors as well as Greek.

We step back to the Golden Age and the reign of Saturn to examine Roman sentimentalities about the virtuous countryside and the corrupting sea, but also the literary challenges to the myth both before and after Augustus had appropriated it for his own reign; Feeney suggests, following hints by Norden, that had Vergil lived, it is he, the poet of Aen. 6. 792–4, who would have written the Carmen Saeculare, not Horace, in whom gold stands for questionable wealth.

We now come to Roman notions of time, regulated by the the fasti—i.e. the calendar and consul-lists taken as one. Drawing a contrast between Syme and Tacitus (158–9), Feeney observes that what we call anniversaries were for the Romans the same day; to be sure the notion of sameness has its limitations, whose exploration in Ovid’s Fasti and Aeneid 8 is well expounded. These recurring days, not least birthdays, became even more significant after Caesar’s reform, which fixed the interval of return and made the calendar, already a component of Roman self-awareness, even more reifiable as a distillation of nature, no longer divorced from the parapegmatic Farmer’s Year. All the more glory then might it bring to persons whose name appeared in it, an innovation for Caesar’s benefit adopted by Cicero to flatter his assassin D. Brutus, but fully exploited by Augustus, who incorporated the republican fasti into a set of monarchical documents full of his name and his achievements.

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