Customer Reviews

Caesar's Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History (Sather Classical Lectures)

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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.

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.

I'm very knowledgeable about ancient Rome and was still surprised by this book since it goes beyond ancient Rome and Greece to modern concepts of time. It clearly demonstrates how societies change as their concepts of time change. It's very difficult for modern humans to understand life in ancient societies wherein time was moveable and changeable. We are so imbued with the concept of concrete, universal time that the idea of there being no set time is almost inconceivable. This book brings the temporal world of the ancients to life and in the process, demonstrates how human societies have changed as we've incorporated a formalized concept of time into every aspect of our lives. I highly recommend this book!