Time for the Ancients

Measurement, Theory, Experience

P. N. Singer

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9783110751925
• eBook ISBN: 9783110752496
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient History

The book presents the author's latest research on ancient perceptions of time; it centres on medical discussions, especially of the doctor-philosopher Galen, while also contextualizing his work within Graeco-Roman evidence and discussions – archaeological, medical, technological, philosophical, literary – more broadly. The focus is on questions of medical or experiential significance: life cycles, disease cycles, daily regimes for mind and body, clinical assessment, including the vital area of diagnosis through the pulse, technologies of time measurement. But the philosophical background is also examined: questions of the nature and definition of time and its relationship to space and motion. Galen offers original contributions in all these areas, at the same time as shedding important light on both contemporary attitudes and previous discussions.

The book thus offers an accessible and vivid overview of key issues in ancient time perception and awareness, while also offering the first in-depth exploration of the insights that the Galenic texts add to this picture.

Five thematic chapters – Time Measurement, Year and Life Cycles, Biography, Medical Cycles – consider a wide range of evidence and of recent scholarship, while highlighting the contribution of medical texts.

Chapter One: Time measurement, time management: days, hours and routines

In this chapter I explore Graeco-Roman techniques of, and attitudes towards, time measurement, from the twin perspectives of everyday life and medicine. I survey literary and archaeological evidence for the two main available technologies of time measurement, sundials and water-clocks, and consider what this evidence tells us about their differential accessibility and context of use, and about Roman attitudes to daily or hourly time organization. I then proceed to examine further some literary, and, in more detail, some medical texts which shed light on ancient attitudes to time management and the division of the day; on the importance of, and relationship between, the two forms of time measurement, as well as the relationship of seasonal to equinoctial hours; and on the balance of work and leisure, in particular exercise, activities within such daily time divisions.

Introductory: modes of time measurement at Rome

An obelisk towered high over the Campus Martius in Rome. Built in 10/9 BCE, the horologium of the emperor Augustus cast its shadow over a long stretch of the low-lying area, where a metal line and markings had been laid in the ground. It was itself visible from a great distance and complemented two other great Augustan edifices in the same area: the Mausoleum Augusti and the Ara Pacis. (See figures 1 and 2.) The line on the ground ran due north from the obelisk: a meridian, which the shadow hit at noon each day. The markings along its length indicated different dates, and these would be hit by the shadow at noon on successive days, as it grew longer or shorter in the course of the year.

Figure 1: The horologium Augusti as depicted on the base of the Column of Antoninus Pius in Rome. An obelisk emerges from the lap of the personified Campus Martius; a winged figure, possibly Eternity (Aiōn) conducts Antoninus and Faustina to the heavens. The column base is now in the Vatican Museums. Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Musei_vaticani_-_base_colonna_antonina_01106.webp

Figure 2: The three great Augustan monuments – mausoleum, Ara Pacis and horologium – in the northern Campus Martius in Rome. The plan, showing the monuments in their positions on a map of the modern city, also indicates their ancient prominence and interrelationship. Note that nos. 12 and 13 show the dubious reconstructions of the monument as a sundial, by Buchner, while no. 4 shows its actual function as a meridian line. The image is reproduced by kind permission of Peter Heslin from his article (2007).

Prominently placed above the forum, meanwhile – the centre of both legal and commercial activity in the city – were one or two sundials, visibly dividing the passing time of daylight into twelve equal units, which, by the late second century CE, the date of the texts which we shall focus on in this chapter, had stood there for more than three hundred years. Other, equally publicly visible, sundials were features of cities throughout the Graeco-Roman world.¹

A few steps from those public sundials, the ancient visitor to the forum – if by chance business affairs took him into the Basilica Aemilia et Fulvia – would find an equally venerable instrument of time measurement, a water-clock or clepsydra, placed there in the year 159 BCE, and dividing the day into (probably) half hours.

Water-clocks, indeed, had the capacity to measure much smaller units of time than that. The main attested use of the clepsydra was, as we shall see, in legal contexts; but here the water-clocks in question were simple outflow devices, whose sole function was the demarcation of short, distinct blocks of time. At the other end of the technological spectrum, an elaborate and sophisticated clepsydra might constitute a luxury object or perhaps status symbol, for example in the dining room of a well-to-do citizen, whose guests might pass a little time admiring the ingenuity and luxury of their host's most up-to-date acquisition.² Such a water-clock might be capable of measuring hours and even subdivisions of hours, of both day and night, throughout the year, with impressive accuracy. Some water-clocks were also on prominent display, certainly by the second century CE, in a number of public spaces – for example at gymnasia, theatres or sanctuaries – although little is known of their technological specifications or measuring capabilities.³ There is also evidence of the use, again in the private context, of handheld or portable sundials. These again would be objects for the elite, probably not of great practical value and certainly not in widespread use. Archaeological evidence suggests that both handheld sundials and sophisticated water-clocks were a rarity.⁴

These few examples present us with a way into the world of ancient time awareness and time management. We have moved, in this brief overview, from the most publicly accessible forms of time measurement in Rome – which were at the same times the ones dealing in the largest units, marking the position of the day within the year, the moment of midday or, at the smallest level, the division the day into hours – through those used in business and legal contexts, in which it was important to have a conception and a measurement of smaller units, to the level of the private, elite household, in which more accurate devices might have been rather a diversion than something of serious practical value.

We shall proceed to consider in more detail the physical construction, context and use of these different technologies, and what these – and some relevant texts – tell us about ancient attitudes to time management, daily organization, leisure and punctuality.

Meridian lines and sundials; seasonal hours

The spectacularly public monument with which we began functioned both as a calendar, showing the moment of the year that had been reached, and as a daily indicator of noon. The information laid out on the ground for the first of these purposes – the marks along the meridian line's length – included such labels as ‘beginning of spring’ and ‘Etesian winds’ (whose arrival early in the summer was a well-known marker of the beginning of the safe sailing season), as well as the names of the zodiac signs and a mark for each degree of the zodiac. On its progress from its shortest extent, at the summer solstice, to its longest, at the winter solstice, the shadow came level with a series of markings on one side of the line, where letters are to be found mentioning the zodiac signs of the late summer to winter months, as well as others corresponding to specific moments in that half of the year; as the shadow shortened on successive days between December and June, the corresponding markings were to be read on the other side of the line.

The utility of such a meridian line, then, is twofold. Passers-by would be made aware of the approach and passing of midday, although of no smaller division of the day than that; but this in itself may have assisted in the regulation and organization of their day. But the observer of the shadow at midday would also gain a confirmation of the position within the calendar on any given day. One chief aim of the construction may indeed have been to give reassurance of stability, to make an assertion of the new era or reliability of the calendar that was to result from Augustus' taking of control over the calendar after a period of drift and uncertainty. The reliability of the new system, after Augustus' reforms and adjustments, would be manifest from the agreement of the lines visibly marked on the ground with the days and festivals of the civic calendar. Indeed, the purpose of the instrument was at least as much to impress and dominate as it was to inform; there was, as a number of scholars have pointed out, a clear political message to be read, not just in the horologium's visibility from afar, but also in its proximity to and physical relationship with the other two great Augustan monuments in the area, mentioned above.⁵

We might say, then, that the horologium Augusti is both misnamed and a somewhat unusual case: not in fact a sundial, not a ‘teller of the hoursʼ, but rather, as we have seen, a teller of progress through the year, as well as a marker of the crucial time of noon. Yet this calendrical function was an important one. Indeed, it was probably the original function, from Archaic Greek times, of the first kinds of gnomon, from which the more recognizable ‘sundialʼ developed. That is to say, publicly visible gnomons functioned in earlier times as tellers of the seasons (and of midday on each day), not as tellers of hours – and it is possible that this remained an important function of some such constructions even in the imperial period.⁶

On the question of nomenclature: while some scholars now prefer ‘solarium’ or ‘meridian’, I have kept here to the traditional ‘horologium’. The original Greek term, ὡρολόγιον, literally a reckoner or teller of hōrai, could, after all, refer to the calculation of seasons, not just of hours.

Hōrai (ὧραι): from seasons to hours

Now, this terminological decision, while unimportant in itself, leads us on to a point which is by contrast of very considerable importance for the story that we are telling. For behind the semantic range of the Greek term ὥρα (hōra) lies a historical development which is crucial to the history of time measurement itself – a development which, though difficult to trace with complete accuracy, took place at some point after the Greek Archaic period.

We should pause to investigate these important developments – both the semantic one and its relative in everyday life – before returning to our survey of the Roman imperial horological mise-en-scène.

The Greek word ὥρα (hōra), in its earliest occurrences, in Archaic Greek literature, refers not to hours but either to times in a more general sense or, more specifically, to seasons of the year. Nor is there any other word at this period which denotes ‘hours’, in the sense of certain units into which the day is divided. Even by the fourth century BCE, the use of the word to refer to hours is at best insecurely attested. The point is of particular significance from the medical perspective. Only two passages in the so-called ‘Hippocratic corpus’ mention the significance of hōrai in the course of a disease; of these, one is attributable to a date later than that of the core corpus (late fifth – early fourth century BCE), while the other is textually insecure.⁷

The use of the term hōra to refer to an hour, then, is insecurely attested, even as the late as the fourth century; and this semantic situation seems to correspond to a sociological one, whereby – in spite of the advent of a technology capable of dividing the day into equal parts by some time in the fifth century, attested by Herodotus (see n. 6 above) – the hour probably did not come to be widely used as a unit for practical, in particular medical, purposes, until considerably later.

By some time in the third century BCE, on the other hand, the use of seasonal hours seems to have been widespread, including for administrative purposes. Such use is for example attested by papyri, some of which give evidence of the use of hour-markings within a postal system which had become established under the Ptolemies; the first secure medical reference to hours seems also to belong to a similar period.⁸

The development is of considerable significance for the medical assessment and measurement of time, which will be a particular focus in this study. As we shall see later in this chapter in the context of daily regimes for health, and also in chapter 4 in the context of the analysis and diagnosis of diseases of periodic recurrence, the identification of precise hours within the day was of great theoretical importance for doctors in the imperial period. Moreover, these doctors are, at least in some cases, claiming to base themselves in detail on the prescriptions and theoretical models of the ‘classical’ texts of th...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Chapter One: Time measurement, time management: days, hours and routines
• Chapter Two: Times of life and times of year: the ever-shifting cycles
• Chapter Three: Lives in time: history, biography, bibliography
• Chapter Four: Time for the doctor: crises, perils and opportunities
• Chapter Five: Time, motion, rhythm: reality, perception and quantification
• Bibliography
• Index of names
• General index