4. Time in Classical Antiquity

Classical Greece and Hellenistic civilization

About 1200 BC the late Bronze Age civilization of Mycenae, which had dominated the Aegean world since the destruction of Knossos some 300 years before, itself collapsed under the invasion of the Dorian Greeks from the north. The early Iron Age that followed lasted until about 800 BC, when the first city-states emerged. It was a dark age similar to the Dark Age of Western Europe following the final collapse of the Roman Empire. The Mycenaean past remained a folk-memory of the Greeks that was preserved orally, culminating in the epics of Homer. In them the one certain thing about man is his mortality, and this temporal restriction was the decisive factor that distinguished men from gods. Since the Greeks looked back on the Mycenaean past as a 'Golden Age' of gods and heroes, they tended to regard history as a decline from this ideal state and not as an ultimate order of reality.¹

Consequently, for the Greeks, unlike the Persians, time was not a god. It only became a god in Hellenistic times when it was worshipped under the name 'Aion', but that signified a sacred, eternal time which was very different from ordinary time, chronos. Different thinkers had different ideas concerning the nature and significance of the temporal mode of existence. At the dawn of Greek literature two contrasting points of view are found in Homer and Hesiod.

In the Iliad Olympian theology and morality are dominated by space- like rather than time-like concepts, the cardinal sin being hubris, that is, going beyond one's assigned province. The whole conception, in the words of Cornford, is 'static and geometrical; everything has its limited field with bounds that must not be passed'.² Homer was not interested in the origin of things and had no cosmogony beyond the idea that water is the origin of all things. This was expressed mythologically by calling Oceanus, the river which encircles the world's disk, the origin of all things ( Iliad, xiv. 246). W. K. C. Guthrie, who has drawn attention to this, makes the interesting point that it was probably an Ionian idea, since 'it reappears in Ionian philosophy and in the eastern peoples to whose influence early Ionia lay particularly open'.³ It will be recalled that Thales, the first Greek philosopher, was Ionian, and he maintained that the first principle (arche) of all things is water.

Hesiod, unlike Homer, in his Works and Days gave an account of man's decline from a primeval Golden Age; his poem was based implicitly on the concept of time, although the word 'time' never actually appears in it. The main purpose of the poem was to offer advice concerning the regulation of the activities of the year, particular days being of good or evil omen, appropriate or inappropriate for different activities. In short, time was regarded by Hesiod as an aspect of the moral ordering of the universe.

Two centuries or more later, in the sixth century BC, the first Greek philosophers speculated, without invoking mythology, on how the world was generated. They regarded the world as being based on a single live space-filling substance from which all things developed spontaneously by the interplay of opposed processes such as separation and combination or rarefaction and condensation. The first explicit statement in Greek literature that, although individual things are subject to change and decay, the world itself is eternal appears to have been made by the philosopher Heraclitus about 500 BC. He regarded perpetual change as the fundamental law governing all things--a view which is summarized in his famous aphorism, 'You cannot step twice into the same river'. He also believed that there is a perpetual strife of opposites: hot and cold, wet and dry, and so on, are each necessary complements to the other and their eternal conflict is the very basis of existence. This world of change and conflict, however, is not just a chaos but is governed throughout time by a principle of order or balance of opposites, keeping them within their due bounds.

This principle was based on an idea that was accepted by other Greek thinkers of this period--the concept of Time as a judge. For example, Anaximander, in the only surviving fragment directly attributed to him, said that all things that are created must also perish, making atonement to one another for their injustice according to Time's decree. This idea was no doubt suggested by the cycle of the seasons with its alternating conflict of the hot and the cold, the wet and the dry. Each of these advances in 'unjust' aggression at the expense of its opposite and then pays the penalty, retreating before the counter-attack of the latter, the object of the whole cycle being to maintain the balance of justice. The fundamental assumption was that Time will always discover and avenge any act of injustice.

The concept of Time as a judge can also be attributed to the great Athenian statesman Solon ( sixth century BC) who, according to Werner Jaeger, 'defends himself "before the bench of Time"'. (In this context it may be mentioned that in Athenian law courts it became the custom to have a clepsydra to ensure that most speeches were limited to half an hour.) This was an age when the state was being founded on the concept of justice. The original Greek word for justice', themis, signified 'divine law'. Although in the Iliad the word dikē denotes a judgement given by a judge or an assertion by a party to a dispute of his rights, in the Odyssey it signifies 'right' or 'custom'.⁴ Later it became the slogan of those struggling for equal justice for all. Anaximander and Heraclitus extended the concept of justice to the whole universe:

In the life of politics the Greek language refers to the reign of justice by the term kosmos; but the life of nature is a kosmos too, and indeed this cosmic view of the universe begins with Anaximander's dictum. To him everything that happens in the natural world is rational through and through and subject to a rigid norm.⁵

Emphasis on the role of time characterized the Pythagorean idea of the kosmos. According to Plutarch, when asked what Time ( Chronos) was, Pythagoras ( sixth century BC) replied that it was the 'soul', or procreative element, of the universe. The extent to which Pythagoras and his followers may have been influenced by oriental ideas has long been a subject for argument. The Orphic idea of Chronos, which may have had an influence on Pythagoras, seems rather like the Iranian idea of Zurvan akarana. In particular, both were depicted as multi-headed winged serpents. Similarly, the dualism which played an important role in Pythagorean philosophy appears to echo the Zoroastrian cosmic opposition of Ohrmazd and Ahriman, although these two ultimates were regarded as personal gods and not as abstract principles like the Pythagorean ten basic pairs of opposites, such as limit versus unlimited, good versus bad, male versus female, odd versus even. The most fruitful feature of Pythagorean teaching was the key idea that the essence of things is to be found in the concept of number, which was regarded as having spatial and also temporal significance. Numbers were represented figuratively by patterns similar to those still found on dominoes and dice. Although this led to Greek mathematics being dominated by geometry, time was no less an important element in early Pythagorean thought. Indeed, even spatial configurations were regarded as temporal by nature, as is indicated by the role of the gnomon. This was originally a time- measuring instrument--a simple upright sundial. Later the same term was used to denote the geometrical figure that is formed when a smaller square is cut out of a larger square with two of its adjacent sides lying along two adjacent sides of the latter. Eventually, the term came to denote any number which, when added to a figurate number, generates the next higher number of the same shape (triangular numbers, square numbers, pentagonal numbers, and so on). The generation of numbers was regarded by the early Pythagoreans as an actual physical operation occurring in space and time, and the basic cosmogonical process was identified with the generation of numbers from the initial unit, the Monad, which may have been a sophisticated version of the earlier Orphic idea of the primeval World-egg.

It is well known that Pythagoras' belief in the significance of numbers was supported by his alleged discovery, with the aid of a stringed instrument, that the concordant intervals of the musical scale correspond to simple numerical ratios. This led many later Greek thinkers to regard musical theory as a branch of mathematics (together with geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy it constituted what eventually came to be called the quadrivium), although this view was not universally accepted, the most influential of those who rejected it being Aristoxenus of Tarentum ( fourth century BC). He emphasized, instead, the role of sensory experience. For him the criterion of musical phenomena was not mathematics but the ear.

Long before the time of Aristoxenus, some of the most acute Greek thinkers had found that the concept of time was difficult to reconcile with their idea of rationality. Indeed, Parmenides, the founding father of logical disputation, argued that time cannot pertain to anything that is truly real. The essence of his difficulty was that time and change imply that the same thing can have contradictory properties--it can be, say, hot and cold, depending on the time--and this conflicted with the rule that nothing can possess incompatible attributes. His basic proposition was 'That which is is, and it is impossible for it not to be.' From this he argued that, since only the present 'is', it follows that past and future are alike meaningless, the only time is a continual present time and what exists is both uncreated and imperishable. Parmenides drew a fundamental distinction between the world of appearance, characterized by time and change, and the world of reality which is unchanging and timeless. The former is revealed to us by our senses, but these are deceptive. The latter is revealed to us by reason and is the only true mode of existence.

The difficulties involved in producing a logically satisfactory theory of time were emphasized by Parmenides' follower Zeno of Elea in his subtle paradoxes concerning motion. The most famous is the one generally known as the paradox of 'Achilles and the tortoise'. (The identification of Achilles' competitor as a tortoise is due to later commentators.) The tortoise is given an initial lead over Achilles, and the argument asserts that however fast Achilles runs he will never reach the tortoise. For, when Achilles reaches the point from which the tortoise starts, the tortoise will have advanced to a farther point. When Achilles reaches that point, the tortoise will be at a still farther point, and so on ad infinitum. Consequently, as Aristotle puts it in his account, 'the slower will always have a lead', in contradiction with experience, that is, the world of appearance. This argument assumes that space and time are infinitely divisible, but not all of Zeno's arguments involve this assumption. The problems that his paradoxes raise concerning the mathematical structure of space and time are still being discussed today.⁶

The difficulties discussed by Parmenides and Zeno do not occur if the concept of time is rejected as 'unreal'. Their influence on Plato ( 427-347 BC) is evident in the different treatment of space and time in his cosmological dialogue the Timaeus. Space exists in its own right as a given frame for the visible order of things, whereas time is simply a feature of that order. In Plato's cosmology the universe was fashioned by a divine artificer imposing form and order on primeval matter, which was originally in a state of chaos. This divine artificer was, in effect, the principle of reason, which by imposing order on chaos reduced it to the rule of law. The pattern of law was provided by an ideal realm of geometrical shapes which were eternal and in a perfect state of absolute rest, like the real world of Parmenides. Unlike the eternal ideal model on which it is based, the universe is subject to change. Time is that aspect of change which bridges the gap between the universe and its model, being 'a moving image of eternity'. This moving image manifests itself in the motions of the heavenly bodies. Plato's intimate association of time and the universe led him to regard time as being actually produced by the revolutions of the celestial sphere. A permanent legacy of his theory of time is the idea that time and the universe are inseparable. In other words, time does not exist in its own right but is a characteristic of the universe.

Plato's conclusion that time is actually produced by the universe was not accepted by Aristotle ( 384-322 BC), who rejected the idea that time can be identified with any form of motion or change. For, he argued, motion can be uniform or non-uniform and these terms are themselves defined by time, whereas time cannot be defined by itself. Nevertheless, although time is not identical with motion or change, it seemed to be dependent on them. He remarks that when the state of our minds does not appear to change we do not notice that time has elapsed. It is by being aware of 'before' and 'after' in change that we are aware of time. He came to the conclusion that time can be regarded as a numbering process associated with our perception of 'before' and 'after' in motion and change. He realized that the relation between time and change is a reciprocal one: without change time could not be recognized, whereas without time change could not occur. 'Not only do we measure the movement by the time, but also the time by the movement, because they define each other. The time marks the movement, since it is its number, and the movement the time' ( Physica, iv. 220b). Aristotle recognized that movement can cease whereas time cannot, but there is one motion that continues unceasingly, namely that of the heavens. Clearly, although he did not agree with Plato, he too was profoundly influenced by the cosmological view of time. He rejected the identification of time with the circular motion of the heavens, but he regarded the latter as the perfect example of uniform motion. Consequently, it provides the perfect measure of time.

Although for Aristotle physics meant the study of motion and change in nature, the main emphasis was placed by him on the states between which change takes place rather than on the actual course of the motion itself. Thus the static form rather than the dynamic process became the characteristic concept in his philosophy of nature, and form and place were more fundamental than time. His natural philosophy was dominated by the idea of the permanence of the cosmos. He rejected all evolutionary theories and stressed instead the essentially cyclical nature of change.

Belief in the cyclical nature of the universe found its apotheosis in the concept of the Great Year, which the Greeks may have inherited from the Babylonians. The idea had two distinct interpretations. On the one hand, it was simply the period required for the sun, moon, and planets to attain the same positions in relation to each other as they had at a given time. This appears to be the sense in which Plato used the idea in the Timaeus. On the other hand, for Heraclitus it signified the period of the world from its formation to its destruction and rebirth. According to him the universe sprang from fire and will end in fire. This idea was probably transmitted from Iran, where it originated. The two interpretations were combined in late antiquity by the Stoics, who believed that, when the heavenly bodies return at fixed intervals of time to the same relative positions as they had at the beginning of the world, everything would be restored just as it was before and the entire cycle would be renewed in every detail. As Nemesius, Bishop of Emesa in the fourth century AD, later put it:

Socrates and Plato and each individual man will live again, with the same friends and fellow citizens. They will go through the same experiences and the same activities. Every city and village and field will be restored, just as it was. And this restoration of the universe takes place not once, but over and over again--indeed to all eternity without end. Those of the gods who are not subject to destruction, having observed the course of one period, know from this everything which is going to happen in all subsequent periods. For there will never be any new thing other than that which has been before, but everything is repeated down to the minutest detail.⁷

Nevertheless, as Ludwig Edelstein has pointed out, even in late antiquity there were philosophers, as well as historians and scientists, who regarded time as non-cyclical.⁸ Cosmological recurrence involving the complete destruction of the universe and its exact re-creation, as believed in by the Stoic philosophers, must be distinguished from historical recurrence involving only the repetition of the general pattern of events, as believed in by the historian Polybius, for example.

Greek civilization not only gave rise to philosophy but it also produced, in the fifth century BC, the first real historians. Until then the Greeks believed that recent events were unimportant compared with the exploits of the heroes in Trojan times. Historiography arose when an event occurred which in its magnitude matched the greatest events celebrated in legend. The whole complex of events in the Persian wars from the fall of Sardis to the retreat of Xerxes was seen as a unity and formed what Robert Drews has called 'one Great Event of awesome proportions'.⁹ Originally, the Greek historian's task was not to explain the present in terms of the past but to ensure that significant actions and events would not be forgotten in the future. Consequently, in its origins Greek historiography was more closely affiliated to epic poetry than to philosophy, and in its development it retained a commemorative function. Greek historians, for example Thucydides, tended to concentrate on the recent past, their object being to put in writing those significant actions which were remembered but had not yet been recorded.

The difficulties against which the 'fathers of history', Herodotus and Thucydides, had to contend were formidable. The Greeks of their time knew astonishingly little about their own past. Not only had they no documents going back more than a century or two, but much of what they 'knew' was merely myth and legend. Since their interest in the past was primarily moralistic, precise knowledge of actual events and when they happened was not required. Herodotus was able to establish some kind of time-sequence for the two centuries before his time, but he was a more diffuse writer than Thucydides, who was concerned with many events occurring in a shorter time interval. As Sir Moses Finley has pointed out, Thucydides, in writing about the Peloponnesian war ( History of the Peloponnesian War, ii. 1), actually had to invent an appropriate system of dating, since each Greek city had its own calendar. In his time the year was usually indicated by the name of an official, for example at Athens the first archon and at Sparta the first ephor. Thucydides fixed the beginning of the war and dated subsequent events by counting how many years had elapsed from the start. Each year of the war he divided into two, which he called summer and winter, respectively. 'Simple enough,' Finley comments, 'yet the scheme was unique and the difficulties in making it work are nearly unimaginable today.'¹⁰

Whereas Herodotus transformed 'history' (historia) from a general enquiry about the world into an enquiry about past events, Thucydides believed that serious history could be concerned only with the present, or the immediate past. Although he did not succeed in imposing his strict standards of reliability on later Greek historians, he effectively discouraged the idea that one could do genuine historical research about the past.¹¹ Nevertheless, by the latter part of the fifth century BC there was a greater general awareness of the significance of time than there had been previously. Although Homer dealt with allegedly historical subjects, his was 'aristocratic' history, involving no chronology, no temporal continuity with later ages, and no real sense of the passage of time. For example, despite Odysseus' twenty years' absence from home, on his return neither he nor Penelope appear to have grown any older. In short, for Homer it made no difference that year follows year. On the other hand, by the time of Herodotus and Thucydides life in the polis did not consist of isolated episodes covering heroes but depended on the continuity of institutions, laws, contracts, and expectations. The passage of time had become more relevant.

In particular, problems of the calendar were the driving force that led to the initial development of Greek mathematical astronomy in the last decades of the fifth century BC. Most Greek religious festivals occurred at or near full moon, but since they were associated with agricultural activities they had to take place at the appropriate times of the year. It therefore became necessary to adopt a luni-solar calendar in which the months were measured by the phases of the moon but which also kept in step with the sun. Since the length of the lunar month is about twenty- nine and a half days and a calendar month cannot contain a fractional part of a day, it was arranged that the calendar months were alternately of twenty-nine and thirty days. As in Babylonia, this calendar was adapted to the sun by intercalating a thirteenth month from time to time, but this was left to local officials in the different cities to decide, and they did this individually and arbitrarily. Astronomers, on the other hand, sought to introduce a regular intercalation by means of a cycle of fixed period. According to Geminus, the author of a manual of astronomy of about 70 BC, the first such cycle obtained by the Greeks was an eight-year solar cycle containing ninety-nine months (three of which were intercalary), but there is considerable doubt about the origin of this cycle, known as the 'octaeteris'. The first well-attested cycle of this type was introduced in 432 BC by Meton. As previously mentioned (ch. 3), it was a nineteen- year solar cycle of 235 months (see Appendix 2). Astronomically based cycles such as the Metonic were used, however, only in scientific texts and had no influence on the various local civil calendars. Meton lived in Athens and appears as a character ridiculed by Aristophanes in The Birds, produced in 414 BC.

Besides historiography and mathematical astronomy another great innovation by the Greeks of the fifth century BC was the art of tragedy. Jacqueline de Romilly, Professor of Greek Literature at the Sorbonne, in her Messenger Lectures at Cornell University in 1967 on 'Time in Greek Tragedy', has argued that it was no coincidence that Greek tragedy was born at the same time as historiography. Tragedy involves the past, and it arose when the Greek awareness of time was becoming clearer and stronger. Greek tragedy concerns a single problem that becomes more and more urgent until it culminates in crime. A short continuous crisis, the origins and consequences of which cover a long period, seems to be the double requirement of tragedy and its double relationship to time. 'Its strength rests on a contrast between before and after; and the deeper the contrast the more tragic the event.'¹² Nevertheless, as Professor de Romilly makes clear, the Greeks disliked showing the action of time on moods and feelings. For example, when Euripides allows Iphigeneia to change her decision within a short time, Aristotle was shocked!

Contact with other nations ( Egypt in the case of Herodotus) led to a greater awareness of the past, because of the evidence for long periods of time presented, for example, by the pyramids. Consequently many Greek writers of the fifth century and later realized that their own society was the end-product of a long period of advance. The more sophisticated Greeks were thus made to regard man in pre-Trojan times as much the same as his distant offspring, and this tended to demythologize the Greek legends, thereby placing the past in quite a new perspective.

After the fifth century, however, few, except writers on scientific subjects, had any belief in the idea of progress in the future. Indeed, the typical Greek tended to be backward-looking, since the future appeared to him to be the domain of total uncertainty, his only guide to it being delusive expectation. As for the philosophers, Plato thought that all progress consisted in trying to approximate to a pre-existing model in the timeless world of transcendental forms and Aristotle believed that it was the realization of a form which was already present potentially. Thus, for both of them the theory of forms excluded all possibility of evolution. Even in the sciences it was thought in later antiquity that all wisdom lay in the past. As E. R. Dodds has remarked, 'where men can build their systems only out of used pieces the notion of progress can have no meaning--the future is devalued in advance'.¹³ Consequently, it is not surprising that in this period the main philosophical schools tended to reject the idea of progress and to hold cyclical views concerning the nature of time. Aristotle himself believed that the arts and the sciences have been discovered many times and then lost again. For example in the Meteorologica ( 339b27) he asserts: 'We must say that the same opinions have arisen among men in cycles, not once, twice, nor a few times, but infinitely often.'

Nevertheless, Arnoldo Momigliano has warned us that many Greek historians, as distinct from philosophers, paid little attention to the cyclical concept of time.¹⁴ He has also pointed out that the future did not loom so large for them as it did for the Roman historians, who were anxious about the fate of their empire. Instead, the Greeks were more concerned with the present and the past. Writing c. 40 BC, the historian Diodorus Siculus said of his predecessors:

Two views about the origin of mankind have been current among the most notable scientists and historians. One school, premising that the cosmos is ungenerated and indestructible, declares that the human race has always existed, and there was no time when it began to reproduce itself. The other holds that the cosmos has been generated and may be destroyed, and that men similarly first came into existence at a definite time.¹⁵

As regards the cyclical view, Momigliano says that the principal upholder of it in Greek historiography was Polybius (c. 202-120 BC), but this opinion is based only on the constitutional chapters in his history of the world, for elsewhere he shows no sign of it. For example, he did not treat the Punic wars as repetitions of events that had already occurred in the past and would occur again in the future. His main theme was the increasing power of Rome in the Mediterranean and this, as Momigliano points out, provided him with a new historical perspective: 'Just because Fortune made almost all the affairs of the world incline in one direction, it is the historian's task to put before his readers a compendious view of the ways in which Fortune accomplished her purposes.'¹⁶

The concept of Fortune (i.e. Fate or Destiny) played a crucial role in later Hellenic thought, but different views were held. Aristotle criticized Democritus (c. 460-390 BC) for believing only in efficient and not in final causes, that is, in strict determinism rather than in teleology. Aristotle believed that strict determinism must be rejected because it destroys the natural basis for distinguishing between voluntary and involuntary actions. For the purposes of law some actions must be regarded as voluntary, since only these can be justifiably punished. For Aristotle this argument was decisive. Similarly, although Epicurus ( 342-270 BC) unlike Aristotle accepted Democritus' atomism, he too rejected Democritus' belief in the strict determinism of all human actions. Instead of teleology, however, Epicurus advocated the existence of chance and free will, partly because, like Aristotle, he argued that you cannot blame or punish a man for something he cannot help doing, but also because he believed that there is a kind of spontaneity in men (and possibly in animals) that is manifested in our apparent freedom, to originate actions. Epicurus introduced the famous 'swerve' into the chain of strict causality, so as to account both for human free will and also for the existence of random motion in the universe; for otherwise all bodies would, in his opinion, fall with the same speed downwards. It was by stressing the chance element in destiny that he was led to the hedonistic philosophy of 'eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die!'

A very different point of view was advocated by the Stoics, beginning with Zeno of Citium ( 335-263 BC). Zeno and his followers rejected Plato's two-worlds theory of ideal forms and sense data. Instead, they believed in the organic unity of the whole universe, and they regarded intelligence as a refined material substance with a fiery nature. Unlike the Epicureans, the Stoics were strict determinists who advocated a philosophy of resignation in the face of worldly difficulties. For them Fate had a cyclical, or eternally recurrent, character. It was identified with Necessity and was symbolized by the unceasing rotation of a wheel, like the mythical wheel of Ixion. Since Fate was the power that kept order in the universe, as revealed particularly by the stars and planets, the prevalence of Stoicism influenced the growing belief in astrology in Hellenistic times and in the days of the Roman empire. The cyclical nature of events was regarded by many thinkers as inevitable, because it was thought that otherwise they would be deprived of both 'rationality' and 'legality'.

In late antiquity, both Plutarch (c. AD 46-120), the famous biographer and moral philosopher, and Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. c. AD 200), an important commentator on Aristotle, criticized the views of the Stoics, as well as those of the Epicureans. Although he did not completely discard the astrological concept of destiny, Plutarch argued that there was a place in it for contingency. He formulated explicit definitions of 'necessity' and 'contingency' that are somewhat like the modern definitions of 'analytic' and 'synthetic': 'The necessary is a possibility, the contradiction of which is impossible, but the contingent is a possibility, the contradiction of which is also possible.'¹⁷ This distinction applies particularly to the future. Like Plutarch, Alexander of Aphrodisias argued that not everything is the product of inevitable destiny, since things that are produced by reason and by artists in the exercise of their craft 'do not seem to be produced by them through necessity, for they make each one of them indeed, but they are equally at liberty not to do so'.¹⁸

Just as there was no unique Greek idea of time, the history of the human race also presented itself to the Greeks in various forms. Besides the cyclical view and the progressive, there was the important tradition concerning a Golden Age in the remote past. The earliest extant account of this is to be found in the Works and Days of Hesiod (c.700 BC), who sought to account thereby for man's present condition and, in particular, for his need to work. According to Hesiod, in the 'good old days' before the lordship of Zeus when his father Kronos was king, there was a Golden Age. Strictly speaking, Hesiod refers to a golden race rather than to the golden age of later writers. The idea of a primeval golden age can be traced back to the Sumerians (c. 2000 BC). For them its most significant feature was freedom from fear. According to a Sumerian poet: 'Once upon a time there was no snake, there was no scorpion, / There was no hyena, there was no lion, / There was no wild dog, no wolf, / There was no fear, no terror, / Man had no rival.'¹⁹

According to Hesiod the age of idle luxury was followed successively by an age of heroes, a silver age, an age of bronze, and finally by the present iron age. Contrary to our knowledge today, this last was considered to be less civilized than the bronze age that preceded it. The original decline from the primeval Golden Age was explained by the myth of Prometheus, which has points of resemblance to the Hebrew myth of 'The Fall' described in Genesis. These include not only the creation of woman ( Pandora corresponding to Eve) and the alleged evils that followed therefrom, but also the acquisition of 'forbidden knowledge', which in the Greek case included the discovery of fire.

By the classical period of Greek thought the myth of the Golden Age had partially given way to the opposite idea that man's early condition was nasty, brutish and short'. According to Moschion, who lived about the third century BC but wrote in the spirit of a century or two earlier, it was due to Time--'the begetter and nurturer of all things'--that 'The earth, once barren, began to be ploughed by yoked oxen, towered cities arose, men built sheltering homes and turned their lives from savage ways to civilized.'²⁰ Some writers on cyclical theories explicitly held out the hope that, although the world was in decline, the wheel would turn again so that eventually another Golden Age would repeat the idyllic conditions of the remote past. In his Politics Plato put forward a myth of cyclical change in which the creator imparts rotation to the universe and keeps it under his rule until, at the end of an era, he releases control. Thereupon the world reverses its rotation and everything starts to deteriorate until God reasserts his control and lets the universe rotate once again in the same direction as before. W. K. C. Guthrie, who has drawn attention to this myth, also points out that what Aristotle particularly deplored in the recurrent world catastrophes was the loss of accumulated knowledge and wisdom that they entailed.²¹ Aristotle also doubted whether there could be time without thinking beings, since he regarded time as not merely succession but 'succession in so far as it is numbered', and nothing can be numbered unless there is someone to do the counting. The germ of this idea can be traced back to the sophist Antiphon (c.480-411 BC), one of whose fragments contains the earliest Greek definition of time.²² According to this definition, time has no substantive existence but is a mental concept or means of measurement--a point of view that strikes us today as being remarkably modern.

Finally, in surveying the role of time in ancient Greece, brief mention must be made of the instruments available for its measurement. Besides the gnomon, or sundial, and the clepsydra, or water-clock, an improved version of which with a more constant flow was invented by Ctesibius of Alexandriac. 270 BC, there is evidence of more elaborate instrumentation, such as the 'Tower of the Winds' which can still be seen in Athens, north of the Acropolis. Designed and built by the astronomer Andronicus Kyrrhestes of Macedonia in the second quarter of the first century BC, with a wind vane and complicated sundials on each of its eight walls, its most interesting feature is a reservoir in a smaller building that stood next to its south side. Water from a nearby spring kept it filled. This is a requirement for water-docks of the inflow type. With a constant bead of pressure, the flow of water from a tap near the base of the reservoir could also be kept constant. The tap could be regulated so that the water flowing from it filled another tank in exactly twenty-four hours, while raising a float inside the tank a fixed distance. With a water- dock inside the tower and sundials outside, visitors could observe the time both by day and by night and also when the sky was cloudy as well as when it was clear. To cope with the traditional use of variable hours, so that the period of daylight always comprised twelve, Andronicus is thought to have used a system that is described in detail by his Roman contemporary, the architect Vitruvius. The clock's float was connected by a line to a counter-weight and this line passed round a horizontal shaft. As the float rose the shaft rotated and so did a circular metal plate attached to the end of it. On this plate was depicted a map of the heavens, and holes along the line of the ecliptic made it possible for a representation of the sun to be moved at intervals of a day or two in imitation of its annual motion. A complete rotation of the map every twenty-four hours simulated the daily rotation of the heavens. A grid of reference wires in front of the rotating map presented the hours, and as the solar image passed each wire it indicated the time as well as any sundial could. J. V. Noble and D. J. de Solla Price, who have described this Tower of the Winds in detail, believe that the interior must have been a dazzling sight. ( Price has called the Tower of Winds 'a sort of Zeiss planetarium, of the classical world'.) They conjecture that Poseidon was a central figure between two fountains and that Hercules and Atlas held the wire grid before the bright disk which simulated the motion of the heavens. 'We live in an era in which we accept science and technology as commonplace,' Noble and Price conclude, 'and we expect them and our architecture to be efficient and functional. Athens . . . was a place of wonder and beauty, and it was a time to marvel at the achievements of mathematicians and astronomers--a time to build and admire a Tower of the Winds.'²³

Ancient Israel

It has for long been held that our modern idea of time derives from that of early Christianity, which in turn can be traced back to that of ancient Israel and Judaism. Instead of adopting the cyclical idea of time, the Jews are said to have believed in a linear concept, based in their case on a teleological idea of history as the gradual revelation of God's purpose. Although there is much to support this view of the origin of our modern idea of time, it is now realized that it can only be adhered to with some reservations, as we shall see.

Following the Exodus from Egypt and the Settlement in Canaan in the latter part of the second millenium BC, the Jews found themselves in a region which was on the main line of communication between Egypt and Babylonia. Some time after the reigns of Saul, David, and Solomon the Jewish realm split into two. In 722 BC the northern kingdom, Israel, was overthrown and its capital destroyed by Sargon II. Two years later its people were deported to Assyria. In 586 BC the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem, including the Temple, and many of the inhabitants of the southern kingdom, Judaea, were deported to Babylonia. According to Theodore Vriezen, Professor of Old Testament Studies at the University of Utrecht, the Babylonians deported mainly the upper classes and left perhaps 20,000 of the lower classes behind, so as not to let the country fall into total decay.²⁴

The reaction of the Jews to these vicissitudes of fortune was profound. Appeal was made to the past for evidence of divine providence, current misfortune being explained as punishment for unfaithfulness to Yahweh, or God. It was believed that, if the nation were to become more zealous in its service of God, there would be more hope of deliverance. Although this was predicted to occur at some unspecified date in the future, belief in it was strengthened by the promise of a Messiah who would defeat Israel's enemies and restore the nation to its former glory. Consequently, the essential aim of the Jewish God in history was the salvation of Israel.

The definitive account of this belief was presented in the Book of Daniel, written long after the return from the Babylonian Exile under the stress of danger from the Seleucids just before the Maccabean rising in the second century BC. The appeal to the past was thus developed into a forward-looking philosophy of history. It has therefore frequently been maintained that for the ancient Hebrews time was a unidirectional linear process extending from the divine act of creation to the ultimate accomplishment of God's purpose and the final triumph, here on earth, of the chosen people, Israel.

According to the theologian O. Cullmann in his book Christ and Time, 'the symbol of time for primitive Christianity as well as for Biblical Judaism . . . is the upward sloping line, while in Hellenism it is the circle'.²⁵ On the other hand, the historian of political philosophy J. G. Gunnell has argued that, although the Hebrews were more oriented towards the future than the Greeks, who tended to look more towards the past, 'the concept of linear progression is a rationalization of the Hebrew experience of temporality'.²⁶ More recently another historian, G. W. Trompf in his studyThe Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, has drawn attention to the prevalence of what he calls 'notions of re-enactment' in the Old Testament which formed an ideological basis for the great Israelite festivals. Trompf also cites examples of reenactment in Hebrew historiography, such as the crossing of the Jordan in Joshua, which was consciously likened to the traversing of the Red Sea in Exodus, and the similarity of the Babylonian exile to the earlier Egyptian bondage.²⁷ Moreover, even in eschatology and its presentation in terms of history, the idea of the future that dominated Hebrew thought involved a return to the primeval state that the Jews believed they had lost.²⁸ In other words, although they transferred their own Golden Age from the past to the future, a quasi-cyclical factor was involved.

Gunnell has pointed out that, unlike the Greeks, the Hebrews never tried to analyse the 'problem' of time as such. They seem neither to have conceptualized their experience of time nor formed an abstract idea of history. 'History was the space in which the drama of individual and social life unfolded according to the purpose of Yahweh, and cosmic time simply attested to the works of Yahweh and His power over the universe.'²⁹ One of the most significant features characterizing the Hebrew experience of time was the 'contemporaneity of past and future'. In other words, for the Hebrews the present was never a clearly delimited unit with precise boundaries but was part of a continuum stretching from the beginning to the end of time and was continually influenced by both past and future. It is significant that the Old Testament contains no numbered dates, despite its concern with an intricate historical record. The covenant was not just an important past event preserved by tradition but was the theme of what Gunnell calls 'a communal drama played out between Yahweh--He who will be there--and His people in time', for in the words of Deuteronomy 5:3, 'The Lord made not this covenant with our fathers, but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day.'

The outstanding feature that distinguishes Hebrew thought from Greek thought (particularly that of Aristotle) was the idea of the cosmos as a creation of God that actually had occurred in history. In Hebrew thought, unlike Greek, nature was not divine, and God transcended all phenomena. The sun, moon, and stars were all God's creatures and served to show his handiwork ( Psalm 19). Unlike the Egyptians and Babylonians, the Hebrews did not regard kingship as 'anchored in the cosmos'. In Hebrew religion, and in that religion alone, man was joined to God by a quasi-legal covenant, as a result of which the ancient bond between man and nature was destroyed.³⁰ Because of this, the Jews have sometimes been regarded as the 'builders of time', whereas the Greeks were the 'builders of space', the Romans the 'builders of empire', and the Christians the 'builders of heaven'. Eric Voegelin has emphasized the fundamental difference between what he calls the 'cosmological' civilizations, which presupposed the political symbolization of the cosmos typified by Babylonia with its epic of Marduk, and 'eschatological' civilizations such as the Hebrew--but first exemplified by the Iranian--based on the religion of Zarathustra.³¹ Although the main emphasis in Jewish eschatology has always been on the fate of the nation, the doctrine of personal immortality (which originated with Zarathustra's passionate belief in the justice of God) seems to have been adopted by the Jews during or after their Babylonian exile. Belief in this doctrine was the greatest innovation of post-exilic Judaism. Irrespective of the precise role of linearity in the Hebrew notion of time, it was for long assumed that the eschatological nature of that concept greatly influenced, by way of Christianity, the development of our modern idea of time's unidirectional non-cyclic nature.

In recent years, however, there has been a growing tendency to question the assumption that, prior to the advent of Christianity, Israel was unique among the nations of antiquity in the significance it attached to history and the non-repeatability of events. For, not only did the explicit recognition of forward movement in time and the rejection of the idea of endless recurrence originate with Zoroastrianism, but in the last twenty years or so Old Testament scholars have drawn attention to the similarity between some passages in the Old Testament and certain Mesopotamian texts. As a result, J. Van Seters, Professor of Biblical Literature in the University of North Carolina, and others have argued that the idea of there being a unique 'divine plan of history' in the Old Testament has been 'greatly overstated'.³² In other words, the conviction of the Israelites that they were 'God's chosen race' is now generally regarded by scholars as not greatly different from the fundamental belief on which the Sumerian and Babylonian city-states had been based, namely, that the king was divinely elected.

The Hebrews were influenced by the Sumerians and Babylonians in other ways too, including the measurement of time. Consequently, their calendar was based on the moon. As among other peoples who count by lunations, the Hebrew month begins when the moon's slim crescent is first visible in the evening twilight. As early as the time of Saul the festival of the new moon was celebrated with great solemnity. Later, when Jerusalem was the capital, as soon as the appearance of the new moon had been proved by credible witnesses before the Sanhedrin, messengers were dispatched from there to announce the commencement of the new month.

Originally the Jewish year commenced at the autumn equinox. The Jewish civil year still begins at this time, but since the exodus from Egypt the Jewish ecclesiastical year has begun with the month Nisan at the spring equinox. By using years of different lengths, depending on the insertion or not of an intercalary month, reasonable agreement with the sun was maintained. Not only the new moon but the full moon too was regarded by the Hebrews as being of great religious significance, and the timing of Passover was determined by the first full moon on or after the spring equinox. As regards the numbering of their years, the Jews used the same era as the Seleucids of Syria from the time they came under their rule, in the second century BC, until the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 AD.

In some of the older parts of the Bible, particularly in those concerning the earlier prophets, the moon is frequently mentioned in connection with the Sabbath, which commemorated the seventh day of creation, when the Lord rested from his labours. In his book Rest Days Hutton Webster has drawn attention to the passage in 2 Kings 4:23, describing how, when the Shunammite woman wanted to go to the prophet Elijah to beg him for her son's life to be restored, her husband objected, saying 'Wherefore wilt thou go to him today? It is neither new moon nor Sabbath.' As Webster goes on to point out, when study of the cuneiform records revealed that the Babylonian shabbatum (full-moon day) also fell on the fourteenth (or fifteenth) day of the month, we were presented with another survival of what must have been the primary meaning of the Hebrew term shabbath.

Although the Hebrew seven-day week ending with the Sabbath (the only day to which a name was given) resembles the Babylonian seven-day period ending with an 'evil day', there are imporant differences. For the latter cycle was always directly associated with the moon, whereas the Hebrew week was not but was continued from month to month and year to year regardless of the moon. Moreover, the Babylonian evil day was observed only by the king, priests, and physicians, whereas the Hebrew Sabbath was observed by the whole nation. As Webster points out, 'To dissever the week from the lunar month, to employ it as a recognized calendrical unit, and to fix upon one day of that week for the exercises of religion were momentous innovations which, until evidence to the contrary is found, must be attributed to the Hebrew people alone.'³³

By the time that Israel became part of the Roman empire, the idea was already widespread among the various religious sects that the 'End of the World' was at hand, although it was only for the Essenes of Qumran that this belief assumed a definite form; that, whereas the First Judgement at the time of Noah had been destruction by water, the Last Judgement would be destruction by fire. The Essenes, an extremely ascetic sect who withdrew to the desert region of Judaea near the Red Sea, appear to have originated in the middle of the second century BC at the time of the Maccabean revolt against the misguided Hellenizing reforms of the Seleucid ruler of Palestine Antiochus IV. He had recently taken over this region, which had previously been subject to the Ptolemies in Egypt. The Essenes were not only greatly inclined to apocalyptic views and legalism, but they were frantically anti-Hellenistic. Following the conquests of Alexander, Egypt and the rest of the area that we now call the Middle East were dominated by Hellenistic customs and views. Greek became the lingua franca of this region and remained so during the time of the Roman empire. Because of this, the books of the New Testament appeared in Greek, although the language spoken by Jesus and his disciples had been Aramaic.

Many Jews, especially outside Palestine, became Hellenized, but inside that country only the Sadducees were sympathetic to Hellenic culture. As the most intellectually enlightened of the sects, they were on the side of the ruling power. Their name signified 'sons of Zadok', the high priest at the time of David who was thought to be a descendant of the younger son of Aaron. They were the main enemies of the predominant sect, the Pharisees, who believed that salvation would only come if they adhered strictly to the Mosaic law, as originally set out in Deuteronomy where it was made clear that the chosen people must be a 'clean' people. The Deuteronomic standpoint was later canonized in the Torah and in the books of the prophets and became central in Jewish life. Indeed, of the books of the Old Testament so far found to have been in use among the Qumran sect, with the exception of Isaiah and the Psalms, most are copies of Deuteronomy.³⁴

It is of particular interest to us today that the rivalry of Pharisees and Sadducees extended to their differing views concerning the way time should be measured. For, whereas the Pharisees adhered to the lunar year (with intercalary months so that the agricultural year kept pace with the sun), the Sadducees adopted the luni-solar year used by the Greeks. Each sect accused the other of wishing to observe the prescribed religious festivals at the wrong times, although in practice they had to keep to the same dates. Because the Pharisees were the predominant sect, few Sadducee writings have survived. Among those that have, particular interest attaches to the Book of Jubilees, which was probably composed about the year 110 BC.³⁵ The basis of this calendar of jubilees seems to have been the famous Pythagorean right-angled triangle of sides three, four, and five.³⁶The sum of the first two gives the number of days in the week, the sum of all three gives the number of months in the year, and the sum of their squares gives the number fifty. According to Philo of Alexandria, a first-century Graeco-Judaic philosopher who wrote many works that still survive, including commentaries on the Old Testament, fifty was regarded as the holiest of numbers and 'the principle of the generation of the universe' ( De vita contemplativa, 65). The significance of a fifty-year cycle in Jewish life, with the remission of debts, the release of slaves, etc., was eventually responsible for the practice that has been followed by successive Popes, since 1300, in declaring a Jubilee of the Roman Church every fifty years.

Imperial Rome and early Christendom

Because of the way in which it began, Christianity inherited the peculiar Jewish view of time with its hope of redemption from successive oppressors. At first Christians looked upon the risen Jesus as the Messiah whose return was imminent and would bring to an end the existing world-order. Gradually, as time passed without this return occurring, Christians had to cope with a world that continued to exist, its end being postponed to an indefinite future. If Jesus were the Messiah, then he had already come and a new interpretation was necessary. The birth of Jesus thus came to be regarded as dividing time into two parts, because it ended the first phase of the divine purpose and initiated the second. Unlike adherents of other contemporary religions in the Roman empire, except Judaism, Christians regarded their religion as expressing the purpose of God in history; but whereas Judaism was concerned primarily with the fortunes of Israel, Christians considered their faith to be of universal significance. The crucifixion was considered by them to be a unique event not subject to repetition. Consequently, time must be linear rather than cyclic. This essentially historical view of time, with its particular emphasis on the non-repeatability of events, is the very essence of Christianity. It is brought out clearly, and even contrasted with the Hebrew view, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, 9: 25-6: 'Nor yet that he should offer himself often, as the high priest entereth into the holy place every year with the blood of others; For then must he often have suffered since the foundation of the world; but now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.'

The world in which Christianity originated was that of the Roman empire. The age was one in which a variety of religions flourished, many of oriental origin. In general it was an extremely superstitious age. On many days of the year the traditional religious calendar forbade business of any sort. In particular, on days of ill-omen ships could not set sail. Thus, no Roman skipper would move off from a port on 24 August, 5 October, or 8 November, and it was thought bad to be at sea at the end of the month.³⁷

As Sir Ronald Syme has pointed out, the Romans had a special veneration for authority, precedent, and tradition, and they greatly objected to change unless it was thought to be in accord with ancestral custom, which meant in practice the sentiments of the oldest living senators. The Romans tended to be suspicious of novelty, and the word 'novus' had for them a sinister ring, although their memory of the past reminded them that change had often come about, although at first resisted. As Syme has remarked, ' Rome's peculiar greatness was due not to one man's genius or to one age, but to many men and the long process of time.'³⁸

One of the main inspirations of Roman historians was the cult of ancestors and the propensity of noble families to commemorate their deeds. Unlike the Greek historians, they made it their business as patriots to present a comprehensive survey of their country's past. The first history of Rome was, however, written by a Greek, Polybius, who lived in Rome in the second century BC. Later historians of note include Caesar, Sallust, Livy, Tacitus, and Suetonius. Livy (c. 59 BC-AD 19) gave his history the title Ab urbe condita ('From the Foundation of the City') and began with Aeneas. Omens and prodigies abound in his work, so that compared with him Herodotus seems almost modern. The only Roman historian who can be compared to Thucydides is Tacitus (c. AD 55-117). Both were great stylists and for them history was the ultimate tribunal before which the actions of rulers and others can be judged, 'but where Thucydides was a magistrate, Tacitus was an advocate--the most brilliant, perhaps, who ever sought to determine the judgement of Time, but an advocate all the same'.³⁹ Although much of his historical writing depended on oral testimony, he is of all ancient historians the one who most frequently cites the authors and documents that he has consulted. He had an exalted idea of history that is well illustrated by his claim ( Annals, iii. 65) that the historian's duty is 'to rejudge the conduct of men, that generous actions may be snatched from oblivion, and that the author of pernicious counsels, and the perpetrator of evil deeds may see, beforehand, the infamy that awaits them at the tribunal of posterity'. The Romans tended to regard the course of history as alternating between defection from and adherence to traditional values. As E. R. Curtius has pointed out, the pious attitude of the Romans to their past and their tendency to regard it as if it were a part of the present signified a kind of timelessness that excluded a genuinely historical view of the world and was very different from our sense of temporal perspective.⁴⁰

Although the Romans respected the literary and other cultural achievements of the Greeks, they were puzzled by the importance assigned by them to mathematics. The outstanding exception to the general conclusion that the Romans were not really interested in science was Lucretius (c. 94-55 BC), whose De rerum natura is nowadays regarded as the greatest philosophical poem ever written. Although it impressed both Cicero ( 106-43 BC) and Virgil ( 70-19 BC), the Epicureanism on which it was based made little impression on the Romans, except for its hedonistic aspect. As regards the concept of time, the poem is remarkable for its modern point of view: 'Similarly, time by itself does not exist; but from things themselves there results a sense of what has already taken place, what is now going on and what is to ensue. It must not be claimed that anyone can sense time itself apart from the movement of things or their restful immobility.'⁴¹

Unlike Epicureanism, Stoicism had a considerable appeal for the more educated citizens. A famous passage in Virgil Fourth Eclogue gives expression to the concept of the 'Eternal Return': 'Now is come the last age of the song of Cumae; the great line of the centuries begins anew . . . A second Tiphys shall then arise, and a second Argo to carry chosen heroes; a second warfare, too, there shall be, and again shall a great Achilles be sent to Troy.' The stoical attitude of philosophical resignation replaced the old Roman polytheism which had become more and more a meaningless formality. In so far as Jupiter survived he was the personification of Providence or Destiny. The deification of the Emperors, introduced by Augustus, was not taken too seriously and signified little more than in later ages was implied by the adjective 'Holy' in the title 'Holy Roman Emperor'.

Although for the upper classes the Pax Romana in the age of the Antonines ( second century AD) came as a great opportunity to concentrate on and uphold the customs of their local town or district, for humbler men it provided wider horizons and unprecedented opportunities for travel. As a leading authority on late antiquity has pointed out, 'merchants were constantly on the move, seeking opportunities in the underdeveloped territories of Western Europe, often settling far from their native towns'.⁴² Indeed, one merchant from Phrygia is known to have visited Rome no fewer than seventy-two times. This new freedom to travel safely far and wide had a profound effect not only on men's lives but also on their thoughts and beliefs; these men who were being uprooted provided 'the background to the anxious thoughts of the religious leaders of the late second century'.⁴³ It was from them and no longer from the humble and oppressed, as in the previous century, that the converts to Christianity were now mainly recruited.

At this time, however, Christianity was only one among a number of competing religions in the Roman empire which were coming increasingly under the cosmopolitan influence of Hellenistic civilization. Stoicism had declined, the last prominent exponent of its philosophy being Marcus Aurelius who ruled from 161 to 180. His Meditations, with their emphasis on the vicissitudes of perpetual change, exude an air of world-weariness. The following century saw the spread of Gnosticism, the believers in which laid claim to secret, or privileged, knowledge and so were called gnostikoi ('knowers'). It was a way of thought based on the general Hellenic idea that salvation is obtained by knowledge. Besides Christian forms there were others such as Hermeticism and Manichaeism. One of the most characteristic features of Gnostic thought was the fundamental dualism of God and the world, the Deity being regarded as completely transcending the world which, so far from being his creation, was the realm of the Devil and consequently irredeemably evil. Gnosticism can be looked upon as a revolt against Greek science. Although dualistic it was quite different from Platonism: cosmic time was not the moving image of eternity but 'at best a caricature of eternity, a defective imitation far removed from its model'.⁴⁴ Similarly, Gnosticism was opposed to orthodox Christianity by its hostility to history, for instead of being based on the idea that God prepares for the future by way of the past it regarded the world as one from which God was absent. Consequently, when Gnosticism was combined with Christian ideas the result was soon judged unacceptable by the Church. Nevertheless, this peculiar combination had a long life and was destined to reappear in the Middle Ages as the Albigensian heresy that flourished for a while in southern France but was eventually crushed in the first quarter of the thirteenth century by the northern French at the command of the most powerful of the medieval Popes, Innocent III.

Among other forms of religion that flourished in the Roman empire was Mithraism. This extremely masculine religion appealed to the Roman army. The founding father of modern Mithraic studies, Franz Cumont, showed that Roman Mithraism was a continuation of the Iranian religion of Zarathustra and that its origins can be traced back to the Hindus, for in the Vedic hymns we encounter the name Mitra. According to Cumont, despite the theological differences between the Vedas and the Avesta, 'the Vedic Mitra and the Iranian Mithra have preserved so many traits of resemblance that it is impossible to entertain any doubt concerning their common origin'.⁴⁵

Two different iconographical images of Mithra have survived. In one found only in the West, e.g. in the course of excavations in the City of London, he appears as a handsome bull-slaying god, signifying the renewal of the world at the time of the New Year. In a marble group in the British Museum depicting the bull-slaying Mithra the most striking feature is that three spikes of wheat are shown issuing from the wound of the sacrificed bull.⁴⁶

Mithra's other form, found in the Eastern as well as the Western world, is as a lion-headed monster around whose body a serpent is coiled. The snake is sometimes decorated with signs of the zodiac. It therefore represents the path of the sun around the ecliptic and indicates the connection between Mithra and the Iranian god of time, Zurvan. This symbolism is similar to that found in many ancient cultures, including those of Mesoamerica, in which the serpent represents cycles of endless time, perhaps suggested by the fact that the snake periodically sheds and renews its skin. In the story of the Fall in the third chapter of Genesis the destroyer of Man's primeval innocence is also depicted as a serpent. The representation of endless time by a snake swallowing its own tail and bearing the legend 'My end is my beginning' occurs later in rings worn on the finger, such as that possessed by Mary, Queen of Scots.

The Mithraic lion-headed god symbolized Eternity. This representation of Mithra appears to have been derived from Egyptian art, and it has been suggested that it may have been influenced by the bandages of mummified corpses.⁴⁷ There are indications that in Egypt the god of eternal time was identified with Osiris. In some representations, in the Book of the Dead, the phoenix is depicted as arising from him.⁴⁸ The phoenix is also sometimes depicted in Mithraic contexts. Since Egyptian theology was influential in Imperial Rome, M. J. Vermaseren has argued that 'neither Iran nor Egypt alone formed the cult of the lion- headed god in Mithraism, but the Hellenistic age in general, of which Egypt was a major component, formed a concrete representation of the abstract idea of eternity.'⁴⁹

Besides the various religions of eastern origin that flourished in Rome during the second and third centuries AD, there was also a resurgence of philosophical speculation. This was based on a revival of Plato's ideas and so is called Neoplatonism. The greatest figure of this school was Plotinus (c. 205-70). Born in Egypt, he settled in Rome in 244. In his philosophy reality is the spiritual world contemplated by reason, the material world being a mere receptacle for the ideal forms imposed on it by the world- soul. The seventh part of his third Ennead ('On Time and Eternity') can be regarded as meditation on the passage in Plato Timaeus (37-8) where time and the creation of the world are discussed.⁵⁰ Plotinus believed that the origin of time was to be found in the life of the world-soul. The question as to whether time could conceivably exist if there were no 'soul' (or mind) to apprehend it had been raised, but not answered, by Aristotle, whose definition of time as the 'numbering' of motion and change in relation to before and after appeared to presuppose the existence of a 'soul' that contemplates and measures it. For most philosophers of classical antiquity the world was both animate and divine. Consequently, it was possible for them (but not for Christians, because they rejected pantheism) to speak of a world-soul that could measure time, and this was, in fact, the answer given by Plotinus to Aristotle's question. Plotinus also advanced beyond Plato by modifying the latter's famous metaphor of time as the moving image of eternity, since he was more concerned to stress the difference between, rather than the resemblance of, time and eternity. In his opinion, although everything that exists must be like its cause, the fact that one thing is produced by another implies that they are different. Adopting a hierarchical standpoint and preferring to speak in terms of 'life' rather than 'motion', Plotinus regarded time as an intermediate between eternity (or the higher soul that contemplates eternity) and the motion of the universe which reveals time as the 'life' (or creative power) of 'soul'.⁵¹ Although not a Christian, Plotinus was in some respects a forerunner of St Augustine, particularly because he thought of time in psychological terms.

Early in the fourth century the struggles that had occurred intermittently between the Roman state and the Christian Church ended with the latter proving the stronger, partly as a result of the military upheavals that had threatened the former in the middle of the previous century. Two events of outstanding importance then helped to settle the fate of each; the capital of the Roman empire was transferred to Byzantium, renamed Constantinople, and Christianity became the state religion. In his earlier years the emperor Constantine (c. 288-335) had been an adherent first of Hercules and then of Sol Invictus. His conversion to Christianity marked a turning-point in the history of both the Church and Europe. The 'Chi-Rho' monogram of Christ began to appear on Constantine's coins in the year 315. At the same time, the Bishop of Rome began to become more important in the west, partly because the Emperor no longer lived in the old capital.

Whereas Augustus had had the poet Virgil to sing his praises, Constantine had the ecclesiastical politician and historian Eusebius as the man who sat immediately to the right of his throne during the sessions of the Council of Nicaea in 325 and exercised a decisive influence on the creed and discipline of the Universal, or Catholic, Church. Constantine was declared to be Emperor by divine right. As a result, he 'gained rather than lost by his willingness to exchange the style and title of a god for that of God's vice-gerent'.⁵² Later that century the Empire was finally split up into an eastern and a western part. Thereafter, the latter, which was the more directly threatened by invaders, could no longer call upon the stronger military forces of the former. After the western ruler Honorius had refused the province of Noricum (southern Austria) to the Visigothic king, Alaric, whose lands were under pressure from the Huns to the east, the latter marched with his troops on Rome in the year 410 and sacked the 'Eternal City'. This unprecedented catastrophe shocked the Empire profoundly. It led the Bishop of Hippo (near Carthage) to write soon afterwards his great book The City of God, the first philosophy of history, in order to rebut the charge that the sack of Rome was punishment for the abandonment by its citizens of their traditional pagan gods.

Like Paul of Tarsus, Augustine of Hippo was a convert to Christianity, having previously been a Manichee and then a Neoplatonist like Plotinus. His Confessions, written not long before the Fall of Rome, was an even more original form of literature than Rousseau's written more than a thousand years later, for it was the first true autobiography. It led William James to call St Augustine, although he lived so long ago, 'the first modern man'. In it he gave an account of his life including his conversion to Christianity and his struggle against rival doctrines.

Even after he had ceased to be a Neoplatonist, St Augustine remained very much under the influence of Plato's philosophical ideas, in particular those concerning time. Like Plato, he believed that the concepts of time and the universe were inseparable, each being essential to the other. In The City of God ( xi. 5, 6; xii. 16) he argued that time can have no existence unless things are actually happening, and in his Confessions ( xi. 14) when replying to the question what was God doing before he made heaven and earth, 'I answer not,' he wrote, 'as one is said to have done merrily (eluding the pressure of the question), "He was preparing hell (saith he) for pryers into mysteries".' In both books we find him passionately concerned with the nature of time and vigorously rejecting cyclical theories of history. In The City of God ( xii. 13) he wrote:

The pagan philosophers have introduced cycles of time in which the same things are in the order of nature being restored and repeated, and have asserted that these whirlings of past and future ages will go on unceasingly. . . . From this mockery they are unable to set free the immortal soul, even after it has attained wisdom, and believe it to be proceeding unceasingly to false blessedness and returning unceasingly to true misery. . . . It is only through the sound doctrine of a rectilinear course that we can escape from I know not what false cycles discovered by false and deceitful sages.

Like Plotinus before him, St Augustine, in Book XI of his Confessions, submitted Aristotle's concept of time to searching criticism. He argued that time and motion must be more carefully distinguished from one another than they were by Aristotle. In particular, he objected to correlating time with the motions of the heavenly bodies, since time would still exist if the heavens should cease to move but a potter's wheel continued to rotate. For there would be some temporal duration represented by each revolution of the wheel and a certain number of these revolutions would still take place in the interval of time we call a day, even though the motion of the sun had ceased. Similarly, if a body be sometimes in motion and sometimes at rest, we measure its period of rest as well as its period of motion by time. In place of Aristotle's association of time with motion and his appeal to the uniform daily revolution of the heavens as its basis, St Augustine turned, not as Plotinus had done to the concept of the 'world-soul' but to the human mind for the ultimate source and standard of time. Whereas Aristotle did not enquire into the mental process by which we perceive time, because he believed that our minds must necessarily conform to the time of the physical universe, St Augustine took the mind's activity as the basis of temporal measurement. He considered the problem of measuring the time taken by a voice in making a single sound. Clearly, before the sound begins we cannot measure the time it is going to take, but after it has sounded how can we measure it, since it is then no more? Nor can we measure it in the present if we regard the present as an indivisible instant that is truly momentary and without duration. St Augustine came to the conclusion that we can measure time only if the mind has the power of holding within itself the impression made by things as they pass by even after they are gone. In other words, we do not measure the things themselves but rather something that remains fixed in the memory. It is the impression that passing events leave in the mind that we measure, for only this impression remains after they have passed. The mind has the power of distending itself into the future by means of anticipation and the past by means of memory. In the present there is only the attention of the soul by means of which the future becomes the past, and only when the constant diminishing of the future of the sound has made it entirely past can the mind measure it in terms of some preconceived standard. St Augustine did not explain how the mind could be an accurate chronometer for the timing of external events, but as the pioneer of the study of psychological time he stands in the front rank of those who have contributed to the understanding of our sense of time.

Whereas for most Greeks and Romans, whether they believed in cycles or not, the dominant aspects of time were the present and the past, Christianity directed man's attention to the future. In the words of the philosopher Erich Frank, 'With Christianity . . . man acquired a new understanding of time.'⁵³ The Christian view of time directed to the future, as presented by St Augustine, differed from the ideas of time current in Classical antiquity in that it was neither cyclic nor would it continue indefinitely without anything essentially new occurring. John Baillie has made the further point that, in his detailed criticism of cyclical views of time, St Augustine was anxious to defend the doctrine of creation and particularly its corollary that 'through the creative power of God the course of events is characterized by the emergence of genuine novelty.'⁵⁴ In assessing the importance of St Augustine for the development of the Christian view of time, his writings can be contrasted with the New Testament. Olaf Pedersen has recently drawn attention to St Paul's complete indifference to time and chronology: he never even dated his letters.⁵⁵ Presumably this total lack of interest was due to his belief, which he shared with other early Christians, that the Second Coming was imminent ( Romans 13: 11-12). Time for Christians began with the Creation and would end with Christ's Second Coming. World history was bounded by these two events. The spread of this belief marks the divide between the mental outlook of Classical antiquity and that of the Middle Ages. Moreover, our modern concept of history, however rationalized and secularized it may be, still rests on the concept of historical time which was inaugurated by Christianity.⁵⁶

Although it is to Christianity that we owe our modern temporal orientation, it is to the Romans that we are mainly indebted for the form of our calendar and conventions of time recording. Prior to Julius Caesar, however, Roman achievements in chronometry were far from impressive. For example, when Rome's first sundial was brought to the city from Sicily in 263 BC, during the first Punic war, and was erected in the Forum it was inaccurate because it indicated the time appropriate to the place whence it came which was more than four degrees to the south. It was not until 164 BC, almost a century later, that a public sundial was erected that was appropriate to Rome's latitude. A public clepsydra was set up in Rome in 158 BC by Scipio Nasica. The introduction of clocks into Roman law courts, following the practice in Greece, led some unscrupulous lawyers to bribe the clepsydra attendant to regulate the water supply in their favour. From Caesar we learn that water-clocks were used in military camps to time the night watches ( De bello Gallico, v. 13). According to St Mark (13: 35), there were four night watches: evening, midnight, cock-crow, morning.

Writing in Imperial times, the poet Juvenal (c. AD 50-130), informs us that in his day wealthy members of the upper class had private water- clocks and special slaves to read them and announce the hours to their masters. Clocks thus came to be regarded as status symbols. An example of this occurs in Petronius Feast of Trimalchio, Trimalchio having a beautiful clock in his dining room. Nevertheless, the unequal hours and comparative inaccuracy of Roman clocks led Seneca ( Apocolocyntosis, ii. 2-3) to complain that it was impossible to tell the exact hour 'since it is easier for philosophers to agree than for clocks'!

Our present calendar is a modification of the calendar introduced by Julius Caesar on 1 January 45 BC and since named after him (see Appendix 1). Previously, the Romans had tried to bring their civil calendar, which like many ancient calendars was based on the moon, into line with the astronomical year based on the sun by adopting a system involving an additional or intercalary month every second year. Since the length of this month was not determined by any precise rule, the pontiffs were left to exercise their discretion, and they frequently abused this power for political ends. By manipulating the number of days in the intercalary month they could prolong a term of office or hasten an election, with the result that by the time of Julius Caesar the civil year was about three months out of phase with the astronomical year, so that the winter months fell in the autumn and the spring equinox came in the winter.

Acting on the advice of the Greek astronomer Sosigenes, Caesar directed that to correct this anomaly the year 46 BC should be extended to 445 days. Although this led to it being called 'the year of confusion', his object was to put an end to confusion. He also abolished the lunar year and the intercalary month and based his calendar entirely on the sun. He fixed the true year at 3651/4 days and introduced the leap year of 366 days every fourth year, the ordinary civil year comprising 365 days. He ordered that January, March, May, July, September and November should each have 31 days, the other months having 30 days, except February which should normally have 29 but in leap years would have 30. Unfortunately, in 7 BC this neat arrangement was interfered with in order to honour Augustus by renaming the month Sextilis after him (he believed that it was his lucky month) and assigning to it the same number of days as the preceding month that had been renamed after his murdered great-uncle by Mark Antony. A day was thus taken away from February and transferred to August. To avoid having three months each of 31 days occurring in succession, September and November were each reduced to 30 days and October and December were each raised to 31. Thus to honour the first of the Roman emperors an orderly arrangement was reduced to an illogical jumble that many people find difficult to remember but which in the course of 2,000 years has been successfully imposed on most of the world.

Although originally the Roman calendar began in the spring on 1 March (as reflected in our names for the months September to December), the consuls, who were elected for one year, in 153 BC began to take office on 1 January. From then on the year was regarded by the Romans as beginning on that day. Later this choice was considered to be pagan by the Church because of the festivities traditionally associated with it. Instead the Church preferred to use the Annunciation for the first day of the year, and this led to the adoption of 25 March, nine months before Christmas, although this choice was by no means universal. (Astronomers, as a rule, kept to 1 January as the beginning of the year. Generally, the history of the beginning of the civil year is complicated.⁵⁷ For example, in Venice the year began on 1 March until the fall of the republic in 1797.) From AD 312 'indiction cycles' of fifteen years' duration were introduced by the Emperor Constantine for taxation purposes and led to the Byzantine year being reckoned from 1 September, the date on which each year of an indiction cycle began. They remained popular in the West throughout the Middle Ages and even continued to be used by the supreme tribunal of the Holy Roman Empire until its abolition by Napoleon in 1806.

The Romans made use of the idea of denominating the years by a single era count. This idea had been put into practice in 312/311 BC by Seleucus I, the Hellenistic ruler of Babylonia. The following century the Greek system of dating by successive Olympiads from the first in 776 BC was begun, either by the historian Timaeus of Sicily or by Eratosthenes, the famous librarian of the Museum in Alexandria and measurer of the earth, and later Greek chronology was based upon it. The Roman system of dating ab urbe condita (i.e. from the foundation of Rome) was introduced by Varro in the first century BC and was based on the date assigned to the fabled founding of the city. Although this system was ratified by Julius Caesar in 46 BC and was widely used, there was some uncertainty about the precise relation of the resulting Roman dates to those of the Olympiads.⁵⁸According to the historian Polybius, the founding of Rome occurred at an Olympiad dating corresponding to 750 BC.

Other dates were also ascribed to this event. In the time of Augustus the list that was compiled of magistrates of the Republic was based on counting from 752 BC. The date that was eventually generally accepted was 753 BC, originally suggested by Varro ( 116-27 BC). According to tradition, the birthday of Rome was on the festival of Parilia, 21 April. Consequently, on that day in the year AD 247 the Romans celebrated the thousandth anniversary of the founding of their city. Coins were minted bearing the famous inscription Roma aeterna--' Rome, the eternal city'.

Among the conventions for the division of time that have come down to us from Imperial Rome is the seven-day week. Its origin can be traced back to the Sumerians and Babylonians. It was never used by the Greeks, who divided the month into three parts of ten days each, but it was employed by the Jews (see p. 55). Originally, the Romans had a complicated system of dividing the month, with Calends (from which our word 'calendar' is derived) on the first, Ides on the fifteenth of March, May, July, and October and on the thirteenth day of the other months, and Nones occurring eight days before the Ides. Originally, the Calends were the days of new moon and the Ides the days of full moon. Initially, the year was divided into the ten months March to December, the period midwinter to spring being left out because there was little agricultural work to be done then. Later this period was divided into the months January and February. In the early history of Rome the only times recognized in the daylight period were sunrise, midday, and sunset. The nights, however, were divided into four vigilae (or watches), this system being presumably of military origin. The days were counted backwards, from the Calends, Nones, and Ides, respectively. The day from which the Romans calculated and the day to be designated were both included, for example, 2 January was designated ante diem IV Non. Jan. The Nones were so named because they occurred on the 'ninth' day before the Ides. The days after the Ides were reckoned as days before the Calends of the succeeding month. This system was still in use in western Europe as late as the sixteenth century!⁵⁹

In Imperial times, however, the custom became popular, under astrological influence, to use the seven-day week with the different days named after the respective 'planets'.⁶⁰ Inscriptions at Pompeii list the 'days of the gods', namely Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus. This order, from which our modern days of the week derive (e.g. in French), appears at first sight to be devoid of sense, since it does not accord in an obvious way with the order in which (according to pre-Copernican cosmology) the 'planets' were thought to lie in relation to the earth: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the sun, Venus, Mercury, the moon. The explanation is that the planets were believed to rule the hours of the day as well as the days of the week and that each day was associated with the planet that rules its first hour. The first hour of Saturday was ruled by Saturn, and similarly the eighth, fifteenth, and twenty-second hours. The twenty-third was allotted to Jupiter, the twenty-fourth to Mars, and the first of the next day to the sun, which thus ruled Sunday, and so on through the week. From this comes the custom, introduced in the third century AD, of indicating the most important dates according to the weekdays as well.⁶¹

The Christians, because of the Jewish origin of their religion, at first adhered to the Jewish seven-day week in which the days, except the Sabbath, were numbered but not named. In due course, however, they began to be influenced by the astrological beliefs of converts from paganism; as a result, they adopted the planetary week. Meanwhile, the influence of Mithraism had led the pagans to substitute Dies Solis (the Sun-day) for the Dies Saturnis (the Saturn-day) as the first day of the week. This change appealed to the Christians who had long observed Sunday--the Lord's Day (Dies Dominica) on which Christ rose from the dead--as the first day of the week, in place of the Jewish Sabbath. The planetary week was officially adopted in AD 321 by the Emperor Constantine, who also followed the Christian practice of regarding Sunday, instead of Saturday, as the first day of the week. He formally decreed that magistrates, citizens, and artisans were to rest from their labours 'on the venerable day of the sun', but he permitted field work. Already in the first century AD, under the influence of Judaism, Roman Society had begun to introduce a weekly day of rest--unlike ancient Greece where there were not even any school holidays, except on special occasions such as days in honour of Apollo, Poseidon, etc.⁶² Tertullian (c. 155-222) was the first Church Father to declare that Christians ought to abstain on Sunday from secular duties or occupations, lest these should give pleasure to the Devil.

The first mention of Christmas Day, as far as we know, was in the Roman calendar for the year 354. Previously, 6 January had been celebrated as the Epiphany, or anniversary of Christ's baptism, which was believed to have occurred on his thirtieth birthday. The choice of 6 January for this purpose has been traced back to the gnostic Christians of Egypt, the corresponding date in the calendar used there being traditionally associated with the blessing of the Nile. Christ's birthday only became important for the Church when infant baptism replaced adult baptism. This led to the belief that Christ's divine nature originated at his birth rather than at his baptism. As a result, by about the year 400 Christmas Day had become a significant date in the Christian Year: 25 December was chosen so as to exorcize the great pagan festival of the solar solstice.

In the latter part of the fourth century the last great emperor of the west, Theodosius, who was of Spanish origin, finally abolished the pagan Roman calendar with its hotchpotch of festivals, thereby severing one of the most familiar links the Romans had with their historic past. Consequently, it is to him that the European world owes a uniform calendar corresponding to the needs of a universal society and based upon the Christian year. In 386 he reaffirmed his decree and invoked severe sanctions against those who desecrated the Lord's Day.⁶³ The view that the Lord's Day is essentially the Jewish Sabbath--a 'taboo' day--transferred from the seventh to the first day of the week found expression from time to time in medieval law and theology. It culminated in the sabbatarian excesses of English and Scottish Puritanism and the Sunday legislation, much of which has been relaxed since the First World War.

Easter was introduced in Rome about the year 160, and as in Alexandria was celebrated on the Sunday following the Hebrew Passover, which for practical purposes could be reckoned as the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox. A set of Easter tables drawn up by Cyril of Alexandria ( 376-444) was accompanied by a consecutive set of years beginning with the Emperor Diocletian and his persecution in AD 284, but when in AD 525 a Scythian monk living in Rome, Dionysius Exiguus, prepared a continuation of Cyril's tables, at the request of Pope John I, he felt that it was inappropriate to reckon from the reign of this enemy of Christianity, and he chose instead to date the years from Christ's Incarnation.⁶⁴ Astronomical evidence suggests that this may have occurred in the first half of the year 5 BC. (For astronomers, unlike historians and chronologists, there is a year 0.) Although Dionysius' system was the origin of the AD sequence that we now employ, it was not made use of for nearly 200 years, the oldest known work in which it is employed being Bede Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, of the early eighth century. The BC system, extending backwards from the birth of Christ, was occasionally used by Bede, but after him it lapsed until the fifteenth century. It did not come into general use until the latter half of the seventeenth century.