Greek & Roman Calendars by Robert Hannah

Apr 13, 2005 Alun Science, The Past 1 Comment Ancient History, Archaeoastronomy, Book, Calendars, Greek, Review, Roman

I think it was D.R. Dicks in his book Early Greek Astro­nomy to Aris­totle who bemoaned the lack of books on Greek Astro­nomy. He looked back to the 1930s and Thomas Heath’s book on Greek Astro­nomy for an earlier work on the sub­ject. At the time when I was doing my BA I thought that was a bad thing. Now I sus­pect it’s not. Rather it shows that when clas­si­cists look at astro­nomy in the ancient world they keep an eye on how it inter­re­lated with soci­ety. The res­ult is excel­lent books like Rose­mary Wright’s Cos­mo­logy in Antiquity, Tam­syn Barton’s Ancient Astro­logy and now Robert Hannah’s Greek & Roman Cal­en­dars. I’ve just fin­ished my first skim of the book and I’m quite impressed.

One of the big prob­lems I have with a lot of work on archae­oastro­nomy is that authors often love to give reams of data and announce that it’s up to archae­olo­gists or his­tor­i­ans to inter­pret it. This might sound fine in the­ory, lots of people pro­du­cing masses of object­ive data, but I end up won­der­ing “What is the point?”. Given I’m open to archae­oastro­nomy that sug­gests that there’s a prob­lem. Keith Kin­tigh put it nicely when he said:

[A]rchaeologists see archae­oastro­nomers as answer­ing ques­tions that, from a social sci­entific stand­point, no one is ask­ing. To put it bluntly, in many cases it doesn’t mat­ter much to the pro­gress of anthro­po­logy whether a par­tic­u­lar archae­oastro­nom­ical claim is right or wrong because the inform­a­tion doesn’t inform the cur­rent inter­pret­ive ques­tions. It may be true that a build­ing is lined up within half a degree of true north, but what do I do with that sin­gu­lar fact?

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Robert Hannah’s book is inter­est­ing first and fore­most not because it is about astro­nomy, but because it is about people.

He starts by explain­ing why cal­en­dars are so import­ant: they reg­u­late social time. He doesn’t fall into the hack­neyed claim that accur­ate cal­en­dars are essen­tial for agri­cul­ture, and keeps the issue of how a soci­ety reg­u­lates its social activ­ity at the forefront.

Chapter one is short and intro­duces the astro­nom­ical reas­ons why a cal­en­dar is not a straight-forward device. The explan­a­tion is pretty basic, by which I mean he doesn’t get lost in minu­tiae which might appeal to astro­nomers, but would bore the aver­age clas­si­cist rigid. I’m assum­ing any clas­si­cist with a deep interest in astro­nomy would already know this inform­a­tion and would skip on to chapter two. How­ever, there is enough inform­a­tion here to sup­ply what is needed to be known.

Chapter two starts with the earli­est cal­en­dars and explains events such as heli­acal rising lucidly. The earli­est cal­en­dars dis­cus­sion are from Mycenaean times, but most of the chapter con­cen­trates on archaic cal­en­dars. It also tackles the prob­lem of the Olympics, which is brave to say the least. In this chapter there is more of a con­cen­tra­tion on sym­bol­ism, his work from Elec­tronic Antiquity on the Shield of Achilles makes an appearance.

The cal­en­dar as we would recog­nise it, in the sense of a pro­gres­sion of months is the core of Chapter three. He also refers back to his work on parapeg­mata, calendrical stelae which have holes for move­able pegs to pub­lic­ally indic­ate the day. By the holes would be handy com­ments like Ornis rises this day or Today the heat is at its greatest. He also tackles some of the issues in fix­ing mod­ern dates to months.

Chapter four, Syn­chron­isms, tackles the ways in which was can cor­rel­ate the months of other Greek cal­en­dars to each other to pro­duce more known dates. This is a chapter I’ll need to read again. This kind of work is a mine­field and while I can­not see any­thing wrong with it, it’s the sort of detail clas­si­cists can debate for years. It’s no fault of the book, I need to be sharper with this material.

Rome gets a lot less atten­tion in the book. The only chapter which fully cov­ers the mater­ial is chapter five. I don’t think I’m bet­ter informed on the Roman cal­en­dar, but much of this seemed quite famil­iar, so I think this chapter is per­haps the least innov­at­ive. Still, that is a rel­at­ive term, there still a fas­cin­at­ing sec­tion on Augustus’s horo­scope to read.

Chapter six is the oddest chapter in the book. It’s entitled After­words, and that more or less sums up the bitty nature of the sec­tion. It’s not that the bits aren’t good, but it may have made more sense as a Later Antiquity chapter.

The only big dis­ap­point­ment is that in the back you’ll only find a select bib­li­o­graphy, which doesn’t even list all of Hannah’s major works. On the whole it’s the kind of work I’d like my PhD to be. It’s thought-provoking, ori­ginal and well-researched but above all it’s access­ible without being light­weight. Han­nah shows that a schol­arly work can use lan­guage as a part­ner to illu­min­ate con­cepts rather than, as some authors seem to believe, an oppon­ent to be wrestled into sumbis­sion. The icing on the cake is that in paper­back it’s afford­able. Rather than being one of this ridicu­lously expens­ive Kluwer volumes that cost more than the Book of Kells, Duck­worth have pro­duced a book that it’s sens­ible to go out and buy. It’s almost as if they want people to read it. Brilliant!