Time as an anachronism
Time is Over. Photo CC-BY Gabor Dvornik.
I’m writing up a paper, and because it’s one I haven’t actually finished yet I quite like it. It ties up some loose ends with project. It also adds something new to ancient politics without having to contradict a lot of people. It’s been going quite well so I’ve started writing up the Introduction and I must have been slightly on automatic because I’ve run smack into the question “What is Time?” A lot of people much more intelligent than me have been banging their heads against this problem for millennia, so I’ll be doing well to solve it in a couple of paragraphs. I think for my work I’ve managed to tighten the problem into two smaller questions. Is the modern experience of time as a largely objective passage of duration anachronistic when you look at the ancient world?
Plato in the Timaeus 38c says:
Wherefore, as a consequence of this reasoning and design on the part of God, with a view to the generation of Time, the sun and moon and five other stars, which bear the appellation of “planets,” came into existence for the determining and preserving of the numbers of Time.
trans. Perseus Project CC licenced BY-SA
This means that Plato saw the planets as creating time. This is the inverse of how we think of time, because we think time would exist anyway and that time is something that planets move in. So do we need a radically different mental model for how ancient people though about time? I’m not sure. For a counter-argument here’s a bit of Clouds by Aristphanes. Strepsiades is bothered about his debts and how he cannot afford to pay them back. He goes to Socrates, to teach him how to think:
Socrates
Do you, yourself, first find out and state what you wish.Strepsiades
You have heard a thousand times what I wish. About the interest; so that I may pay no one.Soc.
Come then, wrap yourself up, and having given your mind play with subtilty, revolve your affairs by little and little, rightly distinguishing and examining.Strep.
Ah me, unhappy man!Soc.
Keep quiet; and if you be puzzled in any one of your conceptions, leave it and go; and then set your mind in motion again, and lock it up.Strep.
(in great glee). O dearest little Socrates!Soc.
What, old man?Strep.
I have got a device for cheating them of the interest.Soc.
Exhibit it.Strep.
Now tell me this, pray; if I were to purchase a Thessalian witch, and draw down the moon by night, and then shut it up, as if it were a mirror, in a round crest-case, and then carefully keep it–Soc.
What good, pray, would this do you?Strep.
What? If the moon were to rise no longer anywhere, I should not pay the interest.Soc.
Why so, pray?Strep.
Because the money is lent out by the month.trans. Perseus Project CC licenced BY-SA
In ancient Greece a month was a lunation, the period of time from one New Moon to the next. By removing the moon Strepsiades removes months. This seems to back up Plato’s ideas about planets generating time (the Sun and Moon were πλάνητες ἀστέρες, planetes asters or wandering stars, in the ancient world). But the joke only works if the solution is nonsense. Pulling down the moon is a daft idea, but is the idea that months would cease to have meaning too? The Romans lived perfectly well without lunar months.
Herodotus (II.4.1), writing around the same period, was clear that lunar months weren’t good ways to track time.
But as to human affairs, this was the account in which they all agreed: the Egyptians, they said, were the first men who reckoned by years and made the year consist of twelve divisions of the seasons. They discovered this from the stars (so they said). And their reckoning is, to my mind, a juster one than that of the Greeks; for the Greeks add an intercalary month every other year, so that the seasons agree; but the Egyptians, reckoning thirty days to each of the twelve months, add five days in every year over and above the total, and thus the completed circle of seasons is made to agree with the calendar.
trans. Perseus Project CC licenced BY-SA
From this it looks like time is quantative. For example if today is Tuesday, then even if it feels like a Monday it can’t be Monday because Monday + 1 day = Tuesday. I think this cannot be purely the case for ancient Greece though.
For example McCluskey (2000:18) and Pritchett (2001) both note that the calendar can pause or skip days. The same is true for months. To keep the Greek calendar in line with the seasons they didn’t insert an extra day every so often, they inserted a whole month as Herodotus says above. You end up trying to match months against seasons and seasons have qualities. These days in the UK we say Spring starts on March 21. In reality Spring starts when the weather improves. Spring can come earlier or later. If you’re in a society that doesn’t recognise a fixed number of days in a solar year, like ancient Greece, then the quality of the days become important. The calendar is used to regulate religious acts and if a certain festival is supposed to be at the start of Spring and the flowers or animals associated with the festival are not yet out then it’s not the right day and the calendar needs to be corrected.
While the Greeks shared common religious beliefs, on the details they were fiercely independent. In this period taking part in a religious event was a political statement about belonging to a polis, a city-state. Non-citizens did not have the right to participate in the events in the same way as a citizen. So if religion was used to define us from them and the calendar was a religious tool, then a neutral objective count is not good enough. They wanted to be able to have their own distinctive calendrical cycle. I think that’ll be something I need to clarify. It’s not that the Greeks couldn’t make an accurate calendar. It’s that, for the job they wanted it to do, a less precise calendar was better.
Where does that leave Herodotus? Clearly the Greeks weren’t stupid and if Herodotus knew that a three-hundred and sixty-five day cycle made sense, you can be sure many in his audience did too. But Herodotus had his own axe to grind.
Herodotus was writing towards the end of the fifth century BC. Athens and Sparta had been rivals for decades contesting the power vacuum created by the defeat of Persia. Herodotus wrote about the Persian War, not his own time. His aim was to recall a Panhellenic glory shared by all Greeks. A three-hundred and sixty-five day cycle wouldn’t inherently dissolve all intra-Hellenic differences but it would social bonds between the Greeks. I don’t think it was a conscious political statement, but I think the comment on the Egyptian calendar reflected the Panhellenic ideals you find elsewhere in the History.
Every so often someone will tell me ‘there’s no such thing as ancient science’. Usually when I’m associated with the Centre for Interdisciplinary Science. They’re right. Science is a modern social construct that doesn’t fit neatly on to the ancient world. On the other hand it is a convenient label for attempts to produce generalised explanations and practices, without immediate recourse to supernatural beings, established with at least the attempt of a pretence at rational justification. And it’s good enough for the much cleverer people who write the various volumes in Routledge’s Sciences of Antiquity series. But I agree with the idea that if you’re not aware of the difference, it’s something that will come back to bite you. In the same way, I’m not sure that the way we think about Time can applied back to the past. The difficulty is that it’s such a slippery subject I don’t know if I always have a grasp about how I think about Time in the present.
Bibliography
McCluskey, S.C., 2000. The Inconstant Moon: Lunar Astronomies in Different Cultures. Archaeoastronomy, 15, p.14–31.
Pritchett, W.K., 2001. Athenian Calendars and Ekklesias, J C Gieben.
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