Caesar's Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History

When the Romans first started trying to map themselves into the larger Mediterranean world, their sense of where they belonged and how they fitted in was a challenge simultaneously to their sense of time and their sense of space; the charts they needed were geographical and chronological at once. Providing such charts was harder than it may appear, not least because charts of time and space do not always overlap harmoniously. Different parts of the world can appear to occupy different dimensions of time, “allochronies,” as Johannes Fabian (1983) calls them, niches where the quality of time appears to be not the same as “ours,” where the inhabitants are stuck in the past or are perhaps already ahead, in the future.