On Roman Time

Because they list all the public holidays and pagan festivals of the age, calendars provide unique insights into the culture and everyday life of ancient Rome. The Codex-Calendar of 354 miraculously survived the Fall of Rome. Although it was subsequently lost, the copies made in the Renaissance remain invaluable documents of Roman society and religion in the years between Constantine's conversion and the fall of the Western Empire. In this richly illustrated book, Michele Renee Salzman establishes that the traditions of Roman art and literature were still very much alive in the mid-fourth century. Going beyond this analysis of precedents and genre, Salzman also studies the Calendar of 354 as a reflection of the world that produced and used it. Her work reveals the continuing importance of pagan festivals and cults in the Christian era and highlights the rise of a respectable aristocratic Christianity that combined pagan and Christian practices. Salzman stresses the key role of the Christian emperors and imperial institutions in supporting pagan rituals. Such policies of accomodation and assimilation resulted in a gradual and relatively peaceful transformation of Rome from a pagan to a Christian capital.

Religion is a major subfield of ancient history and classical studies, and Roman religion in particular is usually studied today by experts in two rather distinct halves: the religion of the Roman Republic, covering the fifth through first centuries B.C.; and the religious diversity of the Roman Empire, spanning the first four centuries of our era. In Time in Roman Religion, author Gary Forsythe examines both the religious history of the Republic and the religious history of the Empire. These six studies are unified by the important role played by various concepts of time in Roman religious thought and practice. Previous modern studies of early Roman religion in Republican times have discussed how the placement of religious ceremonies in the calendar was determined by their relevance to agricultural or military patterns of early Roman life, but modern scholars have failed to recognize that many aspects of Roman religious thought and behavior in later times were also preconditioned or even substantially influenced by concepts of time basic to earlier Roman religious history. This book is not a comprehensive survey of all major aspects of Roman religious history spanning one thousand years. Rather, it is a collection of six studies that are bound together by a single analytical theme: namely, time. Yet, in the process of delving into these six different topics the study surveys a large portion of Roman religious history in a representative fashion, from earliest times to the end of the ancient world and the triumph of Christianity.

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In the 27th century, humanity's greatest technological achievement is the massive, star-powered Temporal Displacement Ring: a portal to the past. Professor Robert Cragg, reeling from his own personal losses, volunteers to be the first-ever time-traveling historian, fleeing into the shadows of the Roman Empire. Instead of dry, dusty bygones, he encounters real people. Commoners and nobility, sailors and businessmen, zealots and legionaries, druids, gladiators, and philosophers all cross his path. The past, he finds, is not dead and gone, but very much alive... alive with wonder, fear, and, perhaps, love...

"Both scholars of late antiquity and those intrigued by the adjustments required of society's leaders in an age of rapid change will find this book highly informative, insightful, and provocative."--Elizabeth A. Clark, author of "Women in the Early Church"

This sweeping history of the Roman Empire from 44 BC to AD 235 has three purposes: to describe what was happening in the central administration and in the entourage of the emperor; to indicate how life went on in Italy and the provinces, in the towns, in the countryside, and in the army camps; and to show how these two different worlds impinged on each other. Colin Wells's vivid account is now available in an up-to-date second edition.

Traces how the day has served as a key organizing concept in Roman culture—and beyond. How did ancient Romans keep track of time? What constituted a day in ancient Rome was not the same twenty-four hours we know today. In The Ordered Day, James Ker traces how the day served as a key organizing concept, both in antiquity and in modern receptions of ancient Rome. Romans used the story of how the day emerged as a unit of sociocultural time to give order to their own civic and imperial history. Ancient literary descriptions of people's daily routines articulated distinctive forms of life within the social order. And in the imperial period and beyond, outsiders—such as early Christians in their monastic rules and modern antiquarians in books on daily life—ordered their knowledge of Roman life through reworking the day as a heuristic framework. Scholarly interest in Roman time has recently moved from the larger unit of the year and calendar to smaller units of time, especially in the study of sundials and other timekeeping technologies of the ancient Mediterranean. Through extensive analysis of ancient literary texts and material culture as well as modern daily life handbooks, Ker demonstrates the privileged role that "small time" played, and continues to play, in Roman literary and cultural history. Ker argues that the ordering of the day provided the basis for the organizing of history, society, and modern knowledge about ancient Rome. For readers curious about daily life in ancient Rome as well as for students and scholars of Roman history and Latin literature, The Ordered Day provides an accessible and fascinating account of the makings of the Roman day and its relationship to modern time structures.

Not much has happened in the Roman Empire since 1994 that required the first edition to be updated, but Bunson, a prolific reference and history author, has revised it, incorporated new findings and thinking, and changed the dating style to C.E. (Common Era) and B.C.E. (Before Common Era). For the 500 years from Julius Caesar and the Gallic Wars in 59-51 B.C.E. to the fall of the empire in the west in 476 C.E, he discusses personalities, terms, sites, and events. There is very little cross-referencing.