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.
