The Ordered Day: Quotidian Time and Forms of Life in Ancient Rome(Cultural Histories of the Ancient World)

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.

Table of Contents:
List of illustrations Acknowledgments Note on translations Introduction Part I: Ordering History 1. In Search of Palamedes 2. The Long-Legged Fly 3. Telling Roman Time Part II: Ordering Lives 4. Days in the Life 5. Three Patterns to Live By 6. Epicurean Days? Cicero and Horace 7. Literary Days: Martial and Pliny the Younger 8. Today in Retrospect: Seneca and Marcus Aurelius Part III: Ordering Knowledge 9. Christian Roman Days 10. La Vie Quodidienne a Rome 11. Reading Roman Days in Modern Times Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index of Passages Index

About the Author :
James Ker is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Deaths of Seneca and the coeditor of The Values of Nighttime in Classical Antiquity: Between Dusk and Dawn.

Review :
Fascinating....Ranging from Caesar to Seneca, Plautus to Pliny the Younger, Ker's new study goes beyond mere timekeeping to show what Roman activity, culture, and ultimately self-understanding owed to the Roman day. —New Criterion The Ordered Day is a thought-provoking contribution to the study of ancient literature, history and theories of time. —Classical Review