The ordered day : quotidian time and forms of life in Ancient Rome / James Ker.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ker, James, 1970- author.

Contributor:

Edward Potts Cheyney Memorial Fund.

Series:

Cultural histories of the ancient world

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Time--Social aspects--Rome.

Time.

Time--Political aspects--Rome.

Time perception--Rome.

Time perception.

Chronology, Roman.

Manners and customs.

Time--Political aspects.

Time--Social aspects.

Rome--Social life and customs.

Rome.

Rome (Empire).

Physical Description:

xiv, 458 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.

Other Title:

Quotidian time and forms of life in Ancient Rome

Place of Publication:

Baltimore, Maryland : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023.

Summary:

"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 24 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"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: Spurinna's Rule

Order, Timing, Day

The Day in Roman Time

Quotidian Time

The Shape of This Book

pt. I ORDERING HISTORY

1. In Search of Palamedes

A Parasite's Lament

Disentangling Diachronies

Pride of Theoderic

2. The Long-Legged Fly?

The Tent on the Shore

The Path to Precision

From Livy to Cicero

Caesar the Strategist

Caesar the Reformer

3. Telling Roman Time

Discerning Varro

A Long Final Page in Natural History (Pliny the Elder)

Primordial Partition in On Your Birthday (Censorinus)

pt. II ORDERING LIVES

4. Days in the Life

Pliny the Elder's Writing Routine

Day Patterns and Forms of Life

Recent Theorizing and Roman Daily Time

"Synchrony" and the Dawn of Quotidian Time

Always Already an Oeconomic Day?

5. Three Patterns to Live By

The Ordered Farm

The Ordered Body

The Ordered Princeps

6. Epicurean Days? Cicero and Horace

Writing the Quotidian Self

"I Read or Write Something"

Retooling the Statesman's Day (Cicero, Letters to His Friends 9.20)

Day of a Somebody (Horace, Satires 1.6)

7. Literary Days: Martial and Pliny the Younger

The Day as Factory of Literature

Hacking the City Schedule (Martial, Epigrams 4.8)

Salvo et Composito Die (Pliny, Letters 9.36, 9.40)

8. Today in Retrospect: Seneca and Marcus Aurelius

A Review of the Day Just Completed

Examining Day, Self, Life (Seneca, Moral Letters 83)

Retelling the Day as Rhetorical Exercise (Marcus Aurelius, Letter 4.6)

pt. III ORDERING KNOWLEDGE

9. Christian Roman Days

Roman Daily Life from the Outside

Clocks at Vivarium

Monastic Rule ...

... And Liturgical Day

Hymnic and Ascetic Days

Ausonius's Day of Poems (Ephemeris)

Days with Sidonius Apollinaris (Letters 2.9)

Rabelais Looks Back

10. La vie quotidienne a Rome

Carcopino's Modern Curiosity

Five Centuries of Reassembling Roman Daily Life

Before Carcopino

Carcopino's Moment (1939)

Beyond Carcopino?

11. Reading Roman Days in Modern Times

Early Rising and Daylight Saving

Roman Time as a Component of Modern Times

Six Revealing Tendencies of "Daily Life in Ancient Rome".

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Edward Potts Cheyney Memorial Fund.

Other Format:

ebook version :

ISBN:

9781421445175

1421445174

OCLC:

1337524666

Publisher Number:

99993103742