What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.
Augustine of Hippo’s famous comment on time from Book 11 of his Confessions. The nature of time has remained the subject of philosophical and scientific discussion ever since. How do with think of time? As a sequence with a beginning, middle and end? Or as a cycle, with things coming around again and again – as with the seasons? Augustine was concerned with these questions and more: could time really meaningfully exist if, as he put it the past was gone, the present fleeting and the future not yet arrived?
Obviously, how you measure time and how you see yourself in it is crucial to world views. Think of the French Revolution and its complete reinvention of the calendar, days and months, and its restarting the clock with L’An Un (Year I) in 1792, or even more bloodily – if less logically – the Khmer Rouge resetting the clock at Year Zero in 1975. During the Paris Commune of 1871 there were moves to rename the Year L’An 80 – year 80 of the Revolutionary Era. Nothing came of it; it was yet another tragi-comic aspect of the Commune. Why do Young Earth Creationists find the Darwinian revolution and the 20th advances in scientific chronology so upsetting? Not because of their belief in God – it’s perfectly possible to be a devout Christian and believe in divine creation without believing that the earth is only 8,000 years old. It’s because it takes man away from being at the centre of history and moves mankind effectively to a recent, fleeting moment, and that unpicks the hierarchical creationism that underpins their whole world-view. Time can be central to identity.
These ideas were not alien to the Roman world. Various Roman provinces had their own provincial chronology. There was, for example, the Spanish Era which continued be used throughout our period. It began in the year we think of as 38BC and appears to have been considered to represent the foundation of the Roman Provinces of Hispania. Nothing significant in that regard appears to have happened in that year, which to me at least makes it more likely that the system was set up in that year rather than retrospectively. In North Africa there was a similar Mauretanian era, which started in the year we count as 39AD. In the same part of the world the Vandals established their era, beginning in 439, in other words counting from the date of their capture of Carthage and conveniently permitting the correction of Mauretanian Era dates simply by erasing the initial CD (400). Some Romans counted the years since the Foundation of the City (Ab Urbe Condita) in 753 BC, a system popularised by Livy whose History, written up to 9BC, had that title. In the 6th century, the Gallic cities of Lyon and Vienne had competing ways of counting the years, starting with a different consul.
These weren’t the only ways in which the reckoning of time was politicised. Obviously the Republican calendar had been repoliticised at the very start of the Roman Empire with the renaming of the fifth and sixth months of the calendar after Julius Caesar and Augustus (July and August). The Romans associated each year with the names of the Ordinary consuls whose tenure began the year: Thus for example the year 428, when Germanus visited Britain as mentioned in the [previous post], was the Year of the Consulship of Felix and Taurus. Most late antique Chronicles use this as the means of identifying a year. There is no single numerical system. Otherwise probably the most common means of numbering the years was by regnal year – in other words, the Nth year of the reign of Emperor, or King, so-and-so. Another classical system counted the Olympiads, the cycles of 4 years between the Olympic Games. With all of these and the provincial eras running currently it’s not especially surprising that people often didn’t know how old they were. Regnal years began on the day when a ruler started to reign, which need not be on the day the previous ruler died. To know how old you were, you didn’t just need to know what the current regnal year was, and what the one was when you were born, but how many kings there’d been in between and how long they’d ruled for.
Time was one area where Christianity did make quite a difference. Christianity, like Judaism, believed that time began at the beginning when God created the world. So it had a fixed point at the start. More importantly, though, Christians believed that it would have a fixed point at the end, with the Day of Judgement. That was an idea not much found – or not given the same prominence – in other religions. So Christians very much saw their place in the world as on a very specific time-line, between Creation and the Apocalypse.
Basing themselves on various Old Testament and other texts, Christian thinkers thought in terms of the six ages of the world. These were:
• The First Age: Adam to Noah i.e the Antediluvian period
• The Second Age: The Flood to Abraham, ‘the father of all nations’
• The Third Age: Abraham to King David
• The Fourth Age: David to the Babylonian captivity
• The Fifth Age: The Babylonian captivity to Christ.
• The Sixth Age: Christ onwards
The seventh age would come after the Day of Judgement and would be the eternal Kingdom of God. The schema was mapped on to the Creation, with 6 days followed by the day of rest: six ages followed by the eternal rest. Roman Christians were very keen to note that the birth of Christ had taken place during the reign of the first Emperor, Augustus. Gregory of Tours an avid devotee of the cult of St Martin as we’ve seen, thought it was additionally significant that St Martin was born in the reign of the first Christian Emperor. The interest in synchronicity went back to Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea who, in addition to his Ecclesiastical History also wrote a Universal Chronicle in which the histories of different civilisations: Egypt, Greece, Rome and so on were put in separate columns alongside Judaeo-Christian History so one could see what was happening in the history of Greece and Rome at the same time as events recorded in the Bible – you could see which Old Testament Prophet was active at the time of the Trojan War, for example. This was an important way of inscribing Christian history into the history of the Empire. So there was a common idea that the Sixth Age of the World was coterminous with the Roman Empire.
At the same time, Christian thinkers were more interested than their predecessors in a single linear chronology, from Creation. From the Old Testament it was possible to calculate the number of years between the Beginning and now. Gregory of Tours thought that when he finished his Ten Books of Histories 6063 years had passed since Creation. There were other systems too. Most common in our period was the Anno Passionis, years since the Passion or Crucifixion of Christ (Anno Domini dating was invented in the early sixth century but not popularised until the eighth, largely by Bede). Unfortunately there were two systems of Anno Passionis (or AP) dating which worked out as four years apart... Sometimes in 5th-century history you get what looks like the same event repeated after a 4-year interval – largely because historians haven’t bothered to check the chronographical system being used by the different chroniclers.
It’s also, if you’re interested in this sort of thing, important to note that Late Antique people calculated things differently from us. If we are asked how many years between 2016 and 2020 we would say 4; late antique people would say five, because you’d count from the beginning of 2016 to the end of 2020. Similarly with days, which is why, as mentioned in [a previous lecture], the 4th day before 7 March is 4 March rather than 3 March (you count in this case from the end of the 7th backwards to the start of the 4th). Historians often forget this too.