Time and Temporality in the Ancient World by Ralph M. RosenReview by: Francis M. DunnInternational Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Fall, 2006), pp. 281-285Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30222132 .Accessed: 15/03/2012 11:44

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BOOK REVIEWS

Ralph M. Rosen (ed.), Time and Temporality in the Ancient World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2004), VII + 216 pp.

Time is a topic of perennial interest--something we often take for granted, yet peri- odically find of new importance or see with new eyes. One need only think of Einstein's theory of relativity, in which time slows and space bends, or of Proust's novel, where past and present become hopelessly intertwined, to recognize major shifts in the understand- ing of time. On a smaller scale, the academic world has recently seen a surge of interest in time, with scholars heralding an array of new approaches. To make sense of these devel- opments, it may be helpful to focus on two extreme positions in recent scholarship, one synchronic and the other diachronic. The synchronic approach is more common in the humanities and is now loosely associated with New Historicism, which views literature, culture, power, and ideology as part of a self-contained system that generates meaning and asserts control. The triumph of this model is perhaps signaled by the paradoxical claim that time itself is the product of a synchronic system which gives "time" meaning, and a good example of this model is the collection of essays, Chronotypes: The Construction of Time, edited by John Bender and David Wellbery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), devoted to the general proposition that temporal models, whether realized in literary narratives, religious beliefs, or social practices, are always produced by a par- ticular culture in a particular period, and that a given model or "chronotype" cannot be understood apart from its context. At this extreme, time cannot be understood as a uni- versal medium in which change occurs but as, in each context, a peculiar feature of local circumstances.

The diachronic approach, by contrast, is more common in the social sciences, where scholars are starting to ask, not how political or social structures work, but how they change through time. The role of temporal change or development, recently banished from literary studies, is thus being resurrected in other fields such as anthropology. A good example is Nicholas Thomas' Out of Time: History and Evolution in Anthropological Discourse (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), which argues that anthropology as a discipline has been unable to free itself from the timeless struc- turalism of Levi-Strauss, and that a fuller understanding of human culture requires atten- tion both to how societies interact and to the changes they undergo. At this scholarly extreme, time is the crucial feature of a revised methodology that promises to correct the prior deficiencies of the discipline.

While there are many other positions on the subject of time, these two extreme views do help us to survey the academic landscape. It is therefore surprising that this collection of essays begins with no such map to guide its readers. In his Preface, the editor, Ralph Rosen, instead points out formal overlaps and interconnections among the chapters: sev- eral address the contrast between linear and cyclical time, for example, while others are concerned with the problems of chronography. Although it is fascinating to observe sim- ilarities and differences across such a wide range of specialties, all concerned with "Time and Temporality in the Ancient World," from British archaeology to Chinese poetry, from Assyrian calendars to Hindu cosmology, nevertheless there is no indication that contrib- utors were asked to address common themes-the editor simply invites the reader to

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appreciate, behind this cultural and disciplinary diversity, the "universal" qualities of human time and the homologous forms through which it is conceptualized. Most of the individual essays do, however, make either an explicit or implicit case for studying time without appealing to presumed universals.

Two contributions, by Eleanor Robson and Chris Gosden, can serve to mark out the two extremes in recent scholarship. Robson, in "Scholarly Conceptions and Quantifica- tions of Time in Assyria and Babylonia, c. 750-250 BCE" (Chapter Three, pp. 45-90), pro- vides an overview of Near-Eastern time reckoning and the royal scholars who competed to give the king such information. The first section, on calendars, describes the conflict between the celestial or divine year, in which the risings of stars mark out a period of 360 days, and the lunar or human year of 354 days, in which months begin with the new moon. The problem of reconciling these periods with a solar year of 3654 days, which led to increasingly refined schedules of intercalation, is described as religious and admin- istrative rather than scientific, since scholars were concerned with when to perform ritu- als. The second section, on chronography, describes the records available for dating past events and shows how lists of favorable and unfavorable days and months were used to advise the king. The third section, on astronomical prediction, compares eclipses with other evil omens, arguing that accurate calculations were driven not by a thirst for knowledge but a desire to save the king from disaster, and concludes with the practice of installing a substitute king before an eclipse and killing him afterwards--a practice once followed by Alexander the Great. Robson's survey has an explicit agenda, namely to replace a teleological narrative, where Babylonian astronomy prepares the way for West- ern science, with a synchronic vignette of culture and power; the degree to which this approach necessarily flattens time and space is evident in the wide historical and geo- graphical range of her material.

The opposite or diachronic approach is presented by Chris Gosden in "Shaping Life in the Late Prehistoric and Romano-British Periods" (Chapter Two, pp. 29-44). He begins by setting out the postmodern view of time as culturally contingent, and then qualifies this in two ways: feeling and caring are as important as actions and thoughts in cultural representation, and none of these should be considered apart from its temporal relation to others that precede or follow. He fleshes out these points by turning to "Alfred's Cas- tle," a hillfort on the Berkshire Downs where excavation has revealed a sequence of ditches and enclosures from the late Bronze Age to the Roman period. He argues that instead of one cultural form (irregular and circular enclosures) being replaced by another (Roman squares and rectangles), the site illustrates a kind of incremental appropriation, with barrows first being used to align ditches, the ditches then being used to lay out an enclosure, and the enclosure finally being occupied by a Romano-British villa. Thus at each step cultural forms involve a thoughtful use or adaptation of the past. Gosden's general claim that culture is not "given" but fluid, requiring human attention, is clear and convincing. However, his specific claim--namely that we can extrapolate an understand- ing of time peculiar to these people (for whom ditches and enclosures were "emotional anchors" to their world, and creating new structures involved reshaping their past rather than breaking with it)-is more tenuous.

Whereas these two essays by Robson and Gosden make strong claims for a new approach to time, a third essay in the collection triangulates the range of possibilities by sketching a traditional approach to a traditional problem. In "Greek Chronographic Traditions about the First Olympic Games" (Chapter Eight, pp. 169-184), Astrid M611er reviews the problematic evidence for Greek chronography and considers the example of determining the date for the first Olympic Games. Her summary of scholarly disputes

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concludes by endorsing the view that the date of 776 was probably established by Timaeus or Eratosthenes, and differs from earlier reconstructions by insisting on a strict linear development: the synchronism of Lycurgus and Iphitus was first made by Aristo- tle; after this breakthrough it was necessary to add the "uncounted" Olympiads; and Eratosthenes, by filling this gap with 108 years = 27 Olympiads, was able to offer a coher- ent scheme that began with the first officially counted Olympiad in 776. An essay of this scope, however, cannot build the detailed case that might persuade other specialists; what will strike readers of this book is M611er's allegiance to the kind of linear progress rejected by most of the other contributors.

Development through time can, of course, take many other forms. Teleological or mechanistic change over long periods is usually rejected these days as a nineteenth- century "Grand Narrative," while studies of diachronic change tend to focus upon nar- rower "local narratives" such as that involving Alfred's Castle. Yet two essays in this collection, one by Ludo Rocher and another by Michele Renee Salzman, show how longer narratives may be revised. Rocher, in "Concepts of Time in Classical India" (Chap- ter Four, pp. 91-110), reviews the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain models of cosmic time and scholarly attempts to reconcile them. The traditional approach is a quest for origins: if we cannot trace the yuga/kalpa tradition back to a beginning on the subcontinent, then it must have entered from outside, presumably from Babylonia. Rocher's alternative invokes cultural context: since the earliest, Vedic, texts were elite creations, the absence of cyclical time in these poems does not prove that the notion came from outside, as a "folk belief" in cosmic birth and destruction may have existed alongside the changeless model pre- ferred by the Vedic elite. Thus Rocher does not abandon the quest for origins, but instead complicates it by adding cultural layers to his picture of religious belief.

Traditionally, diachronic models have asked not only about origins (how does a given culture arise?), but also about change (how does one culture replace another?). In "Pagan and Christian Notions of the Week in the 4th century CE Western Roman Empire" (Chapter Nine, pp. 185-211), Michele Renee Salzman examines how the Christ- ian seven-day week became canonical by the beginning of the fifth century. The seven- day week first spread in the West as an astrological scheme based on the sun, moon, and five visible planets, was adopted by Mithraists who associated Mithras with Sol, and was taken over by Christians even as they denounced its pagan associations. Thus Sunday or dies Solis was recognized as a Roman holiday, with games and festivals, before the Christians gradually took it over as a day of rest and worship. Furthermore, the Christian week continued to use the pagan names for the days and was observed alongside eight- day market cycles and the Roman calendar with Kalends, Nones, and Ides (the essay too often assumes that week days and calendar dates are comparable). Thus the seven-day week as we know it resulted not simply from Christian ascendancy but from the compe- tition of many religious and secular interests. It is interesting to note that the complexity of cultural change which Gosden addressed by critiquing synchronic models, Salzman here addresses by revising a diachronic one.

Whereas those who critique diachronic models often take Grand Narratives as their opponent, those who challenge synchronic models have a convenient straw man in the contrast between Linear and Cyclical Time. In "Cyclical and Teleological Time in the Hebrew Bible" (Chapter Five, pp. 111-128), Mark Brettler counters the supposedly stan- dard view that time in biblical Israel was understood as linear. The cyclical view of time so prominent in Ecclesiastes reflects, he suggests, the regular climate of the Levant; the recurring pattern of idolatry punished and piety rewarded at the beginning of Judges can be used to argue more generally that narrative repetitions reflect a cyclical view of time;

284 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Fall 2006

and passages often described as teleological can in fact be seen as cyclical to some degree. Brettler is surely right to challenge simple generalizations about the Bible, but it would be helpful if he made clearer distinctions regarding human time, divine time, and narrative structure, as well as regarding linear, teleological, and eschatological views of time.

David Pankenier's essay, "Temporality and the Fabric of Space-Time in Early Chi- nese Thought" (Chapter Six, pp. 129-146), likewise challenges the view that Chinese thought was predominantly linear, in part by noting the problem of generalizing across long historical periods, and in part by isolating a culturally specific understanding of time. In the early imperial period, the world was conceived not in terms of causality through time but in terms of the interconnectedness within what scholars sometimes call "space-time." This notion of interconnectedness builds upon Confucian thought, legiti- mates the emperor's place at the center of a harmonious world, and is expressed both in the theme of interweaving in the Book of Changes and a prose poem by Dong Zhongshu and in the elaborate structure of these two texts. In other words, there is a story to be told about Chinese thought as it changes through time, but Pankenier's own project is to describe a single synchronic model--of time as part of an interwoven fabric-that cannot be reduced to lines and circles.

In the essay "Topographies of Time in Hesiod" (Chapter Seven, pp. 147-168), Alex Purves expresses a somewhat analogous view. She opposes neither linear nor cyclical models of time, claiming instead that both are so central to Hesiod's Theogony that they create an impasse resolved only through the image of the pithos or storage jar. By means of this culturally specific artifact of the archaic period, the Hesiodic farmer was able to defeat or at least outwit the seasons of shortage by saving during the seasons of plenty. In a similar way, both Kronos (unsuccessfully) and Zeus (successfully) attempt in Theogony to outwit the seasons of their downfalls by storing away powerful forces that might either help or harm them in the future.

Despite the opposition I have drawn between them, there are nevertheless points of contact between synchronic New Historicism and diachronic New Anthropology, espe- cially in their attention to particular cultural moments or transitions, as there are also points of contact between the temporal models of ancient peoples and those employed by their modern interpreters. Yet if some of these schemes are associated with a specific time and place in the ancient world, and some with a specific time and place in contemporary schol- arship, is it then possible to imagine other schemes as well? This is exactly what seems to be promised by John Barrett in "Temporality and the Study of Prehistory" (Chapter One, pp. 11-27). He begins by turning away from traditional Grand Narratives, pointing out that archaeological explanations of long-term change tend to be (logically) circular, extrapolat- ing from material evidence the underlying causes that supposedly produce that very evi- dence. Yet he does not therefore turn toward a strictly synchronic model. While accepting that atemporal structures offer the necessary conditions for change, Barrett points out that change arises at the local level through human agency and individuals need not have intended a long-term change for us to recognize their place in the process. For example, the rise of land holdings passed from one generation to the next suggests a particular under- standing of social relations maintained through time; a similar understanding is perhaps implied by an earlier burial practice in which members of a group reused family graves. Barrett thus claims not only that we should consider human agency, but also that "tempo- ral practices" such as maintaining a certain relation to the dead may contribute to material developments, for example, changes in landholding. It is unfortunate, however, that this intriguing claim is supported by such a brief and speculative case study.

Before closing, I must comment on the look and feel of this book, for two reasons. First, the design and font are attractive, and the book is printed on unusually good paper.

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Second, the editing is unusually bad: words are frequently omitted or misplaced, awk- ward expressions and vague citations have not been corrected, and some illustrations do not correspond with the text. For example, in Chapter Two, two references to fig. 2.1 (on p. 36) actually refer to the Castle plan in fig. 2.2, and the reference to fig. 2.2 with discus- sion of walls 2005 and 2008 and trench 5 (on pp. 40-42) refers the reader to a missing plan of the central stone building; in Chapter Six a figure illustrating the complex structure of hexagrams in the Book of Changes (6.1) is missing; and in Chapter Seven the captions accompanying the full-page photographs are incorrect. There are thus problems with the production of this volume, and relatively loose connections among its constituent essays, but on the whole it provides a generous survey of ancient understandings of time and an instructive selection of modern approaches to the topic.

Francis M. Dunn Department of Classics

University of California, Santa Barbara

Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite's Tortoise: The Veiled Woman in Ancient Greece (Swansea, Wales: Classical Press of Wales, 2003), X + 358 pp.

The book explores the veiling of women in the ancient Greek world from the period between 900 BC and 200 AD in the Mediterranean, including Mainland Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt, and South Italy. The title comes from the image of Aphrodite Ourania by Pheidias, described as standing with one foot on a tortoise. According to Plutarch, it was meant to typify womankind staying at home and keeping silent. The veiling of the female head or face was part of a male ideology that required women to be silent and invisible creatures: like a mute tortoise, she had the liberty to wander about underneath her all-covering shell, taking her house with her.

Chapter 1 introduces the controversial, impassioned and emotional contemporary image of the veil. It has two contradictory meanings: it is used as a sign of sensual female sexuality, and as the principal symbol of the subjection of women in the Middle East: its use as a symbol of Muslim fundamentalism is satirized by a picture of the Statue of Liberty with a heavy burqa covering her face, one of a number of intriguing illustrations appearing throughout the book. Classical scholarship, the author argues, wants to deny any similarity between the ancient Greek custom and that of the contemporary veil-soci- eties of the Islamic world. Chapter 2 includes a useful discussion of the problems of the vocabulary of ancient Greek dress, followed, in Chapter 3, by an attempt to classify the various types of head coverings shown in art, using Greek words where possible to describe the Greek garments. This usually proves to be impossible since we can so rarely match an image with its Greek name, so the author turns to modern Arabic names. The terms are illustrated by means of heavily veiled modern figures. These photographs of modem women contrast sharply with the ancient Greek representations of female fig- ures, whose heads are often uncovered-in the case of the Cheramyes Hera, the statue is actually headless. The author explains that the veil is only apparently absent, because the edge of the mantle could easily be drawn over the head. This explanation is repeated in the following sections on the iconography and interpretation of figures and scenes of Greek women covering their heads, or much more rarely, their faces (Ch. 4). He attributes the absence of the veil and the transformation of costumes taken from real life to eroticiz- ing and idealizing trends in Greek art: male clients wanted to see the women without

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Issue Table of ContentsInternational Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Fall, 2006), pp. 165-329Front MatterReception of Valerius Flaccus' "Argonautica" [pp. 165-185]"L'Allegoria della Prudenza" di Tiziano e il "Signum Tricipitis" del Cerbero di Serapide [pp. 186-196]Milton, Homer, and Hyacinthus: Classical Iconography and Literary Allusion in "Paradise Lost" 4.300-303 [pp. 197-216]Zwischen Klassizismus und Geschichtlichkeit. Goethes Buch "Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert" [pp. 217-242]Review ArticlesReview: Naming the Fault in Question: Theorizing Racism among the Greeks and Romans [pp. 243-267]Review: "The Roman Frankness": Robert Lowell and the Classics [pp. 267-280]

Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 281-285]Review: untitled [pp. 285-289]Review: untitled [pp. 289-292]Review: untitled [pp. 292-295]Review: untitled [pp. 295-298]Review: untitled [pp. 298-300]Review: untitled [pp. 300-303]Review: untitled [pp. 303-305]Review: untitled [pp. 305-308]Review: untitled [pp. 309-310]Review: untitled [pp. 310-314]Review: untitled [pp. 315-317]Review: untitled [pp. 318-320]Review: untitled [pp. 320-322]Review: untitled [pp. 323-325]Review: untitled [pp. 325-327]

Publications Received [pp. 328-329]Back Matter