On the library's shelf of new books a few days ago there was a biography of Gaius Valerius Catullus (Aubrey Burl, Catullus, a Poet in the Rome of Julius Caesar, 2004). I’ve had a warm feeling for Catullus since translating, line by line as a schoolboy, the great erotic epithalamion written for the wedding of Junia Aurunculeia and Manlius Torquatus. An epithalamion is a song for the bedding of the bride, and Catullus’s poem overflows with a sexual urgency, an emotion unacknowledged in the public discourse of my younger days. While my teacher attended to such chilly questions as whether the meter was glyconic or pherecretean, I understood with my whole body that Manlius and Junia were warmer than Rock and Doris or Ozzie and Harriet.
I borrowed the biography of the poet because I remembered being informed that a life of Catullus could never be written. Too little was known of him—only that he was raised far to the north of Rome, somewhere in the vicinity of Verona, that he was of half-Celtic stock, that he was very wealthy, and that he died at the age of thirty in 54 B.C. And sure enough, the new biography isn’t really a biography at all, but rather a gossipy account of political, military, and social doings in Rome during the years when Catullus flourished.
Much was familiar, but an aspect of Roman reality that I should have remembered, yet didn’t, was that the ancients kept time differently than we do. They were, for example, weekless. Moreover, they allotted twelve hours to the period from sunrise to sunset and twelve hours from sunset to sunrise. But of course, days are longer in the summer and shorter in the winter, so an hour at the summer solstice would be about twenty-five per cent longer than an hour at the equinox, and an hour in midwinter about twenty-five per cent shorter. On any given day, the length of an hour would be slightly different than yesterday’s hour or tomorrow’s. It seems like a complicated system and I think that the modern method of keeping the hours constant in length regardless of the season is quite a sensible improvement. Rome was largely a world of sundials. Mechanical clocks, a late medieval invention, were almost a millennium and a half into the future, and the clepsydra, the ancient water-clock, was not so adjustable or so subtle an instrument that it could be altered slightly from day to day.
The Roman system leads naturally to another question. When the Romans lengthened or shortened the hour, did they also vary the number of minutes – say, seventy-five minutes to an hour in summer, forty-five minutes to an hour in winter? Or did they keep the number of minutes constant at sixty, but allow the minutes to fluctuate in their duration?
And why does Roman horology put me in mind of James Thurber’s observation when he turned sixty-- that if there were fifteen months in every year, he’d only be forty-eight?
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