BEFORE the invention of clocks, what did time mean to people? Time in Antiquity is a fascinating look at how ancient Greeks and Romans marked the seasons and told the time 鈥� from checking the length of their shadows to tracking the rising and setting of the stars. The book is packed with technical detail that might put some people off, but peppers his account with lively anecdotes from plays and poems, such as a greedy guest who arrives hours early for dinner when he measures his shadow at dawn instead of dusk.
Hannah鈥檚 message is that for the ancients, time was inseparable from cosmic cycles: the wheeling of the sun, moon and stars through the heavens. Today, the sun is not deemed accurate enough and clocks are instead set to atomic vibrations. Yet we still talk of 鈥渟unrise鈥� and 鈥渟unset鈥�, when we know these are illusions. In that sense, says Hannah, we are still children of the ancient world.
Routledge