James Ker's The Ordered Day is a critical response, by a classicist well-versed in modern theoretical approaches to time, to Jérôme Carcopino's La vie quotidienne à Rome, over eighty years after that (in)famous book presented its hour-by-hour account of the Roman day. It is a response, not an update. K. is not interested in reconstructing daily patterns of Roman life in more nuanced and source-critical ways. The Ordered Day is indeed not a book about patterns of life, but one about patterns of thought. It focuses on ‘the significance of an “ordered day” in the Roman sociocultural imagination’ (2).
The defining feature of K.'s ‘ordered day’ is clock time: the Greco-Roman (i.e. seasonal) hour constituted the main tool with which authors of the first and second centuries c.e. — K.'s core corpus — ordered their accounts of days. Therefore, part one (chs 1–3) asks from when and to what extent hours and clocks were part of the daily life of Rome. Although this question is a historical one, the approach is more philological, with a clear focus on literary sources. In the first chapter, for example, K. starts from the Plautine parasite's complaint about the recent custom of eating according to the clock. It contextualises this passage by discussing its Greek sources of inspiration and the emergence of clock time in Athens, by looking for confirmation in literary accounts about the first clocks in Rome and by discussing diachronically the topos of eating by the clock and that of clocks as symbols of civilisation. In the third chapter, he tries to reconstruct Varro's ideas about the introduction of clock time on the basis of the surviving accounts of Pliny and Censorinus. The strength of K.'s contribution lies in the depth of analysis of these passages. Archaeological scholarship on the spread of sundials and water clocks or historical perspectives from documentary sources and from the contemporary Hellenistic kingdoms could be better integrated. The limited historical perspective makes the central argument of ch. 2 somewhat unconvincing. This chapter identifies Caesar as an innovator during whose period of influence time became more ordered, not only because of his calendar reform but also on the diurnal level. The surge of sources on daily time in this period might, however, just as well reflect the increasing number of Latin texts in general. Moreover, the idea of the late first century b.c.e. as a pivotal period seems to be based on an underestimate of the role of clocks in the second century b.c.e. (which the reviewer identifies as much larger in a forthcoming article in Klio 106.2). The many nuances to the central argument (e.g. 55, 65–6, 73) suggest that the author too started retreating from his original point in the course of writing.
The heart of the book is part two (chs 4–8). Here, the reader finds in-depth commentaries on selected passages from, among others, Cicero, Horace, Martial, Pliny the Younger, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, some also central to Carcopino's reconstruction of Roman quotidian time. K.'s discussion, however, is not about how the historical figures behind the authors used time, but about how they constructed time as writers. K. shows what is ‘operative in the discourse of the day pattern: the internal order of the whole day as an embodiment of one person's life and a specific worldview or order’ (127), making fruitful use of Bender and Wellbery's concept of ‘chronotypes’. He notes stylistic devices revealing word plays and emphases, and illuminates the passages in the context of the literary conventions of the genre and the philosophical ideas of the author, as well as in the context of the author's social relations and historical circumstances. Unavoidably, there remains a certain tension between the implied criticism of the simplistic harvesting of rich literary texts as if they were representative vignettes of daily life and the continued need to derive from these sources factual knowledge on Roman days. K. explores ‘how the temporal order of a subgroup or individual is defined through contrast with that of the majority’ (18), but to understand how authors playfully respond to social norms about daily time in order to communicate more complex ideas, these norms first need to be identified.
The ninth chapter, on days in late-antique Christian society, is assigned to part three (chs 9–11) on the reception of the Roman day, but the topic is approached as in part two, with Ausonius’ Ephemeris as one of the central texts. K. rightly avoids the stereotypical treatment of monastic day rhythms as innovations anticipating modern time discipline, but highlights their relation to Roman days. The rest of part three focuses on Carcopino's La vie quotidienne à Rome. K.'s goal is not to add further criticism — his own opinions on the book in fact remain largely implicit — but to place this book in context. Ch. 10 offers a useful status quaestionis starting from the Renaissance, which places Carcopino in a long scholarly tradition. The insightful final chapter shows how contemporary debates on, for example, the standardisation of clock time or the length of a work week informed modern views on Roman days. K. argues that ‘a historical outlook that can use the Roman day as a way of ordering knowledge about Roman life is also a complex modern instrument that allows the curious reader to see “what time is” in modernity’ (331). This final section almost feels like a different book, much more directly engaging with Carcopino, but it does fit, and indeed forms an invaluable addition to the earlier discussion that adds new layers of depth to the debate and rounds off a book that is well worth hours of your day.
