H.'s book is an intriguing investigation of the development of chronological periodisation from 88 bce to 17 ce with reference to the concept of a saeculum. This is worth stating at the outset, because from the title alone readers may have expected rather more than this. The centrality of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, to whom H. attributes a revolutionary new usage of periodisation, is also a major focus of the book. H. sees this phenomenon embedded in the Memoirs of Sulla that appears as fragments in Plutarch's Life of Sulla. These self-styled memoirs, H. suggests, create ‘Sulla, preordained by the gods to bring about a new saeculum, [and he] would rule over Rome and favorably transform Roman life and culture’ (p. 21). This was reinforced by a reformation of the calendar and is traced to the abundant coinage minted by Sulla. Not least amongst these was a coin featuring Hercules strangling the Nemean Lion as a prototype for Sulla to become the saviour of mankind in 88 bce, the year of an Etruscan omen introducing a new saeculum (pp. 26–7). This interconnection of much-scattered evidence (as H. observes, p. 27) presents Sulla as a revolutionary thinker utilising the Etruscan concept of a new saeculum, created by an exceptional man from civil war and chaos, and H. maintains that Sulla is the first to make such a connection as the formulator of a new temporal logic (evidenced by Plut. Sull. 7.3–5). H. is persuasive, but he admits that ‘No ancient source actually declares Sulla unique in this regard, nor does anyone explicitly attribute their use of periodization language to an innovation by Sulla’ (p. 36). Thus, H. is mapping an ‘intellectual trend’ surviving in a variety of fragmentary sources that points to a greater interest in temporal thinking in the first century bce. There is a problem with all this: the Etruscans had delineated such temporal thinking at an earlier date – if we are to read Varro embedded in Censorinus (DN 17.5–6). Moreover, there is a level of uncertainty that Sulla really was the first innovator to connect himself and his actions with the opening of a new saeculum for the benefit of Rome and its citizens.
It is possible that the connection to Sulla, such a focus for H., distracts us from his fascinating exploration of the idea of temporal concepts in the first century bce. For example, Chapter 2 opens with the observation that ‘Sulla's popularization of the Etruscan divinatory language of the saeculum may have been the seed that would soon flourish as the rise of saecular discourse’ (p. 40): this makes readers wonder at H.'s level of certainty and to ask: what was the Etruscan concept of saeculum – so disconnected from Rome and its citizens living across Italy, including within Etruria? In Chapter 3 H. looks at the periodisation of moral decline; turning points were variously attributed to: 168 bce (transfer of debauchery from Macedonia to Rome, Polyb. 31.25.3–8); 154 bce (pudicitia runs rampant in Piso Frugi, Plin. NH 17.244); 146 bce (fall of Carthage, Sall. Cat. 6–13); whereas Livy (39.6.7) goes for 187 bce, when Manlius Vulso's army returns from Asia. The last is almost 100 years earlier than 88 bce, thus a full saeculum before Sulla's self-acclaimed new saeculum. H. points out that Livy was writing post-Sulla, but could this not be read as evidence for a presence of thinking about saecula prior to Sulla? In any case, for Sulla to bring into being a new saeculum, there needs to be a concept of an earlier saeculum. There is a full discussion in Chapter 3 of the concept of saecula within poetry and the overall theme of moral decline with, of course, Augustus as the man to open a new saeculum and with Livia as his female equivalent, as seen at least by Ovid in exile (pp. 77–9).
The concept of the great man defining a new saeculum is thoroughly explored by H., but he goes further to extend it to ‘the idea of a single person introducing a major human innovation’ (p. 96), almost in the manner of Prometheus, to alter human existence, which can be found across Latin literature from a play attributed to Plautus now lost, the Boeotia, in which the inventor of sundials is attacked for affecting eating habits, to the array of inventors in Pliny's Natural History. This aspect is explored in Chapter 4. This historiographical feature of antiquity also shapes our own concept of what is known through the association of innovation with individuals, for example Pompey's theatre in stone (55 bce), creating in modern studies an equation between a theatre and the man who built it (or its moment of creation), rather than its use over centuries long after Pompey's death within a decade of the theatre being completed. The ancient concept of saecula being associated with a great man or men reinforces what we see today as the reduction of history into the tales of great men from antiquity, whether Julius Caesar or Augustus – who has his own saecula in antiquity and is still associated with an ‘Augustan Age’ in modern historiography, which is shaped solely by the chance fact of his chronological longevity (W. Scheidel, ‘Emperors, Aristocrats, and the Grim Reaper: towards a Demographic Profile of the Roman Élite’, CQ 49 [1999], 254–81).
Chapter 5 focuses on what happens to the association between saecula or periodisation after Sulla and finds that periodisation seems to have been avoided in political discourse, presumably due to Sulla's less than favourable posthumous reputation. H. points to Cicero using the language of periodisation with reference to both Pompey and himself as ‘the man of the saeculum’ in 63 bce, clutching at a portend interpreted by Etruscan seers (p. 109). It was a concept completely avoided by Julius Caesar, which seems strange given that he fixed the calendar (pp. 110–11). It is in the triumviral period that we find the emergence of Messalla Corvinus and Agrippa as men of their saeculum. Most will know of Tibullus 1.7, but H. brings in the lesser-known poems Ciris and Catelepton (pp. 111–12) to demonstrate the application of temporal thinking, but I should add that in 1.7.57–60 we find Messalla Corvinus paving a road in silex (lava) described as a monumenta that we might understand as built for a saeculum due to its quality and durability. In contrast, Agrippa, in his aedileship of 33 bce, is linked by H., via the cleaning of the Cloaca Maxima, to Hercules diverting a river to clean the stables of Augeas and to argue, in contrast to scholarship emphasising the practical nature of this aedileship, that Agrippa was demonstrating ‘his epochal nature as a leader’ (p. 112). Here H. misses the possibility of connecting the building of the Aqua Julia by Agrippa as a further reference to the myth of Hercules in diverting a river to clean the stables (pp. 113–15). I have added here two minor extensions of H.'s analysis to show how stimulating the book is and its importance in refiguring other areas of Roman history – not least the history of construction.
There is much more in the book that cannot be covered in this review: eternal returns (Chapter 2) and literary periodisation (Chapter 6). It is well written with a clear argument that temporal periodisation mattered to the Romans in the first century bce, prefiguring the ‘Augustan Age’ (on which there is much discussion). Yet, reading the book, I was still left wondering whether Sulla was that original and, if he was, why did the concept of a Sullan saeculum become quite so murky and fragmented in the sources that survive? Putting this matter aside, the book is worth reading to open your mind to the concept of the Romans taking action with a view to a future that would last beyond their own lifetime.
