Time seems to be having a moment in Classics. These two collections stem from conferences on temporality in ancient texts. For the most part, both steer clear of the practical mechanics of time measurement to concentrate instead on the manipulation and representations of time in literary and philosophical texts, especially non-narrative ones. In each, chapters employing more traditional approaches share space with those which grapple with newer (to Classics) theoretical concepts, such as Bakhtin’s chronotope, narratology, queer and feminist time, ontology and ecocriticism. Reading these two volumes together is fascinating both for where they overlap and for where they do not.
Making Time for Greek and Roman Literature primarily features US-based authors, including a mix of early, mid-career and well-established scholars. According to the editors’ brief introduction, the volume ‘explores various models of representing temporality in ancient narratives in order to elucidate how structures of time communicate meaning’, with a focus on ideological uses of time as it relates to bodies and political power, a goal which it admirably accomplishes. The chapters are grouped into four thematic sections, within which the papers unfold chronologically from Greek to Latin. The first section, ‘Out of Time’, and the last, ‘Beyond Time’, are somewhat amorphous, and contain only two chapters each, with some marked conceptual overlap. The second and third, however, on queer and feminist theories of time and social and political power, are satisfyingly coherent.
The first two chapters employ fairly divergent approaches. Alex Purves and Victoria Wohl’s contribution is a sophisticated meditation on Simonides’ and Sappho’s lyric expressions of sleep, a human state that exists somehow out of time. Using comparative photographic material, they connect the atemporality of sleep with the disjointed temporality of lyric utterances. James Ker, the sole contributor to both volumes under review, considers a passage in Galen about the limited control over their own time exercised by those who must serve others. While at first this seems like a productive passage for a discussion of enslaved temporality, Ker argues that Galen may in fact be writing about imperial administrators of any status, whether free or not, and is thus not a reliable source for the temporality of the enslaved, a convincing if somewhat dispiriting conclusion.
The second section, ‘Engendering Time’, engages with queer and feminist theories of time. The first two chapters, by Sarah Olsen and Kate Gilhuly, approach ancient texts through theories of queer time, especially those of Lee Edelman and Elizabeth Freeman, who show how queer lives have the capacity to reject heteronormative temporality and reproductive futurism. Olsen writes about the chorus of Euripides’ Andromache, while Gilhuly turns to Xenophon’s Symposium. Strikingly, in both chapters, the results are mixed: while the texts employ queer temporal strategies, especially in their use of counterfactual and anachronistic narratives, they also explicitly promote decidedly non-queer ideologies of heterosexual partnership and reproductive futurism, Euripides by denouncing the lost future generations of Trojans and Xenophon by rewriting Plato’s Symposium to promote chaste pederastic relationships and heterosexual marriage, concluding his dialogue with a sexy dance which leads the male participants to return eagerly to their wives. Olsen and Gilhuly, however, both productively develop the mismatch between ancient and modern, provoking nuanced revisions of contemporary theory. The final chapter in this section, by Caitlin Hines, effectively employs Julia Kristeva’s feminist theory of women’s time to consider how Ovid typically elides the cyclical female temporality of pregnancy in the Metamorphoses and Fasti. When pregnancy is an unavoidable component of the myth, Ovid presents it as a form of narrative delay. The lone exception is the pregnancy of Silvia which led to the birth of Romulus and Remus, although even that is undercut by a shift from lunar to solar calendrical time.
The theoretical approaches in the third section, ‘Shaping Time’, are at times less clearly articulated, but many of the conclusions are still appealing and ably illustrate the impact of politics and social class on literary time. After a useful summary of Greek measures of calendrical and festival times, Nigel Nicholson reads a series of Pindaric odes about Sicilian victories in the Olympic games of 476 b.c.e. to show how they support the Sicilian tyrant Hieron’s regime and his claims to supralocal Greek festival time. Kirk Ormand combines narratology with social class analysis in his investigation of the function of time to represent either change or stasis in archaic invective poetry. He offers satisfying close readings of Archilochus, Anacreon and Hipponax, as well as a sensitive analysis of the more anomalous case of Semonides. In his chapter on Petronius, Jeffrey Ulrich demonstrates how Trimalchio attempts to exert control over cosmological and calendrical time in his household, despite the resistance of his guests, and argues that the narrative does the same to the novel’s readers. The chapter was compelling, but could be more successful with deeper exploration of why exactly Trimalchio’s manipulation of time is Marxist. The final chapter, by Andreas Zanker, deals with the political theme of decline, which it approaches from a literary and cognitive angle by detailing various Latin metaphors for decline and their conceptual and aesthetic ramifications.
The final section moves to less canonical Greek texts from the second and third centuries c.e. Robert Cioffi elegantly demonstrates the capacities of ghostly figures to make past and future times present in Greek literature of the Roman imperial period. His discussion of the complex temporalities of Phlegon of Tralles’s resistance oracles, which retroject prophecies of Roman defeat into earlier periods, was especially nuanced and rewarding. Patrick Glauthier closes the volume with an astute analysis of a passage from the apocryphal Gospel of James, in which Joseph experiences the cessation of time at the moment of Jesus’ birth, an event which Glauthier explicates in terms of the Greek philosophical tradition, the literary sublime and ekphrasis. In its demonstration of what it means to be out of time, this contribution forms a fitting bookend with the volume’s opening chapter on sleep and its capacity to take the sleeper out of regular time.
Temporalities, Texts, Ideologies: Ancient and Modern Perspectives similarly leans towards the ideological and philosophical implications of the construction of time. Contributors, primarily UK-based, bring to bear a range of approaches, with varying degrees of theorisation. An introduction by the editor lays the groundwork for the methods contained, with helpful reference to recent developments both within and outside of Classics, explicitly setting aside narratological and metaphysical approaches to turn towards ‘how time and temporal relationships are imagined and negotiated in specific cultural and historical contexts’. The volume falls into four sections, each with three chapters. The first section is on general approaches to time, including chapters on Homer, Greek philosophy and Roman literature, while the next two sections are somewhat thematic but primarily divided into Greek and then Latin texts. The last is a somewhat unexpected grouping of Seneca alongside two reception studies. While, as with most volumes, few are likely to read through the whole, I would have found either a fully chronological or a fully thematic organisation, such as one of those described as alternatives at the end of the introduction, slightly more satisfying.
The first section, ‘The Presence of Time’, takes its title from Ker’s chapter. Ahuvia Kahane opens the volume with Homer, reading the adjective δολιχόσκιος, ‘long-shadowed’, as describing a spear at several points in motion and at rest in the ground or an enemy’s body. By compressing several possible moments in one term, Kahane argues, Homer transcends linear time and represents human cognition of multiple temporalities. The chapter is complexly argued, with references to philosophy and cognitive theory, and concludes by expanding the argument to other epithets in Homer and the function of fate, but is unfortunately marred by several incorrect references to the Iliad as Odyssey. Duncan Kennedy’s chapter offers a romp through recent concepts of ontology, including the historical ontology of ideas as they come into being, which are then cleverly applied to developing ideas of ontology itself in Greek philosophy from Parmenides to Plato. Ker’s chapter starts with a broad survey of approaches to temporality, including both Latin idioms and modern theories, then provides three case studies on the conceptions of time in Plautus, Lucretius and Seneca, who are examined in particular for how they represent the present as distinct from the past and future.
The first of the three chapters on Greek texts, by Anke Walter, compares divine and human temporalities in the two parts of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, concluding with interesting observations about how the human-focused linear timeline of the second half may have inspired Callimachus’ more politically motivated Hymn to Delos. Susannah Ashton turns to ideas of time in the pre-Socratic philosopher Pherecydes; her chapter forms a productive counterpart with that of Kennedy in demonstrating the necessity for understanding pre-Socratic philosophers on their own terms, not just those of Plato. It also serves as a fitting continuation of Walter’s ideas of divine time. David Fearn offers a dense meditation on ecological time in Pindar Ol. 10; he draws on photography, object-oriented ontology, Bakhtin’s chronotope and more in a whirlwind of references. His claims about Pindar’s presentation of nature in relation to human time are provocative, but perhaps more ambitiously wide-ranging than the allotted space allows.
The section on Latin literature, ‘Temporal Patterns and the Politics of Latin Literature’, begins with Rebecca Batty’s discussion of rivers as liquid chronotopes in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In an argument in careful dialogue with earlier scholarship, she shows how the rivers in the apocalyptic scenes of books 1 and 2 disrupt both natural and historic time by flooding or disappearing. Poetically, they epitomise the repetition and renewal of metamorphic time and allow Ovid to allude to literary history and contemporary Augustan trends. Martin Stöckinger analyses the presentation of linear narrative in Suetonius, Nepos and Tacitus. After providing a state of the field in each case, he adds nuanced readings to demonstrate how the authors’ use of temporality fits their literary goals. Nepos, for instance, focuses on character rather than career and thus is not as concerned with narrating events in order, especially in biographies of foreign leaders who are not constrained by the timeline of the cursus honorum. Finally, Tom Geue’s jaunty contribution on length in Martial and Pliny argues that Martial uncharacteristically attempts to ‘go long’ in his tenth book of epigrams, which included an epigram dedicated to Pliny the Younger. Pliny, however, cuts part of Martial’s epigram when he quotes it in a letter and insinuates that his poems will not endure, a display of his social and literary dominance.
The final three papers, collectively titled ‘The End of Time’, are each impressive in their own right, albeit a bit of a mixed bag. Catharine Edwards explores the function of time in Seneca’s Epistulae, particularly his focus on each day as the most important unit of time and his complex schematisation of different units of one’s life as concentric circles. Xinyue, in the first of two reception studies, argues that Italian humanist authors of Christian calendar poems manipulate and respond to Ovid’s Fasti in their depiction of the Annunciation. This detailed essay shows how calendrical time can be weaponised in the defense of Marian worship. The final chapter, by Philip Hardie, looks at the Last Judgement as seen by eighteenth-century English poets, who rely on both Latin epic and Milton’s Paradise Lost. As in Glauthier’s and Batty’s chapters, religious and cosmic transitions bring about the cessation of regular time and provide opportunities for narrative innovation for writers describing such atemporal states of exception.
As organising concepts, time and temporality are remarkably capacious: they lend themselves to explorations of abstract temporality, social expressions of time in gendered and classed lives, and formal experiences of time for readers or audiences of texts. Reading these two books alongside each other provides a panoptic view of the state of research on temporality in ancient Greek and Roman literary studies, with some exceptions. Neither volume devotes much space to historiography, especially in Greek. Xinyue’s introduction clarifies that this is purposeful in the case of his collection, both because that field has been so ably explored by others, and because his volume is more focused on temporality in non-linear narratives. Generally speaking, Bakhtin remains a name to conjure with, especially in his theorisation of the chronotope, mentioned in both introductions and in several chapters. In terms of ancient theories, Aristotle’s concept of linear time as change appears sporadically, often presented as background (Purves and Wohl) or as foil for sexier formulations like those of the Pre-Socratics or more recent theories of non-linear time (Kahane and Kennedy). Some texts are shared touchpoints in both volumes, at times to remarkably different effects. Both Fearn and Nicholson discuss the moon in Pindar Ol. 10: for Nicholson, it refers to the lunar calendar used to determine the date of the games, while for Fearn it represents ‘the inalienable-but-alien presencing of nature within foundational cultural achievement’ (116). On the Latin side, Seneca makes several appearances. His de brevitate vitae is used by Ulrich and Ker to demonstrate the concept of time as a valuable but limited resource, in both an economical and ethical sense. Edwards makes similar claims for the Epistles, again showing the centrality of time in Seneca’s Stoic practice. Ovid too is a popular author, whose complex narratives express bodily, ecological and calendrical time.
One aspect I found striking was the employment of modern media such as photography and video, able to capture and replicate specific moments in ways perhaps unthinkable to the ancients. This seems to be especially appealing in analyses of lyric poetry, like Purves and Wohl’s chapter on Sappho and Simonides and Fearn’s on Pindar, both of which frame lyric temporality through the lens of modern photography and credit it with the generative concepts of their contributions. Kahane and Gilhuly also demonstrate their concepts of time with reference to theories of modern media. Such claims suggest that both ancient texts and modern visual works are attempting to replicate a transhistorical human experience of temporality, rather than responding to and creating uniquely time-bound concepts of the temporal relationship between image, subject and viewer. Such juxtapositions offer an opportunity for further discussion of the differences between ancient and modern temporalities or even a meta-discourse about our own temporality as scholars of antiquity.
Despite the many theoretical and textual overlaps across these collections, there are some divergences in emphasis. Making Time devotes more room to socially constructed and embodied concepts of time, especially queer time and gendered temporalities. On the other hand, theories of ontology and ecocriticism are more prominently foregrounded in Temporalities. Due to these differences in focus, readers in search of an overview of the current state of the discussion of temporality in ancient literature, especially in non-narrative works, will want to peruse both volumes.
