Time simply passes. Its formalisation into cycles of recurrence — hour, day, month, year — makes calendars. Its sequencing into successive periods — decades, centuries, eras and ages — makes history. Both forms of punctuation have been of the highest interest to historians for many decades now. For the rhythm and shape of these divisions, their cultural specificity and situatedness, their easy naturalisation and wide reach and their ability to elevate particular moments and privilege certain individuals, offer insight into a society’s capacity to explain itself to itself, its reckoning with change and its judgements on past and future. Paul Hay’s interesting monograph draws attention to a particular mode of punctuating durational time, the Roman saeculum, and its associated discursive mode of ‘saecularity’. The window of investigation is narrow but substantial: the city of Rome from Sulla to Augustus (88 b.c.e. to 14 c.e.). Its objects of analysis are, chiefly, well-known works of Latin literature, especially poetry, epigraphic documentation and also, less central but more productive, cult practice, staged spectacle and monumental construction.
H. advances his argument in six well-balanced and sensibly ordered chapters. The first two offer context, political and intellectual, for the supposedly sudden prominence of saecularity. The first, ‘Omen History: Sulla and the Etruscans on Periodization’ proposes, in fairly stark terms, that Sulla was responsible for introducing into mainstream Roman intellectual and political history the saeculum periodisation, developing Trevor Luke’s identification of Sulla’s self-fashioning as a ‘man of the saeculum’. In consequence, H. argues, the following century saw an explosion of various periodising schemes. The following chapter, ‘Eternal Returns: Cataclysmic Destruction in Greek and Roman Thought’, seeks to embed this new and experimental saecularity within a deeper background of classical and Hellenistic Greek philosophy: Plato and Aristotle on geographic catastrophism, Stoic ekpyrosis and Epicurean palingenesis. H. suggests that the myths of Deucalion and Phaethon were reshaped into parallel paradigmatic watery and fiery ‘metakosmetic’ moments (the formal philosophical term for the transition between two saecula).
Ch. 3, ‘Inflection Points: Progress and Decline Narratives with Periodization’, and ch. 4, ‘Beyond the Metallic Ages: Technical Histories and Culture Heroes’, trace the impact of saecular discourse on first-century bce re-writings of the Roman past. H. repeatedly claims that the new saecularity permitted more sophisticated, increasingly ‘punctiform’ ways to articulate both the general trajectory of Roman society (typically downward) and the development of specific cultural techniques (e.g. medicine).
The following chapter, ‘Acting Your Age: Periodization in Roman Politics after Sulla’, is inevitably pulled to the epoch-making work of Octavian/Augustus — the myths surrounding his birth, the Palatine Hill complex, the Ludi saeculares, various Golden Age declarations; there is a fun discussion of Agrippa’s cleaning of the Cloaca Maxima and its Herculean–Augean imagery. As H. shows, saecularity could accommodate the combination of rupture and proclaimed restoration of the Augustan moment. A somewhat anomalous final chapter, ‘Pyramids and Fish Wrappers: Roman Literary Periodization’, associates the neoterics with a saecular reconstruction of literary history, an insistence on their own out-of-timeness and their hopes for immortal fame. Saecular periodisation is shown to be structured into the architecture of the Palatine Library.
There is much to admire here. The scholarship is creative and responsible — throughout, H. is generous in his recognition of earlier contributions and attuned to uncertainties and gaps in the record. As an intellectual and literary history, it has some finesse, offering new readings of well-known literary passages that, to my eyes, are mostly plausible, sometimes ingenious, always interesting. As an argument anchored to a political and social history, it is wanting: readers may not be persuaded by the Sullan periodisation.
Like all good books, Saeculum prompts more questions, some of which are anticipated in the Conclusion. H. has persuasively constructed a historical landscape with multiple periodising schemes: what kind of frictions were generated when they rubbed up against each other? More particularly, the traditional pairing of Greeks-and-Romans permits only the big Greek philosophers to count as an external influence. But what of Hellenistic Jewish thought, or the other highly articulated periodising schemes circulating in the eastern Mediterranean and, surely, also at Rome? The decision not to take this path is explicit, but somewhat disappointing. A deeper and bolder engagement with the intellectually vibrant scholarly conversations on historical time beyond Classics would only have increased H.’s contribution to our understanding of this distinctly Roman temporal form.
