In recent decades, studies of time in the ancient world have continued apace, frequently highlighting cultural and political context, and increasingly concerned with technologies of time. The collection under review, arising from a conference at Wellesley College in 2021, is distinctive in two ways. First, it is strictly concerned with literary works and not, say, technology or religion. And second, among these it gives special attention to works that in some way stand outside time. As the following summaries indicate, the contributions vary in the degree to which they engage with temporality, and they vary in their effectiveness.
The first section brings two very different subjects under the rubric ‘Out of Time’. In ‘Now, Sleep’ A. Purves and V. Wohl consider the temporality of sleep in fragments of Simonides and Sappho. In sleep, as Aristotle observed, we are unaware of the passage of time and thus seem to stand outside it. In Simonides, PMG 543, Danae addresses the sleeping baby Perseus and imaginatively enters his world outside time and unaware of dangers. In so doing, she longs to project his timelessness onto the world of storm and sea. In Sappho 168b, by contrast, the speaker is or was asleep, and so lies apart from the temporal world that the poem would have described. Lyric, especially through apostrophe, suspends time in certain ways, and the motif of sleep takes this further. The following piece considers not a state outside of time but the experience of outsiders. J. Ker, in ‘Untold Times? A Page from Galen’, addresses the daily routines of ancient Romans and asks if we can learn about those of non-elite individuals, which are generally untold. The page of Galen in question seems to consider whether those in a condition of slavery have the same opportunity as others to maintain a healthy regimen. As Ker's analysis proceeds, it emerges that Galen thinks they do have the same opportunity and, furthermore, that he might not refer to enslaved persons at all. Galen might be speaking metaphorically about his own slavery to the emperor; so we do not learn about non-elite lives after all.
The second section, ‘Engendering Time’, touches on various issues involving gender. In ‘Fertile Pasts and Sterile Futures in Euripides’ Andromache’ S. Olsen explores the play's first stasimon, where the chorus wishes that Hecuba had killed the baby Paris. If Hecuba had heeded Cassandra's pleas, the deaths at Troy would not have taken place, nor would wedding beds have been left empty in Greece. The counterfactual wish subverts reproductive norms in the imagined murder of a child by its mother and the actual empty beds and orphaned parents, even as the play ends with a child saved and marriages restored. Insofar as the wish contemplates a different past and alternative futures, and subverts a heteronormative life pattern, the ode can be said to entail a queer temporality. Gilhuly in ‘The History of Sexuality in Xenophon's Symposium’ describes the pronounced revisions in this work, as the licentiousness of the historical Kallias and Autolykos is rewritten as chaste tutelage, and the literary precursor of Plato's Symposium is rewritten to exclude homoerotic desire. Xenophon revises Greek sexuality to centre heterosexual marriage and illustrates this in the concluding performance of the marriage of Dionysos and Ariadne. If revisionism is in a sense ‘queer temporality’, it paradoxically serves to favour a heterosexual norm. In ‘Materna tempora: Gestational time and the Ovidian Poetics of Delay’ C. Hines begins by enumerating the many occasions on which the narrator in Metamorphoses and Fasti elides pregnancy – that is, mentions conception and then immediately passes to childbirth. This general disdain for gestation contrasts with the few cases where the narrator lingers over a painful pregnancy and where mora as metaliterary delay by the narrator intersects with mora as the time required for pregnancy. If elision and delay both exemplify what Hines calls a vexation with cyclical women's time, Rhea Silvia subordinates pregnancy to linear, imperial time: hers can take time but not involve suffering as she stands at the very beginning of Roman history.
Cultural considerations come to the fore in the third section, ‘Shaping Time’. N. Nicholson in ‘Hieron of Syracuse and the Politics of Epinician Time’ documents the ambitious ways in which the tyrant appropriated the symbolic value of the Olympic games. Hieron and his associates were victorious in a number of events in 476 bce and commissioned odes from Pindar and Bacchylides to celebrate them. By referencing the time of the festival and the past of Olympia, Hieron not only laid claim to its Panhellenic prestige, but also placed himself at its centre, much as he strove to make Syracuse the centre of a wider political regime. In ‘“But Now”: The Temporality of Archaic Greek Invective’ K. Ormand divides iambic poetry into two classes. On the one hand, events in the poems of Archilochus and Hipponax can undergo significant change (as when Lycambes becomes a joke) and are presented in subsequent singulative narration. On the other hand, those in Anacron or Sappho remain essentially unchanged (Artemon remains disreputable) and are presented in simultaneous iterative narration. The former reflects middling social values and the latter elitist values. The famous poem of Semonides belongs with the latter, except that it is meta-invective. J.P. Ulrich in ‘Wasting Time With Petronius’ proposes that, when Trimalchio kills the crowing rooster, lists days on his doorposts and uses a platter with signs of the zodiac, he is carving up time to create an ‘oppressive regime of reshaping time’ (p. 150). When one freedman says that day is nothing, and another complains that the rich enjoy constant Saturnalia, they are attempting ‘to subvert Trimalchio's time hegemony’ (p. 153). Finally, when Encolpius cannot leave by the door he entered, we have ‘a reassertion of Trimalchio's oppressive regime of linearity’ (p. 155). In ‘The Metaphors and Poetics of Roman Decline’ A.T. Zanker dissects the orientational and ontological metaphors used by Roman writers, such as decline, collapse or sickness. He then surveys artistic ways in which they were deployed. They might be rhetorically elaborated or pithily condensed, and placed for effect at an opening or a close. They could expand upon, criticise or otherwise allude to a previous example. They could even be dressed out with metrical effects.
The closing section considers different ways of moving ‘Beyond Time’. In ‘Greek Ghosts and Roman Imperial Time’ R. Cioffi seeks to place in their imperial context stories about ghosts, who emerge from the past and can sometimes foretell the future. In Lucian's Lover of Lies one of the interlocutors remains unpersuaded that ghosts are real; somehow this relates to the fact that Lucian's text is ‘haunted’ by allusions to Plato and other thinkers. Pausanias reports that visitors to Marathon may hear the men and horses of the ancient battle; this jibes with nostalgia for the Greek past. In On Marvels Phlegon of Tralles reports that, after the Romans defeated the Seleucids, one of their opponents rose from the dead and foretold the end of Roman power, and a similar prophecy was given by the head of a Roman man: Cioffi wonders how these would be read by a Roman imperial reader. And in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana ghosts are associated in varying ways with monarchical power. P. Glauthier, in ‘Time Stood Still, and It Was Sublime: Proto-Gospel of James 18’, addresses a passage where the narrative of Joseph seeking a midwife switches to Joseph's first-person account of the world standing still, then returns to the third person as Joseph learns that Mary has given birth. Glauthier's reading situates the work in Greek philosophical and literary traditions: the notion that time stops when the heavens stand still derives ultimately from Plato's Timaeus; a feeling of sublime transcendence when encountering a higher truth likewise derives from Symposium and Republic; and the tension between a still object and a continuing narrative is familiar in the device of ekphrasis. Hence readers are made to feel the transcendent moment at which Christ is born.
If the collection as a whole is somewhat uneven, it offers a fascinating, often stimulating array of approaches to time in Greek and Roman literature.
