This volume is a collection of six essays about religion and the calendar of the Roman Republic and the Empire. Their connecting thread is time, or rather temporal concepts, and the way they organised the religious thought and practices of the Romans.

The first chapter is an overview of the Roman calendar which aims at emphasising structural aspects of the year. After a short introduction to its genesis, F. discusses the adoption of the pre-Julianic calendar, that is, the transition from a lunar or lunar-solar scheme to a solar one. Like many scholars before, he cautiously chooses the end of the fifth century b.c., but one may have expected a discussion of M. Humm's hypothesis, which assigns this change to the aedileship of Cn. Flavius in 304 b.c. (Appius Claudius Caecus. La République accomplie [2005], pp. 451–80). F. then describes the situation of festivals and the nundinal letters. The link with the next section, which highlights the Hellenisation of early Roman cults, is less obvious but F.’s intention is to show that Greek influence on Roman religious thought began early. He concludes with a description of the festivals of the first six months, because our evidence relies mostly on Ovid's Fasti. F. aims at giving insights into the religious thought of Roman priests who controlled the shaping of the ancient calendar. He brings a particular focus to the pair January/February, which enables him to introduce a conceptual opposition between what he calls ‘firstness’ and ‘afterness’.

Chapter 2 tackles the classification of the days. The central theme is the status of the dies postriduani, also called dies atri, which were thought to be ill-omened. Excluding the correlation between their origin and the dies Alliensis (18 July 390 b.c.), F. argues for their antiquity and sees their negative quality as a consequence of their situation in the temporal organisation. He thus retains the etymology relating ater to alter and understands them as ‘after days’. The origin of the taboo would be the contrast between this ‘afterness’ with the ‘firstness’ of the gods who had to be invoked for religious matters. As Aelius Gallus (Festus 304–306 L.) seems to relate dies religiosi with ‘after days’, he also concludes that they could have had a link with the netherworld and its gods. Interestingly, Plutarch gave a similar explanation (QR 25). However, religiosus in this case cannot only be interpreted as related to the dead or the underworld (J. Rüpke, Kalendar und Öffentlichkeit [1995], pp. 561–5) and, precisely, dies atri were not appropriate for parentationes. This explanation may be only a part of the story, the justification for this quality remaining highly speculative. The chapter finally examines the dies Cremerensis and the nature of the days of republican battles for which the date is known.

Chapter 3 is about the Argei. In mid-May, the Roman priests and magistrates tossed dummies into the Tiber from the Pons Sublicius after a procession through the city to collect them in the 27 sacraria where they had been settled since 16–17 March. F. is right to think that ancient aetiologies cannot shed light on the significance of these rites and holds as the most likely explanation their purifying value to protect the crops against hostile spirits, especially the dead. Nevertheless, he mainly focuses on the unusual sequence of two days starting the whole cycle. Establishing a link between the formula ‘sexagenarios de ponte’ and the total of days (60) between the beginning in March and the end of the cycle in May, he considers that the existence of a two-day festival could be the result of the Julian reform of the calendar. One problem for this hypothesis, however, is that the last rites took place on May 14 and not on May 15 as he writes many times. The chapter ends with the meaning of the 27 Argei and the etymology of the word, choosing the unusual solution of deriving it from a theme arg- (‘white’; ἀργός).

In Chapter 4, dedicated to the ludi Saeculares, F. first draws attention to a widely-discussed question, that of the length of a saeculum and the dates of the celebrations of these ludi during the Republic. Considerable evidence is summoned: the first celebration should be dated to 362 or 358 b.c. The other known dates (249, 149 or 146), could thus be explained by calculating saecula of 100 or 110 years, as attested in ancient sources. All the demonstration is rich in material and well-conducted, but we could doubt its premises. Modern scholars have used considerable ingenuity to solve contradictions that did not necessarily exist for the ancients, as B. Schnegg-Köhler (Die augusteichen Säkularspiele [2002]) has shown. The viewpoint chosen by F. betrays too much attention to rigid temporal schemes: ancient authors did not have a unique definition of the saeculum and the problem should be, instead, ‘what made a festival secular?’, so that any conclusion is difficult to draw for the evidence before 17 b.c. The chapter continues, more conventionally, with the interpretation of the Augustan ludi Saeculares as a reinvention of the tradition and their connection with the newly founded Principate.

Chapter 5 is concerned with the taurobolium. This sacrifice, related to the cult of Cybele, is known only in the imperial period from a few, problematic texts and inscriptions. Its reconstruction is based on the description by the Christian poet Prudentius (Perist. 10.1006–50): the initiate, after stepping down into a pit, would have been bathed by the blood of a bull stabbed over him. F. defends the idea that the taurobolium was an original feature of Cybele's liturgy. This could be right, but we do not have much evidence for it. F. continues with an analysis of the Magna Mater's place in Roman religion after its introduction in 204 b.c., with a particular focus on the imperial period. Like Carcopino, F. maintains that the insertion of the festival in March should be assigned to Claudius and he tries to strengthen this idea with different pieces of evidence, which are not always convincing. Finally, F. is conscious that this is a Roman cult that has spread in the Occident and he wants to show how official and mystic aspects have mingled together. An attempt is made to explain the dates of celebration mentioned in inscriptions, relating some of them to significant days for the imperial power. In this chapter, the analysis relies on a conception of the ‘oriental cults’ which has been challenged by, among others, W. Burkert. F. knows these works, but does not discuss their views.

The last chapter tackles the ‘non-Christian origins of Christmas’, an example of the borrowing of a ‘temporal concept’ from Roman religion. In c. 200, the birthday of Jesus was not yet associated with the winter solstice, but with 6 January. Accordingly, the chapter shows how and why 25 December was progressively chosen. For F., the link is the god Sol and the study of his place in Roman religion leads him on different detours about obelisks or the seven-day week. He then goes back to the role of Aurelian and the solar cult in the fourth century a.d., especially in the religious context of Constantine's reign. These ideas are not really new but, the oldest evidence for 25 December being in 354, F. thinks that the substitution should be understood as a consequence of the great popularity among the Romans of the solar cult and its association with the Christian god.

The content of this last chapter is representative of the ambition of the book: as F. wants to examine all the implications of complex questions, following his reasoning is not always easy. Moreover, there are occasional factual errors and many typographical errors which do not fit with the price of the volume. The book thus partly misses its goal. F. deals with a considerable amount of evidence and problems, with some suggestive hypotheses and ideas, but does not provide a clear and up-to-date synthesis for students or scholars and, lacking a coherent structure, the book gives only a partial view of Roman time.