Several years ago a keen undergraduate bound for an MA programme asked me to recommend a book that described the activities of ancient Romans throughout the hours of the day. I hesitated, wishing I could refer them to a work that would interrogate such an approach to social history in light of previous attempts. Fortunately, such a work now exists: K.’s monograph utilises modern theories of time to examine the development of the concept of the ‘ordered day’ in the Roman world from the Republic to late antiquity, while addressing previous efforts to explicate Roman daily routines in scholarship from the Renaissance to the present.
The volume is divided into three sections. In the first (Chapters 1–3) K. focuses on the creation of ‘clock time’ and the ordering of the Roman day into hours through the adoption of new technology. He demonstrates that, because ancient sources offer a number of different accounts of the arrival of sundials and water clocks at Rome during the Republic, we cannot and should not attempt to construct a single narrative from the data. Instead, he uses their conflicting voices to look from different angles at the role and significance of clock time in Roman society, focusing especially on Varro, Pliny the Elder and Censorinus and devoting less attention to archaeological material. In Chapter 2 he argues, somewhat tentatively (pp. 66, 78), that Caesar played a central role in establishing Rome’s ‘ordered day’ through his close attention to calendar and clock time.
In Part 2 (Chapters 4–8) K. provides detailed analyses of several key passages describing daily routines of elite men. In Chapter 4 K. adapts J. Bender and D.E. Wellbery’s concept of the ‘chronotype’ to coin the term ‘day pattern’, that is, ‘a representation of how a given person or persons spent their entire day, seen as a kind of cyclic totality and viewed through a socioethical lens’ (p. 117). He argues that day patterns give shape to ‘forms of life’, and the relation of these patterns to forms of life produces the ‘order of the day’. In order to access how these patterns, forms and orders interacted in Roman society, K. states that he has chosen to examine literary documents rather than datasets of ancient evidence pertaining to time that is often decontextualised. While this decision prioritises the experiences of elite men, K. is forthright about omissions (p. 19), and at times he uses these privileged texts to reconstruct aspects of the daily routines of women or slaves. Chapter 5 examines three models for shaping day patterns: farm life, attention to physical health and the daily routine of an emperor. In the following chapters K. compares passages from six authors who have received much attention in scholarly formulations of ‘Roman daily routines’, and he looks at the relationship between their writing process, social context and the creation of their daily routines. K. investigates how Cicero and Horace adopt Epicurean attitudes to quotidian schedules (Chapter 6), how Martial and Pliny the Younger construct their days around writing and circulating texts (Chapter 7), and how Seneca and Marcus Aurelius engage in self-examination in an epistolary format at the end of their days (Chapter 8).
The final section (Chapters 9–11) takes the Roman day into late antiquity and beyond. In Chapter 9 K. uses Ausonius to demonstrate that Christian routines took inspiration from the Roman day. The chapter can give a one-sided impression of ancient piety: more attention is given to daily religious habits among Christians than is found for pagan practices in earlier sections. Chapter 10 is a particularly useful overview of the history and controversies surrounding books that strove to present the Roman day and daily life in an accessible format to the public, beginning in the sixteenth century. K. devotes most attention to J. Carcopino’s highly influential La vie quotidienne à Rome (1939), but he also discusses a medley of more recent studies that were intended to remedy Carcopino’s omissions (including J.P. Toner’s Leisure and Ancient Rome [1995] and Popular Culture in Ancient Rome [2009]; R. Turcan’s Vie quotidienne de Rome et ses dieux [1998]). In the final chapter K. draws on the work of V. Ogle and J. Fabian to enumerate six tendencies found in ‘daily life handbooks’ that encourage readers to draw comparisons and identify differences between the time schemes and daily routines of Roman and modern societies.
Throughout the monograph K. underscores the limitations of this particular endeavour: he is clear that insufficient attention is given to the ‘ordered days’ of non-elites, particularly slaves and women, due to the scope of the study (already lengthy). In the conclusion he points readers to the need for further examination of two aspects of the Roman experience of time: disorder and space. These topics have not been entirely neglected, as with the discussion of Caesar’s strategic use of space and time in Chapter 2 or Martial’s ‘queered’ routines in Chapter 7. Further studies of the role of lucubration in diurnal and nocturnal schedules will benefit from a recent investigation and exhibition of forms of artificial light that Romans experienced in public and private interiors (R. Bielfeldt et. al., Neues Licht aus Pompeji [2022]). In the case of disorder, theories of queer temporalities can open doors, for example exploration of social crises and anxiety surrounding the privileging of reproduction as an analogy of time (cf. L. Edelman, No Future [2004]; J. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place [2005]).
The Ordered Day is a thought-provoking contribution to the study of ancient literature, history and theories of time. It will prove useful to instructors who are preparing courses on subjects such as ‘Daily life at Rome’ or ‘Roman culture and society’ and who wish to challenge students to rethink prior conceptions of time and daily routines in both the ancient and the modern worlds.
