Saturday, January 31, 2015
Ancient Dates
Denis Feeney, Caesar's Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), p. 15 (footnote omitted):
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We are now in a position to see that correlating Greek and Roman dates means correlating Greek and Roman events. There is, in fact, no Greek or Latin word for "date." An ancient date is an event—or, to be more precise, any date is a relationship between two or more events. As inhabitants of the B.C.E./C.E. grid, we simply cannot help thinking of ancient writers as working with dates, which to us are numbers. But they are not connecting numbers; they are connecting significant events and people.
