Those of us who live in the twenty-first century have it easy when it comes to issues related to time and dates. There is usually not a lot of thinking involved. Simple numbers, or a word or two. But it hasn’t been like that everywhere over the millennia.
I am not just talking about telling what time it is. With ubiquitous smart phones and all kinds of digital devices – plus wall clocks and desktop clocks and alarm clocks, not to mention the displays that stare at us from everything from microwave ovens to coffee makers – we are never left wondering. Something similar can be said about the days, weeks, months, and years.
Here is a conversation that you might hear when speaking to a teenager in a random school in a random city:
“How old are you?”
“16.”
“So you were born in 1999?”
“Yeah.”
“In what month were you born?”
“July.”
“And the day?”
“The 2nd.”
“Do you know what day of the week it was?”
“Uh, I think it was Friday.”
“And the time?”
“7:00 AM.”
“One more thing: do you know how old your mom is?”
“She’s old, like forty-one.”
“So she was born in 1974?”
“Yeah.”
“Before you go, write down the following number: one thousand, three hundred and eighty-nine.”
“1,389.”
Not imagine the same conversation with a random Roman teenager at the school of a random Roman grammarian in a random city.
“How old are you?”
“I am in my fifteenth year.” (Yes, the Romans would include the current year, right up until the next birthday.)
“So you were born in the consulship of Gaius Julius Caesar and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus?” (We would simply say it was 46 BC.)
“Yeah.”
“In what month were you born?”
“Quintilis … no wait, someone just changed the name to Iulius.” (After Julius Caesar, of course.)
“And the day?”
“That was the sixth day before the Nones.” (The Romans divided the month into Kalends, Nones, and Ides, and would count backward and forward from there.)
“Do you know what day of the week it was?”
“The day before market day.” (The Romans had an eight-day market week, not a seven day one. Monday, Tuesday, and the rest weren’t introduced until much later.)
“And the time?”
“The third hour.” (Without clocks as we know them, they had to be creative. So they divided the days in two parts, counting from midnight, and then again from noon. Things got more complicated when one tried to narrow down the exact time, because the length of the hours varied depending on the time of year, from the shortest 44-minute hours to the longest 75-minute hours.)
“One more thing: do you know how old your mom is?”
“Old, like in her forty-second year.”
“So she was born in the consulship of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus and Marcus Licinius Crassus?”
“Yeah, their first consulship, not the second.”
“Before you go, write down the following number: one thousand, three hundred and eighty-nine.”
“MCCCLXXXIX.”
Have fun!
