T HE C HRIST IAN INVENT ION O F T IME

Time is integral to human culture. Over the last two centuries

people’s relationship with time has been transformed through indus-
trialization, trade and technology. But the first such life-changing
transformation – under Christianity’s influence – happened in late
antiquity. It was then that time began to be conceptualized in new
ways, with discussion of eternity, life after death and the end of days.
Individuals also began to experience time differently: from the seven-
day week to the order of daily prayer and the festal calendar of
Christmas and Easter. With trademark flair and versatility, world-
renowned classicist Simon Goldhill uncovers this change in thinking.
He explores how it took shape in the literary writing of late antiquity
and how it resonates even today. His bold new cultural history will
appeal to scholars and students of classics, cultural history, literary
studies and early Christianity alike.

simon goldhill is Professor of Greek at the University of

Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College, as well as Foreign
Secretary of the British Academy. He is one of the best-known
classicists of his generation who has lectured all over the world, and
he has appeared on TV and radio from Canada to Australia. His
books have been translated into ten languages and have won three
international prizes.
 greek culture in the roman world
series editors
JAŚ ELSNER, University of Oxford
SIMON GOLDHILL, University of Cambridge
CONSTANZE GÜTHENKE, University of Oxford
MICHAEL SQUIRE, King’s College London

Founding Editors
SUSAN E. ALCOCK
JAŚ ELSNER
SIMON GOLDHILL

The Greek culture of the Roman empire offers a rich field of study. Extraordinary
insights can be gained into processes of multicultural contact and exchange,
political and ideological conflict, and the creativity of a changing, polyglot
empire. During this period, many fundamental elements of Western society
were being set in place: from the rise of Christianity, to an influential system of
education, to long-lived artistic canons. This series is the first to focus on the
response of Greek culture to its Roman imperial setting as a significant
phenomenon in its own right. To this end, it will publish original and
innovative research in the art, archaeology, epigraphy, history, philosophy,
religion and literature of the empire, with an emphasis on Greek material.

Recent titles in the series:

The Christian Invention of Time: Temporality and the Literature of Late Antiquity
Simon Goldhill
The Moon in the Greek and Roman Imagination: Myth, Literature, Science and
Philosophy
Karen ní Mheallaigh
The Resurrection of Homer in Imperial Greek Epic: Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica
and the Poetics of Impersonation
Emma Greensmith
Oppian’s Halieutica: Charting a Didactic Epic
Emily Kneebone
Preposterous Poetics: The Politics and Aesthetics of Form in Late Antiquity
Simon Goldhill
The Aesthetics of Hope in Late Greek Imperial Literature: Methodius of Olympus’
Symposium and the Crisis of the Third Century
Dawn LaValle Norman
Greek Epigram and Byzantine Culture: Gender, Desire, and Denial in the Age of
Justinian
Steven D. Smith
Painting, Ethics, and Aesthetics in Rome
Nathaniel B. Jones
Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Augustan Rome: Rhetoric, Criticism and
Historiography
Edited by Richard Hunter and Casper C. de Jonge
Author and Audience in Vitruvius’ De architectura
Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols
 THE CHRISTIAN
INVENTION OF TIME
Temporality and the Literature of Late Antiquity

SIMON GOLDHILL
University of Cambridge
 University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre,
New Delhi – 110025, India
103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781316512906
doi: 10.1017/9781009071260
© Simon Goldhill 2022
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2022
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
names: Goldhill, Simon, author.
title: The Christian invention of time : temporality and the literature of late antiquity /
Simon Goldhill.
description: Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2022. | Series: Greek
culture in the Roman world | Includes bibliographical references and index.
identifiers: lccn 2021030353 (print) | lccn 2021030354 (ebook) | isbn 9781316512906
(hardback) | isbn 9781009071260 (ebook)
subjects: lcsh: Time perception – History – To 1500. | Time – Religious aspects –
Christianity. | Time – Social aspects – History – To 1500. | Time – History – To 1500. | Time –
Philosophy – History. | Classical literature – Themes, motives. | Time in literature.
classification: lcc ce25 .g65 2022 (print) | lcc ce25 (ebook) | ddc 115–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030353
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030354
isbn 978-1-316-51290-6 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
 T HE C HRIST IAN INVENT ION O F T IME

Time is integral to human culture. Over the last two centuries

people’s relationship with time has been transformed through indus-
trialization, trade and technology. But the first such life-changing
transformation – under Christianity’s influence – happened in late
antiquity. It was then that time began to be conceptualized in new
ways, with discussion of eternity, life after death and the end of days.
Individuals also began to experience time differently: from the seven-
day week to the order of daily prayer and the festal calendar of
Christmas and Easter. With trademark flair and versatility, world-
renowned classicist Simon Goldhill uncovers this change in thinking.
He explores how it took shape in the literary writing of late antiquity
and how it resonates even today. His bold new cultural history will
appeal to scholars and students of classics, cultural history, literary
studies and early Christianity alike.

simon goldhill is Professor of Greek at the University of

Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College, as well as Foreign
Secretary of the British Academy. He is one of the best-known
classicists of his generation who has lectured all over the world, and
he has appeared on TV and radio from Canada to Australia. His
books have been translated into ten languages and have won three
international prizes.
 greek culture in the roman world
series editors
JAŚ ELSNER, University of Oxford
SIMON GOLDHILL, University of Cambridge
CONSTANZE GÜTHENKE, University of Oxford
MICHAEL SQUIRE, King’s College London

Founding Editors
SUSAN E. ALCOCK
JAŚ ELSNER
SIMON GOLDHILL

The Greek culture of the Roman empire offers a rich field of study. Extraordinary
insights can be gained into processes of multicultural contact and exchange,
political and ideological conflict, and the creativity of a changing, polyglot
empire. During this period, many fundamental elements of Western society
were being set in place: from the rise of Christianity, to an influential system of
education, to long-lived artistic canons. This series is the first to focus on the
response of Greek culture to its Roman imperial setting as a significant
phenomenon in its own right. To this end, it will publish original and
innovative research in the art, archaeology, epigraphy, history, philosophy,
religion and literature of the empire, with an emphasis on Greek material.

Recent titles in the series:

The Christian Invention of Time: Temporality and the Literature of Late Antiquity
Simon Goldhill
The Moon in the Greek and Roman Imagination: Myth, Literature, Science and
Philosophy
Karen ní Mheallaigh
The Resurrection of Homer in Imperial Greek Epic: Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica
and the Poetics of Impersonation
Emma Greensmith
Oppian’s Halieutica: Charting a Didactic Epic
Emily Kneebone
Preposterous Poetics: The Politics and Aesthetics of Form in Late Antiquity
Simon Goldhill
The Aesthetics of Hope in Late Greek Imperial Literature: Methodius of Olympus’
Symposium and the Crisis of the Third Century
Dawn LaValle Norman
Greek Epigram and Byzantine Culture: Gender, Desire, and Denial in the Age of
Justinian
Steven D. Smith
Painting, Ethics, and Aesthetics in Rome
Nathaniel B. Jones
Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Augustan Rome: Rhetoric, Criticism and
Historiography
Edited by Richard Hunter and Casper C. de Jonge
Author and Audience in Vitruvius’ De architectura
Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols
 THE CHRISTIAN
INVENTION OF TIME
Temporality and the Literature of Late Antiquity

SIMON GOLDHILL
University of Cambridge
 University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre,
New Delhi – 110025, India
103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781316512906
doi: 10.1017/9781009071260
© Simon Goldhill 2022
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2022
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
names: Goldhill, Simon, author.
title: The Christian invention of time : temporality and the literature of late antiquity /
Simon Goldhill.
description: Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2022. | Series: Greek
culture in the Roman world | Includes bibliographical references and index.
identifiers: lccn 2021030353 (print) | lccn 2021030354 (ebook) | isbn 9781316512906
(hardback) | isbn 9781009071260 (ebook)
subjects: lcsh: Time perception – History – To 1500. | Time – Religious aspects –
Christianity. | Time – Social aspects – History – To 1500. | Time – History – To 1500. | Time –
Philosophy – History. | Classical literature – Themes, motives. | Time in literature.
classification: lcc ce25 .g65 2022 (print) | lcc ce25 (ebook) | ddc 115–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030353
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030354
isbn 978-1-316-51290-6 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
 T HE C HRIST IAN INVENT ION O F T IME

Time is integral to human culture. Over the last two centuries

people’s relationship with time has been transformed through indus-
trialization, trade and technology. But the first such life-changing
transformation – under Christianity’s influence – happened in late
antiquity. It was then that time began to be conceptualized in new
ways, with discussion of eternity, life after death and the end of days.
Individuals also began to experience time differently: from the seven-
day week to the order of daily prayer and the festal calendar of
Christmas and Easter. With trademark flair and versatility, world-
renowned classicist Simon Goldhill uncovers this change in thinking.
He explores how it took shape in the literary writing of late antiquity
and how it resonates even today. His bold new cultural history will
appeal to scholars and students of classics, cultural history, literary
studies and early Christianity alike.

simon goldhill is Professor of Greek at the University of

Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College, as well as Foreign
Secretary of the British Academy. He is one of the best-known
classicists of his generation who has lectured all over the world, and
he has appeared on TV and radio from Canada to Australia. His
books have been translated into ten languages and have won three
international prizes.
 greek culture in the roman world
series editors
JAŚ ELSNER, University of Oxford
SIMON GOLDHILL, University of Cambridge
CONSTANZE GÜTHENKE, University of Oxford
MICHAEL SQUIRE, King’s College London

Founding Editors
SUSAN E. ALCOCK
JAŚ ELSNER
SIMON GOLDHILL

The Greek culture of the Roman empire offers a rich field of study. Extraordinary
insights can be gained into processes of multicultural contact and exchange,
political and ideological conflict, and the creativity of a changing, polyglot
empire. During this period, many fundamental elements of Western society
were being set in place: from the rise of Christianity, to an influential system of
education, to long-lived artistic canons. This series is the first to focus on the
response of Greek culture to its Roman imperial setting as a significant
phenomenon in its own right. To this end, it will publish original and
innovative research in the art, archaeology, epigraphy, history, philosophy,
religion and literature of the empire, with an emphasis on Greek material.

Recent titles in the series:

The Christian Invention of Time: Temporality and the Literature of Late Antiquity
Simon Goldhill
The Moon in the Greek and Roman Imagination: Myth, Literature, Science and
Philosophy
Karen ní Mheallaigh
The Resurrection of Homer in Imperial Greek Epic: Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica
and the Poetics of Impersonation
Emma Greensmith
Oppian’s Halieutica: Charting a Didactic Epic
Emily Kneebone
Preposterous Poetics: The Politics and Aesthetics of Form in Late Antiquity
Simon Goldhill
The Aesthetics of Hope in Late Greek Imperial Literature: Methodius of Olympus’
Symposium and the Crisis of the Third Century
Dawn LaValle Norman
Greek Epigram and Byzantine Culture: Gender, Desire, and Denial in the Age of
Justinian
Steven D. Smith
Painting, Ethics, and Aesthetics in Rome
Nathaniel B. Jones
Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Augustan Rome: Rhetoric, Criticism and
Historiography
Edited by Richard Hunter and Casper C. de Jonge
Author and Audience in Vitruvius’ De architectura
Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols
 THE CHRISTIAN
INVENTION OF TIME
Temporality and the Literature of Late Antiquity

SIMON GOLDHILL
University of Cambridge
 University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre,
New Delhi – 110025, India
103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781316512906
doi: 10.1017/9781009071260
© Simon Goldhill 2022
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2022
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
names: Goldhill, Simon, author.
title: The Christian invention of time : temporality and the literature of late antiquity /
Simon Goldhill.
description: Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2022. | Series: Greek
culture in the Roman world | Includes bibliographical references and index.
identifiers: lccn 2021030353 (print) | lccn 2021030354 (ebook) | isbn 9781316512906
(hardback) | isbn 9781009071260 (ebook)
subjects: lcsh: Time perception – History – To 1500. | Time – Religious aspects –
Christianity. | Time – Social aspects – History – To 1500. | Time – History – To 1500. | Time –
Philosophy – History. | Classical literature – Themes, motives. | Time in literature.
classification: lcc ce25 .g65 2022 (print) | lcc ce25 (ebook) | ddc 115–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030353
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030354
isbn 978-1-316-51290-6 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
 T HE C HRIST IAN INVENT ION O F T IME

Time is integral to human culture. Over the last two centuries

people’s relationship with time has been transformed through indus-
trialization, trade and technology. But the first such life-changing
transformation – under Christianity’s influence – happened in late
antiquity. It was then that time began to be conceptualized in new
ways, with discussion of eternity, life after death and the end of days.
Individuals also began to experience time differently: from the seven-
day week to the order of daily prayer and the festal calendar of
Christmas and Easter. With trademark flair and versatility, world-
renowned classicist Simon Goldhill uncovers this change in thinking.
He explores how it took shape in the literary writing of late antiquity
and how it resonates even today. His bold new cultural history will
appeal to scholars and students of classics, cultural history, literary
studies and early Christianity alike.

simon goldhill is Professor of Greek at the University of

Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College, as well as Foreign
Secretary of the British Academy. He is one of the best-known
classicists of his generation who has lectured all over the world, and
he has appeared on TV and radio from Canada to Australia. His
books have been translated into ten languages and have won three
international prizes.
 greek culture in the roman world
series editors
JAŚ ELSNER, University of Oxford
SIMON GOLDHILL, University of Cambridge
CONSTANZE GÜTHENKE, University of Oxford
MICHAEL SQUIRE, King’s College London

Founding Editors
SUSAN E. ALCOCK
JAŚ ELSNER
SIMON GOLDHILL

The Greek culture of the Roman empire offers a rich field of study. Extraordinary
insights can be gained into processes of multicultural contact and exchange,
political and ideological conflict, and the creativity of a changing, polyglot
empire. During this period, many fundamental elements of Western society
were being set in place: from the rise of Christianity, to an influential system of
education, to long-lived artistic canons. This series is the first to focus on the
response of Greek culture to its Roman imperial setting as a significant
phenomenon in its own right. To this end, it will publish original and
innovative research in the art, archaeology, epigraphy, history, philosophy,
religion and literature of the empire, with an emphasis on Greek material.

Recent titles in the series:

The Christian Invention of Time: Temporality and the Literature of Late Antiquity
Simon Goldhill
The Moon in the Greek and Roman Imagination: Myth, Literature, Science and
Philosophy
Karen ní Mheallaigh
The Resurrection of Homer in Imperial Greek Epic: Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica
and the Poetics of Impersonation
Emma Greensmith
Oppian’s Halieutica: Charting a Didactic Epic
Emily Kneebone
Preposterous Poetics: The Politics and Aesthetics of Form in Late Antiquity
Simon Goldhill
The Aesthetics of Hope in Late Greek Imperial Literature: Methodius of Olympus’
Symposium and the Crisis of the Third Century
Dawn LaValle Norman
Greek Epigram and Byzantine Culture: Gender, Desire, and Denial in the Age of
Justinian
Steven D. Smith
Painting, Ethics, and Aesthetics in Rome
Nathaniel B. Jones
Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Augustan Rome: Rhetoric, Criticism and
Historiography
Edited by Richard Hunter and Casper C. de Jonge
Author and Audience in Vitruvius’ De architectura
Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols
 THE CHRISTIAN
INVENTION OF TIME
Temporality and the Literature of Late Antiquity

SIMON GOLDHILL
University of Cambridge
 University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre,
New Delhi – 110025, India
103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781316512906
doi: 10.1017/9781009071260
© Simon Goldhill 2022
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2022
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
names: Goldhill, Simon, author.
title: The Christian invention of time : temporality and the literature of late antiquity /
Simon Goldhill.
description: Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2022. | Series: Greek
culture in the Roman world | Includes bibliographical references and index.
identifiers: lccn 2021030353 (print) | lccn 2021030354 (ebook) | isbn 9781316512906
(hardback) | isbn 9781009071260 (ebook)
subjects: lcsh: Time perception – History – To 1500. | Time – Religious aspects –
Christianity. | Time – Social aspects – History – To 1500. | Time – History – To 1500. | Time –
Philosophy – History. | Classical literature – Themes, motives. | Time in literature.
classification: lcc ce25 .g65 2022 (print) | lcc ce25 (ebook) | ddc 115–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030353
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030354
isbn 978-1-316-51290-6 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
 Contents

Acknowledgements page ix
List of Abbreviations of Ancient Sources x

Introduction 1

part i
1. God’s Time 19
2. The Time of Death 45
3. Telling Time 64
4. Waiting 85
5. Time and Time Again 100
6. Making Time Visible 113
7. At the Same Time 132
8. Timelessness and the Now 156
9. Life-times 181
10. The Rape of Time 206

part ii
11. Beginning, Again: Nonnus’ Paraphrase of the Gospel of John 223
12. The Eternal Return: Nonnus’ Dionysiaca 267

vii
viii Contents
13. Regulation Time: Gregory’s Christmas Day 314
14. Day to Day 337
15. ‘We Are the Times’: Making History Christian 380

Coda: Writing in the Time of Sickness 420

Bibliography 422
Index Locorum 472
Subject Index 483
 Acknowledgements

The writing of this book was made possible by a Major Research

Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, from 2018 to 2020. My thanks
are due to this wonderful foundation, truly committed to the principles of
research, and to the Faculty of Classics and King’s College, Cambridge for
granting me a further two years in what was a deeply welcomed extended
sabbatical. The libraries in Cambridge were remarkable in providing me
with books and articles unbrokenly throughout lockdown.
Colleagues and friends have been very generous with their time and
intellectual contributions.
I have benefitted from reading and discussing work in progress with
Homi Bhabha, Andrew Faulkner, Marco Formisano, Emma Greensmith,
Jonas Grethlein, Fotini Hadjittofi, Duncan Kennedy, Anna Lefteratou,
Max Leventhal, Dimitri Levitin, Calum Maciver.
Chapters have been read and commented on, and questions answered
by: Richard Armstrong, Philip Burton, Catherine Conybeare, Theo
Dunkelgrun, Emma Greensmith, Claire Hall, John Henderson, Duncan
Kennedy, Miriam Leonard, Aleka Lianeri, Diana Lipton, Chaim
Milikowsky, Stephen Oakley, Stefan Reif, Rob Shorrock, Christos
Simelidis.
Duncan Kennedy and John Henderson kindly and insightfully read all
of Part 1 at a crucial point in its articulation. Catherine Conybeare and
Emma Greensmith have been constant and deeply appreciated discussants.
Real audiences in Colgate, New York; Cambridge; Oxford; London and
Berlin contributed helpfully in response to delivered papers. Virtual audi-
ences in events hosted in Jerusalem and London, likewise.

ix
 Abbreviations of Ancient Sources

Aeschylus
Aga. Agamemnon
Eum. Eumenides
Ambrose of Milan (Ambr.)
De incar. domin. sacr. De incarnationis Dominicae sacramento
(On the Sacrament of the Incarnation of
the Lord)
De virg. De virginitate (On Virginity)
Expos. Psalm. Expositio Psalmi cxviii (Commentary on
Psalm 118)
Hex. Hexaemeron
In Psal. In Psalmos (On the Psalms)
Luc. Expositio evangelii secundum Lucam
(Commentary on the Gospel according
to Luke)
AP Anthologia Palatina (Palatine Anthology)
Ap. Rhod. Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica
Aristotle
De cael. De caelo (On the Heavens)
Phys. Physics
Athanasius
Apol. contra Arian. Apologia contra Arianos (Defence against
the Arians)
De Synod. De synodis (On the Synods)
De Virg De Virginitate (On Virginity)

x
 List of Abbreviations of Ancient Sources xi
Augustine of Hippo (Aug.)
Civ. Dei De civitate Dei (On the City of God)
Con. Confessions
De doctr. christ. De doctrina Christiana (On the
Christian Doctrine)
De Gen. contra Manichaeos De Genesi contra Manichaeos (Against
the Manichaeans on Genesis)
De ver. relig. De vera religione (On the True Religion)
Enarr. in Ps. Enarrationes in Psalmos (Explanations of
the Psalms)
In Evan. Joh. Tract. In Evangelium Joannis Tractatus
(Commentary on the Gospel of John)
Serm. Sermones (Sermons)
Basil of Caesarea
Ep. Epistles
Cassian
Inst. Institutes
Cassiodorus
De an. De anima (On the Soul)
Clement of Alexandria (Clem.)
Misc. Miscellanea
Paed. Paedagogus (The Tutor)
Strom. Stromateis
Cor. Corinthians
Cyprian (Cypr.)
Ep. Epistles
Laps. De lapsis (On the Fallen)
Cyril of Alexandria
Comm. ad Ioh. Commentary on John’s Gospel
Contra Jul. Contra Julianum (Against Julian)
De ador. De adoratione (On the Adoration)
Expos. in Psal. Expositio in Psalmos (Commentary on
the Psalms)
Glaphyr. in Pent. Glaphyra in Pentateuchum (Elegant
Comments on the Pentateuch)
In Joh. In Johannum (Commentary on John)
In xii proph. In xii prophetos (On the Twelve
Prophets)
Dan. Daniel
Deut. Deuteronomy
xii List of Abbreviations of Ancient Sources
Dio (of Prusa/Chrysostom)
Or. Orationes (Speeches)
Dio. Sic. Diodorus Siculus
DL Diogenes Laertius
Epict. Epictetus
Epiphanius
De mens. et pond. De mensuris et ponderibus (On Weights
and Measures)
Eun. Eunapius
Euripides (Eur.)
Heracl. Heracleidae (Daughters of Heracles)
Or. Orestes
Eusebius (Eus.)
Hist. Eccl. Historia Ecclesiastica (History of the
Church)
Praep. Evang. Praeparatio Evangelica (Preparation for
the Gospel)
Ex. Exodus
Galen
Libr. Ord. De ordine librorum suorum (On the
Order of His Books)
Gen. Genesis
Gregory of Nazianzus
Apor. Aporrhēta (Ineffable Matters)
Carm. Carmina (Poems)
Ep. Epistles
Or. Orationes (Speeches)
Poem. Arcan. Poemata Arcana (Poems on the
Mysteries)
Gregory of Nyssa (Greg. Nyss.)
Cant. Cantus (Hymns)
Contra Eun. Contra Eunomium (Against Eunomios)
Trid. Spat. De tridui inter mortem et resurrectionem
domini nostri Iesu spatio (On the Three-
Day Space between the Death and
Resurrection of our Lord Jesus)
Vita Mos. Vita Mosis (Life of Moses)
HA Historia Augusta
Her. Herodotus
 List of Abbreviations of Ancient Sources xiii
Hesiod
Theog. Theogony
W&D Works and Days
Homer (Hom.)
Il. Iliad
Od. Odyssey
Irenaeus
Adv. her. Adversus hereses (Heresies)
Isocrates
Phil. Philip
Jerome (Jer.)
Adv. Ruf. Adversus Rufinum (Against Rufinus)
Ep. Epistles
Praef. In Pent. Praefatio In Pentateuchum (Preface to
the Translation of the Pentateuch)
Josephus
AJ Antiquitates Judaicae (Jewish Antiquities)
Vit. Vita (Life)
Lactantius (Lact.)
Inst. Institutes
Longinus
De sub. De sublimitate (On the Sublime)
Lucian
Ver. Hist. Vera Historia (True History)
Macrobius
Sat. Saturnalia
Man. Manilius
Marinus
Vit. Procl. Vita Procli (Life of Proclus)
Martin
Dial. Dialogus
Mat. Matthew
Nonnus
Dion. Dionysiaca
Par. Paraphrase
Num. Numbers
xiv List of Abbreviations of Ancient Sources
Origen (Orig.)
Cels. Contra Celsum (Against Celsus)
Jo. Homily on John
Orosius
Hist. Historiae (Histories)
Ovid
Met. Metamorphoses
Paulinus
Ep. Epistles
Vit. Ambr. Vita Ambrosii (Life of Ambrose)
Paus. Pausanias
PG Patrologia Graeca
Phil. Philippians
Philo
De somn. De somniis (On Dreams)
De vit. contemp. De vita contemplativa (On the
Contemplative Life)
Opif. De opificio mundi (On the Creation of
the World)
Vit. Mos. Vita Mosis (On the Life of Moses)
Plato
Prot. Protagoras
Rep. Republic
Theaet. Theaetetus
Tim. Timaeus
Pliny the Elder
NH Naturalis Historia (Natural History)
Pliny the Younger
Ep. Epistles
Plutarch
De E On the E at Delphi
De facie in orbe lunae On the Face of the Moon
Praef. Chron. Eus. Praefatio, Chronicon Eusebii (Preface to
the Chronicon of Eusebius)
Prudentius (Prud.)
Apoth. Apotheosis
Cath. Cathemerinon (Hymns for the Day)
 List of Abbreviations of Ancient Sources xv
Ditto. Dittochaeon (Double Shepherd’s Staff)
Ham. Hamartigenia (The Origin of Sin)
In Sym. In Symmachum (Against Symmachus)
Perist. Peristephanon (Crowns of the Martyrs)
Psych. Psychomachia
Ps. Psalms
Ps-Apoll. Met. Psalm. Ps-Apollinaris, Metaphrasis Psalmorum
Quintilian
Inst. Or. Institutio Oratoria (The Orator’s
Education)
Rom. Romans
Rufinus
HE Historia Ecclesiastica (History of the
Church)
Sallust
Bellum Jug. Bellum Jugurthinum (Jugurthine War)
Cat. Catilina
Seneca the Younger
Ep. Epistles
Socrates
Hist. Eccl. Historia Ecclesiastica (History of the
Church)
Sophocles (Soph.)
OC Oedipus Coloneus (Oedipus at Colonus)
OT Oedipus Tyrannus (Oedipus the King)
Phil. Philoctetes
Sozomen
HE Historia Ecclesiastica (History of the
Church)
Sulpicius Severus (Sulp. Sev.)
Chro. Chronicle
Ep. Epistles
VM Vita Martini (Life of Martin)
Tacitus
Ann. Annals
Tertullian (Tert.)
Adv. Marc. Adversus Marcionem (Against Marcion)
Apol. Apologia
xvi List of Abbreviations of Ancient Sources
De cor. De corona militis (On the Soldier’s Crown)
De spect. De spectaculis (On the Shows)
Thess. Thessalonians
Varro
Ling. De lingua latina (On the Latin Language)
 Introduction

‘I’ve been on calendars, but I have never been on time’

Marilyn Monroe

In my view, there is no artwork that captures the modern sense of time as

profoundly as Christian Marklay’s installation, The Clock – first produced
in 2010, and, since its opening, repeatedly staged in galleries around the
world, to amazed reviews. It is, as Zadie Smith declared, ‘sublime’.1 The
Clock is made up of around 12,000 short film and television clips that run
on a 24-hour loop. In every single clip, you can see a watch or clock which
shows the exact time at which you are watching The Clock. The synchron-
ization is both funny and uncanny. If you start watching at 2.10, each of the
short extracts contains a timepiece showing 2.10 – often several clips for the
same minute. At 2.11, it is all 2.11 – and so on for twenty-four hours. At
6.00, a string of hatted men suggests a cocktail; tea is taken repeatedly
between 4.00 and 4.30, tea-time; high noon looms and awaits its gunshots.
The joy or frustration of interruption is replayed again and again with an
extraordinary fascination. It is so easy to be hooked by the briefest narrative
of suspense, to be caught by the excitement of a flash of racing, to imagine
for whom the cute guy is getting dressed in his favourite shirt, to wonder if
the gun to the head will be escaped.
Through these brief fragments of an infrastructure of time, the spectator
becomes acutely aware of how often the affordances of time in cinema are
themselves a structuring device of visual narrative. The Clock shows again
and again cinema’s love of the establishing shot – a man looks at his watch
and then ahead expectantly; or the desperate race against time (‘We only
have twenty minutes, Jim’); or the build-up of stressful suspense (how long
can he hang on to the rock?). What the theatre calls ‘business’ embodies
and displays a sense of existing in time: the cigarette lit under a lamp-post;

1
Smith (2011). Short clips are temporarily available on the internet.

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 2 Introduction
the stamping feet of the waiting watchman; the stifled yawn of the bored
beauty. Part of The Clock’s wit comes from unveiling the clichés of the
cinematic enactment of time in and through the repetition of embodied
gestures. You find yourself sharing Marklay’s obsessiveness – watching for
the time on the clock on the wall of the saloon rather than the fight in front
of it, smashing the tables and spilling the drinks.
Yet, as you watch over a period of time, you may also become aware of
the extraordinary skill of the editing of this installation – and not just by
wondering at the sheer work of collecting so many clips with just that view
of the time on a clock (it must have taken so much time). The soundtrack
of one film drifts over the start of the next clip, linking them with a half-
heard echo of overlapping themes; a door opens in one clip, only to lead
into the set of another film; a running criminal from one film is chased by
a policeman from another film, but at the same minute, precisely, in the
narrative time of both films. This Clock certainly evidences its clock-maker.
The Clock is a work of intricate beauty.
The spectator is made acutely aware of time in another sense too. You
know at exactly what time you enter the installation and take your seat.
You know what the time is, to the minute, as long as you stay. Watching
the clock in a film is usually a sign of boredom. You are meant to lose
yourself in the narrative, not glance at the time. Here you are riveted by
watching the clock. Attentive to time. Of course at some point in the
twenty-four hours you need to go – to go to the bathroom or leave. But
when? Every minute counts: how much time in The Clock is the right time?
When will you give up your seat to another? You see yourself in time, feel
yourself embodied in time – we all have our body-clocks – and come face to
face – through the face of the clock – with your own investment in the
temporal calibration of your experience. You feel time passing, minute
by minute.
This installation speaks to a uniquely modern sense of time, dependent
on the social pervasiveness and accuracy of the clock. Consider, for
a moment, as an equally modern but contrastive mirror for The Clock,
the Superbowl as it appears on American television – another filmic display
of clock-time. The programme is stretched out so that one hour (precisely)
of game-time lasts for four hours; its final thirty seconds can last ten
minutes. The game is fragmented into a series of plays, each repeated in
slow motion and in real speed from different angles. The capitalist world of
advertising invades the tension of the game – feeds vicariously off it – with
commercial delays, where, with a different sense of counting, every minute
also has a well-advertised price. (The cost per minute of an advertising slot

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 Introduction 3
is leaked avidly to the press). A fan always knows how much time there is
on the game-clock, however long the show lasts. The referee could even
announce a resetting of the game-clock, although the time of the show
always just goes on, as it must. The Superbowl programme is the culmin-
ation of a long but specific history of the commercialization of time, its
measured commodification. It is hard to think of parallels for such aggres-
sive manipulation and regulation of time, minute by minute, in the
spectacular shows of the past. Time was not always money. It was not
always possible to watch time tick by like this.
It is a cliché of modernity’s self-awareness that everything is getting
faster, attention span getting shorter. The Clock performs this increasing
fragmentation of time’s flow, minute by minute. For a generation increas-
ingly raised on the digital media, with the flash of pop-up ads or the
apparently instantaneous communication of e-mail or Twitter, Warhol’s
promise of five minutes of fame may seem too long. This changing sense of
time becomes especially salient when we reflect on how hard it is to
imagine a life lived without an idea of minutes or seconds, as is the case
throughout antiquity, for whom even the half-hour is a precariously util-
ized precision. How we measure out our lives – with coffee spoons or
digital certainty – is integral to how we inhabit the world.
Indeed, I have started with Marklay’s The Clock because it is
a contemporary artwork that embodies in the most sophisticated and
engaging way how a representation of time depends on a set of specifically
modern ideas about time, practices of time, and aesthetics of time. Such
a big claim could open into a book-length study in itself. But let me try to
summarize very briefly what I mean.
In terms of modern aesthetics, first of all, we should note the classic
modernist gesture of changing perspective so that what is usually in the
background is brought to the fore: Marklay directs us towards the devices
of timing by which a narrative is organized. The Clock shows how time is
showed. The Clock epitomizes thus the formal self-reflexivity typical of
modernist aesthetics. It achieves this display of time through a narrative of
fragments. Since T. S. Eliot iconically declared ‘These fragments I have
shored against my ruin’, modernist art has privileged not just the fragment
but also the collocation of fragments in collage or – most recently – the
remix or mash up.2 Marklay’s The Clock recuts and juxtaposes momentary,
discrete extracts from films – but leaves the films on the cutting floor. This
fragmentation changes how each extract can be appreciated. Because each

2
‘The Wasteland’ in Eliot (1920), with Varley-Winter (2018) for further bibliography.

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 4 Introduction
moment is decontextualized, it is hard not to view them generically –
through stereotypes, expectation, clichés – as I did above when I described
‘the cute guy getting dressed in his favourite shirt’ or ‘the fight in the
saloon’ (I don’t know what films the scenes come from: allusiveness is not
the mode). Modernist aesthetics is obsessed with understanding modernity
through repetition and its role in structuring social life: the most famous
scene of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times is the tramp desperately trying to
stay in time with the production line’s demands for repetition. The
repetition of material modernity in its images of celebrity and commercial
products are integral to the art of Andy Warhol (from Campbell’s soup
cans to the face of Marilyn Monroe); the repetitive scripts of social
interaction are central to the language of the dramas of Harold Pinter or
Samuel Beckett. The role of stereotypic filmic imagery in identity forma-
tion is brilliantly articulated in the art of Cindy Sherman. And we could
add many other such examples. The repetition of clock-watching in
watching The Clock, with its constant reframing of its scenes into less
than a minute of anonymous celebrity, is deeply engaged with these
aesthetic obsessions of modernity.
Film itself is a modern technology, with its 1,440 frames a minute, and
its now digital capacities. Film changes the narration of time, how we see
time. The technology of time, however, also alters the experience of time.
There is a large-scale politics to this, of course.3 The technical advances of
clock-making are crucial for the history of seafaring, and hence trade and
imperialism, for which western film, and Hollywood in particular, has
played its role: how the West was won . . . and keeps winning the battle of
culture.4 Organizing time, synchronizing time locally, nationally and
internationally, is no straightforward business, even when the technology
should allow it. It is surprisingly recent – late nineteenth century – when an
agreed national time, thanks to the railway system, was instituted in Britain
and elsewhere; even later when international time was stabilized, Greece,
proudly going alone, was still producing maps with Athens rather than
Greenwich as the mean into the 1920s; the international date line was (re-)
fixed only after the Second World War, changing the date, in a moment,
on several islands.5 The Clock, however, speaks more to how Western social
life has been altered by the possibility of accurate time-keeping – which
modern scholars agree is distinctive of modernity, though when and where
3
See Clark (2019); Hartog (2011); Wilcox (1987). The bibliography of this introduction is indicative
only: fuller bibliographies are in the following chapters.
4
Sobel (1996) was trend-setting; see also the exceptional Galison (2003); also Ishibashi (2014).
5
Rosenberg and Grafton (2010); Galison (2003); Schivelbusch (1986); Gay (2003), Ogle (2015) 20–46.

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 Introduction 5
this modernity starts is debated and re-debated.6 It has become
a commonplace of the historiography of time that industrialization
changes people’s experience of time, demanding that time is measured
and commodified in work, that work is thus defined by time (nine to five),
or by units of production (the production line: time and efficiency studies),
rather than by the necessary tasks of the agricultural year; and by increas-
ingly small divisions of time.7 An obsession with punctuality as a sign of
good manners – a virtue even – is a modern politesse.8 The Clock displays
the degree to which modern social life – as represented in film – is regulated
by the constant turn to the time. To be in the installation overlaps your
own experience of the time of watching – minute by minute – a leisure
time activity, with the representation of the pervasive need to watch the
time. The installation – being in The Clock – is a necessarily reflexive
experience of modern, clock-bound social time.
Ideas of time also alter as modernity progresses. The nineteenth century is
the first era to recognize itself as a century.9 Life expectancy in the twentieth
century allows us to lament a young death at 65, something unimaginable in
antiquity. Boredom as an expected element of work or childhood comes with
industrialization. Only in modernity is human progress through technology
or science an anticipation, an anticipation that seeds science fiction as well as
social hopes.10 Above all, since geology’s scientific advances in the early
nineteenth century and biology’s theories of the mid-nineteenth century,
time’s abyss stretches back millions and millions of years and forward indef-
initely – though the anthropocene may herald a more limited presence of
humans within time.11 Deep time is dizzying – and is explicitly set against
Christian insistence on the beginning of time in creation and the end of time
at the end of days, which postulates therefore a finite historical time span.
Equally dizzying, however, are the smallest measurable units. To measure 10−21
of a second is an almost incomprehensible achievement.12 Einstein is science’s

6
Sherman (1996); Dohrn-van Rossum (1996); Bartky (2000); Galison (2003); Glennie and Thrift
(2009); Ishibashi (2014); Ogle (2015).
7
Thompson (1967) is seminal; Le Goff (1980). See Nowotny (1989); Kern (2003) and (the equally
seminal) Latour (1993).
8
See Wolkenhauer (2019); Ker (2019): the Roman moral discourse of time did not include
punctuality.
9
Buckley (1966).
10
Hartog (2020) 221 describes progress nicely as a secularization of perfection and perfectability (what
Origen in De principiis calls ‘our journey towards perfection’).
11
Gamble (2021); Buckland (2013); Rudwick (2005), (2008); Secord (1986) for the geology; Rees (2003)
for the apocalyptic. Hartog (2011); Assmann (2013) (especially 131–208); Jordheim (2014) for the ‘new
regime of time’.
12
On short time in antiquity see Miller and Symons eds. (2019).

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 6 Introduction
most recognizable face because of his contribution to a new understanding of
time, even if relativity is an understanding baffling to most, despite the
massive sales of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. How humans
see themselves in time depends on such grounding concepts, which change
over time.
There are dozens of eye-opening books on this modern construction of
time – which does not run at the same pace in all regions of the world or
across all institutions or communities in any country.13 Or, as Frederic
Jameson puts it from his Marxist perspective, ‘Each mode of production
has its own temporalities.’14 I have offered here no more than the briefest
headlines of this fascinating and complex history, but I start with this
modern artistic and intellectual reflection on the modernity of time
because it is part of what has motivated this book. These attempts to locate
and understand the rupture that defines modern time – along with the
recognition of the continuities that make identifying such a rupture hard –
have largely turned their back on what has a strong claim to be the first
truly great transformation of thinking about time. This transformation is
the Christian invention of time. The aim of this book is to describe and
understand how notions and practices and experiences of time changed in
late antiquity as the Roman empire became Christian, and how such
a transformation transformed the representation of time in the literature
of the era. There can be no adequate historiography of time that does not
recognize this fundamental reorganization of Western thinking, institu-
tionalization and experience concerning time.
Now, there are also many books about time in antiquity too, so many
indeed that it has become a trope of their introductions not only to make
such a statement, but also to note how many scholars have made such
a statement before (time and time again). The few paragraphs that Aristotle
dedicated to a theory of time – hugely influential paragraphs in the history
of philosophy – have resulted in long books based on innumerable
articles.15 The history of the water-clock and sundial have been traced.16
Augustine’s brilliant discussion of time – his celebrated statement that he
knows what time is until someone asks him is one of the few moments of
antiquity to appear repeatedly in books on modernity – not only has

13
Barak (2013); Wishnitzer (2015); Ogle (2015) 75–119; to add a (post-)colonial perspective to the works
already cited. Banerjee (2006) smartly links temporal and monetary systems in colonialism.
14
Jameson (2002) 79.
15
Coope (2005) on Aristotle; Sorabji (1983) for the tradition, both with bibliographies.
16
Allen (1996); Hannah (2009); Winter (2013); Talbert (2017); Jones (2019); and in a long history
Dohrn-van Rossum (1996).

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 Introduction 7
proved one of the most discussed arguments from late antiquity, but also
has played a fundamental role in the by now extensive bibliography linking
time and narrative.17 The history of the calendar – like the history of
astrology, often requiring obsessive attention to details of mathematical
calculation – leaves a heritage on everyday living still, and cannot be told
without Julius Caesar’s interventions.18 There are also discussions of time
in various genres: historiography most intently, but also epic, tragedy and
rhetoric.19 More recently, we can see the beginnings of an interest in
anachronism or ‘queer time’ in antiquity.20 The whole history of classi-
cism, indeed, the later reception of antiquity, depends on a genealogical
view of how modernity is connected to the past – a construction of what it
means to inhabit the time of now.21 This too has its own historiography.
Yet it is striking that the history of the invention of Christian time – how
Christianity’s multiform development slowly changes the temporalities it
inherited – has not been analysed from the multiple perspectives that such
a large-scale cultural transformation needs, although the recognition that
Christianity changed the understanding of time is readily acknowledged.22
In part, this silence is a product of the institutionalization of the discip-
lines, so that classics and theology, ancient history and church history, are
separated, institutionally and in practice, in modern universities (for all
their shared backgrounds and past involvement).23 It is still the case that
most theologians and most classicists – even when both groups work on
late antiquity – look anxiously (dismissively, longingly) at each other across
the divide of their disciplinary expertises. In part, this silence is a reflex of
the regular assertion that modernity secularized time – that such secular-
ization is indeed a sign of its modernity.24 Religion is the past to be left
behind. The claim that modernity is the progress (in all senses) of secular-
ism has been sharply dismantled by recent critics,25 but its influence is
evident in the unwillingness to consider the deep influence of religious
thinking on the most basic concepts of time, despite the evident religious

17
Ricoeur (1984); Kennedy (2013); Nightingale (2011); Pranger (2010); Allen ed. (2018).
18
Rüpke (1995), (2006); Feeney (2007); Kosmin (2018); Stern (2001), (2012).
19
Grethlein and Krebs eds. (2012); Grethlein (2013); Hartog (2011); Lianeri (2011), (2016); Bakker
(2002); Purves (2019); Phillips (2020); Georgiadou and Oikonomopoulou eds. (2020).
20
Atack (2020); Holmes (2020); Rood, Atack and Phillips (2020); Phillips (2020). Nagel and Wood
(2010) is influential.
21
The Postclassicisms Collective (2019).
22
Hartog (2020: 83): ‘There is for sure a Christian regime of historicity’. More commonly, it is totally
ignored, as in Elias (1992).
23 24
Conybeare and Goldhill eds. (2020). Davis (2008).
25
Asad (2003); Taylor (2007) have been particularly influential; see Levey and Modood eds. (2009);
Modood (2019); Calhoun, Juergensmeyer and van Antwerpen eds. (2011); Mahmood (2015).

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 8 Introduction
roots of the week (as Zerubavel showed nearly forty years ago26) or the
holiday or the idea of daily routine. In part, not looking towards the
invention of Christian time is also a pragmatic if rather feeble response
to the sheer scale of material and the complexity of the interlocking
subjects that such a topic summons.
The first part of this book is an attempt thus to outline the Christian
invention of time. The transformation that Christianity achieves engages
both with the experience of time – the accepted structure of the seven-day
week, the order of daily prayer, the festal calendar of Christmas and
Easter – and with time’s conceptualization – a new discourse of eternity,
of life after death, of the triviality of the mundane, of waiting for the end of
days. This Christian temporality was formed in and against the Jewish,
Greek and Roman cultures in which it slowly developed. This, then, gives
the founding question of the first section of the book: What were the
institutions and languages which structured the experience and under-
standing of time, and which Christianity inherited both from Greek and
Roman cultures and from the Jewish tradition, and how did Christianity
reshape such inheritances?
To answer this question the first section of the book contains ten essays on
aspects of temporality. Each of these ten chapters takes a fundamental
question of the discourse of temporality and explores how the traditions of
Greco-Roman and Jewish culture are slowly transformed by the gradual
dominance of Christianity. Each of these opening chapters is strictly an
essay. They are short, with no pretension to comprehensive coverage, and
each is designed to outline the parameters of what is a huge area of culture,
rather than list all the relevant sources or give a full analysis of what are often
heavily discussed and complex texts or conflicted institutions. They set out
what I take to be the key questions of this history of temporality. The
transformations of Christian time cannot be understood without this double
address to both the pagan and the Jewish cultures in which it took shape
(truly an ‘entangled history’), and cannot be understood properly without an
address to the conceptualization, experience and expression of time through
the gradual development of Christian doctrine, power and institutionaliza-
tion. Christian doctrine developed slowly and painfully and polemically (we
should always talk of Christianities in late antiquity)27 – and discussed
aspects of time fervidly. This alteration of normative discourse required
power to find social and cultural expression – through institutionalization,

26
Zerubavel (1985), though there is much that is worryingly parochial in his evidence.
27
See e.g. the exemplary Shaw (2011).

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 Introduction 9
including the institutions of literary production. All this must be part of
a history of temporality. Some readers may find the form of the essay too
much of a provocation, some no doubt will find elements of superficiality in
their areas of expertise. The aim, however, is to indicate how broad a cultural
question the Christian invention of time is. I am fully aware that each of
these chapters could be expanded to book length. The wager is that the scope
of the foundational question that this organization of material allows to
emerge justifies the essayistic treatment of each element of it.
The second section of the book has an equally large question: how did
this transformation of temporality change the writing of late antiquity? To
answer this question, this second section has five longer chapters, each of
which looks in greater detail at specific authors and texts from late
antiquity. These extended readings give me the chance to demonstrate
how the questions outlined in the first section are embedded in the
language and narratives that form the imaginary of the growing
Christian community. Again, selection is necessary. There are chapters
on Nonnus’ Paraphrase of the Gospel of John, and on Nonnus’ Dionysiaca;
on Gregory of Nazianzus’ poetry and prose, starting with his collection
known as the Aporrhēta, ‘Ineffable Matters’, and concluding with a study
of his sermon on Christmas Day 380. The final two chapters juxtapose
Ambrose and Prudentius, who both wrote collections of hymns on the
Christian day; and Sulpicius Severus and Orosius, who both wrote histor-
ies of the Christian world, and in the case of Sulpicius a very influential life
of his master, St Martin of Tours. There are self-evidently many other
authors who could have been included (originally considered chapters on
Quintus of Smyrna and on Juvencus will appear elsewhere), but by this
selection I cover Greek and Latin, prose and verse – and the most salient
genres of epic, paraphrase, sermon, hymn, hagiography, and historiog-
raphy, genres rarely brought together to produce a broad cultural picture.
These two large-scale, interlinked questions – how the fundamental
changes in Christian thinking about time are to be understood, and how
these changes are embodied and embedded in the writing of late antiquity –
structure this book.
An immediate caution is necessary. I have so far talked of Christianity,
Greco-Roman culture, Judaism. Along with pagan and barbarian, these
central terms of identification run the risk of concealing the fractured
differences and competing claims that actually mark the transformation
of the Roman world. Since at least Walter Bauer in the 1930s, it has been
recognized not just that there were many different Christian groups from
the beginnings of Christianity onwards, but also that any historiography

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 10 Introduction
that focuses on the opposition of orthodoxy and heresy is likely to rehearse
the self-serving rhetoric of the later dominant church authorities that
defined themselves as orthodox.28 Whatever claims of universalism and
truth we find, in each of the writers I discuss there is an evident rhetoric of
conflict between pro- and anti-Nicaean Christians, between church
authorities and charismatic individuals, between ascetic and civic projec-
tions of religion. Christianity remains Christianities. Similarly, while the
Roman empire had an enkuklios paideia, a general course of education and
culture, that started always from Homer and moved through a curriculum
of reading to the institutions of rhetoric and philosophy, there are expressly
debated and publicly enacted social and cultural differences both between
Greece and Rome, and between different groups in the Greek-speaking
East or Latin-speaking West (or the bilingual elites or the Latin-dominated
army, say, which go between East and West). Tradition – to paraphrase
Heidegger – is a rhetoric designed to present the past as self-evident – an
ideological projection not just of what past is to be authorized but how the
present finds its own genealogy within it. Again, as we will see, tradition is
one of the most contested areas for each of the authors I discuss. Similar
arguments could be made – and often have been made – for the language of
pagans and barbarians. ‘Pagan’ and ‘barbarian’ are collective terms
designed to conceal differences, to promote the values of Christian civil-
ization as privileged and dominant: to simplify and polarize. These central
terms of identification are all used as persuasive gestures of self-definition
and need to be repeatedly pluralized and nuanced. The era of late antiquity
is a time of transformation (as well as a transformation of time), and in it
there are many shifting contingencies of self-positioning, networks of
situated group formation, and traumatic explosions of hatred as well as
religious conflicts and exclusions. The violence of supersessionism is inte-
gral to these narratives. The detailed readings of individual authors need to
be extremely cautious about too clumsy claims of contextualization.
What is more, if there is no ‘view from nowhere’ within the exchanges of
late antiquity, there is also no ‘view from nowhere’ in studying any aspect
of the historiography of late antiquity, especially where religion is
concerned.29 The modern historiography of the Arian controversy, to
take a specifically contentious example, could be said – conveniently and
rhetorically – to be bookended by Cardinal Newman, the most celebrated

28
Bauer (1971 (1934)).
29
‘View from nowhere’: see the seminal Haraway (1988). For how critics invented ‘late antiquity’ see
Herzog (2002b); Vessey (1998); Rebenich (2009).

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 Introduction 11
and controversial convert from Anglicanism in the nineteenth century, and
Rowan Williams, leading academic but also Archbishop of Canterbury in
the twentieth century.30 It would be incautious not to reflect on how the
intricate specificities of Newman’s intense public and private engagement
with what orthodoxy is, might affect both his research and his writing of
such a history for a public readership, much as it would be unwise not to
consider how Rowan Williams’s intellectual credentials as a historian as
well as a theologian, ameliorative public persona and religious liberal could
inform his understanding of such an aggressive earlier Christian battle over
the authorized truth. For both Newman and Williams, the Reformation –
how it is understood historically and lived religiously – is also a fundamen-
tal moment of rupture to be negotiated, in their retrospective attention to
an earlier conflict. For a historian writing about time in a pre-Reformation
era, to disentangle what has become a dominant Protestant historiography
within the university – a style of close reading, a view of change, a work
ethic, an idea, above all, of what religion is – is an ongoing and pressing
charge. In what follows, I will sometimes draw attention to striking and
even dismaying examples where confessional commitments distort aca-
demic analysis. We should all also know that it is always harder to recog-
nize one’s own biases, one’s own situatedness.31 Working on antiquity is no
excuse not to recognize the need to take account of the contemporary
insistence on such anxious self-reflection. My minimal but requisite hope is
that, with a self-consciousness that is not crippling, I will have properly
respected all the authors, modern and ancient, I bring onto the page, and
will have tried to understand why they have written what they have written
and the way they have written it. To grasp what is at stake for yourself and
for the figures you study is a basic requirement of criticism.
Although the second section of the book is focused on specific authors and
specific genres, the ten essays of section one are each focused on a topic, and
range widely over antiquity to show why and how this topic is integral and
significant for the discourse of temporality. These ten topics are: (1) God’s
Time – how is the notion of a time of divinity – immortality – conceptual-
ized? This chapter traces the shift from Homer’s gods, without season, age or
death on Olympus, through the new articulation of a doctrine of God’s
temporality around the time of the Council of Nicaea, to Augustine’s
attempt to imagine timelessness. (2) The Time of Death – how does the
conceptualization of death inform a concept of temporality? Christianity
aims to change fundamentally what death means for life, fame and human

30 31
Newman (1833); Williams (1987). Goldhill (forthcoming b).

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 12 Introduction
achievement – but with what effect on narratives? (3) Telling Time: the
history of chronometry. How did time get told – measured and narrated – in
antiquity and how does it relate to the history of modern technologies? What
does the order of monastic time do to storytelling? Can a good monk have
his own story? What, in short, is the relation between counting and recount-
ing? (4) Waiting. Narrative – as Barthes recognized long ago32 – requires its
delays: ancient epics, indeed, are all constructed around delay, from Achilles’
refusal to fight onwards. Yet Christianity insists that waiting for the Second
Coming is the desired achievement, the crisis of now. This chapter therefore
looks at the shifting patterns of hesitation, prophecy and fulfilment that
structure ancient narratives – and how Christianity changes such dynamics.
(5) Time and Time Again: this chapter considers how the role of exempla,
integral to classical rhetoric and normativity, are redrafted by the logic of
typology: repetition and normativity. What is the relation between time and
linear narrative with both exempla and types? (6) Making Time Visible.
Between memorial and memory, how does a culture make its past visible.
What is historical time, what sort of memory or future does it project? What
is pilgrimage as a culture of viewing the topoi of the past? (7) At the Same
Time. Simultaneity is the problem of Einstein . . . What does it mean to say
two events happened at the same time? This chapter explores how classical
and Christian historiography use – differently – the notion of ‘at the same
time’ to construct patterns of comprehension, affiliations of power, and
a sense of world history. (8) Timelessness and the Now. This chapter looks at
two competing notions and how their interactions are differently expressed
over time. The first is ‘timelessness’ and its difference from eternity;
the second is ‘the now’ – how the moment is conceptualized. Is time
a series of nows? Or is it an unbroken continuity? What can it mean ‘to
live in the moment’? (9) Life-times. This chapter explores how a concept of
time is integral to narratives of a life (life-writing/biography/hagiography).
What strategies do Christian biographers adopt and adapt from the pagan
and Jewish traditions to rewrite what it means to have a life, to live
a Christian life-time? (10) The Rape of Time. This chapter considers rupture –
the sudden – as a force not just in narrative but in ideology. It takes its title
from a poem inscribed on a grand church in Constantinople where the
patroness who paid for the building is described as having ‘forced’ or ‘raped’
time because her building surpasses Solomon’s Temple. How, then, is
change to be conceptualized? This is crucial for conversion, say: is it
a sudden moment (as Kierkegaard theorizes, basing his account of the

32
Barthes (1975).

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 Introduction 13
sudden in Plato) or a development? Can one ‘make a new start’? Inevitably,
this turns not just to a philosophical idea of change but also a politics of
revolution. How violent is the demand of supersessionism?
Although each essay can be read as a free-standing introduction,
together they construct an argument. The opening chapter’s grounding
concern with the contrasting models of how divinities exist outside time –
with all the complications of how a son of God can be accommodated
within such timelessness – leads into a discussion of how such embedded
thinking about the nature of immortality redrafts a set of attitudes towards
human life and death, human achievement and what lasts. This consider-
ation of what lasts in turn leads into a discussion of how the time of
mortality can be calibrated, measured, organized and thereby lived. How is
the time of mortality – a life-time – to be ordered, regulated? Crucial to the
new Christian understanding of such a nexus of ideas is what waiting
means – how looking forward affects the sense of the duration of time and
how time is to be inhabited – and what life stories are to count. To
understand what counts, the exemplary life is crucial. What, then, is the
role of the examples of the past for the present and the practice of typology,
which forces the present and past into models of each other? How do the
cultures of Greece and Rome and then the culture of Christianity make
such exemplarity visible, what memorials of the past, what practices of
seeing the past are encouraged and institutionalized? How is a place in
history made material? This interest in memorialization looks back signifi-
cantly to the earlier discussion of what counts and what lasts in a human
life. One fundamental question for such practices of historiography – one
of the key genres of memorialization – is what it means to say that two
events happened at the same time – and what such synchronicity is taken to
indicate. Synchronicity as a problem is integral to the arguments about the
Trinity that grounded the opening description of divine time. Thus,
chapter 8 picks up the first chapter to see how timelessness as an idea is
developed and how it relates to the contrasting claim to be ‘in the
moment’, the complete absorption in a fragment of time, ‘the now’. The
final pair of chapters, in turn, develop the question of what is to count in
a life-time to look first at the narrative genres of life-writing – how a life-
story can be recounted – and, finally, the models of rupture and continuity
that underlie the concern with timelessness and the moment – or the very
passage of time. Together – and the cross-cutting questions here are
evident – these ten essays argue that concepts underpinning temporality –
timelessness, synchronicity, the moment, waiting, repetition, rup-
ture – inform the ontological understanding of god and man, eschatology’s

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 14 Introduction
transformation of history, the human sense of living in time and in the
passing of time, how a life is ordered, valued, memorialized and narrated,
and consequently the politics of how a group sees itself within history.
And, most importantly, this opening section shows that the development
of Christianity fundamentally changes how temporality is structured and
therefore structures how humans place themselves in time and the practices
of temporality: how life is (to be) lived. There is an ethics and politics
embedded in the brackets around ‘(to be)’: the often veiled dynamic
between description and normative demands is what makes Christian
temporality instrumental. This is the Christian invention of time.
These ten chapters set up the terms and debates in which the five close
readings are framed. It is in this first section where many of the most well-
known writers who write explicitly about time appear – philosophers such
as Plato and Aristotle; chronographers such as Eusebius; poets such as
Ovid, with his Fasti (‘Calendrical Records’); theologians such as
Augustine, whose profound discussion of time in the Confessions is
a recurring touchstone for this book. These writers would appear in any
list of the usual suspects for a book about ancient temporality, and they
have due place in these opening essays. These essays, however, are the-
matic: there is no attempt to catalogue comprehensively by author
Christian views on time (‘Time in the New Testament’, ‘Time in
Augustine’, ‘Time in Origen’ and so on). The second section, by contrast,
does focus on specific texts and authors. The selection of authors for
the second section of the book was motivated by wanting to demonstrate
how the Christian transformation of time was instrumental in writing
which was not usually placed in the list of usual suspects, because it offers
a less obviously or straightforwardly direct discussion of time within
a philosophical or theological tradition. My argument is that it is in
these texts where we see the impact of the change of thinking about time
most saliently. It is here where we see the temporal imaginary in formation.
For the Christian readers of late antiquity, I argue, an understanding of
how the self inhabits time is forged through the experience of encountering
these and other such explorations of the ethics, narratives and history of
being in a Christian world. None of the primary texts studied in detail in
this section are a regular part of the contemporary canon, and part of my
polemic is to widen our notion of the literature of antiquity for classicists,
theologians and historians. This is not just a question of bringing under-
appreciated texts into the limelight, important though it is to contest and
broaden what tradition means; it is also a way of re-visioning the more

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 Introduction 15
familiar texts by reframing them within this wider and differently charged
narrative. Time also becomes differently visible in retrospect.
Although I use modernity, as in this introduction, as a means to explore
contemporary critical self-placement and as a contrastive mirror for late
antiquity – modernity from the Renaissance onwards – I do not focus
purposively or in detail on texts after Nonnus in the fifth century. I do no
more than allude to the Byzantine or Latin medieval continuation of these
changing ideas and ideals of temporality – a topic which would require
another book. Consequently, although chapter 14 on Prudentius and
Ambrose looks specifically at how the religious day becomes
organized, hour by hour, office by office, I do not discuss the long tradition
of Books of Hours, the material history of the later church, its continuing
practices of liturgy and ritual, the medieval monastery, and the effect of the
Reformation, still continuing, on how modernity’s temporality makes
sense, although reading and thinking about such later changes has helped
focus why the invention of Christian time in late antiquity is so
important.33 Nor do I have the languages to explore Islamic material,
though I find it easy, even in translation, to be beguiled by the statement
of Imam al-Shafi that the 103rd Sura, al-Asr, can act as a summary of the
Qu’ran, in that, if this chapter alone had been given, everything else would
follow. Al-Asr reads: ‘By time, the human being is in loss, except those who
believe, and do good deeds, and advise each other to truth, and recommend
patience’. Al-Asr sharply asks, and gently but tellingly answers, what salve
there could be for the loss that time brings to human life. One day,
perhaps, I will have the tools and the opportunity to pursue the ideas of
this book further, to make good my losses and deficits.
It will already have been evident, though it is worth being explicit here, if
only to forestall a certain familiar type of review, that I have also made no
attempt at providing the sort of full bibliography expected of
a Habilitationsschrift, say, for each and every figure or subject that this
book treats. I have tried to indicate, where it is most relevant to do so, from
where I have learned in particular, what the most useful books and articles
are, and where further annotation can be found by anyone who seeks it, but
without feeling the need to record again the whole history of particular
debates or critical approaches. Even so, the bibliography is nigh on fifty
pages long, and it seemed better to lessen the scholarly annotation in order
to ease the flow of reading. There are inevitably ignorances with a project

33
I have had my go at ritual and liturgy in the nineteenth-century church in Goldhill (2016) 249–83,
with further bibliography.

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 16 Introduction
on this scale, but the scope of the footnoting is deliberate. This, too,
follows the usual practice for the essay form. But I would not want this
designed refusal to engage extensively in the narcissism of small differences,
which is the bread and butter of scholarship, to obscure what I hope will be
this book’s contribution to the discipline. The book hopes to exemplify
how classics, along with theology and history, can expand its perspective
from its narrow, historically and ideologically determined canon of texts,
to broaden the languages, range of material, and scope of questions it
allows, in order to broach the large-scale questions with which the field’s
claim to be foundational needs to engage. Hence the book takes on texts in
Greek, Latin and Hebrew across a full range of genres to explore as fully as
it can a truly major question about the nature and impact of the culture of
late antiquity.
The long inheritance of Christian time in the modern West is evident in
multiple forms, from the way that the seven-day week feels like such
a natural division of time, to the now half-heard church bells that ring
every hour in my university town. But the focus of this book is not on such
an inheritance, but rather on the transformation of time in late antiquity.
The impact of this transformation is certainly long lasting and profound,
but it is the complexities of understanding how such a gradual revolution
was shaped that interest me, and, in particular, how the writings of late
antiquity embed and embody such a new imaginary of how the self can
inhabit time. This book, thus, is not about the philosophical or mathem-
atical quiddity of time, nor is it a history of ancient books on the theory of
time or the mathematics of calendars or the technology of clocks. It is
about how the idea of time was re-shaped in and for the West, under
pressure from a multiform religious agenda, that changed the experience as
well as the understanding of time. This is a major cultural revolution whose
history needs telling. This book is the first step towards such a history.

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part i
 chapter 1

God’s Time

There is an extraordinary moment in the history of the translation of the

Bible, that opens a vista not just on to the cultural politics of translation
but also on to the way that theories of time frame scripture’s narratives
of God.
At the beginning of chapter 2 of Genesis, after the account of the six days
of creation, the Hebrew text reads (Gen. 2.2): ‘and on the seventh
(ha’sh’vi’i) day God finished His work which He had made; and He rested
on the seventh day from all His work which He had made’ – as the King
James version has it. The authoritative Greek translation of the Hebrew,
the Septuagint, reads: ‘And on the sixth (ἕκτῃ) day God finished His work
which He had made; and He rested on the seventh day from all His work
which He had made’. How on earth can ‘seventh’ have been translated as
‘sixth’? How can one of the most familiar sentences of the Bible, a sentence
that explains the foundational ritual of the Sabbath, be renumbered in this
way? What is the Greek doing to the Hebrew here?
Modern scholarship reminds us that there were other translations in
circulation, and that even the fixity of the now established text of the
Septuagint was hard won.1 Nonetheless – or perhaps because of these
different translations – the status of the Septuagint as the authoritative
translation of the Hebrew Bible was proclaimed in antiquity as divinely
guaranteed, and the Septuagint was thus used in ritual and in theological
debate by both Jews and Christians for centuries – and quoted repeatedly
by the Gospels and Paul as the Old Testament.2 The different ways in

1
Grafton and Williams (2006); Rajak (2009).
2
Origen’s Hexapla set three other Greek translations against the Septuagint, but even in this scholarly
work, it was only the Septuagint he annotated with textual marks to distinguish where it differed
from the Hebrew version, and both Rufinus comments that the Septuagint is ‘ours’, nostra (HE
6.16.4), and Epiphanius noted the Septuagint was the middle column utterly to refute those on either
side (de mens. et pond. 535). See Grafton and Williams (2006) 94–5. On the status of translation, see
Smelik (2013).

19

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 20 The Christian Invention of Time
which this authority of the Septuagint is asserted is itself telling. Three
Jewish writers, each writing in Greek, Aristeas, Philo and Josephus, lov-
ingly tell the miraculous story of how Ptolemy Philadelphus, ruler of
Egypt, commissioned the Septuagint in the third century bce, and each
has a different version of what is at stake in such a translation. Aristeas
explains at greatest length the deep respect with which Ptolemy treated the
Jews.3 Ptolemy requests that seventy-two experts be sent from Jerusalem to
Alexandria to complete the translation, commissioned on the grounds that
no library could be thought comprehensive without these revelatory texts
of Jewish law. Aristeas lists and describes the extravagant gifts the king sent
to Eleazar, the priest of the temple at Jerusalem, along with his request for
translators (an ecphrasis thoroughly Greek, and thoroughly unbiblical, in
its expression and expectation of a sophisticated sense of realism: Aristeas’
competitiveness is integrally Hellenized).4 He describes the lavish feast
with which the experts are received in the palace at Alexandria, and their
individual, brilliant, summary answers to the king’s seventy-two profound
philosophical questions (Jews cleverer than Greeks . . .5). The Jews duly
retreat to the island of Pharos, and in seventy-two days produce an agreed
text, the absolute accuracy of which an audience of Jewish notables
confirmed. The Letter of Aristeas is clearly designed, like other texts of
the flourishing Alexandrian community of Jews, to project and promote
the status of the Jews primarily in their own but also in others’ eyes through
the celebration and dissemination of the community’s foundational texts.
As ever, translatio is not just an exercise in rendition but a bid for cultural
capital.
Philo was a leading figure of the Alexandrian Jewish community, who
led an embassy to Caligula in Rome.6 His numerous works read the
Hebrew Bible through the lens of Platonic philosophy, often with an
extensive allegorical apparatus. Philo declares that Ptolemy had developed
an ‘ardent passion’ (ζῆλον καὶ πόθον, Vit. Mos. 2.31) for Jewish laws, and
this motivated his commission of a translation. The seventy-two experts
from Jerusalem retreat to Pharos because they want to avoid the confusion
of Alexandria with its mix of different animals, peoples, sicknesses and
3
On Aristeas, see Honigman (2007); Pearce (2007); Orlinsky (1975); Gruen (2008); Hatzimichali
(2017).
4
Pearce (2013); thanks to Max Leventhal for discussion. For later Jewish visuality, see Neis (2013);
Levine (2012).
5
On the importance of the question and answer to Aristeas see Adams (2020) 118–34. Midrash Eikah
Rabba 1.1.6–13 collects stories in which Greek philosophers are outwitted by Jewish children.
6
On Philo, see Niehoff (2018), with extensive further bibliography (also Runia (2012)); Lévy (1998);
Niehoff (2001); Hadas-Lebel (2003); Adams (2020) 118–34, 139–46, 277–90.

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 God’s Time 21
noises: they seek a place of tranquillity and purity for their souls – the
philosophical symbolism here is patent enough – and they find a place of
elemental nature to write of the genesis of nature. The translation emerged
‘as if they were inspired, not with each man producing his own scriptural
exposition (προεφήτυον), but everyone using the same words and expres-
sions, as if there was an invisible dictation to each of them’ (Vit. Mos. 2.37).
Philo writes a full paragraph explaining that the similarity of the Hebrew
(Chaldaean) and Greek languages makes the process of translation close to
swapping mathematical symbols of geometry: the Hebrew and Greek
tongues are ‘like sisters’ running together ‘in the purest spirit’ (2.41) –
without the variety and treachery usually associated with translation. This
truly unconvincing claim – made with a flourish of linguistic science –
reveals Philo’s deep ideological investment in the harmony of Hellenism
and Jewish culture.7 So, he adds as proof, there is a festival every year in
Alexandria to celebrate the day of the completion of the translation, shared
by Jews and Greeks alike – an occasion publicly to perform this sisterhood.
For Philo, the Septuagint is the sign of a fully Hellenized Judaism, and, he
hopes, the harbinger of a Judaized Hellenism. Translatio – without add-
ition or subtraction – is the mark of the idealized cultural hybridity Philo
himself embodies.
Josephus straddles the boundaries between Jewish and Roman culture.8
Written in Rome for a Greek-speaking audience by a Jew who was once the
leader of the revolt against Rome, but who now lives in the imperial palace,
his Jewish Antiquities, a paraphrase of the Jewish scriptures (as it has been
called), is a text of translation as exchange – where the treachery of
translation and the treachery of cultural transition and the treachery of
political collaboration are never far apart, in the text’s reception at least.
Josephus copies into his history a very close and very full version of Aristeas’
Letter (AJ 12.11–118), and in the Preface to the Antiquities (1.10–13) takes the
example of the Septuagint as a model for making available Jewish sacred
writing to a wider audience. For Josephus, self-serving as ever, the
Septuagint is no more than one restricted predecessor of his own project,
a predecessor that he claims disingenuously to have ‘found’ (εὗρον, 1.10), as
if the liturgical text of the Alexandrian community (and far beyond)
needed him to find it. Nonetheless, when he retells the story of Genesis,

7
See Niehoff (2001), (2018) and for the connection of Homeric and Jewish scholarship Niehoff (2012);
Honigman (2003); with crucial background in Nünlist (2009).
8
On Josephus, see Cohen (1979); Mason (1998); Rajak (2002); Edmondson, Mason and Rives eds.
(2005); Cohen and Schwartz eds. (2007); Goldhill and Morales eds. (2007) each with further
bibliography.

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 22 The Christian Invention of Time
God ceases labour on the sixth day, just as the Septuagint has it (JA 1.33).
Josephus writes within an intellectual, historical and cultural tradition of
empire: he offers his account of Judaism as ‘worthy of serious attention’
(ἀξίαν σπουδῆς, 1.5). The translation of the Septuagint is now subordinate
to Josephus’ translation of scripture into the privileged genre of classical
history for a Greco-Roman audience.
The story of the Septuagint does not stop with Josephus’ appropriation.
Philo’s story, with its imagery idealized to the point of allegory, rather than
Aristeas’ more prosaic account, may well be the source for the story that
circulates later among Christians in particular, but also among Jews, that
the seventy-two scholars were each put in separate rooms and nonetheless
miraculously came up with the same version (the joke, of course, is that it
would have been more of a miracle to get seventy-two scholars in the same
room to agree) – a fourth version of what translation portends. Clement,
Tertullian, Eusebius and Augustine all refer to this story, which is also
given as a factual example (ma’aseh: ‘it actually happened that . . .’) in the
Babylonian Talmud (Megillah 9a) during a discussion about where and
how Greek, as the threatening language of the dominant culture, can be
accepted into Jewish religious practice.9 Jerome, translator supreme him-
self, who produced the Latin of the authorized version, tersely dismisses the
tale as myth.10 Augustine, however, uses the story of the translators’
inspiration to prefer the Septuagint whenever it differs from the Hebrew
text: he attributes the previous lack of a translation to Jewish ‘religious
scruple or envy’ (religione vel invidia), a typical sign of how what was told
first as a story of the importance of Jewish scripture becomes
a supersessionist tool, complete with a bitter disdain.11 The story of the
Septuagint’s inspired composition is repeatedly retold for over 700 years.
As Christians make Greek (and then Latin) the language of scripture, the
Septuagint and its authority as the word of God takes on an increased
significance: it is a miracle that inevitably evokes the twinned issues of how
conflict between cultures and languages is negotiated, and how authority is
transmitted – and, eventually, how Christianity triumphed over (the
Septuagint’s) Jewishness.
So, granted this privileged status of the Septuagint, and the charged
politics of translation, how should the extraordinary translation of ‘the

9
Eus. Praep. Evang. 13.12.2; Clem. Strom. 1.22.168; Tert. Apol. 18; Aug. Civ. Dei 18.42. On Tertullian,
see Osborn (1997); on Clement, see Osborn (2005); Heath (2020); Thomson (2014).
10
Praef. In Pent.; Adv. Rufin. 2.25. See Cain (2009); Chadwick (2001) 433–55 and especially Vessey
(1993).
11
De doctr. christ. 2.15 (22).

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 God’s Time 23
seventh day’ as ‘the sixth day’ be understood? Rabbinical writing offers
a remarkable answer to this question. Midrash Rabbah Bereshit (10.9),
a compilation of midrashic and homiletic expositions on verses from
Genesis, put together in the fifth century ce, explains that ‘sixth day’
was a deliberate mistranslation, made specifically for Ptolemy. (In the
Talmud, b. Megillah 9a, there is a list of such selective and pointed
manipulations in the Septuagint, a list, however, which offers no explan-
ation of any of the omissions or changes.) The Hebrew text of Genesis
states that God finished his work on the seventh day and rested on the
seventh day. Does this not imply that God worked on the seventh day?
Midrash Rabbah Bereshit 10.9 starts to explain away this problem with an
analogy (‘It is like a man striking his hammer on an anvil, raising it by day
and bringing it down after nightfall’), but then offers this more revealing
answer attributed to Shimon ben Yochai: Mortal man (basar vadam), who
does not know his minutes, his times or his hours, must add from the
profane to the sacred; but the Holy One, blessed be He, who knows His
moments, His times and His hours, can enter by a hair’s ‘breadth’.
God and humans exist in time differently. Because of the condition of
human knowledge, the division between the profane time of the week and
the sacred time of the Sabbath needs an articulated division, which takes
time: it is an addition (‘must add’). The Sabbath begins before sundown to
allow for the frailties of human knowing about time. For God, whose
knowledge is perfect, there is no space – a hair’s breadth – between beginning
and ending. Thus he can indeed finish work and start rest on the seventh day
without work having any duration on the seventh day. Ptolemy – and by
extension the world of Greek learning – could not be expected to understand
this subtle argument, and thus to avoid any vexing controversy, the text was
changed. The translation is designed to simplify things for the Greeks.
Now, Midrash Rabbah Bereshit was compiled in the fifth century, more
than 700 years after the Septuagint, and b. Megillah probably a century
after that. It would be easy to see these rabbinical explanations as a post
factum rationalization. The book of Jubilees, a Hellenistic rewriting of
Genesis and parts of Exodus – a book obsessed with the ordering of time
and the importance of the Sabbath – already had bluntly written (2.16),
‘He finished all his work on the sixth day’.12 Jubilees, a sign of the dynamic
fluidity of engagement with scripture in the Hellenistic world, although it
is cited by Christians for centuries and was important for the sect of the

12
VanderKam’s work, especially VanderKam (2018), is seminal. See also Reed (2015) with further
bibliography; Kreps (2018).

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 24 The Christian Invention of Time
Dead Sea Scrolls, was eventually excluded from the normative canon by
religious authorities, except by both Jewish and Christian groups in
Ethiopia. The rabbinical explanation is a rationalization that self-
evidently emphasizes the excellence of rabbinical exegetical comprehension
over and against Greek understanding.13 Yet what is both crucial and
paradigmatic is that the explanations depend on seeing God’s time as
different from human time, and for the rabbis this difference is based on
how time can be known and measured – inhabited.
I have started this book with the story of creation (of course), for two
interconnected reasons, then: first, because it establishes how the special
nature of God’s time becomes a fundamental issue in how temporality is
conceptualized – this chapter’s central question – and, secondly, because it
demonstrates how to ask in this way how God’s time is conceived imme-
diately opens into issues of translation, cultural difference, transmission of
and exclusions from authoritative tradition, the anthropology of religious
institutions, principles of measurement, as well as ideas about divinity’s
ontological difference from humanity. That is, from the start, I can begin
to explore the spreading interconnection of different questions and discip-
linary frameworks (intellectual history, cultural history, theology, anthro-
pology, and so on) that any issue concerning temporality will provoke –
which is a grounding motivation – the intellectual excitement – for this
project.
*
This chapter will end with Augustine’s insistence, too, that God has
a relation to time that is quite other from humans. But to appreciate
how both these Jewish and Christian arguments from late antiquity are
distinctively formed against a longer Greco-Roman cultural tradition, we
need to look backwards to that tradition. Here, there is another inevitable
starting point – namely, Homer and Hesiod, who, as Herodotus declared,
‘gave the Greeks their gods’.14 (We will come to Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and
Lucretius, other starting points for the time of divinity, later in the book.)
Homer and Hesiod are foundational texts for Greek culture, and, as
Herodotus indicates, provide a conceptual frame for representing divinity

13
On later rabbinic anxieties and confusions about the Septuagint as translation, see Smelik (2013),
especially 298–320. On Talmud and classical culture see Heszer (1997); Schwartz (2001), (2009);
Rubenstein (2003); Kalmin (2006); Lapin (2012); Boyarin (2009), (2015) – and Lieberman (1942),
(1950).
14
Her. 2.53: see T. Harrison (2000); Gould (2001) 359–77; Mikalson (2003); and more generally
Eidinow, Kindt and Osborne eds. (2016).

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 God’s Time 25
that echoes throughout later Greek writing of all genres, and, differently, in
Latin texts too. How, then, does divine time get shaped by these formative
narratives?
Homer’s Odyssey starts its narrative at a moment when Athene reminds
Zeus that Odysseus is languishing on the island of Calypso.15 The hero has
been on Ogygia, the belly-button of the ocean, for seven years, forced to
have sex with the goddess, and crying each day on the beach, longing for his
own homeland. When Calypso tells him that Zeus has demanded he be
allowed to leave, she starts a conversation in which she compares herself as
a goddess to Penelope, Odysseus’ wife. If he knew the sufferings he would
face, she declares, he would stay with her and become immortal, rather
than striving to return to his human life. Can Penelope match her in ‘body
and form’ (5.211–12)? Odysseus agrees that Calypso is more impressive in
‘form and stature’ (5.217) because ‘she is mortal but you are immortal and
ageless’ (5.218). Nonetheless, he wants and hopes all and every day (ἤματα
πάντα, 5.219) to go to his oikos and see the day of his return (νόστιμον
ἦμαρ, 5.220).
This brief conversation at the starting point of Odysseus’ narrative of
return establishes a basic and complexly layered opposition that runs
through Homeric discourse on divine time.16 Gods do not experience
death (ἀθάνατος) and do not experience old age (ἀγήρως). Humans
experience both. Thus, gods ‘do not know the externality of the divisions
of time’,17 but humans have wishes and expectations that last all day, and
each day, on their limited journey towards an inevitable end. A human’s
life is marked out, as Hesiod’s epic of the mundane emphasizes in its very
title, by ‘works and days’, a calendar of timed activities with duration and
senescence. It has its singularities (‘the day of return’), but is framed by the
household (oikos), whose continuity exists through the generations. The
generations of humans, as Apollo famously puts it, are like leaves that fall to
the ground and are replaced. The warrior who falls to the ground in death
underlines that ‘falling’ is what humans do in their striving.18 To the eyes of
Apollo, the continuity of the generations is not the equivalent of the
permanence of divine order precisely because divine deathlessness changes
the experience of time. Humans cannot experience the continuity of the
household over the generations, only project it, record it, hope for it; the
unbroken, unfragmented time of gods is other. So, there are no seasons or

15
Clay (1997) is excellent on this.
16
Vidal-Naquet (1981) 69–94; Levy (1979); Clay (1981–2); Vernant (1959).
17
Vernant (1991) 46; Bergren (1983). 18 See Purves (2019) 37–66.

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 26 The Christian Invention of Time
weather on Olympus (although there is sunrise and sunset). From
Olympus, they observe human activities, and, in Homer at least, Zeus,
the supreme god, never leaves Olympus. As Alex Purves smartly
summarizes:
Time on Olympus is of a different quality, and is also experienced in
a different way, from time on the ground. Gods understand the movement
of human time and use some of the same temporal markers as humans do
(e.g. sunset) to determine it. However, they do not typically know what it
means to experience time or – because they live for ever – what it means for
time to have length. Another way of putting it would be to say that gods do
not have their ‘own’ time. Instead, from a position outside time, they are
able to observe and monitor the time of mortals.19
On Ogygia with Calypso, Odysseus cannot work and his days are
without distinction (no ‘works and days’ for him).20 Food, a human
necessity, requires no effort of production.21 There is no ritual calendar,
not least because when a man lives with a divinity, rituals which express the
normative articulated separation of man, beast and god, must be sus-
pended. There are no sacrifices on Odysseus’ journeying, except for the
disastrous parodies of the Cyclops eating his men or his men killing the
oxen of the Sun.22 The moment of return is also a return to work as
Odysseus starts his journey by building his raft: work, reasserting
Odysseus’ rejection of immortality, is an intervention in and against divine
temporality. (Hephaestus, the god who does work – he manufactures
wonderful artefacts – is also the one god to be thrown from Olympus by
Zeus – he too falls – and who is humiliated in his bodily disability by the
gods’ laughter and by being cuckolded by Ares.) But even more tellingly,
Odysseus and Calypso do not have any children despite having sex for
seven years. ‘A divinity’s seed is never in vain’ – except here. Odysseus’ first
moment of human recognition on Ithaca will be with his son, Telemachus;
the first four books of the Odyssey have been taken up with the Telemachy,
Telemachus’ search to find out about his father and to demonstrate his
incipient maturity. The father–son relationship grounds the patriarchal
household, its genealogy.23 Childlessness with Calypso is for Odysseus to
stand outside the temporality of the household. With Calypso, unworking,
in days without transformation or distinction, and without the children
that mark the continuity of the human condition in the household,

19 20 21
Purves (2019) 53. Segal (1994). Seminal is Vidal-Naquet (1981) 39–68.
22
Vidal-Naquet (1981) ch. 1, with now the stimulating Stocking (2017). 23 Goldhill (1991) 9–24.

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 God’s Time 27
Odysseus is outside the generations of man, like leaves – in a form of God’s
time.
The different relation of gods to time is marked by the alpha-privatives
with which the standard Homeric vocabulary represents divine difference:
gods are a-thanatoi, ‘without death’; gods are ‘without age’, a-gērōs. This
difference is intricately expressed in how work, bodies, food, sexual activity
are represented. Gods are born and come of age, but they do not progress
beyond the age their narrative allots them. (Christian and, differently,
Muslim writers will determine these ideas as profoundly other to their
own theologies.) Hermes is always youthful; Apollo a beardless young man.
There are no old female divinities in the pantheon, however distinguished.
There are certainly old men and old women in Homer, however, and the
miseries of old age are a commonplace of archaic poetry, an expected and
lamented restriction on human life. Humans die, but they are not by dying
removed from time.24 When Odysseus visits the underworld in Book 11 of
the Odyssey, he sees the previous generations and his dead friends and
relatives. They continue in a form of existence. They require blood from
a sacrifice to speak; they are without substance and cannot be embraced
(‘three times though he tried’); but they are in time: changeless now,
‘striding across the fields of asphodel’, but not divine. When Achilles
famously wishes that he could be the humblest man on earth rather than
king of the dead, he marks not only the Odyssey’s committed preference for
survival even at the expense of humiliation, but also the difference between
the eternity of divine deathlessness and the eternity of human mortality.25
Dissatisfaction distinguishes human existence in the underworld, whereas
divine eternity, whatever its local arguments and violence, is marked by
established ease. When Odysseus is to be told he will leave Calypso, he is
found on the beach ‘his sweet life (aiōn) was dripping away in grief for his
return, because the goddess no longer (ouketi) pleased him’ (5.152–3). ‘No
longer’ may hint at a counterfactual narrative – there was a time when . . . –
but more importantly his life-time is melting as he cries over his lost return,
and expresses his dissatisfaction. The ideas are interlinked: the return to his
human world implies the slipping of time which is the condition of human
existence, and the dissatisfaction which is its mark.
Gods’ time is not human time, then, in this early Greek writing. Can it
be asked, then, how does gods’ time come into being? Is there a creation

24
See in general Falkner and de Luce eds. (1989).
25
See Goldhill (1991) 72–91; Redfield (1975) 1–41; Nagy (1979); Griffin (1980); Edwards (1984); Lynn-
George (1988).

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 28 The Christian Invention of Time
story for gods’ time? Rabbinical commentators declare that the question of
what happened before the beginning of bereshit, ‘In the beginning . . .’,
should not be asked.26 This may look like the pious exclusion of faith-
challenging philosophical questioning, but is perhaps better seen as an
indication of the senselessness of asking about a narrative, which must take
time, before time has come into existence. As we will see later, the eternity
of divinity in Christian thinking becomes a specific and deeply contested
idea when the relationship between God the father and God the Son
becomes an issue. (The word aiōn, which defines Odysseus’ life-time,
will become in later Greek, as we will see, a basic term for ‘time’ itself or
‘eternity’; ‘eternal’, aiōnios, a term of ideological contestation.) But for
archaic Greek writing, Hesiod provides the paradigmatic narrative of the
genesis of divinity and the order of time. While the Works and Days divides
human time into its repeated patterns of ritual, labour, and family con-
tinuity and disruption, the Theogony narrates the coming to being of the
divine order: the structure of the divine world is narrated – framed in
time – by virtue of a genealogy.27 Genealogy, however, is also change,
a narrative of a power relation between generations, which is expressed as
violent hostility between the male figures of Ouranos, Cronos and Zeus,
with the complicit trickery of the mothers, Gaia and Rheia. The tension
which drives the Theogony, therefore, is: how can genealogy, with its assump-
tion that the son will replace the father, produce the stability of unchanging,
unconflictual order? As Jean-Pierre Vernant’s celebrated analysis explains,
after Zeus binds his own father and fights successfully to take up the kingship
of heaven and earth, he first swallows Metis (his first wife, as she is described
[886]). Metis, the goddess who embodies cunning intelligence, the attribute
necessary for the weaker (the son) to outwit and overthrow the stronger (the
father), is now embedded in Zeus; he possesses and controls the very quality
necessary to challenge him: he is to be known as mētieta, ‘metis-ized’.
(‘Cunning’, or ‘all wise’, the usual translations, conceal the full transforma-
tive sense of this adjective, applied only to Zeus: he has incorporated mētis).
This marriage – or total possession – produces Athene, born from the head
of Zeus, nourished in his body. Athene is, as Aeschylus puts it, ‘totally of the
father’ (Eum. 738). Now filiation is without threat to the father, genealogy
without the danger of disruption. With mētis embodied in Zeus, power is
established without the possibility of being overthrown. Second, however,
Zeus marries Themis, the goddess of fixity and regulation – and their first

26
See Schäfer (2008); Niehoff (2005); Alexander (1992a), each with further bibliography.
27
See Vernant (1965), (1989); Fowler (1998); Clay (2003) with extensive further bibliography.

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 God’s Time 29
children are the Horai, the Seasons or the Hours – regulated time. Regulated
time is born of the union of rule and order. Legal Order, Justice and Peace
come from the same union, figures who ‘regulate (ὠρεύουσι) daily life (erga)
for human beings’ (903). The etymological play between ‘Seasons’ (ὧραι)
and ‘regulate’ or ‘have concern for’ (ὠρεύουσι) is pointed: as social order
requires regulation, so too does time. Fixed time is the result of the end of the
genealogical violence of the Theogony. As individual gods may be born and
grow to a particular state which becomes unchanging, as the race of gods too
can be said to be ‘always existing’ at the start of a poem that narrates their
coming into being (αἰὲν ἐόντων, 21), so the structure of the divine world and
with it the order of time can be narrated as coming into being for all time:
structure expressed through genealogy. The apparent paradox of the coming
into being of the everlasting receives narrative resolution in Hesiod’s genea-
logical myths. The agricultural time of the seasons, the necessary condition
of the works and days, is the product of the establishment of gods’ time.
Humans, then, come into existence only after the creation of the time of
the gods, a genealogy that grounds the opposition of divine and mortal. Yet
in Homer, Hesiod and in other archaic narratives the boundary that such
an opposition constructs is also explored, played with and contested in
fascinating ways. Odysseus meets Heracles in Hades, or rather he meets the
eidōlon, the ‘image’, or ‘wraith’ of Heracles (11.602). Heracles himself,
explains Odysseus, enjoys feasts with the deathless gods and has Hebe
(‘Prime of Life’) as his wife. These lines have caused anxiety since antiquity,
and were declared to be an interpolation early on. It is indeed a surprise
that an eidōlon of Heracles can be in Hades (where he talks and looks
menacing) while the figure of Heracles himself on Olympus can be married
and enjoy divine celebrations. But there is a parallel not regularly cited
here. Helen of Troy, according first to Stesichorus and then Euripides, did
not go to Troy, but only her eidōlon: she herself remained in Egypt.28 She
too is a child of Zeus and destined for a special afterlife. But more
importantly Helen too is a figure who confuses the standard normative
oppositions, in her case, of gender.29 Helen commits adultery with Paris,
but in the Odyssey is again living with her husband Menelaus, and, when
Telemachus arrives in Book 4, the couple are celebrating the wedding of
their daughter to Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son (and a second wedding of
Menelaus’ son from a slave). In the scenes that follow, Helen tells a story in

28
See Woodbury (1967), and, more critically, Bassi (1993).
29
See Bergren (1981); Katz (1991); Wohl (1993); Goldhill (1994); Felson Rubin (1994); Doherty (1995);
Zeitlin (1996) 19–52; Worman (2001).

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 30 The Christian Invention of Time
which in Troy she longs to return to Greece and actively helps the Greek
mission against Troy, but this story is juxtaposed to Menelaus’ tale in
which Helen actively if ineffectually works to scupper the Greeks in the
Trojan horse. The contrast of the two stories has prompted heated discus-
sion about the doubleness as well as the duplicity of Helen since
antiquity.30 The story of the eidōlon and the real Helen as two figures in
the same time-frame embodies this doubleness and duplicity. Heracles, in
turn, is the paradigmatic human figure who transcends the expectation of
mortality and becomes divine. As such, he is a contrastive limit case
repeatedly in Pindar’s poetry of praise, to set against the limits of achieve-
ment humans can achieve.31 His existence in the Odyssey as an eidōlon in
Hades and as a divine figure on Olympus, does not need to be explained as
the confusion of a poor poet in the past, so often the last resort of self-
aggrandizing modern textual criticism. Perhaps it is better to see it as the
embodiment of the anomaly that is Heracles, the figure who precisely
confuses the expectations of human time and gods’ time.
In the underworld, Odysseus also describes Castor and Polydeuces
(11.300–4), the brothers of Helen. They have an honour (timē) ‘equal to
the gods’ in that on alternate days they are dead in Hades and alive on
earth. The unparalleled repeated transition between life and death is
marked by an unparalleled adjective, ἑτερήμεροι, ‘alternate day-ed’ –
‘One time they live, another time they are dead – alternate day-ed’ (303–
4). Philo, much later in Alexandria, and obsessed, as we saw, with rewriting
the stories of the past, is the only ancient author we know to have picked up
on this strange word significantly. He used it to write a beautiful paragraph
about the life of a man who pursues virtue (De somn. 150–6). Such a life of
askēsis, writes Philo, is ‘alternate day-ed, as someone said’ – self-consciously
marking the odd word as a specific allusion, without a named author,
asking for our complicity – ‘one time alive and awake, another time dead
and asleep’ – a phrase which follows Homer’s syntax and vocabulary to
enforce the connection. The wise inhabit Olympus, as it were, he goes on,
constantly rising in and through learning, the bad live in the pits of Hades,
proceeding ‘from swaddling clothes to old age, familiar with decay’ (151).
Typically for Philo, time itself is moralized, as if only the bad age and
weaken. So those who strive for virtue live as if on a ladder (the image is
designedly Platonic), trying to go up, but often slipping back down – an
allegorical exposition of Homer’s adjective. Polydeuces and Castor, shift-
ing between life and death, become figures to express the daily struggle in

30 31
Goldhill (1988). See Currie (2005).

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 God’s Time 31
a man’s life between the higher aims of virtue and the lower desires. The
unique word in Homer, describing a unique condition of mortality, in
Philo becomes a model for all human striving.
Homer’s concise image of Castor and Polydeuces is expressed more fully
and in what becomes its most familiar version, however, in Pindar’s ode,
Nemean 10, where Zeus offers Polydeuces a choice.32 As with Odysseus,
a profoundly alternative narrative is briefly imagined but dismissed. Since
he is the son of Zeus, Polydeuces may, if he wishes, avoid ‘death and hated
old age’ (83–4) and live on Olympus with the gods; or he may, out of love
for his mortal brother, choose that they both live ‘half a life beneath the
earth, half in the golden halls of heaven’ (87–8). Polydeuces chooses to
share (im)mortality with his brother. Again, as with Helen and Heracles,
when the boundary between human and divine continuity is crossed, the
story takes the form of a double embodiment and a double experience of
time. Within the standard matrix of the contrast between death and
deathlessness, ageing and agelessness, and its concomitant horror of
decay, there is an imagining of another relationship to time, where two
brothers can share both the divine and human experience of time.
Such doubleness is modelled in the divine world by Persephone. The
daughter of Demeter, picking flowers, is raped by Hades, who takes her
down to the underworld. Demeter wanders the world in grief looking for
her child, with the consequence that the agriculture necessary for human
life fails. When Persephone is found, her return to the world above is
dependent on whether she has eaten pomegranate seeds in the underworld.
Because she has been forced to eat, she is compelled to spend six months of
the year in the underworld and six months in the world above (raped,
forced to eat, sent to earth and back . . .). This narrative – most familiar
from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter33 – gives a mythic explanation of the
seasonal disappearance and reappearance of crops. But it also links human
daily life to the time of the gods, and sets a half-life in the world of the dead
and the world of the living at the heart of the divine pantheon.
The sexiest and funniest version of the difference between gods’ time
and human time is the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite.34 This hexameter
poem tells how Aphrodite was made to fall in lust by Zeus in order to stop

32
Young (1993). The relation of this poem to Theocritus 22, as well as Homer, is much discussed: see
e.g. Hunter (1996) 65–76; Sens (1992).
33
Foley ed. (1993); Richardson (1978); Richardson (2011); Clay (1989); and for its extensive afterlife,
Hinds (1987).
34
Clay (1989) is the best guide to the Homeric Hymns; see also Faulkner ed. (2011); and on the Hymn
to Aphrodite Smith (1981); Bergren (1989); Schein (2008); Faulkner (2008a).

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 32 The Christian Invention of Time
her constant boasting of how she had made the gods desire humans; and
how thus she is led to seduce Anchises on a mountain top above Troy and
becomes pregnant with Aeneas – starting the family line that will lead
(eventually) to the Roman empire. The poem begins by asking the Muse to
sing of the erga, ‘the works’, of Aphrodite – a phrase which can imply the
divinity’s outstanding achievements, but which is also a common expres-
sion for ‘sex’, which is the deed with which Aphrodite as the goddess of
sexual desire is most associated; and the central act of the poem will be the
conception of a hero. Aphrodite’s power is said to conquer every being,
gods, humans and beasts alike, an announcement immediately qualified by
a long account of three divinities who escape her influence, Athene,
Artemis and Hestia. They are all parthenoi, a term usually translated as
‘virgins’. This vocabulary does not merely indicate a sexual status but
immediately establishes a contrast not just with Aphrodite and her vic-
tims – polytheism is a system where divinities form a network of power,
attributes and influences – but also with humans. In early Greek cultural
values, to be a parthenos is a transitional state, which is to be passed through
as quickly as possible. The human virgin is imaged as a dangerous wild
animal who must be tamed by the yoke of marriage, and, by the fifth
century bce, medical treatises, such as Peri Parthenion, have formalized
prolonged virginity as a potentially lethal condition with dismaying psy-
chological as well as physical symptoms.35 The household with its patri-
archal genealogy provides the frame of human life, and this integrally
organizes the role of the parthenos within the exchange of marriage and
the expectation of the production of children. The lengthy description of
the three goddesses as permanent ‘virgins’ constructs a powerful contrast
between divine and human experiences of time, ageing, change – before
a story that will powerfully reassert the necessity of humans staying in
human time, however close they get to a goddess.
As befits a hymn to the laughter-loving goddess of desire, there is a good
deal of delightfully witty writing in the poem – Aphrodite’s denial at first
that she is a goddess, although she has appeared on the mountain top
dressed as a virgin on her wedding day; her modest downwards glance as
she goes to his bed, imitating her frailer victims as she herself becomes
a fool for love; Anchises’ later admission that he had his doubts about her;
the poem’s disrobing of Aphrodite, a reverse arming scene – do not all
seductive scenes make the reader dangerously complicit with the snares and
tricks of desire? – and, above all, the final sting where Aphrodite threatens

35
See King (1998).

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 God’s Time 33
to get Zeus to zap Anchises with a thunderbolt if he tells anyone about their
tryst (how, then, do we know the story?). As readers, we participate in the
world of Aphrodite’s sexy games, her erga. But it is in Aphrodite’s final
speech to Anchises that the difference between humans and gods becomes
most fully articulated. As Jenny Strauss Clay has most cogently argued, the
goddess mobilizes the examples of Ganymede and Tithonus to explain why
she will not make Anchises immortal, ‘an illogical and specious argument’,
even if perhaps ‘rhetorically effective’.36 Ganymede was taken to heaven,
snatched by Zeus, and retains his youth and is immortal, if never more
than a boy. Tithonus was given immortality at the request of his lover,
Dawn, but, without the gift of agelessness, becomes increasingly withered
and decrepit, until she locks him in a chamber in disgust. The figure who
divides time into day and night, Dawn, is tricked by the time-bound decay
of her human object of desire. The baby Aeneas is to be given to the wood
Nymphs to be brought up, instructs Aphrodite in her childcare arrange-
ments, explaining that the Nymphs do not grow old, but will die: they are
liminal, ‘neither divine nor human’ (259). The Nymphs will bring up
Aeneas, a ‘young shoot’ (thalos, 278), who, like the leaves and like the
Nymphs, will in his turn fall in death. Anchises, the human who will age
and die, is thus contrasted with figures who are immortal and unchanging
as the object of desire (Ganymede), who suffer from ageing but are
immortal (Tithonus), and who are un-ageing but will die (Nymphs).
Anchises is told of the variations of agelessness and deathlessness, but is
doomed to experience neither. As the angry and humiliated Aphrodite
sums up, ‘If you could live as you are in body and looks, you could be called
my husband’, but as things are, ‘destructive, burdensome old age’ will
overwhelm you, old age which ‘the gods hate’ (241–6). Aphrodite leaves,
and the poem ends without Anchises being able to reply to her farewell,
silenced before her physical and conceptual separation. Divinity and
humanity are certainly intimate in this poem – for the last time, if Jenny
Strauss Clay’s bold analysis is correct37 – but the feints and laughs of the
narrative leave the gap between human time and gods’ time unbreached,
except in the poem’s own imaginary of mythic figures, manipulated by
Aphrodite to enforce a separation between herself and the lover she has
taken. Odysseus refuses the opportunity of immortality, to stay for ever in
gods’ time, in order to start his journey back towards his oikos, Anchises is

36
Clay (1989) 190. See also King (1986).
37
Building on van der Ben (1980) but doubted by Faulkner (2008a) 3–18 and (2008b); Thalmann
(1991) 146. See in general Murnaghan (1992); Pucci (2000).

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 34 The Christian Invention of Time
designedly not made the offer. When gods enter human time, the confu-
sion of temporal order erupts: here, living with the consequences of sex
(‘like a virgin’), the immortal is pregnant with a human child (for nine
months?) who will, like his father, grow old and die, after founding an
immortal city. The discourse of temporality struggles to keep gods ‘outside
(human) time’.
When we turn again to the narratives of Christianity in late antiquity –
after Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Lucretius, amongst others – we will come
back to how God’s time becomes a burning question posed by the birth of
a God, the sexuality of a human in relation to a divine birth, and how the
coming of age and death of a divine figure can be comprehended. But there
will be very little flirtation, amused mockery and ribald laughter in such
violent and fearful theological arguments. Indeed, seriousness was never
more deadly.
*
Homer and Hesiod remained a constant presence in Greek writing and
education, and their representation of divine time thus continues to be
instrumental in the Greek imaginary. This continuity constitutes a vexing
problem for Christian intellectuals in the developing church. The leading
Christian churchmen of the fourth century, Gregory of Nyssa, his brother
Basil of Caesarea, and their close friend, Gregory of Nazianzus, stridently
upheld the value of the tradition of Greek learning which privileged
Homer as the foundational poet of such a tradition.38 This was no straight-
forward position for them to take. On the one hand, their stance set them
against other Christians, ‘who despise learning (paideusin diaptuein)’ and
especially learning from non-Christian traditions (exōthen), as ‘treacherous
and dangerous and keeping us far from God’.39 Such traditional education,
however, as Gregory of Nazianzus insisted – and embodied in his own
work – must be regarded as ‘the first of good things’: Gregory’s letters are
dotted with knowing quotations from Homer and other writers of the
classical tradition;40 and Basil both defends the study of such writers and
demonstrates the moral value of Homer for Christians. On the other hand,

38
See e.g. Elm (2012); Limberis (2011); Daley (2008); Børtnes and Hägg eds. (2006); Rousseau (1994);
Schwab (2012); and more generally Bowersock (1990); Eshleman (2012); Jones (2014); MacMullen
(1997), and on Latin Kahlos (2007). The discussion of Homer was already central to Origen’s
response to Celsus, see Hunter (2021), which may go back to the Gospel of John, see Van Kooten
(2021).
39
Funeral Speech for Basil 43.11.
40
Storin (2019) is ground-breaking for Gregory. McLynn (2015) is good on the politics the letters
perform.

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 God’s Time 35
Julian the Apostate, who also deeply valued the so-called pagan past, and
resisted the rise of Christianity, attempted to enact a law which banned
Christians from teaching such traditional material on the grounds that for
a Christian to teach Homer either made them teach it falsely or made them
hypocrites with regard to their own beliefs. This group’s commitment to
paideia was thus fully part of a politics of culture – both a politics between
Christians, and a politics between Christians and Julian and his
supporters.41 Each was also deeply involved with theology, of course, and
their writings indicate vividly how contentious and even violent the issue of
God’s time could become for the Christians of the fourth century, as
Christology – the nature of Jesus Christ within the Trinity; how to
calibrate the divinity and humanity of the Son – became a battleground
of belief and authority, within these conflicts over the direction of the
culture of empire.
Gregory of Nyssa paints a wonderful portrait of just how pervasive
arguments over Christology had become, a portrait tinged with satire
and his own polemical agenda, for sure:42
The whole city is occupied with such discussions: the alleyways, the market-
places, the broad avenues and city streets; the clothes sellers, the money-
changers, the food vendors. If you ask for change, they philosophize about
the Begotten and the Unbegotten. If you ask the price of bread, the answer is
‘The Father is greater, the Son inferior’. If you ask ‘Is the bath ready?’, he
will answer ‘The Son was created from nothing’.43
Such religious fighting talk produced civil discord – a law was even
passed trying to prevent bath attendants from discussing such matters –
and Gregory of Nazianzus sniffily makes his own highly rhetorical plea to
keep such potentially violent debates among the elite: ‘Serious theology (to
peri theou philosophein) is not for everyone, I tell you, not for everyone . . . Is
any of the crowd (to participate), unfit as they are for such sublimity and
contemplation? Utterly unhallowed? Let him not come near; it is not
safe’.44 But between Alexandria, Antioch, Rome and Constantinople,
different ecclesiastical authorities, with different groups of supporters,
were struggling not only over belief but also over power, authority and

41
See the excellent Elm (2012); reading Homer was already a source of contention for Origen on
Celsus, see Hunter (2021).
42
As Williams (2017) 16–22 reminds us forcefully.
43
Gregory of Nyssa, On the Divinity of the Son and the Holy Spirit, PG 46 557; on public disputation in
general see Lim (1995).
44
Or. 27.3. Gregory is also quite capable of arguing for the universal, easy message of Christianity,
when it suits him politically: see Or. 4.73. Thanks to Lea Niccolai for discussions on this.

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 36 The Christian Invention of Time
status: a bishopric could enrich, excommunication and confiscation of
property crush a family.45 The power games of empire at a local and
wider level were intricately intertwined with the church’s contests over
doctrine. Gregory of Nazianzus, burned too often, tellingly described his
fellow bishops – he even imagines them offering it as a self-description – as
‘wicked umpires of ambition and ignorant judges of politics’.46
Gregory of Nyssa offers an exemplary case of how God’s time could
become a contested question.47 In his treatise Against Eunomios he attacks
Eunomios for arguing – as Arius had before him – that the Son had not
always been in existence, but by virtue of being begotten was secondary to
the Father. The watchword of the Arians, according at least to their
enemies, was: ‘There was a time (pote) when he was not’, ἦν ποτε ὅτε
οὐκ ἦν. The creed proclaimed at the Council of Nicaea specifies this
statement, along with the parallel idea that ‘Before he was begotten, he
was not’, as two of the heretical claims that lead to immediate
anathematization.48 To make his case, Gregory constructs an elegant
contrast between God’s time and the mundane time of humans, which
opens out into a full theology of time and man’s agency – and also reveals
his reading in Neo-Platonic philosophy, the intellectual project from
outside Christianity that nonetheless intimately informs Christian think-
ing. Human time is marked by its ‘extension’, diastēma, as is human space.
That which is created is defined by such ‘extension’. Extension can be
divided and measured. But unlike this created life, ‘the life of God is
entirely separate from temporal measurement . . . Time (χρόνος) is
a characteristic of created reality only.’49 As Gregory writes: ‘That life
(God’s) is not in time, but time came from it’50 – an argument we will
shortly see developed further by Augustine. So if the Son was secondary to
the Father, it would be like putting two sticks, a shorter and longer one,
next to each other. However close they were, they would still embody and
make visible measurable distance. Such visible measurement is alien to the
eternity (aidiotēs) and ungraspability of the infinity of the divine.51 Human

45
Rapp (2005).
46
Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 42.22. On his iambic poetry of complaint see Hawkins (2014) 142–80.
47
On Gregory of Nyssa, see Coakley ed. (2003); Ludlow (2007); Marmodoro and McLynn eds.
(2018), each with further bibliography; and specifically and with further bibliography Balás (1976);
Plass (1980); Boersma (2012). On Maximus the Confessor’s adoption of Cappadocian theory see
Mitralexis (2016).
48
Good introductions in Young (2010); Ayres (2004); Behr (2004) – and the earlier studies of Hanson
(1988) and Simonetti (1975). On Basil’s attack on Eunomius, especially in the context of his
pedagogy, see Rousseau (1994) 93–133.
49 50
Boersma (2012) 583. Contra Eun. 1. 51 Balás (1976) 151–3.

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 God’s Time 37
beings, finite as they are, cannot comprehend the infinity of God (‘to tell of
God is impossible . . . but to know him even more impossible’, phrasai men
adunaton, noēsai de adunatoteron, Or. 28.4). As humans, ‘we are tethered to
this temporal existence with its diastemic character’, ‘inescapably
temporal’.52 Humans can strive to ascend towards God, to transcend
temporality, but this process is unending, constantly marked by the
unfulfillable desire for the divine. God’s time is otherwise.
God’s creation of time, rather than any existence in it, explains
Gregory’s reading of the Easter story, where he analyses the darkness at
the occasion of the crucifixion as a night dividing the day into two days.
Christ rules the temporal order, Gregory writes, so that ‘his works should
not necessarily be forced to fit set measures of time (τοῦ χρόνου μέτροις),
but that the measures of time (τοῦ χρόνου τὰ μέτρα) should be newly
contrived for what his works required’.53 God is not to be ‘bound by time
(τῷ χρόνῳ) for his actions, but to create time (τὸν χρόνον) to fit his
actions’.54 For Gregory, God as the author of time can recreate the pattern
of time to his will. Easter is a demonstration of God’s transcendence of
time.
Gregory of Nazianzus, who will be the subject of chapter 13, also writes
against Eunomius. His powerful, intense orations – which gave him the
honorific sobriquet of ‘The Theologian’ in the Byzantine era – offer an
aggressive theoretical rejoinder to his opponents. For Gregory of
Nazianzus, as humans, we are locked into a paradox of language when it
comes to God’s time. ‘When we wish to express what is above time’, he
writes, ‘we cannot avoid the indication of time (chronikēn emphasin)’.55 He
explains what he means: ‘For such expressions as “when” and “before” and
“after” and “from the beginning” are not timeless (achrona), however much
we force their meaning.’56 The crucial terms of the debate about the
priority of God the Father, or even what the first line of the Gospel of
John might mean, are already flawed by their expression in a language
which cannot escape its temporality. Thus, he concludes, ‘It will be
necessary for us to adopt the standard of Eternity, that interval
(diastēma) which extends through all things above and beyond time, and
which is not divided or measured by any movement, nor by the revolution
of the sun, as time is measured.’ Like Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of
Nazianzus resists the measurements of time. The notion of diastēma,
‘extension/interval’, is now applied not to human time but to eternity

52 53
Boersma (2012) 589. Boersma (2012) 595 quoting De trid. spat. 290 Jaeger.
54 55 56
Boersma (2012) 595 quoting De trid. Spat. 290 Jaeger. Or. 29.3. Or. 29.3.

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 38 The Christian Invention of Time
that transcends time – as Gregory himself strives to transcend his own
inhabitation of human language, and performs its impossibility. In
a wonderfully striking turn of phrase, he dismisses his opponents as
philochronoi, ‘lovers of time’.57 Anyone who resists the understanding of
God’s time that is encoded in the Nicene creed is marred by their corrupt-
ing desire for mundane, limited, worldly temporality. Like Achilles in the
underworld, they long for life, any life. The true Christian must be in love
with eternity.
The Council of Chalcedon in 451, necessary because ‘Nicaea bequeathed
both terminological confusion and mutual recrimination’, was a major
political attempt to regulate such debates.58 The council set out to define
what faith is to hold – and it was also a heated drama of infighting between
the barons of the church, between the Western and Eastern Churches (the
Latin prelates were hampered by their need for translators for the debates in
Greek); even the official record of previous council discussions was fiercely
contested. At one level, it was a success, not least in still being held
authoritative by many Christians including the Catholic Church. It estab-
lished the Nicene tradition – ‘the growing narrativization of the idea of
‘Nicaea’’59 – that Basil and both Gregories supported, and, most instru-
mentally, Cyril defended so aggressively.60 At another level, not only did
violent contentiousness continue for some decades, especially, say, in
Jerusalem, but also, over a longer perspective, ‘the divisions stemming
from Chalcedon remain unresolved’.61 The history of the build-up to
Chalcedon, the business of its sessions, and its consequences, make for
an extremely intricate story that has been intensely discussed by scholars.
But for our purposes here, and against its complex backstory, it is crucial
that the council resolved as a statement of faith that the Son was ‘begotten
from the Father before the ages in respect of the Godhead’ and that ‘this
birth in time neither subtracted anything from his divine and eternal birth
nor added anything to it’. God the Son and God the Father are co-eternal.
The Word that was with God at the beginning, as John announces, is
Christ, the Son. Chalcedon’s statement of the Incarnation continued to be

57
Or. 29.5. The concept of diastēma in Gregory of Nyssa is much discussed: see Verghese (1976); Peroli
(1997) 123–5; and, from a Derridean perspective, Douglass (2005).
58
Smith (2018) 12. For the texts see the useful Price and Gaddis (2007).
59
Smith (2018) 199. For the slow development of Nicaean orthodoxy see also Ayres (2004); Behr
(2004).
60
On Cyril, a peculiarly nasty political operator for a saint, see also Wessel (2004) with further
bibliography.
61
Price and Gaddis (2007) 56. See Need (2008); Price and Whitby eds. (2009); Young (2010); and
especially Smith (2018).

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 God’s Time 39
resisted by some and fought over, but remained the authoritative declar-
ation of faith. For Christians – even in opposition – the paradox – or
mystery – of the co-eternity of the Son and the Father now defines God’s
time.
*
Between the era of Basil and the Gregories in the Greek East, and the
Council of Chalcedon (with its Latin- and Greek-speaking prelates,
endorsing Leo’s Tome, and the tradition such endorsement sought to
establish), Augustine in Africa made his struggle to understand the tem-
porality of God an integral argument in his exploration of self-
understanding in the Confessions. In Augustine’s hands, God’s time
becomes a complex and compelling theological idea, the foundation of
Western theology to come. Book 11 of the Confessions constitutes the most
profound reflection on time and God’s time in antiquity – it is a text we
will come back to repeatedly – and in its very depth and rhetorical
brilliance, it shows up the limitations of the discussions of the Greek
theologians, and the politicized silence of the records of the Council of
Chalcedon. Augustine is where my discussion of God’s time needs to
conclude.62
In Book 11 of the Confessions, Augustine asks how God created the
heaven and the earth. It was not made by any process that can be
understood by any analogy to human artifice; rather, dixisti et facta sunt,
‘you spoke and they were made’ (11.5). Augustine immediately asks, ‘But
how did you speak?’, sed quomodo dixisti? (11.6), and this question opens an
extended discussion of the relation between God’s language and time.
God’s words of creation, argues Augustine, cannot have been like a voice
from heaven that utters a sentence heard by men and that takes time to be
said, syllable by syllable, sound against and out of silence. For those words
were for the moment (ad tempus) and for the external ear, whereas the
internal ear is turned towards an everlasting word, a word in silence.63 This
is something quite different, something quite different, declares Augustine
(aliud est longe, longe aliud est, 11.6) – a repetition that is not just emphatic
but dramatically performs its extension in time (longe, longe),
a demonstration of what Augustine is talking about. For if the act of
creation required words that sounded and took time to say, there would

62
A huge bibliography could be given. I will single out here Ricoeur (1984); Kennedy (2013);
Nightingale (2011); Conybeare (2016); Clark (1993); Kelly (2004); Pranger (2010) especially 35–54;
Wetzel (1992) 17–44.
63
Polk (1991) 64–5 – an article also good on the relation of Augustine to Husserl.

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 40 The Christian Invention of Time
need to be pre-existent before the creation of the material world a material
form to make the sound. God’s voice must be something else. God’s word
‘abides forever’, manet in aeternum. This phrase quotes Isaiah 40.8, a verse
that begins ‘The grass withers, the flower fades, but . . .’, thus setting the
permanence of divine utterance against the time-honoured analogy for
human fleetingness. For Augustine, more precisely, however, God’s word
of creation must always already be spoken – not as successive syllables even,
because otherwise there would be ‘no true eternity, no true immortality’,
nec vera aeternitas, nec vera immortalitas. Instead, there would be time and
change, tempus et mutatio. That is, because God is immortal and his
existence is eternal, he stands outside time and change.64 Therefore his
language cannot be in time. ‘Abiding forever’, God’s word too must be
changeless and without the expressivity that is formed in time.
Augustine declares he knows this (novi, 11.7), this wonder of creation;
indeed, everyone who is grateful for the truth, knows this; ‘we know this,
lord, we know this’ (novimus, domine novimus), he writes, upping the ante
of our complicit agreement. But he is quickly thrown back into aporia. If
God’s word is eternal and nothing is made but by God’s saying, how come
everything is not made at the same time? (‘I don’t know how to express
it . . .’, confesses Augustine.) More strikingly, the Gospels themselves are an
example of the Word made Flesh. God speaks through the flesh – per
carnem ait – and the written word ‘sounds in the outer ears of humans’, but
only so that it should be believed and sought inwardly and found in eternal
truth. The Gospels are not simply the unmediated word of God (and thus
true), as so many later religious writers will claim. The Gospels have to exist
in human language, time-bound, and thus heard through the frailty of
human bodies – which is an epistemological as much as a physical condi-
tion. The Gospels, insists Augustine, have rather to be heard inwardly, in
silence, sought for and found in a space beyond the materiality of their
letters, if their eternal truth – God’s truth – is to be appreciated. ‘The
pressure of eternity on the present . . . is all pervasive’.65 God’s existence
outside time is a barrier to the human comprehension of the human form
of the Gospels, God’s words.
The language of the Gospel of John in particular reverberates through
these passages. John’s beginning, an aggressive rewrite of the beginning of
Genesis, changes how we hear the idea of God’s language. For Augustine

64
For the crucial place of eternity in Augustine’s thinking see Meijering (1979) with the commentary
of Wetzel (1992) 26–44; also Polk (1991) 77 ‘temporality has its source in eternity’.
65
Pranger (2010) 40.

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 God’s Time 41
now redrafts the creation story again (11.9): In hoc principio deus, fecisti
caelum et terram in verbo tuo, in filio tuo, in virtute tua, in sapientia tua, in
veritate tua miro modo dicens et miro modo faciens, quis comprehendet? Quis
enarrabit? This is an exemplary sentence of Augustine’s remarkable exposi-
tory technique. It begins with what appears a recapitulation: ‘In this
beginning God, you made heaven and earth’ – a recapitulation of the
previous, now explained, starting point of God’s creation, and
a recapitulation of the opening verse of Genesis. But it is immediately
qualified through the opening of John’s Gospel: in verbo tuo, in filio tuo, ‘in
your word, in your son’. Now, if not throughout the previous exegesis, the
word verbum (‘w/Word’) is invested with its full theological implications.
The beginning of the Gospel of John announces that in principio erat
verbum, ‘in the beginning was the Word’: it is this Word which is now
evoked with in verbo tuo which implies both the eternal utterance of
creation and the verbum of John, the Word that is God and with God –
as the next phrase in filio tuo, ‘in your Son’ requires: the Son is already
present (apud) at the creation, co-eternal with the Father. There may be
a nativity story for the incarnated Jesus in the Gospels and a tale of death,
but the proclaimed co-eternity of God the Son is a constant rejection of the
possibility of seeing such stories as similar to Hesiod’s theogonic genea-
logical narratives. But Augustine extends his incantatory list first with in
virtute tua, ‘in your virtue’: for Augustine, human virtues are a complex
issue, ‘splendid vices’, unless referred to God.66 God’s virtue is other,
a mark of perfection, not a striving to control vice. In sapientia tua, ‘in
your wisdom’, recalls not just the Psalms (104.24: ‘you made all things in
wisdom’), but also the sophia of God, ‘the Holy Wisdom’ which like
Verbum can be an expression for God the Son – itself an appropriation
of the mystical value of sophia in Hellenistic philosophy as an abstract
expression for how humans can strive towards the perfection of God (‘He is
also called ‘Wisdom,’ insofar as He is the knowledge of things divine and
human’ (Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 30.20)). In veritate tua, ‘in your truth’,
recalls here specifically the importance of truth as the embodiment of
God’s word, the eternal and unchanging value of God’s utterance of
creation. These five phrases, each theologically richly layered, lead to
Augustine’s exclamatory miro modo dicens et miro modo faciens, ‘speaking
in a wonderful way, making in a wonderful way’, which appears to capture
in awe the opening dixisti et facta sunt, ‘you spoke and they were made’. But
this rhetorically ringing sentence of majestic worship has the rug pulled out

66
Wetzel (1992) is superb on the issue of virtue in Augustine.

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 42 The Christian Invention of Time
from under it with the final questions: quis comprehendet. Quis enarrabit?
‘Who can understand it? Who will give an account in words?’ The very
thought fills Augustine with ‘terror and burning love’. The extraordinary
journey in this one utterance travels from recapitulation through theo-
logically committed reverence in a rhetorically charged and emotive
expressivity, to a sudden reversal of baffled awe. Augustine is determined
that the sheer unthinkability of God’s time will remain at the forefront of
his exposition, and the very structure of his sentence leads the reader
towards the same blunt question: quis comprehendet?
Augustine’s baffled question opens a further long exposition of God’s
time. He begins with the problem that we have already seen in the
rabbinical commentaries – the people who ask what God was doing
before the act of creation. He contrasts starkly the flitting hearts of
humans living in a world of change, on the one hand, when even
a long time is made up of no more than a succession of moments,
and, on the other, the eternity of God, where ‘nothing is transient and
the whole is present’. He cites but rejects the joke that what God was
doing before Creation was ‘preparing hell for people who ask about
profundities’. But these brief comments are no more than ground-
clearing gestures before the crushing culminatory argument. God is the
creator and establisher (auctor et conditor) of the centuries; he is the
‘causal force’ (operator) of all times; in short, God is the author of
temporality: id ipsum enim tempus tu feceras, ‘For you have made time
itself’. Therefore ‘time could not pass before you made time’. To ask
what happened before creation makes no sense. Non enim erat tunc, ubi
non erat tempus, ‘For there was no then, where/when there was no time’.
Augustine strives to get this difficult point across. ‘It is not in time
(tempore) that you precede time (tempora)’, he continues. Your years
neither come nor go, where our years come and go in succession. But
your years are ‘one day’ and your day is ‘not any or every day but Today’;
because there is no yesterday or tomorrow for you: ‘your Today is eternity’,
hodiernus tuus aeternus. Thus, concludes Augustine, ‘You created all times,
and you are before all times; nor was there any time when time did not
exist’. Augustine inevitably struggles with – or performs the paradox
of – expressing timelessness in a language marked continually by its
temporality, its tenses and duration. His attempt to express how God’s
present is eternal is even more fraught in Latin without the inverted
commas and capital letters that translators use to contrast ‘your “years”’
with ‘our years’, or human ‘today’ with God’s ‘Today’. Augustine is
challenging his readers to try to imagine from within time how God is

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 God’s Time 43
timeless, to experience the conceptual crisis that such a challenge provides.
How can existence be thought without time?
It is this argument about God’s existence outside time that leads to
Augustine’s question, so repeatedly quoted by later writers on temporality,
‘What, then, is time?’. And its stunning first response, ‘Provided no-one
asks me, I know . . .’, another dramatic, paradoxical swerve between
apparent sanguinity and bafflement. We will return to his dense and
brilliant attempt to answer this question later in this book, when we turn
to the experience of the self in time and the role of memory. But I am
hoping that the self-evidently rhetorical and delimited contrast I have
constructed between Gods’ time in archaic Greek writing and God’s
time in the rabbis, the Cappadocians, and Augustine is nonetheless useful
enough in bringing one conclusion to the fore. The contrast between the
archaic Greek past and the Greek, Hebrew and Latin writers of late
antiquity is not best focused on the contrast between the immortality of
God(s) and the mortality of humans, nor on the ageing or agelessness of
God(s) in contradistinction to humans. Rather, in archaic poetry, gods are
conceived as transcending time both by not experiencing its vicissitudes,
and also by enjoying its opportunities – drinking, sex, watching, arguing.
Humans can imagine and represent interstitial conditions between the
condition of a god and the condition of a human, and also narrate
a translation from the human to the divine – while also arguing for the
unbreachable boundary between mortal and immortal (and gods never
become human, permanently, even if they look like them on occasion for
nefarious or dramatic purposes). It is easy for Greek gods to be represented
thus as having sex with humans, producing creatures who straddle the
boundaries of human and divine, and, as in the Homeric Hymn to
Aphrodite, as engaging with humans in a resolutely temporal narrative of
sex, pregnancy, five years of childcare and a demand for silence about
a sexual peccadillo in the past. In the conceptualizations of late antiquity,
however, at least for the rabbis, the Cappadocian Fathers and Augustine,
the question is how to imagine God as timeless, how to imagine a divine
existence without time, and the agency of a timeless God in the history of
humans. There is now a theology of time.
Now, in one case, of course, we have looked at hexameter poetry within
an epic tradition, and, in the other, prose from within a tradition of
religious commentary – across a gap of perhaps 1,200 years, a gap filled
with other writing about God’s time(s), which we will discuss in coming
chapters. Nor, for the moment, have I offered anything by way of a cultural
history for either set of texts, as I would normally demand of myself. The

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 44 The Christian Invention of Time
differences in usage between Homer and Augustine will not be smoothed
over by calling Homer ‘the bible of the Greeks’ (a phrase so many have
used). Nor is it enough to point out that both sets of texts are privileged
genres within their communities of production. Yet the contrast between
Homer and late antiquity, for all its demonstrable insufficiencies, also helps
us see something that is often occluded in histories of writing from
antiquity but which is a fundamental tenet of this book. In late antiquity,
unlike most earlier contexts, time becomes subject to a thoroughgoing
theological framing, which changes the conceptualization of divinity (or is
it that the change of the conceptualization of divinity changes the compre-
hension of time?): God’s time changes; and with it, the forms of narrative
also change. As Lactantius writes (Inst. 4.8), ‘No-one hearing the expres-
sion “son of God” should conceive such evil in his mind as to think that
God procreated as a result of marriage and intercourse with some woman.’
No-one should hear in Christian expressivity any possibility of familiar so-
called pagan genealogical myths of divine coming to be (such as the
Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite). For all the complexities of incarnational
theology, divine coming to be cannot be a Christian narrative. As the word
‘word’ takes on a new, profound and contested range of meanings, which
challenge the inherited relation between the language of God and its nature
in time, so too the phrase ‘son of God’ must be parsed afresh and re-
narrated, within a frame that rejects the genealogical, time-bound implica-
tions of the word ‘son’, who is now ‘coeval with the father’. This history of
change helps reveal the specificity of the strategies of the representation of
divinity and time in both archaic and late antique discourse. One starting
question for this book, then, will be this: how do the narratives of late
antiquity change when the concept of God’s time changes? How can
timelessness and narrative rhyme?

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 chapter 2

The Time of Death

How eternity grounds early Greek thinking about death and human
achievement is articulated vividly by Plato, especially in his response to
Homer’s paradigms.
Plato has a profoundly ambivalent relationship with Homer. Homer he
calls the ‘most divine’ of poets, and (thus) Homer is also the most dangerous
in his seductive, emotional lure away from the philosophical rigour of true
knowledge. The threatening normativity of the poets, in Plato’s construc-
tion, requires strict censorship. Yet the pleasure we all feel in the perform-
ance of Homer – or tragedy – constantly shadows Plato’s dismissals.1 It is
not always in his most explicit engagement with epic poetry, however, that
Plato reveals Homer’s influence on his thinking, even and especially in the
Republic whose establishment for all time bans the epic poets.2 When he
comes in the Laws to discuss the regulations for family life, for example, he
takes it for granted that the human race, by its very nature, pursues
immortality: it is implanted in humans. ‘The desire to prove oneself
famous’, writes Plato (721b–c), ‘as opposed to lying in a nameless grave’,
embodies this ‘pursuit of immortality’. Plato here invokes Homer’s epics,
which provide the paradigmatic model for the pursuit of glory, a model
which establishes the contrast between the anonymity of the unmarked
grave and the fame that epic poetry itself provides – to be sung on the lips
of men, for time to come. Yet Plato, with his typical intellectual expansive-
ness, immediately links this human desire for immortality with an under-
standing of time itself. The Athenian Stranger declares (721c3–7):
γένος οὖν ἀνθρώπων ἐστίν τι συμφυὲς τοῦ παντὸς χρόνου, ὃ διὰ τέλους
αὐτῷ συνέπεται καὶ συνέψεται, τοὐτῷ τῷ τρόπῳ ἀθάνατον ὄν, τῷ παῖδας

1
See Rosen (1988) especially 1–26; Ferrari (1989); Gould (1990), especially 4–69; Nightingale (1995)
60–7; Destrée and Hermann eds. (2011), particularly Most (2011).
2
Hobbs (2000).

45

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 46 The Christian Invention of Time
παίδων καταλειπόμενον, ταὐτὸν καὶ ἓν ὄν ἀεί, γενέσει τῆς ἀθανασίας
μεταληφέναι.
The race of humans is thus in a way organically connected with the totality
of time. It accompanies it and will accompany it through to the end, being
in this way immortal, in that it leaves behind children of its children, being
one and the same each time anew, and it is in procreation that the human
race takes part in immortality.

The phrase ‘the human race’ (genos anthrōpōn) is not as common in Greek
as it is in English, nor is it neutral. (‘The race of women’ is perhaps a more
familiar ideologically loaded expression.3) This language implicitly contrasts
humans with gods and animals, in the standard tripartite systematization of
the world that underlies Greek cosmography. Neither animals nor gods can
desire immortality. The human race, the Athenian Stranger states, is ‘organ-
ically connected with the totality of time’, an extraordinarily dense idea
which his paragraph goes on to unpack. The human race goes hand in hand
with time, as it were, and will continue to do so. Unlike stories or science’s
predictions, now all too pressing, which imagine a time in the past or a time
in the future without humans, here humans and time go together ‘through
to the end (telos)’, a distant teleology. The human race is thus ‘deathless’
(athanatos). The term that defines the gods and their time is now appropri-
ated to humans. How are humans immortal? By having children, and
children’s children – each generation the same, each new time (as we saw
with the Odyssey). In this perspective, there are no distinctive generations,
stronger or weaker, no golden or silver ages. Rather – the conclusion – the
human race partakes in immortality through procreation (genesei – echoing
the opening genos: the being of the race is etymologically connected to its
coming to be). For Plato, the tension remains between the desire for glory,
not to be nameless, and the sheer sameness and continuity of the generations.
Apollo, we recall, in the Iliad compared human beings to leaves that fall,
insignificant in their repeated fleetingness (21.461–7). Glaucus, as he prepares
to fight with Sarpedon, uses the same analogy, seeing himself for a moment,
before risking his life, in the sobering perspective of divine indifference to
human (in)distinctiveness – the contingency of his memorialization. But
Glaucus, who specifically names the season of the leaves as a ‘generation’
(geneē, 6.146), goes on to declare his proud genealogy, asserting a distinctive
line of the generations and his place in this history. To construct such a line
of memory, to take up one’s place in such a fight for glory, is necessary

3
Loraux (1981a) 75–117.

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 The Time of Death 47
precisely because humans die. This is the proclaimed logic of the Homeric
warrior.4 Plato takes up the inherited compulsion of epic, its expressivity,
and reformulates it as a general, philosophically dense idea about human-
kind. What it means to live in time is to struggle to transcend the insignifi-
cance of the fleetingness of the time-bound.
Is death the defining moment of glory, then? Is this what Plato suggests in
the contrast between the unmarked grave and becoming famous? The Iliadic
figure of Achilles, at least as he has been understood by modern readers,
might suggest that the answer to such questions is simply yes.5 (As Solon says
to Croesus in Herodotus, famously and smugly: ‘Look to the end’.)6
Achilles, whose body is as close to divine as a human body can be, is offered
a choice of a long life of comfort but a lack of recognition, or a short life of
immortal glory. He chooses immortal glory and thus a necessary young
death. Death is the price of fame, a ‘tragic consciousness of the untimely’ his
condition of living.7 ‘Let me die immediately’, Achilles declares to his
mother, as he reiterates his commitment to his self-defining wager. The
precise phrase aphthiton kleos, ‘immortal glory’, occurs only once in the Iliad
but (self-performatively) its afterlife has been long.8 The term aphthiton is
another alpha-privative, ‘unwasting’, ‘not decaying’ – and we have already
seen a distant but pointed echo of this language in Philo’s arresting expres-
sion for the humans who do not strive for excellence as ‘familiar with decay’
(phtharsis). Indeed, in Homeric discourse, the very term chronos, ‘time’,
implies not so much a general concept of time, as the deadness of mere
passing, the threat of what Hermann Fränkel influentially termed ‘empty
time’, an indistinct passage of the days, which kleos disrupts with a claim to
the significance of moments of glory that will last in memory and record.9
So, Egbert Bakker writes:
The antithetical relation between khronos and kleos sheds light on the
instances of khronos that do occur in Homer. These denote Fränkel’s
‘empty time’ only when we view khronos in our perspective of temporality.
But in connection with kleos, the time in which ‘nothing happens’ becomes
precisely khronos as factor that is averse to kleos, the dimension in which
people just age and can do nothing to make up for it.10

4
Seminal discussion in Redfield (1975); Nagy (1979).
5
From a large bibliography see Redfield (1975), (1979); Bergren (1980); Lynn-George (1988); Goldhill
(1991): 69–108; Li (2018). For a different frame see Butler (2009), looking back to Weil (1939), on
which see Lindheim and Morales eds. (2015).
6 7
Her. 1.32.9. Phillips (2020) 42.
8
As well as works cited in previous footnote see Finkelberg (1986), (2007); Edwards (1988); Anderson
(1981).
9 10
Fränkel (1960) 1–22. Bakker (2002) 28.

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 48 The Christian Invention of Time
In Homer, chronos is brought into visibility ‘only at moments in which
heroic action or the progression of the narrative is stalled, and so the
possibility to build kleos temporarily blocked’.11 The hero who risks his
life in battle for the glory of victory is the inverse of Odysseus hidden on
Calypso’s island, where his ‘sort of gods’ time’ of unchanging, workless
inactivity makes him so unknown that his son must travel the world to
search for his kleos. While every warrior risks his life for glory, Achilles
willingly exchanges the possibility of survival for the certainty of fame. His
‘undecaying glory’ is the iconic opposite of the ‘wasting’ of Odysseus’
house at the hands of the suitors, in the absence of the master; or
Penelope who ‘wastes’ her life (aiōn) longing for her absent husband.
The term aiōn ‘a life-time’, ‘period’, will become a key term in the theories
of time in late antiquity, as we will see: she wastes her aiōn here, however, in
direct parallel to her husband’s wasted aiōn on Calypso’s island, as we saw
in chapter 1. Or, indeed, the fate of ‘humans, like leaves’ which, in Apollo’s
words, is to ‘decay without spirit’, phthinuthousin akērioi. The implications
of this adjective akērioi are made clearer by Menelaus. When his fellow
Greek princes hesitate to face Hector in single combat, he accuses them of
sitting akērioi aklees, ‘without spirit without glory’ (7.100): their failure to
demonstrate the stomach for a fight is a self-fulfilling indication of their
future lack of reputation. To be ‘spiritless’ is the psychological barrier to
the achievement of fame; it restricts a person to inhabit ‘empty time’. The
leaves that fall, the men who live like leaves, are spiritless and thus without
distinction or lasting reputation. Akērios in these lines is normally under-
stood as ‘without spirit’ (a-kēr); the same letters can also be understood,
however, as ‘not touched by fate’ (a-kēr). Hesiod in the Works and Days
talks of ‘days that are akērioi’, ‘not touched by fate’, which he specifies as
days on which nothing happens. The ‘spiritless’ heroes in their cowardice
threaten to make the challenge of Hector into ‘a day untouched by fate’.
Their delay of action risks stretching the moment of potential glory into
‘empty time’ – as Achilles’ seventeen-book withdrawal from battle is
a threat to return to the undistinguished life of comfort he has previously
rejected. But the leaves, do they decay ‘without spirit’ or ‘untouched by
fate’? With either of these senses for akērioi – and both are possible – decay
and a lack of distinctive, lasting identity are mutually implicative. It is
against such a threat that the Homeric hero, and Achilles above all, pursues
glory, the glory that defeats such (empty) time.

11
Bakker (2002) 28.

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 The Time of Death 49
From the paradigm of Achilles, then, it might seem indeed that the
pursuit of glory (kleos) is intimately connected with the moment of death.
As Achilles’ ‘undecaying fame’ is won at the expense of a necessarily short
life, so each hero risks his own life in battle to transcend the time-bound
human condition. The barrow, tomb or memorial is the physical instanti-
ation of the fame of the dead hero, the sēma that marks distinctiveness.
Epic is the very performance of such fame, creating the aei (‘always’) of
continuity through the bard’s singing, aeidein. The necessity of death
grounds the experience of time.
But things are not quite so simple. Helen, the daughter of Zeus, as she
tries to persuade Hector to sit and rest from war, declares memorably –
and, it turns out, rightly – that she and Paris will be aoidimoi ‘the subject of
epic’, ‘celebrated in song’, for generations to come (Il. 6.358). Helen’s death
is not mentioned in Homer. In later literature – Euripides is an especially
pertinent example – there are stories that she is turned into a star, or that
she goes to the Isles of the Blessed (with Menelaus, in Lucian’s amused
version of literary afterlife). These Euripidean stories all occur in speeches
from a deus ex machina, where the dramatist is particularly creative in his
use of imagined future mythic narratives. His inventiveness and the
multiplicity of stories indicate that there appears to be no single privileged
or expected account of her end. But Helen’s anticipation of her fame is not
dependent on her death. Penelope is the only woman in the Homeric
poems who is described with the specific language of kleos (Od. 24.192–
202).12 Her death is nowhere depicted. Like Helen, her death is not integral
to her story. In the underworld, Agamemnon praises Penelope in compari-
son to his own wife, Clytemnestra, whose death, told or suppressed, is
crucial to her narrative; but for Penelope too, her fame depends not just on
Odysseus coming home to find her chaste, but also on her survival of the
‘dead time’ of his absence. Odysseus’ death, in turn, is certainly projected
in the Odyssey through the mysterious prophecy of Teiresias that ‘death will
come from the sea’, a far-off event (11.97–137). But Odysseus’ kleos depends
on his survival not his death; he returns from the underworld, where the
celebration of his fame is asserted against the ‘most shameful death’ of
Agamemnon, a death that threatens the king’s very kleos, and against the
glory of Achilles. Achilles in the Odyssey is made even to wish to give up all
his post-death glory in order to live humbly on earth, a reverse of his
defining Iliadic choice.13 Significantly, Odysseus is the only Homeric hero

12
See Katz (1991); Foley (1995); Mueller (2007).
13
See Edwards (1984); Pucci (1987); Peradotto (1990); Goldhill (1991), each with earlier bibliography.

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 50 The Christian Invention of Time
who announces his own fame with the explicit language of kleos and in the
present: ‘my kleos reaches heaven’, he declares to Alkinoos, king of the
Phaeacians (9.20). Over and against Achilles in the Iliad, the Odyssey
competitively recalibrates the temporal dynamics of kleos.
Indeed, the Odyssey – to a point of idealization – revels in the generations
and the continuity of the family, the passing of life that motivates the
Iliadic Apollo to dismiss the significance of human striving. When the
families of the Suitors seek revenge for the death of their children, they are
faced by Laertes, Odysseus and Telemachus. Laertes, although he had
fainted away in weakness, when Odysseus had confronted him, bowed
with age, in his orchard, powerfully throws the first spear and kills the
father of Antinous, the first suitor killed by Odysseus in the hall,
a significantly generational pattern of killing. Before this, he boasts ‘what
a day this is! My son and my grandson are competing in valour!’ (Od.
24.514–15). The three generations of single sons, itself a wonder of genea-
logical survival, all appear to be of fighting age at the same time.14
Odysseus, like Penelope, has his body made prime and beautiful again by
Athena; Telemachus has proved himself in the battle of the hall to have
achieved the manhood that was his quest from Book 1; the household
property has passed from Laertes to Odysseus without him passing on. In
this closing, iconic image of Odysseus’ family in the Odyssey, time’s
inevitable trajectory is bent so that, unlike the decaying, falling leaves,
the three generations of men can fight, all in the prime of life, side by side.
It may well be, as Aristotle insists (Phys. 221b), that ‘time in and by itself is
the cause of decay (phtharsis)’, but the Odyssey imagines the family of
Odysseus raised above such necessity. Homeric epic can also imagine, for
a moment, the time of the generations of men reordered, a different way
for men to transcend the exigencies of time.

*
If there is one word which goes right to the heart of this time of death, it is
kairos.15 If chronos signals the empty time of duration, kairos marks a crisis,
the killing time. To be struck kairiōs is to be delivered a mortal blow: it is
your time. The recognition of the time of kairos is to know you are at
a turning point, and the time is ripe; kairos is often translated as the ‘right

14
Goldhill (2010).
15
Trédé-Boulmer (2015) is essential and goes beyond e.g. Wilson (1980), (1981). See also Arrighetti
(2006) 90–101 and Dickson (2019) (on Homer). More speculatively, Gallet (1990) picks up on
Onians (1988) 343–9; Andrews (2020); Cassin (2014) takes the term in a theoretical direction.

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 The Time of Death 51
time’, but is better understood as a ‘decisive time’, a moment when
a decision will make all the difference, a turning point in how the future
will unfurl. Oedipus had to reach the crossroads at just the moment to
meet his father, a moment when a decision and a cutting make all the
difference to Oedipus’ future. Before historiography made a topos out of
the opposition of chronos and kairos,16 ‘duration’ and ‘occasion’, and
rhetoric discovered it as a term of theory, tragedy became the genre
above all that insists on the story of kairos, the one moment that marks
you for death, or, worse, suffering – the recognition, which is always time
turning back on itself, seeing oneself again, and thus otherwise, that ‘All
too late, I learned in full . . .’.
Clytemnestra, whose death at the hands of her son is silenced in the
Odyssey, screams her story aloud, centre-stage, in Aeschylus’ Oresteia.
When she appears at the doorway of the palace, over the concealed body
of her husband, to describe his murder at her hands, with a sexualized and
shockingly ritualized description of his blood spurting over her, she
announces that ‘I have said so many things before to suit the occasion
(kairiōs) but I will not be ashamed to say the opposite’ (Aga. 1322–3). She
has lied to the citizens, manipulated her husband, tricked and deceived her
way to this moment: she sums up the power of her speech simply: ‘to have
spoken to the moment’. But even this apparently transparent declaration
reveals the buried, dangerous life of words in Aeschylus’ dramatic vision.
The off-stage death cry of Agamemnon that she is now recalling with the
description of his murder, was the extraordinary verse: ‘Aaargh, I have been
struck a killing (kairian) blow inside’ (Aga. 1343). As she walked to her
death, a moment she knew she could not avoid, Cassandra had hoped for
kairian plēgēn (1292) ‘a timely/killing blow’ – a prophecy, it seems, of
Agamemnon’s death too. Clytemnestra’s speech ‘to the moment’ (kairiōs)
was ‘lethal’ (kairios). Her clear speech now echoes with the killing blow she
made her husband bellow out loud.
Every tragedy dramatizes the terror of such tipping points, what
Aristotle calls anagnōrisis, the sudden recalibration of past knowing, or
peripeteia, the disastrous fall, faster and heavier than leaves. But in an era
which made causation an obsessional intellectual interest, the question of
how a tipping point is approached becomes insistent. For Oedipus to reach
the time and place of the crossroads, what were the determining factors?
Was it the drunken man at the feast who taunted him for his unknown
birth? Was it the shepherd’s gesture of pity? The decision to expose him

16
See chapter 7 below, p. 138.

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 52 The Christian Invention of Time
rather than put a knife to his throat? His own decision to go to Delphi and
by that road? Was it all part of Apollo’s plan? Or was there a destabilizing
narrative of chance at work? Is tuchē, a word the play returns to repeatedly,
to be understood as fate or luck?17 Tragedy’s dramatization of the killing
time, kairos, turns chronos away from ‘empty time’, ‘dead time’, into
a dangerous destabilizing expanse of uncertain knowledge, concealed
motivation, and hidden connections.
Aeschylus dramatizes this buried life of chronos with remarkable inten-
sity, especially in the Oresteia. The death cry of Agamemnon is approached
with gathering darkness. Clytemnestra prepares for his return with increas-
ingly double-edged speeches of anticipation and the chorus rehearse the
intricate narratives of the past, its errors and demands, and struggle to
explain the desired normative pattern of justice – a pattern in which
Agamemnon’s death will be placed. The connections in this narrative are
terrifying and conflictual. Zeus, the chorus assert, sends an omen of eagles
to direct the expedition to Troy, but this very omen also drives Artemis to
stay the fleet. Calchas, the prophet who interprets the oracle, describes the
eagles as ‘sacrificing (thuomenoisin) a cowering hare’ (Aga. 136), and this
leads him to fear that Artemis will demand ‘another sacrifice (thusian)’
(Aga. 150) – as if the metaphor of ‘sacrifice’ results in the violent sacrifice of
Iphigeneia, which Clytemnestra will cite as part of her motivation for
murdering her husband. This uncertain interconnectivity of events, the
doubt about how actions or words will prove to have been causal, produces
in the chorus – and the audience? – a miasmic fear and desire for stable
knowledge.18
The chorus’ frightened and desperate want of knowledge culminates in
their response to Agamemnon’s death cry. In a strikingly unique piece of
stagecraft, Aeschylus has each member of the chorus speak in his individual
voice. The crisis of Agamemnon’s scream divides the collectivity into
a fragmented chaos of inadequate decision-making. The chorus’ lack of
knowledge stops them from acting. As one chorus member summarizes
(13.56–7): χρονίζομεν γάρ, οἱ δὲ τῆς μέλλους κλέος | πέδοι πατοῦντες οὐ
καθεύδουσιν χερί, ‘Yes, we are wasting time (chronizomen); they are not
asleep in their action; they are stamping underfoot the renown of delay’. In
the ‘real time’ of the staged drama, the chorus member marks what is
happening: they are, like the Greek princes at Troy in Menelaus’ reproach,
stuck in ‘empty time’ – chronizomen – refusing to act. As his colleague had
said, but without taking any action (1353): ‘Now is the perfect time not to

17 18
Pucci (1992). Goldhill (1984) traces this in full.

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 The Time of Death 53
hesitate to act’ (or ‘to delay’ (mellein)). Their opponents meanwhile stamp
under foot tēs mellous kleos, a typically impossibly complex Aeschylean
expression. Kleos can mean ‘report’ or ‘rumour’, as well as ‘renown’,
‘fame’, and here, therefore, there is an implication that what is being
destroyed is also a story of delay. The chorus is desperate for information
from the palace: what they won’t get, it is implied, is a tale of delay. In the
Odyssey, when Odysseus has killed the suitors in the palace, he arranges
for a fake wedding song to be performed so that no kleos of the slaughter
will get out (Od. 23.133–40). No such kleos of delay will emerge, the
chorus fears, here and now. It may even recall their own earlier blithe
misogyny, when, conclusively but with misrecognition, they commented
on Clytemnestra’s story of the fall of Troy (Aga. 486–7): ‘swift to die,
a tale (kleos) told by a woman is wiped out’. Kleos that should aim to be
undecaying, perishes quickly, like an Achilles but without glory, when it
is spoken by a woman. Their misplaced dismissal of Clytemnestra is now
repeated, as they fail even to understand what has happened in the palace
and once again hope for a story to guide them. But kleos is also the
disruption of and triumph over empty chronos: their delay (chronizomen)
seems to invoke the language of kleos, predicated on the action they
cannot undertake. Mellous, however, is a very rare and strange word,
and may also imply what is intended or likely to happen (it is an abstract
noun from mellein, and to mellon becomes the normal Attic for ‘the
future’, though I suspect it never completely loses to abstraction the
sense of a person expecting or waiting for something to happen).19
Those in the palace – actually Clytemnestra – are crushing also ‘the
renown’ of what might be expected or intended – both Agamemnon’s
kleos damaged by his disgraceful death, and their own kleos, disbarred by
their inactivity. Between the kairios blow to Agamemnon by
Clytemnestra and her announcement of her previously kairios speech,
the chorus’ fragmented, desperate interchange dramatizes chronos as
a space of delay and, above all, ignorance that blocks action. To get the
right time involves the confidence of right knowledge. The ‘right time’
makes human decision-making not just a temporal but also an epistemo-
logical issue.

19
Pindar, Olympian 2.56, one of the most vexed lines of Pindar, with its incomplete conditional clause,
begins ‘If . . . someone knows the future . . . (to mellon)’, an ‘if’ that is incomplete if any is. For the
development of the notion of the future in Greek historiography see the essays collected in Lianeri
ed. (2016), with the background of Hölscher (1999); Kosselleck (2004). On expectation and the
future, see on Thucydides 1.138.2 (Themistocles’ ability to estimate what would happen),
Greenwood (2016) 87–91 – with further indicative examples.

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 54 The Christian Invention of Time
The figure in the Oresteia who seems to transcend – and thus most
strikingly to emphasize – how ‘kairos defines the human approach to, and
separation from, divine power as a mode of apprehending the fluctuations
of human temporality’,20 is Cassandra. In stark contrast to the faffing
chorus, Cassandra has perfect knowledge of the past and future, a gift
from divine power (double-edged, of course, in that she can convince no
human of her certain understanding). She alone has the language and
knowledge to express the interconnectivity of events and to determine the
prōtarchon atēn, the ‘first and originary transgression’, a moment that the
human subjects of tragedy so often seek in their counterfactual longings or
explanatory exculpations. But the paradox of Cassandra’s certain know-
ledge is that she cannot affect the unfurling of the story. Perfect knowledge
of the future means no free will.21 The chorus imagine that if only they had
better knowledge, they would know how to act to make a difference to the
future. Cassandra, who does know, can do no more than assert the
inevitability of the future, her speech a devastating superfluity. So she
tells the wondering chorus, as she walks, as calm as a sacrificial ox, to her
death (1299): ‘There is no escape; my hosts, no more time (chronon)’. The
chorus comment, ‘The last moment of time at least is privileged’. Their
temporizing sop to hope is bluntly rejected: ‘That day is here and now’.
Cassandra’s perfect knowledge means she alone of the human characters in
the Oresteia understands exactly and without recourse when the kairos has
arrived. Her refusal of the desire of the god of prophecy, Apollo, leaves her,
thanks to her gift of complete foreknowledge, without recourse to coun-
terfactuals or desire, inhabiting time without surprise or alteration. Is this
not Cassandra’s horrible paradox, to escape from the human experience of
time and yet knowingly to face mortality, her time of death?
Prometheus Bound – which in its current form may not be the work of
Aeschylus, or not entirely of Aeschylus22 – offers the most dramatically
bizarre and yet lastingly influential engagement with these tensions
between action, duration and intervention. Till Samuel Beckett’s works,
it is the only play I know to have a central character bound unmoving –
incapable of action – through the whole drama. Prometheus is tied to
a rock and is to be assaulted daily by an eagle for 10,000 years. This is also
the only extant Greek play which also has no human, social scenario – the
main actors are all divine; only Io, a woman turned into a wandering cow,
is not an immortal; the setting is a mountain range in the Caucasus. The
plot of the play, however, depends, as with Cassandra, on a paradox of

20 21 22
Fitzgerald (1987) 10. Goldhill (1986) 23–8. Griffith (1977) remains the best discussion.

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 The Time of Death 55
knowledge and the passing of time, but now, crucially, without facing
a time of death. Prometheus, who gives humans the knowledge they need
to progress – not just fire – knows a secret. The secret is that whoever
sires a child with the nymph Thetis will produce a son greater than his
father. This secret links the play both to our discussion of the
genealogy of the gods, where the threat to the stable establishment
of Zeus was precisely such a continuation of violent intergenerational
succession; and to Achilles, who is the prophesized son of Thetis, and
whose immortality will be of fame, and thus no threat to Zeus: the
network of myths makes time visible. Prometheus knows that his
knowledge can thus destroy or maintain the rule of Zeus. Zeus has
bound him to the rock. Zeus will not set him free until he reveals the
secret; Prometheus will not reveal the secret until he is set free. It is
a standoff, made a paradox by the fact Prometheus has foreknowledge
of the future. So how long should the standoff last? When will there
be a kairos to shift the actionless action? What could change such
stasis? By making a drama out of gods’ time, the play becomes a form
of chronos, a continuum unbroken by the prospect of recognition or
peripeteia or kleos. Without the intervention of death, even constant
suffering makes for poor storytelling (as we will see, both the everlast-
ing joy of heaven and the everlasting suffering of hell are hard to turn
into narrative, which loves its endings). The play can be saved only by
the prediction of a saviour, Heracles, in a further play, who will break
the standoff by releasing (luein) Prometheus and thus find a resolution
(lusis) for the plot. Prometheus Bound – in the time of the play – asks
us to imagine Prometheus’ experience of time stretching unendingly
onwards. It dramatizes the ‘empty time’ of chronos as waiting and
suffering.
With Cassandra and Prometheus, tragedy explores the paradoxes
that arise from the tension between chronos and kairos, when, under
unique circumstances, ignorance of what is to happen is removed. It is
a dramatization that also highlights the normality of human uncer-
tainty and its consequences. When ignorance of the future is the
condition of humans, it is only ‘too late’ that full knowledge can be
recognized, only ironically that Oedipus can claim to know.
Misrecognizing how chronos relates to kairos, how the unfurling of
events will produce a killing time of crisis, is tragedy’s story. When
Christian texts turn to make kairos a term of theological necessity, it
comes trailing clouds of tragic conceptual anxiety about how the

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 56 The Christian Invention of Time
moment can be seized or lost, how the killing time defines a life. How,
then, should a Christian face the end?

*
Plato has Socrates declare that true philosophers are engaged in a life-long
‘training for death’ (Phaedo 67e). In classical Athens, every citizen trained
for military service, and risked dying in battle for the state, which in civic
discourse becomes the epitaph of ‘having proved yourself a good man’,
agathos genomenos: a man’s goodness itself becomes linked to such a death
in war, and the model of Achilles and the Homeric heroes is never far from
the imaginary of such commitment.23 Even – especially – Socrates fought
for his city, fulfilling the duty that Aristotle sees as a requirement of
democracy, to bear arms for the state. But Plato’s idea takes preparation
for death in a new direction, which redefines how life is to be spent and
valued. ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’: a life without philosophy
has lost its worth. But, further, Plato has Socrates insist first that the soul is
immortal – which makes death, he concludes, unfrightening –
and, second, that the philosopher’s soul in particular, purified as it is,
will rise into a bliss of contemplation that will last.24 This idealism – ‘the
prize is noble, and the hope is great’ (Phaedo 114c) – is surrounded,
however, by hesitations. Socrates has to argue against the doubts of his
friends, and turns to a myth of the underworld to persuade them. Their
grief continues, however. It is not clear that the immortality of the soul
would have been anything other than a very outlandish notion to most of
his contemporaries, as odd as the Pythagorean claim of the transmigration
of souls – unlike the familiar and institutionalized mystery cults’ promise of
the continuation of feasting and fun for their initiates, or Homer’s picture
of bodily ghosts waiting for blood to talk, or the lasting power of the heroes
of cult, including the Athenians who fought and died at Marathon. More
than four hundred years later, Lucian, smart-ass as ever, portrays an
underworld where Socrates, far from a soul in contemplation, is still
nagging away annoyingly at anyone he meets (Ver. Hist. 2.17). But however
much the philosophical claim of the immortality of the soul has one
historical, intellectual trajectory, Plato’s portrayal of how Socrates faced
his time of death embodies the philosopher’s preparation in a calm,
reflective and even witty response to the end of life. For Socrates, the kairos

23
Loraux (1981b).
24
Long (2019) is a useful introduction to this extensively discussed topic. See also Sedley (1989),
(2009); Castagnoli (2019b) all with further bibliography.

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 The Time of Death 57
of his execution becomes a willed transition, a fulfilment of his role as
a philosopher, much as Achilles’ acceptance of his own young death fulfils
his role as hero. This image of Socrates at the time of death has been
powerfully instrumental in the Western imagination.25 Socrates becomes
a figure easy to assimilate to Christian normative history because Plato’s
representation of his death seems to anticipate the moral certainty and
spectacular self-possession of the hagiographic picturing of the martyrdom
of saints.26 It is one way to face the end: a fulfilled martyr to the truth.
If Socrates provides one necessary strand in the back history of the
representation of martyrdom, the self-representation of the Roman adap-
tation of Hellenistic schools of philosophy and especially Stoicism, is also
integral. Stoicism became the philosophical lingua franca of the educated
elite of the Roman empire, and its promotion of fearlessness at the prospect
of the end of life happily adapted and theorized the Roman penchant for
bravery in the face of death, a penchant which also made gladiators stars of
the games’ spectacles of violence.27 It is not by chance that Seneca, whose
vein-opening suicide in the bath became an icon of self-control, exchanges
letters with St Paul, at least in the apocryphal tradition: in the Christian
imaginary, Seneca’s paraded calm at the prospect of death and his philoso-
phy of self-examination makes him a worthy interlocutor for the apostle.28
This fearless calm becomes the trademark of the Christian martyr.
Prudentius’ fourth-century collection of poems known as the Peristephanon
(‘Crowns of Martyrdom’) adopts the metrical forms of the Latin poetic
tradition to tell the stories of Christian martyrs at the point of their
martyrdoms.29 For these martyrs, there is no preparation for death but their
Christianity itself. Eulalia is a young woman who is kept at home by her
parents, but she escapes to town in order to refuse to sacrifice and thereby to
bear witness to her Christianity.30 As with the other martyrs Prudentius
depicts, there is no representation of any pattern of reasoning that leads to
the martyrdom, not even the sort of motivating dream that Perpetua experi-
ences. The Peristephanon is a text for the Christian reader – mediated through
Prudentius’ self-representation as worshipper – to contemplate intense

25
In general, Trapp ed. (2007); Judson and Karasmanis eds. (2006); Moore ed. (2019); more focusedly,
Lane (2001); Nehemas (1998); Edwards (2007).
26
See Frede (2006); Edwards (2007) and Franek (2016) with bibliography to a long history of debate.
27
See e.g. Hopkins (1983); Barton (1993); Wiedemann (1992); Kyle (1998); Gunderson (1996); Edwards
(2007) – all of which pay respects to Veyne (1976).
28
See in general, Griffin (1976); Wilson (2014); and especially Edwards (2014).
29
See Palmer (1989); Malamud (1989); Roberts (1993); Mastrangelo (2008) and generally Castelli
(2004).
30
Goldhill (1999).

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 58 The Christian Invention of Time
suffering as an imitatio Christi, and as an act of public commitment to
Christianity’s truth against fierce and violent opposition. The martyr tran-
scends torture – and it is crucial that every story is a story not just of pain or
death but of torture – through the promise of immortality to come, and
demonstrates this transcendence with a verbal performativity, a wit, that is the
culmination also of Prudentius’ self-display of verbal brilliance as his worship.
‘Turn me over; I am done on this side of my body’, quips Lawrence as he is
burnt to death on the barbecue.31 Such stories of the martyrs not only make
the time of death a defining event in life – death is very much experienced –
but also change the relation of the Christian to time. Salvation is a promise of
immortality, to join the sancti in heaven; how death – as the ultimate moment
of witnessing to Christ – is faced, is determinative of the time to come. Death
as a process of transition is profoundly moralized. Glory, that motivation of
Homer’s heroes, is now an attribute of God, and God alone. To die for God is
to witness his glory. Humans, like the cherubim and seraphim, declare the
glory of God, in the highest. To read Prudentius piously is to understand both
his poetry and the stories of the martyrs as enacting service to the glory of God,
remediating the fame of the poet and the fame of the hero in a different
direction.
Repentance – a form of death and rebirth in the language of
Christianity – changes everything: it is to be a complete and thoroughgoing
realignment of the soul and the life. So – to take one of very many possible
examples – St Mary of Egypt ran away from home at age 12 (the same
transgressive choice that Eulalia makes), but does so to become a prostitute
in Alexandria. For seventeen years she lives her dissolute life, until she has
a remarkable conversion in Jerusalem. From this moment, she retreats to
the desert, taking only three loaves of bread, where she lives for thirty years
alone as an ascetic. When she is finally sighted by Saint Zosimas, she is
naked and appears barely human – her wasting away is transformed into
transcendent ascetic piety – and dies on the very day he gives her commu-
nion. Her new life is a remove from all social interaction; the thirty years
are described only as a continuum of her turn towards God.32 The experi-
ence of chronos as an indistinct time that negates the pursuit of kleos has
become the very fame of the saint. So Simeon Stylites becomes a spectacle
of holiness by displaying himself on a pillar for year after year, where the
mundanity of his experience of time in public is articulated in his hagiog-
raphy only by increased suffering.33 The promise of immortality after the
transition of death changes how human life can and should be experienced.

31 32 33
Conybeare (2002). See Burrus (2004) 147–54, (2019) 93–117. Burrus (2019) 123–34.

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 The Time of Death 59
One history of Christianity – or, better, Christianities – would trace the
repeated tension between the desire for a removal from society into
a chronos of contemplation and worship, and the inevitable engagement
in the messy politics of a church that is central to the power of worldly
empires. Christianity’s projection of temporality from the creation of time
itself to the end of days not only changes how the time of death is to be
conceptualized, but also thus redefines the significance of the mundane –
daily time.
This contrast between the long Greek tradition of memorializing,
representing, conceptualizing the time of death and the Christian recon-
struction of such a tradition is on display with particularly insistent
architecture in the juxtaposition of Books 7 and 8 of the Palatine
Anthology – a juxtaposition almost certainly established only in tenth-
century Byzantium, when the anthology in its current book form was
put together.34 Book 7 contains 748 epitaphs from across several hundred
years. Some record famous warriors who died for their countries in poems
that became famous memorials (‘Stranger, tell the Spartans that here we lie,
obedient to their laws’, AP 7.249). Many record deaths abroad of mer-
chants or those who, shipwrecked, left empty tombs. There are poems for
cats, locusts, pets of all sorts. Others are composed for literary figures or for
poets or civic figures of the past. It is significantly difficult to distinguish
a hard and fast line between records from actual tombs and literary
imitations of the form, as both testify to how death and memorial are to
be conceptualized. Many assume that a stranger is passing by and must be
addressed: that is, the tomb does not speak to a social community or
a family, but to an imagined other, who like us as readers, scan the
inscription and move on. There are few or no sequences of poems in the
collection. There are some epigrams that recognize paradoxes or bizarre
deaths, particularly of brides and grooms, but little recognition of noble
deaths, and, above all, no acknowledgement of an afterlife or that the
values of a lived life may be directed towards a life after death. Rather, the
briefness of the form of the epigram turns the recognition of the fleeting-
ness of life into a repeated display of the imagined observer’s sophisticated
awareness of the epigrammatist’s sophisticated turn of perspective.
So, Simonides, from the fifth century bce, writes a four-line epitaph for
Pythonax and his brother who both died before they saw the prime of life
(AP 7.300). Their father Megaristeus set up this memorial to the dead,
records Simonides, ‘a memorial immortal to his mortal sons a gift’,

34
Cameron (1993).

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 60 The Christian Invention of Time
μνῆμα . . . ἀθάνατον θνητοῖς παισὶ χαριζόμενος. The echoes of Achilles’
choice are emphasized by the pointed juxtaposition of ‘immortal’ and
‘mortal’. The poem’s verbal dexterity, by demanding the reader’s recogni-
tion and reflection, enacts the injunction to each passer-by to stop in time
before the tomb – a stopping which by reading the inscription becomes the
act of performed memorial. By contrast, Aceratus the Grammarian (per-
haps from the first century ce), writes a particularly self-conscious version
of an epitaph for the Homeric Hector (AP 7.138):
Ἕκτορ, Ὁμηρείῃσιν ἀεὶ βεβοημένε βίβλοις,
θειοδὀμου τείχευς ἕρκος ἐρυμνότατον,35 (nb text Gow)
ἐν σοὶ Μαιονίδης ἀνεπαύσατο. σοῦ δὲ θανόντος
Ἕκτορ, ἐσιγήθη καὶ σελὶς Ἰλιάδος.
Hector, constantly bruited in the Homeric books,
Strongest bulwark of the god-built wall,
With you Homer made his end. When you died,
Hector, so too were silenced the pages of the Iliad.
There is no doubt that this epitaph appeals to a literary audience: the
written text of the Iliad is its world. Hector, who shouts a lot in the Iliad, is
always ‘being shouted about’ in Homer’s books (the ‘always’ of immortal
glory is here, more bathetically, Hector’s repeated, loud presence in the
epic). But Homer, here referred to with the patronymic which imagines for
him a descent from Orpheus, made his end – both rested and
stopped – ‘with you’. The riddle of this striking expression is immediately
explained: when Hector died the Iliad fell silent. The Iliad indeed ends
with the funeral of Hector, but the epigram nicely contrasts the ‘shouting’
of Hector with the ‘silence’ of the end. Homer, Hector and the Iliad share
a life of sound and an end in silence. The time of the poem and the time of
its dead hero and the time of the poet are overlapped in this self-reflexive
redrafting of Homeric temporality into the discourse of narratology avant
la lettre. The time of death is the opportunity for a literary critical jeu
d’ésprit.
Book 8 of the Palatine Anthology provides a remarkable contrast with the
displaced and deracinated tombstones of Book 7.36 It is a volume by
a single author, Gregory of Nazianzus. The collection may well have
been ordered by him, as its poems talk explicitly about poems being set

35
Page (1981) 3, very aggressively, prefers the comparative to the superlative here.
36
The following discussion follows closely Goldhill (2020) and especially Goldhill and Greensmith
(2020), where a full bibliography can be found.

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 The Time of Death 61
in sequence, and about the number of poems in such sequences. The book
is indeed structured overall as a diptych, with, first, 165 poems on his family
and friends from his Christian community, and, second, 89 poems attack-
ing those who desecrate Christian tombs. As Homer constructs the anti-
funeral in the desecration of the corpse as a contrast to the hero’s search for
the glory of a noble death,37 so here Gregory contrasts the anti-sepulchral
festivities and desecration of the grave with the celebrated lives of his
Christian heroes. The book is organized around this juxtaposition.
Gregory’s poems are educated, sophisticated verse, replete with the
paideusis we would expect from his self-representation elsewhere, as we
saw in chapter 1, but they echo the epitaphs of the past to redraft the form
into a stridently Christian discourse. The first 165 poems construct
a portrayal of a holy Christian family within an extended Christian
community. He writes a dozen poems, he announces, for his friend and
mentor, Basil of Caesarea; then a dozen for his father; some 53 for his
mother; a good handful for his brother; others for close friends and
religious colleagues. Each individual is evaluated within this community,
for their Christian virtues and their contribution to the community. An
image of an ideal Christian family, a holy family, is projected. Gregory sets
himself at the very centre of this network (and even writes epitaphs for
himself). This idealism is also a polemic. Gregory rejects the sexual life of
the family for himself in a commitment to chastity, but lives within this
community fully. This is a considered and specific position in the ongoing
fights over how a Christian should live, rejecting the strict asceticism of
a desert saint, but also rejecting marriage for himself.38 Readers are not
addressed as passing strangers but as potential intimates, observers of
a community they can aspire to join.
The values which Gregory praises in these epitaphs offer a different
moral framework from his classical predecessors. His father’s ‘winged soul’,
he announces, ‘is with God’ (lachen theon, AP 8.12.5); it is ‘near the Holy
Trinity’ (AP 8.14.4); ‘raised up’ (AP 8.20.2). This triumphal discourse of
transformation to heaven is strikingly contrasting with the descent down
the ‘iron road of Hades’ (AP 7.412.8) which is the only end imagined in
Book 7. This transcendence is directly linked to his father’s life in the
church. Gregory emphasizes his father’s contribution as a bishop,
a shepherd to the people, and his late but wonderful conversion from
idolatry to Christianity, and the family of priests he has sired. (Gregory is
never shy of pointing out how his own marvellous achievements redound

37 38
Segal (1971); Redfield (1975). Elm (2012); Gager (1975).

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 62 The Christian Invention of Time
to his father.) The Christian life praised depends on a good life leading to
a death that leads to ascension to the house of God.
Gregory most intensely honours his mother, Nonna, with ‘so many
epigrams’, and dramatizes the time of her death in a remarkable sequence
of varied responses, and the very variations indicate the ongoing construc-
tion of the discourse of death. (‘Death is not an event in life, we do not live to
experience death’, as Wittgenstein wrote,39 but, as he did not continue, it is
constantly imagined and ideologized through an increasingly intense
Christian gaze at the moment of the death of others.) Each epitaph here
emphasizes that she died in old age in the church praying, and each promotes
a version of Christian virtue in a woman. ‘One woman is famous (kleinē) for
household tasks, another for grace and chastity, another for piety and the
pains of the flesh, with tears, prayers, and charitable actions. Nonna is
celebrated (aoidimos) for everything. If it is right to call this the end, she
died praying’ (AP 8.31). This epitaph lists the virtues of a woman. If
household tasks, grace and chastity have a long history of praise, the addition
of ‘pains of the flesh’ along with ‘tears, prayer and charitable actions’
reframes the tradition in a specifically Christian discourse of suffering and
public service. Nonna for all these virtues is aoidimos, ‘to be sung of’ – the
word Helen had used of herself in the Iliad – and the contrast with the
tradition of epic understanding of a woman’s worth is pointed by such
vocabulary. The paradox is that the genre of epitaph is integrally the
performance of memorial as a performance of fame. Nonna is aoidimos,
kleinē, the object of praise. The very form Gregory adopts inevitably enacts
the tension between humility and pride in the exemplary. She died praying,
he states at the end of this epitaph (and many others), but immediately
glosses this with ‘if it is right to call this an end/a death (teleutēn)’. Death is
indeed no end. As the next epitaph announces, in the voice of Nonna herself,
she has gone to zōēn . . . ouraniēn, ‘a heavenly life’. The time of death has
become the beginning of a life in heaven, a life in light – if ‘to see the light’ is
a common expression for life as opposed to death in earlier Greek, now death
is a transfer into light rather than darkness, a new life. And her very death in
church praying is, Gregory insists, the happy result of her prayers, tears and
vigils through her life. In this long sequence of poems on his mother,
Gregory is redefining the traditional language of memorial so that the
good Christian’s life on earth produces the death that leads to a life in
light in heaven. Life on earth, in turn, is praised as crying, suffering, praying,
and, for some, producing pious children; a rejection of the physical in the

39
Wittgenstein (1922) 6.4311.

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 The Time of Death 63
name of the spiritual, and thus a rejection of the standard marks of social
esteem in wealth and material benefit. The genre of epitaph in Gregory’s
hands redrafts how the ordinary time of life is to be evaluated. The ‘god-
given gleam’ that transforms striving into a triumph of kleos – the model for
men’s competitive commitment to a life of action from Homer to Pindar
and onwards – is transformed now into praise for an existence where
a relation to God is lived through a refusal of the pursuit of kleos in this
life in the hope and expectation of the true life to come. The immortality of
fame is no longer the aim or promise, but an immortal life.
Achilles’ renewed determination to die young to win immortal fame, and
his Odyssean desire to be the humblest man on earth rather than king over the
dead, should be equally impossible thoughts for the Christians of late
antiquity. The martyr’s death is for the glory of god, not the glory of
a human (though the martyr certainly becomes an exemplar of religious
commitment, a life to be lived up to, a life to be ‘embraced with the arms
of the mind’40). A longing for life on earth is a denial of the very promise of
Christianity. This does not stop Homer continuing to be read, studied,
loved . . . Yet what this Christian understanding of the time of death intro-
duces is a repeated tension in the experience of time and thus the narratives of
a life, a tension between removal into contemplation, mortification of the
flesh, prayer, as expressions of a relation to God, and engagement with the
church and the material world as an expression of mission. What the end is
going to be changes how stories are told. The anticipation of the end of days,
we will see shortly, is one motivation for complete sexual abstinence, the
attempt to stop the generations of men, like leaves, falling – or to rethink
entirely how humanity is ‘organically connected to the totality of time’, as
Plato put it. How the time of death is thought to make sense of the human
experience of mundane time becomes a new and vexing question in the
Christianity of late antiquity. The transformation of the time of God comes
with a change in the understanding of the end that is death and with it
a change in the wagers of human achievement: it changes how a human is to
inhabit time. The possibility of a martyr’s iconic death – a killing time that
transcends love of earthly life – is formed in relation to a saint’s continuous
chronos, an unworldly continuity, gazing at and longing for a promised
eternity: both are transformative ideals of an end, for the labourers of the
church on earth to contemplate. A second foundational question, then, for
this book is: how do these shifting conceptualizations of the end change the
narratives of a life, and transform the horizons of how time is to be inhabited?

40
Augustine, Sermo Denis 14.3; see Perkins (1995); Clark (1999); Castelli (2004); Kelley (2006).

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 chapter 3

Telling Time

The messianic religions of late antiquity are obsessed with getting the
time right, to know the right time – both at the level of daily, weekly,
monthly or annual rituals, and at the level of world history. Where the
prophet Cassandra can say for herself, ‘the day has come’, the Gospels
will insist that everyone must be anxiously aware that ‘the hour is
coming and is now here’. The desire to be certain about one’s place in
time produces an extended, competitive and argumentative scholarly
literature, which is never simply about the correct calibration of time.
Rabbinical writing, first of all, is exemplary of these temporal
obsessions.
‘There is no early and late in the Torah’. This rabbinical principle is
a response to when the Pentateuch seems to narrate events out of
chronological order. An immediate example: Leviticus 24 lists legal
regulations, and describes the punishment of a man who has blas-
phemed – a stoning that takes place while the Israelites are travelling in
the desert, after the revelation on Mount Sinai. But Leviticus 25 begins,
‘The Lord spoke to Moses on Sinai, saying . . .’ – an intervention that
must have taken place earlier than chapter 24. There is no inconsistency
here, it is argued, because ‘there is no early and late in the Torah’: linear
temporality is an unnecessary expectation. For rabbinical biblical exe-
gesis, the principle of ‘no early and late’ not only allows cross-referencing
between passages from within apparently different temporal frameworks,
but also produces a creative reading strategy that recognizes but recali-
brates such temporal disruptions in the name of the unity and perman-
ence of the Torah. The Torah exists, it is argued, before the giving of the
Torah on Sinai: Noah, it is pointed out, takes into the ark ‘pure and
impure animals’, a distinction established, it might be thought, only by
the text of the Torah. The Torah pre-exists the revelation to Moses, as the
embodiment of God’s wisdom, which is the ‘paradigm’ or ‘arche-
type’ – the blueprint – of creation itself (Philo already argues this,
64

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 Telling Time 65
separately from the rabbinical tradition).1 The constant and divided
rabbinic arguments about what the text of the Torah signifies is grounded
in the ‘always already’ of its continuing significance.
The challenge to linear chronology and its causality is enacted in the
further rabbinical principle known as bererah – legal retroactivity. This
problematic idea has been superbly analysed most recently by Lynn Kaye.
With bererah, ‘different temporal configurations of events are presented as
coexistent’;2 its aim is to replace previous doubt with ritual certainty
through what can be called a legal fiction about time. So Kaye’s paradig-
matic example concerns the establishment of a legal residence to allow
movement on the Sabbath. An observant Jew cannot walk more than 2,000
cubits from his house on the Sabbath. But to allow someone to hear
a visiting lecturer, say, who will be further from the home, a temporary
legal residence may be appointed to allow a longer walk. But if you do not
know on Friday night, when the Sabbath starts, which direction you will be
travelling, you cannot determine the temporary residence as you are
required to do; but if you do subsequently discover the destination on
Saturday, then, the Talmud asserts, the decision on Saturday will reveal
what the intention on Friday really had been – although evidently the very
problem is predicated precisely on not knowing the intention when the
Sabbath starts. The principle of bererah thus allows ‘a later action to have
actually taken place earlier, replacing the ambivalence with certainty’.3
A logically challenging case of reverse causality . . .4
Now, when and how this principle is invoked by the rabbis is
a complicated matter of legal nicety, which could detain us here for some
time.5 The vista it opens onto the Talmud’s temporality, however, is
instructive. In a perhaps less worrying and more standard scenario, the
Talmud has no anxiety about imagining conversations between rabbis who
lived centuries apart as a way of dramatizing differences of opinion. Linear
chronology is no bar to interaction – without any of the complex heroic,
dream-time or necromantic apparatus typical of Greek and Roman
moments of meeting figures of the past. So, too, when it comes to
a discussion of the interpretation of dreams, it is declared with a certain
psychological plausibility that the interpretation ‘protentively confers reality
upon the dream, and as a consequence, the dream shapes reality’: a double

1
Philo, Opif. 15–25: see van Winden (1983). 2 Kaye (2018) 112. 3
Kaye (2018) 3.
4
And a much more interesting and salient case than the examples dreamt up in Dummett (1954),
(1964). A better case for Dummett might be the laughter which retrospectively turns a comment, not
intended to be humorous, into a joke.
5
Kaye (2018) of course handles these too.

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 66 The Christian Invention of Time
movement of retrospective and proleptic making of truth.6 Most saliently for
me here, however, is how this overturning of linear temporality informs the
Talmud’s style of history writing. From Thucydides’ example onwards,
historiography – to speak grosso modo – expects the unfolding of a narrative
in a linear and causal patterning, where digressions are self-consciously
marked as such. This is not, however, how the Talmud imagines the
interlinking of events. Within a broad patterning of divine retribution,
each moment in the national story is morselized and becomes the fulfilment
and exemplar of biblical verses, which have always already encompassed
these stories to come. Digressions are so prevalent that they form the
normative style of interconnection. The record and memorialization of the
turning points of national history turn out to be stories about good or,
usually, bad halachic decisions (decisions on religious law and behaviour),
where it rarely matters which emperor is the oppressor or in what order the
military or political events are dated. Indeed, major disasters are represented
providentially as paradigms of each other, a repetition enforced by deter-
mining the same date in the calendar for these overlaid occasions: the first
and second temple were both destroyed on the ninth of Av; the Greeks
desecrated the altar on 25 Kislev which was also the date of its rededication.
In these scripturally grounded, theologically underpinned narratives, repeti-
tion is explanatory and causal. (Occasional such comments from earlier in
the Greco-Roman tradition, such as Timaeus’ claim that Rome and
Carthage were founded in the same year, are exceptions rather than
a discursive norm, and, as we will see in chapter 7, simultaneity is
a problem for historiography.) Furthermore, such events designedly form
the aetiology of a festival remembrance. The exodus from Egypt is
announced to be the future festival of Passover before it has happened; the
occasion of the translation of the Torah into Greek, when the world went
dark for three days, is marked out for annual memorial. In this way,
singularities of the national story are transformed into the regulation of the
religious calendar’s repetition. As has been often stated and much debated
after Yerushalmi’s seminal book, Zakhor, the Talmud does not write or
engage with history, but with memory and, above all, religious regulation.7
Nor are matters different in other rabbinical writings: with the striking

6
Wolfson (2011) 147. Wolfson (2006, 2015) fascinatingly takes forward such issues into later Jewish
mysticism.
7
Yerushalmi (1982): the contrast with Jewish texts in Greek, for whom historiography is the ‘most
important Greek genre’ (Adams (2020) 299), is stark; see also Funkenstein (1989); Gafni (1996);
Neusner (2004) and the works cited below in chapter 6, n. 1. I have discussed this in Goldhill (2020)
194–235.

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 Telling Time 67
exception of the first-century ce Seder Olam, a unique and polemical book
of ‘exegetical chronography’, and in contrast with Hellenistic Jewish writers,
including Josephus, the rabbis show no historiographical interest.8
In this sense at least, according to the rabbinical world-view, the insistence
on halachic life – a society ruled by the regulation and debate of religious
law – is a timeless project. The historical time-frame does not affect the halachic
issue. The Talmud has no difficulty in imagining that the patriarchs, Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob went to yeshivah (rabbinic schools), and argued halachic issues,
although one might have thought that they were the first and only Jews in their
own time. This is not so much an anachronism, as an assumption of sameness
across time. When the Torah says of king Solomon, ‘I built houses, I planted
vineyards, I made gardens and orchards, I planted in them trees of all kinds of
fruit’, Midrash Kohelet Rabbah (2.4–8) analyses it to say: ‘buildings, this means
synagogues and schoolhouses; vineyards: this means rows of scholars who sit
like rows of vines; gardens and orchards: this means the great mishnayot
(religious regulations of the rabbis); trees of all kinds of fruit: this means the
Talmud’. The world is to be viewed now and forever through the lens of
rabbinic learning and practice. This all-embracing view may well be formed by
the stringent politicized concern of the rabbis for the boundaries of their own
world, a reflex of the porous and fragile boundaries of the Jewish community
after the destruction of the Temple and the loss of the possibility of self-
determination.9 Certainly the destruction of the Temple marks a divide in
practice, with the consequent allowance that cultic and domestic regulations
can change over time; and the broad generations of the earlier and later rabbis,
the tannaim and ammoraim, are recognized as having different authority.10 Yet
it is integral to rabbinic writing that the interconnection or separation of stories
is generally not expressed along a temporal axis, but through a network of
interrelated normative religious regulations. The narrative form of the Talmud
is not articulated according to a linear temporal succession. Contingency –
most directly theorized in ‘emergency laws’ – can indicate a specific moment in
time, but there is no sense of ‘olden days’, as with Roman writers, or that
different eras have different lineaments. Anachronism is not a pressing issue
because there are not two different times to compare.11

8
See Milikowsky (2014) from whom the phrase ‘exegetical chronography’ is taken; Stern (2001),
(2012); Bickerman (1968).
9
Boyarin (2015); Rubenstein (2003); Schwartz (2001); Kalmin (2006); Secunda (2013); Lapin (2012).
10
On the role of tradition within the Talmud, Vidas (2014) is a fascinating critique of the standard
view upheld by Rubenstein (2003); Halivni (2005); Friedman (2010).
11
Rood, Atack and Phillips (2020) – of course, I am tempted to add, sadly – despite their title include
neither Jewish nor Christian sources in their antiquity.

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 68 The Christian Invention of Time
Yet there is in the Talmud – at the same time – a fascination with telling
the time. Any mechanical technology for telling the time is barely mentioned
in the Talmud (and unlikely to have been regularly available to the students
of the Talmud). Yet the need for rituals to be observed at the correct time
motivates many long discussions. The beginning of the Tractate b. Berakhot
opens with a discussion of the timing for reciting the shema, the fundamental
liturgical prayer of Judaism. The shema says it should be recited ‘when you lie
down and when you rise up’ – evening and morning. From what time, then,
in the evening, and until what time, may it be said? The answer has two
forms. The first is a parallel: ‘From the time when the priests enter to eat the
teruma’, that is, the time of evening’s start is marked by another ritual, the
entrance of the cohenim into the temple to eat the fat of the evening sacrifice.
The second answer, however, is ‘Until the end of the first watch’ –
a diacritical temporal marker. The next pages consequently open an intricate
double argument, first about the parallel – can this be adequately defined
also as ‘when the stars appear’? Is it the same time as ‘when a poor man eats
bread’, mentioned elsewhere in such debates? Or when people go to eat their
Shabbat bread? – and second about the watch: how many watches of the
night are there, three or four? From what biblical verses can the case for
either number be made? If one text (Judges 7.19) says that Gideon ‘came to
the edge of the camp at the beginning of the middle watch’, it proves there
must be three watches, as ‘middle’ implies one before and one after; but if
two verses of a Psalm (Ps. 119.62/119.148) indicate that David rose at mid-
night (to study, of course) after two watches, surely there must be four
watches (two before and two after the midpoint). With a certain intellectual
flair, the text revels in inconclusively reconciling these apparent
contradictions.
This extended argument is exemplary for at least three interrelated
reasons: first for the network of different potential ways of marking time –
different ways of experiencing time as measurement, or seeing oneself
located in the right time as a social and religious positionality; second, for
its use of biblical verses to explore how to divide the night – for making time
a question of scriptural authority, thus requiring the expertise of rabbinical
interpretation; thirdly, for its insistence (and performance) that telling the
time is an epistemological crux. To tell the time requires knowing the time.
So, when a verse of the Bible reads ‘Thus saith the Lord, “About midnight,
I will go out into the midst of Egypt”’ (Ex. 11.4), it is immediately pointed
out that it cannot be God who says ‘about midnight’ as God certainly knows
time (as we have seen). Does this, then, mean that Moses did not know
exactly when midnight was? Rather, Moses calculated that if Pharaoh’s

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 Telling Time 69
astrologers made a mistake about when exactly midnight was, they would say
that Moses was a liar (it is added elsewhere, and they would thus doubt
God). So to say ‘about midnight’ is a motivated inaccuracy – a knowing
refusal to say ‘I know’ – to avoid getting entangled in a mess of false
expectations and accusations.
A witness called before the court, however, is granted the leniency of
human failing. ‘If one says “at the second hour”, and the other says “at the
third hour” their testimony stands’ (m Sanhedrin 5.3) A contradiction of
an hour between two witnesses is to be ignored. But ‘If one says “at the
third hour”, and the other says “at the fifth”, their testimony is rejected.
Rabbi Yehudah says it stands’. Two hours, it seems, is too large
a discrepancy, though there is a countervailing opinion. But, the mishnah
continues, ‘If one says “at the fifth hour”, and the other says “at the
seventh”, their testimony is rejected since at the fifth hour the sun is in
the east while at the seventh hour the sun is in the west’. When there is
a substantial, astronomical reason to make the difference between wit-
nesses less likely, that difference must be accounted for. The debate that
follows from this initial statement of the issue depends not just on human
inability to tell the time accurately – and thus challenging their role as
witnesses, where authoritative knowledge, precisely, is at stake – but also
on the frameworks of measurement. The physical difference of the sun
being in the east rather than the west makes it less plausible that time could
be confused between two witnesses. How tightly time can be measured and
thus form part of regulation becomes a pressing concern for religious
authority. This stretches to the calendar itself, where the recognition of
the precise date of the new moon depends on the witnesses who have seen
it, and where the difference between the lunar and solar calendars requires
the repeated recalibration of intercalated months to keep the festivals in
their proper seasons. Telling time is also the announcement of the proper
times of the religious calendar by the authorities. Indeed, for the rabbinical
communities of late antiquity, as we will see, the regulation and recogni-
tion of their community in and against the dominant structures of imperial
authority is maintained by the regularization and enforcement of their
lunar calendar against the Julian calendar, the time of empire: telling time
can become an act of community-building as resistance.12
The measurement of time, the ordering of the calendar, and the narra-
tives of time are three pillars of the following discussions, but it is the
connection between them that provides my focus: how telling time and

12
See Stern (2001), (2012); Feeney (2007); Kosmin (2018).

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 70 The Christian Invention of Time
telling stories are mutually implicative processes. Between counting,
accounting, recounting (or zählen and erzählen), how are the ordering of
narrative and the ordering of time to be interrelated?
*
Measuring time is obsessive. As is the historiography of time’s technolo-
gies. Histories of time are rarely brief.13
There are hundreds of thousands of baked clay tablets written in
Akkadian and Sumerian from the Assyrian kingdom, which reached its
zenith in the eighth and seventh centuries bce (and remained an object of
fascination for both the Israelite and Greek communities that remembered
the imperial figure of Senacherib in particular). These tablets record in
cuneiform script, amongst other lists and inscriptions, scholarly calcula-
tions of astronomical time. The educated elite of the court created ‘a highly
competitive atmosphere which drove intellectual innovation’.14 Their aim
appears to have been to determine through celestial omens the gods’ will,
and thus it was particularly important to have accurate predictions of the
times of solar and lunar eclipses, always especially dangerous moments.
Much Assyrian scholarship depended on their smart neighbours, the
Babylonians, against whom the Assyrian kings even organized library
raids. In the Assyrian Epic of Creation, however, the regularity of astro-
nomical measurement comes from divine creation. The god Marduk
creates time before the natural world or humankind. He sets the heavenly
bodies in place to follow a temporal pattern and thus mark out time (‘Time
comes into being with the heavens’, Plato wrote, many years later).15 ‘Go
forth every month’, Marduk says to the moon,
without fail as a crescent disc, at the beginning of the month, to wax over the
land. You shall shine with horns to mark out six days; on the seventh the disc
shall be half. On the fifteenth day you shall always be in opposition, at the
mid-point of each month . . . on the . . . thirtieth day you shall be in
conjunction with the sun again. (Tablet 5.16–22)
The calendar here is evidently made up of twelve thirty-day months. The
actual lunar year has fewer days, of course; the solar calendar more.

13
From a huge bibliography on modern time(s), let me single out Galison (2003); Wilcox (1987);
Sherman (1996); Gell (1992); Glennie and Thrift (2009); Bender and Welberry eds. (1991); Koselleck
(2004); Birth (2012); Buckley (1966); Clark (2019); Currie (2007); Landes (1983); Schlögel (2016).
14
Robson (2004) 46 – with further bibliography to which Haubold, Steele and Stevens eds. (2019) is
an important addition. The following paragraph follows Robson’s analysis. Rochberg (2020) looks
at the influence of Babylonian work on Hellenistic astronomy.
15
Tim. 38b6 discussed below pp. 165–9.

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 Telling Time 71
Reconciling these different frameworks involves a mass of continuing
scholarly activity of recalculation and intercalation. Astronomy provides
one technical system for measuring time (and we will return to its Christian
significance in chapters 12 and 13). The omens this system produces provide
an interface between the technology of time-telling and the structure of royal
power, and the performance of the rituals of power, which also make time
visible. The Assyrians, however, also kept limmu lists, lists of court officials,
and lists of kings, year by year, which construct a human deep history back
into the second millennium bce. Such genealogies, fictional and historical,
express, as ever, the self-representation of contemporary rule along with the
narratives of succession that make sense of dynastic transition – that develop,
that is, the discourse of authority. Telling time is deeply involved with the
statements of power.
In classical Athens from the fifth century bce, the technology of water-
clocks, which dated back many centuries in other cultures, was adapted
with loop-back systems to regulate flow, and utilized with greatest public
awareness in the courtroom to limit the time of speeches by defendants and
prosecutors. The clock became the sign of the court and its legal process.
(Plato, typically, has the conversation-hogging Socrates – a notable failure
in court – contrast the restricted flow of the water-clock with the unre-
stricted to and fro of true philosophical debate (Theaet. 172d).) The court-
rooms of Athens embodied the essential ideological tenet of democracy
that guaranteed equality before the law for all citizens, and the clocks
guaranteed equality of time between competing sides within the legal
process. Danielle Allen generalizes the point nicely: ‘Within the polis,
therefore, time as measurement primarily was a mark of citizenship and
privilege in Athens, separating politically powerful from powerless’.16
Regulating time is regulating the exercise of the public spectacles of
political power.
Rome, too, used the water-clock in the courtroom but its non-
democratic politics uses the technology in a tellingly different manner.
The court decided the amount of time allowed to each speaker, and under
the principate, looking back to the Republic, the control of the time of
speech became a contentious issue of political freedom: libera tempora
overlapped the liberal use of time with the time of political liberty. Pliny
in particular dramatizes ‘the perceived boundary between the rapid present
of the principate and the slow past of the republic’ in what he excoriates as
‘a conspiracy of haste among both speakers and judges’:17 ‘We fast track our

16 17
Allen (1996) 163. Ker (2009) 300, 290. See also Riggsby (2009) (and Riggsby (2003)).

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 72 The Christian Invention of Time
cases’, he laments in a letter, ‘using clepsydrae less numerous than the
number of days it once took for cases to be set forth’, paucioribus clepsydris
praecipitamus causas quam diebus explicari solebant (Ep. 6.2.6). Yet Pliny
himself is also capable of proudly boasting how in Trajan’s court he was
granted extra clepsydrae to make his case (Ep. 2.11) – reflecting the pulchrum
et antiquum ‘noble and ancient practice’ of the time of the Republic (a
simplification that Cicero’s description of being ordered to speak for only
half an hour might belie). Pliny also praises his own performance as a judge
because he grants speakers the time they require (Ep. 6.2.7–8). Pliny also
shows, that is, how amid the complaints about tempora, he earnestly
manipulates the possibilities of (self-)representation to project the possibil-
ity of good governance. The power of regulating time is negotiated as well
as exercised.
This connection between political control and the exercise of time is
a constant in the historiography of time. ‘Neither political Space nor
political Time are natural resources. They are ideologically constructed
instruments of power.’18 As the inscription on the clock-tower in Adana in
Turkey, built in the late Ottoman empire, declares with extraordinary
explicitness: ‘It seems like a clock striking but in fact it is the government
calling.’19 Social systems, as Niklas Luhmann argued, are intimately con-
nected with their temporal horizons, their comprehension of Weltzeit.20
Or, to use François Hartog’s productive expression, regimes of historicity,
which determine the self-awareness of a person through the interrelations
of past, present and future, depend on theories of time. This is nowhere
clearer than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where, as Reinhart
Koselleck’s seminal analysis of the ‘semantics of historical time’ asserts,
a new dominance of historical self-awareness and a new professionalization
of the discipline of history become prevalent: political regimes both write
the past in self-justifying, teleological narratives of their rise to power over
time, and display the past in similarly performative material and ritual
forms, from museums to coronations.21 As Chris Clark puts it, power
bends time to its own narrative – ‘regime chronopolitics’, each with its
own ‘distinctive temporal signature’.22 The Victorian fantasy of Merrie
Old England, or Walter Scott’s medievalism, or the German-speaking
states’ obsession with their Teutonic past, create an imagination of the
past that informs the political dreams of the future, and explains the
political engagement of the present. It is not by chance that the very

18 19 20
Fabian (1983) 144. Wishnitzer (2015) 149. Luhmann (1975), (1982).
21 22
Koselleck (2004). Clark (2019) 16, 211.

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 Telling Time 73
concept of heritage takes its now instrumental cultural and political shape
only in the nineteenth century.23 Periodization takes on a new ideological
force in such nationalist narratives – terms endemic to this book such as
‘Hellenistic’ or even ‘late antiquity’ are intellectually loaded construc-
tions of this era24 – and a heightened consciousness of ‘living in the
present moment’, in ‘modernity’, is symptomatic of the time’s self-
consciousness and rhetoric. Industrialization is a crucial part of this
process of the ordering of time. A national time – time should be
measured on the same scale across the jurisdiction of a nation state – is
introduced because of the need of harmonizing railway timetables,
a system dependent on the accuracy of timepieces as well as the state’s
will and power to enforce it.25 With the transformations of transport,
which reduces distances by speed, time itself seems to hurry, or at least the
experience of travel brings a vivid sense of acceleration, the feeling of
time, as well as the landscape, rushing by. Work and days are reorganized
by industrial capitalism’s insistence that time is money, and ‘time-
discipline’ and ‘time-thrift’ become categories instrumental in defining
work through efficiency and productivity in a set time rather than
through tasks completed according to the order of time. As
Wordsworth wrote, from his Romantic longing for a different artisanal
understanding of a relation to work and the natural world, labouring men
and women are now overseen by ‘Stewards of our labour, watchful men |
And skilful in the usury of time . . .’.26 In this ‘usury of time’ – wonderful
phrase – punctuality is a virtue, wasting time a grievous error. By
contrast, the first state prison in England, with its forced inactivity of
timed incarceration, is also a nineteenth-century introduction. Now
punishment is – for the first time? – to be measured by time, time ‘inside’,
time judged to fit the crime: prisoners will henceforth have to ‘do time’.
Through the nineteenth century, the organization of historical time into
a universal developmental model grounds political movements, investing
terms such as ‘revolution’, ‘progress’, ‘the state’ with new force. Marxism’s
passion for explaining the past in service of a normative future is only the
most obvious example where a theory of work and industrialism’s time-
keeping explains how the experience of everyday time is embedded
in a model of the necessary unfurling of a universal development of

23
Swenson (2013).
24
See e.g. Momigliano (1994) on Droysen; Lianeri ed. (2011); Herzog (2002a) on ‘Late Antiquity’. See
also Bowersock, Brown and Grabar (1999); Rousseau ed. (2009); Brown (1998).
25
See Galison (2003); Wilcox (1987); Sherman (1996); Birth (2012).
26
Wordsworth, Prelude 5.378–9. See Sennett (2008), (2005).

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 74 The Christian Invention of Time
politico-historical time.27 This politicized notion of a universal time –
‘Godless, continuous, empty and homogenous’28 – continues to ground
the narratives of political dominance.29 (Chakrabarty may be right to
emphasize ‘godless’, but the contrast, easy to oversimplify, between
Catholic ideals of church tradition and Protestant notions of reformation
also underlie this historiography, especially in Western Protestant univer-
sity environments, as is demonstrated by the ease with which the so-called
Protestant work ethic is assimilated to such economic models of modern-
ity.) Geology, however, was the discipline that, with greatest immediate
shock value, revolutionized Victorian comprehension of deep time.30
Geology produced a model of the long history of the material world
which challenged in particular the possibility of traditional Christian
chronology, Protestant or Catholic, with its commitment to the limited
span of time in its eschatological vision. In its invention of stratigraphy,
geology also offered a way of conceptualizing, representing and articulating
the past, which, in combination with later evolutionary science, made cyclical
or non-dynamic natural history harder to maintain. ‘Revolutions still more
remote appeared in the distance of this extraordinary perspective (of geology)’,
as one challenged scientist wrote, striving to capture his sense of wonder, ‘The
mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.’31 As with
Darwin’s vision of the infinite number of generations each contributing to the
incremental work of evolution, so the abyss of geological time, stretching,
unendingly, into the past and the future, terrified, excited and overwhelmed
imaginations in the nineteenth century – and both geological and evolution-
ary biological theory profoundly influenced the narrative of the novel, for
example, as scholars, extending the revelatory work of Gillian Beer, have
outlined tellingly. ‘Comte, Hegel, Darwin, Spencer and Marx shared the
idea that philosophies, nations, social systems, or living forms become what
they are as a result of progressive transformation in time, that any present form
contains vestiges of all that has gone before.’32 For some, the very word vestiges
will recall Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, one of
the nineteenth century’s most provocative books in such a tradition.33 In

27
See e.g. Buckley (1966); Burrow (1981); Bowler (1989); Fritzsche (2004); Hesketh (2011);
Koditscheck (2011).
28
Chakrabarty (1997) 36; see also the other essays in Lowe and Lloyd eds. (1997); and the trenchant
Davis (2008).
29
Chakrabarty (2000); Jameson (2002); Banerjee (2006).
30
Lyell (1837): see Rudwick (1992), (2005), (2008); Secord (1986).
31
Playfair (1805) Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 5: 73.
32
Kern (2003) 51. See Beer (1983) and e.g. Shuttleworth (1984); Buckland (2013).
33
See the wonderful Secord (2000).

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 Telling Time 75
short, between historiography, science, literature, theology and political the-
ory, how both the deep time of the past and the everyday time of social life are
to be comprehended and narrated has become a battleground of competing
theories of time and forms of narrative. Telling time is integral to these
discourses of authority and power, and telling time is instrumental in how
these discourses changed everyday life, its comprehension and exercise, in the
nineteenth century and beyond. Who is to control the telling of time? When
Philip Gosse, fundamentalist Christian and biologist, was laughed into public
humiliation for suggesting that God placed fossils on earth as fossils, he
became a lightning rod for the profound differences between religious and
non-religious understandings of time.34 Can we write a history of telling time,
then, without turning back to God’s time?
One starting point for such a history might be Aristotle. In Book 4 of his
Physics, Aristotle gives a compressed account of time that has provoked
many responses over the centuries.35 He begins with three paradoxes about
the very existence of time, for which he surprisingly does not offer solu-
tions. First, he asks: if time is made up of the past, which has been but is
not, and the future which will be, but is not, how can time participate in
being, since it is made up thus of non-being – what is not. Second, if
something is divisible, its parts must exist. But time is divided into the past,
which is not; and the future, which is not, and cannot be made up of just
‘nows’. Third, he asks: is the now always different or always the same? The
now cannot be different, he argues. If the current time (now) is three
o’clock, when will the instant be when this now will have ceased to be? It
cannot be at three o’clock, for that is when the moment exists. It cannot be
the very next instant because two instants cannot be next to each other. If
there is a gap between the first and second instant, the gap itself can always
be divided. So if one were to say, it ceases to exist at three o’clock plus
one second, what about three o’clock plus half a second? Does the now
exist then? If it does, the instant was not three o’clock; if it does not exist, it
did not cease at three o’clock plus one second. And so on in infinite regress.
But if the two instants are without division, there is no moment when the
first ceases to exist and the second exists; events of the past would be,
impossibly, co-existent with events in the present.

34
Brilliantly told in Gosse (1907).
35
See Annas (1975); the seminal Sorabji (1983); the fully detailed Coope (2005), and, for modern
response e.g. Mellor (1981), each with extended further bibliography. Garcia (2014) 177–88 shows
incisively why the positions of McTaggart, Broad, Merrick and others back to Kant are destined to
‘lead to impasses’ (182).

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 76 The Christian Invention of Time
These three paradoxes have fascinated modern philosophers of time, and
they have argued extensively and intently about Aristotle’s possible solu-
tions, and traced the solutions to such problems of the instant and of
change that are to be found in other ancient and medieval thinkers – and
we have already begun to see how engrossed Augustine was in a similar
array of concerns about the disappearing presentness of human time,
already lost to memory and anticipating the future, as it is experienced.
Aristotle goes on to argue that change and mind are preconditions for the
existence of time, and to define time as a ‘number of motion with respect to
the before and after’, ὁ χρόνος ἀριθμὸς ἐστι κινήσεως κατὰ τὸ πρότερον
καὶ ὕστερον (220a25): change is essential to the recognition of time, as is, it
seems, an ensouled being to recognize it. Whether ‘number’ necessarily
implies a quantity that can be counted has been debated by philosophers,
as has almost every aspect of Aristotle’s dense few pages. Yet for my
purposes here, rather than rehearsing the book-length debates about the
precise sense and implications of Aristotle’s argument, it is more important
to note that Aristotle offers a theoretical account within a model of physics
that does not refer to divine causation, nor insist on calendrical require-
ments, nor even debate at length about what it is to inhabit time; rather, he
tries to argue about time itself. Telling time, for Aristotle, is a tightly
focused philosophical project. Far from an engagement with the spectacles
of politics, law and regulation, Aristotle’s mode of telling time is resolutely
abstract, rebarbative in its intellectual austerity, and, in contrast with
Hartog’s regimes of historicity and Clark’s historicity of regimes, search-
ing, it seems, for a universal – a timeless – definition of time.
This Aristotelian project also has a long heritage. Were we to return to
the nineteenth century, we could happily follow Peter Galison’s detailed
studies of Poincaré, for example, whose work on simultaneity was funda-
mental in the lead-up to Einstein’s publication of four seminal papers on
time in 1905.36 (Richard Sorabji, with a certain delight in his own unusual
lack of restraint, declares that only Einstein has made a contribution to the
theory of time of comparable ground-breaking novelty to Aristotle.)37 We
might also enjoy the tales of the experimental failures to capture simultan-
eity in signal transmission across the English Channel, which, like so many
other Anglo-French collaborations, broke down into mutual accusations of
incompetence. The international adoption of Greenwich Mean Time was
seen in France as a national insult and resisted for some years – another
example of the unfortunate interface of the science of time and nationalist

36 37
Galison (2003). Sorabji (1983).

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 Telling Time 77
ideology. Such a history of telling time would also follow the especially rich
recent bibliography on the development of the technology of timepieces,
from the long, experimental struggle to measure longitude accurately –
a project which was certainly neither austere nor abstracted from the
politics of money-making and empire – through the equally fascinating
story of clock-making, to today’s removal of time-telling from any relation
to the heavens – atomic clocks use the electromagnetic transitions in the
hyperfine structure of the caesium-133 atom, accurate, it is boasted, to the
equivalent of the loss of one second in 20 million years.38 This history
would note how for many centuries it was barely necessary or possible to
measure time in daily life with more precision than an hour (a measure that
in itself shifted in length through the year as it usually represented a twelfth
of a day or the twelfth of a night, which thus expanded and contracted
according to the season); how clocks and then watches introduced both
more accurate and more personally owned expressions of precise time-
keeping (the stories of Pepys, walking the streets of London to test his new
watch’s accuracy, are paradigmatic of how behaviour was changed by this
technology); to the most recent nanotechnology that claims to measure
time in extraordinarily small divisions, that are barely imaginable. When
measurement claims to reach 247 × 10−21 of a second (247 zeptoseconds), is
this still telling time? Under such circumstances we might be reminded of
where Aristotle started his reflections, that time exists, ‘barely, obscurely’.
It might seem, therefore – and this has often been argued – that from the
Enlightenment onwards, modernity is thus distinguished by an increasing
secularization of time. Isaac Newton is one of the highest high priests of
Enlightenment science, but he was also a committed Christian who
‘undertook an extraordinary programme of creative theological research,
whose expansiveness, originality and radicalism was matched by only
a handful of contemporaries’ (including spending many of his scientific
hours calculating the dimensions of the Temple of Jerusalem).39 When it
comes to Time, however, Newton writes what could stand as the credo of
such secular belief: ‘Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself and
from its own nature, flows uniformly, without regard to anything
external’.40 So, it has been claimed, at the turning point of the beginning
of the nineteenth century, ‘the linear, rather than the tabular historical

38
See e.g. Landes (1983); Wilcox (1987); Sherman (1996); Gay (2003); Glennie and Thrift (2009); for
seafaring as well as railways as a major influence see Ishibashi (2014); for the politics of national time
see Bartky (2000); for the Ottoman empire, the fascinating Wishnitzer (2015); on Egypt, Barak
(2013); for Greenwich time in England see Rooney and Nye (2009).
39
Iliffe (2013); and see Iliffe (2016) for the full story. 40 Newton (1846) 77.

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 78 The Christian Invention of Time
timeline, the visual representation of time so familiar to us to be unre-
markable, became a hegemonic temporal metaphor’.41 Although quantum
physics in the wake of Einstein came to change the game at least for science,
it still appears that measuring time is generally treated as a regular physical
event; and, in social life, time is invested with a mundane expectation of
linear regularity; across the world, time is time is time. We glance at our
watch or phone, and move on . . .
But things are not quite so simple, and not only because of quantum
physics’ destabilization of the basic ideas of simultaneity, ‘uniform flow’,
and uncertainty. Virginia Woolf, herself a high priestess of modernism and
its narratives, captures one factor. ‘An hour, once it lodges in the queer
element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times
its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented
on the timepiece of the mind by one second.’42 The experience of time
resists the regularity of measurement: boredom stays time; excitement
accelerates it. For Woolf, time is not in the province of the regular, but
the queer.43 Her own style of writing – like that of James Joyce – attempts
to capture this ‘queer element’ of human consciousness, but such writing is
inconceivable without its contextualization in modernist psychology, par-
ticularly Sigmund Freud, and modernist theories of time, especially Henri
Bergson, as was recognized at the time. Wyndham Lewis declared: ‘Mr
Joyce is very strictly of the school of Bergson-Einstein-Stein-Proust. He is
of the great time-school they represent.’44 He could have added Freud.
Freud, translated into English by Woolf’s friend, James Strachey, and
published by her husband, Leonard Woolf, always insisted on the indes-
tructability of the content of the unconscious. What is repressed will return
(Wiederkehr des Verdrängten). It is essential to Freud’s view of temporality
and causation that these lasting experiences, memory-traces, impressions
are revised and refitted to new circumstances, a process he termed
Nachträglichkeit, ‘deferred revision’. The stratification of the mind – and
the archaeological metaphor is not arbitrary – keeps the past in the present,
and, much as the past impacts on the psychology of the present, so too
through Nachträglichkeit the present changes the past. The time of the
mind is not linear, even and especially when considering sexual

41
West-Pavlov (2013) 68. 42 Woolf (1928) 98.
43
The idea of ‘queer time’ has been especially taken up in medieval and early modern studies recently:
see Dinshaw (2012); Freccero (2006). As with antiquity, the current discussions of ‘queer time’ in
medieval Europe do not discuss how straight time seems to become culturally hegemonic only in the
Enlightenment and its aftermath.
44
Lewis (1927) 89.

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 Telling Time 79
development. The compulsion to repeat (Wiederholungszwang) is the most
telling symptom of the failing repression of the past in the present.45 Both
Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and James Joyce’s Ulysses are novels that take place
in a single day and have thus a unitary temporal structure (the repeated
ringing of Big Ben in Mrs Dalloway sounds out the clock of linear time),
but each seeks to represent the multiform, non-linear, layered conscious-
ness of its hero/ine. Each plays out the tension between the forward drive of
the book’s telling and the fragmented, echoing, interconnecting making of
sense – between the linear progress of the narrative and a multi-directional,
fissiparous experience of narrative. For both Joyce and Woolf, the time of
the mind cannot be adequately fitted to the time of the clock.
Virginia Woolf hand-set ‘The Waste Land’ by T. S. Eliot. The
career of Eliot – another of the high priests of modernism – could be
marked out between the bleakest version of time’s arrow in ‘Fragment
of an Agon’:
Birth, and copulation, and death.
That’s all, that’s all, that’s all, that’s all,
Birth, and copulation, and death.
and the famous opening of the ‘Four Quartets’ that draws not just on these
modernist psychologies and theories of time, but also on Augustine:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
In between these two poems, Eliot had converted to Anglo-Catholicism,
which Woolf wrongly predicted he would quickly drop like the bones from

45
See, from within the hothouse of psychoanalytic literature, Laplanche (1999a), (1999b), (1999c),
(2017), better than the deeply disappointing Green (2002).

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 80 The Christian Invention of Time
an eaten herring.46 Eliot resists the idea of an eternal present in the name of
redemption, and the echoes of possibility (‘perhaps’, the performed hesita-
tion in theorizing), set against the inevitability of the ‘one end’, redeemed
by his religion. Eliot, too, insists on the echo in the mind as the experience
of consciousness (‘footfalls echo in the memory’) and turns it back on his
readers: ‘My words echo, thus, in your mind’, insisting, like Augustine that
reading, the experience of language – logos – is integral to the understand-
ing of time. Here, for the modernist Eliot, his religious hope as much as his
sense of consciousness stand against the simple directional flow of time’s
arrow. The triumph of secularization will have to wait.
Digressions knowingly disrupt and draw attention to the interconnec-
tion of narrative and time. (‘Let us talk of something else, for a while . . .’).
I have taken this briefest of detours through more recent centuries partly
because some of the very best theoreticians of time have worked on this era
and the mobilization of their insights cannot take place without such
contextualization. Partly, when considering time, of all subjects, it would
be crass to think that the study of antiquity can take place as a view from
nowhere, no time – an appeal to disinterested objectivity that will be
discussed in the coming chapters: I write from within a modern set of
assumptions about time that I hope, over time, to be able to make more
visible. How time is told changes over the centuries, and how such
technologies and theorizations change narrative form is also revealed
vividly by this later history. It is a history of appropriation and changes
of self-understanding, as well as technology or philosophy, that lets us see
what might be meant when we privilege any ancient ideas as ‘influential’ –
and thus to appreciate more precisely our own stake in such a history. We
see what is specific to both, when the ancient and modern worlds are
mirrored in each other, across the divide of the Christian invention of time.
That is why such a digression as this is integral to my narrative.

*
The Roman day had its order, certainly. Martial, a poet with an extraor-
dinary eye for the disruptive in the mundane, captures this potential for the
compulsion of routine with characteristic vividness (4.8.1–7):
The first and second hours wear out the clients,
the third puts to work the hoarse lawyers,

46
‘Drop Christianity with his wife, as one might empty fishbones after the herring’. Letter to Francis
Birrell, 3 September 1933, cited in Cooper (1995) 200 n. 3.

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 Telling Time 81
Rome stretches her various labours till the fifth hour,
the sixth will give rest to the tired, the seventh will bring an end,
the eighth to ninth is enough for oily wrestling matches,
the ninth commands us to pile up cushions and crush them,
the tenth is the hour for my little poetry books . . .
The poem goes on to explain that it is only late, and at a decent party,
that his poetry should come to the eyes of the emperor. The roll-call of the
hours of the day – the clichés of mundane expectation – is a build up to the
moment of relaxation when Martial’s voice can dare be heard. The day is
but a prelude to a moment of the night. As so often, Martial’s description
of the city-life of Rome and its power dynamics is also a self-serving search
for his own place on the map, in this case, the map of time.47
Rome, too, had its timepieces to help with such a map. Augustus set up
a huge sundial in the forum, his horologeum, an expression of power over space
and time: ‘the emperor measured time in such a way to show his natural
destined part in its progress’.48 Petronius imagines that Trimalchio had
a water-clock with a trumpeter (real or mechanical? Vitruvius explains the
technique at 11.11) to sound out the hours, a sign of his vulgar extravagance,
and the sort of innovation that makes Pliny the Elder grumpy. Astrologers
calculated times through the maps of the heavens with great precision (and
threat) and it seems that the most complex chronological machine as yet
discovered from antiquity, the Antikythera mechanism, was designed for such
astrological calculations.49 Yet in later antiquity, Christianity, at least
Christianity in its more extreme forms of monasticism, radically altered
how the hours of the day were calibrated and experienced.
Anthony retreated to the Egyptian desert to live a solitary life of
a hermit, and others followed his example – though not always to his
extreme of fasting, prayer and solitude: reading the life of Anthony was
a tipping point in Augustine’s conversion, but he never saw the need to
find a cave to live in; Jerome took his staff and library with him on his
retreat in the Holy Land. Pachomius, however, starting around 318, organ-
ized a group of these individual ascetics into a novel community at
Tabennisi in Egypt. The very term monastery, with its root, monos,
‘alone’, marks the paradox of the community of solitaries.50 By the time

47
See Fitzgerald (2007); Rimell (2008); and Wolkenhauer (2019), with Ker (2019).
48
Allen (1996) 165. In relation to Paul, see Nasrallah (2019) 199–223.
49
Jones (2017) sums it up. Talbert (2017) takes us from public grandeur to the hand-held. See Hannah
(2020a) and (2020b) for short summaries. For the fullest account of ancient timepieces, with
pictures, see Winter (2013).
50
See Rousseau (1985), with the background of Rousseau (1978).

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 82 The Christian Invention of Time
of his death in 348, there were eight other groups of what became known as
‘cenobitic’ communities (‘communities of shared life’), and in the next
generation the number of monks involved in such institutional living
swelled into the thousands. Pachomius was the first to write a code for
such monastic living and he organizes the day around the liturgy – regular
prayers at regular hours – and expects the times in between to be spent on
manual labour and spiritual reflection. Although the flight to the desert
constituted a sort of ‘anti-city’ (as Peter Brown memorably describes it),
the cenobitic monastery was also productive, a highly organized factory of
manual and spiritual labour.51 Indeed, for the families of Basil and
Gregory – Basil was instrumental in the foundation of eastern
monasticism52 – such religious institutions were based on their existing
wealthy estates and consciously avoided the extreme ascetism of an
Anthony. The life of the monastery remained for many centuries
a model of Christian time.
No figure is more salient in this history than John Cassian, not least
because he was bilingual in Latin and Greek, and brought the principle of
monastic regulation in the style of Pachomius’ Rule to the West.53 He
visited monasteries in Egypt, and returned to export Pachomius’ paradigm.
Cassian’s Institutes are full of instructions for the precise, repeated and
zealously regulated use of time, including the night. Here is a typical rule
for the monk entrusted with waking the others for night-time prayer
(Inst. 2.17):
But he who has been entrusted with the office of summoning the religious
assembly and with the care of the service should not presume to rouse the
brethren for their daily vigils irregularly, as he pleases, or as he may wake up
in the night, or as the accident of his own sleep or sleeplessness may incline
him. But, although daily habit may constrain him to wake at the usual hour,
yet by often and anxiously ascertaining by the course of the stars the
right hour for service, he should summon them to the office of prayer, lest
he be found careless in one of two ways: either if, overcome with sleep, he
lets the proper hour of the night go by, or if, wanting to go to bed and
impatient for his sleep, he anticipates it, and so may be thought to have
secured is own repose instead of attending to the spiritual office and the rest
of all the others.
Time is to be regulated assiduously; daily habit retrained; precision
required. Cassian even tells us at what time of day a monk might be
51
Brown (1988). See also Gaca (2009). 52 See Rousseau (1985) 190–232.
53
Rousseau (1978); Markus (1990) 181–8; Stewart (1998); Driver (2013) (with full bibliography), all of
whom cite Chadwick (1950).

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 Telling Time 83
afflicted by depression (akēdia, usually translated as spiritual ‘sloth’) –
especially the fifth to sixth hour, it seems.
Benedict’s Rule is perhaps the most influential monastic regulation over
the centuries. It is influenced by Basil’s Rule, but has a far more rigorous
expression of how time is to be controlled.54 Seven compulsory religious
services at specific junctures (the seven so-called Canonical Hours) are
supplemented by night-time vigils; meal times are to be taken at specific
times in different seasons; the length of daily work is stipulated. In a way
that is unparalleled in antiquity, the monastic rules insist that every hour
counts and must be counted; that repetitive, stringent observance of such
rules of time are integral to spiritual salvation; that such observance is
indeed an ‘office’, an imposed duty, willingly upheld. In chapter 14, we will
see how this institutionalization becomes part of internal life. The rule of
the monastery provides a template in which the distinction either of kairos
and of chronos, or of work and leisure, does not apply: all time is regulated
to direct humans towards the worship of God.
Are there ways in which the industrious factory that is the monastery
looks forward to the industrial factory of the nineteenth century?55 The
daily time that Christianity established makes the logic of my earlier brief
digression on the modern history of time-telling, I hope, clearer. We will
return to calendars, eras and the end of days before long: Christianity
insists that time is unthinkable outside religious history and the
Christian year (God’s time).56 But for the mundane telling of the time
of day Christianity bequeathed a newly demanding idea of time that is
not just regular, regulated, ritualized, but also stridently repetitive and
compulsive. Looking to God re-orders how life is seen, and the technol-
ogy of temporal control is integral to how God’s time and human life are
shaped. Unlike the violent and bloody tales of saints in pursuit of the
crown of martyrdom, and unlike the Talmud, which images the necessity
of a constant questioning and exploration of what correct halacha is, the
monastic rule idealizes the tautological narrative of regulations obedi-
ently followed. We might ask if this extreme religious ordering of time
leaves any narrative that is not of transgression or temptation. Is not the
best monk a man without a story? Is not the desire for God’s

54
See Zerubavel (1981) 33–69; Adam (1995) 64–6 who is typical in taking the regula teleologically as the
model of the modern schedule, without regard for its religious foundations.
55
Weber (1981) [1923] 365.
56
Keble’s The Christian Year was one of the nineteenth-century’s bestselling books, which capitalized
on the link between daily devotion and reading – instituting the domestic performance of Christian
time: see Tennyson (1981); Blair (2012); Lysack (2019).

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 84 The Christian Invention of Time
timelessness – or even eternity – a desire for no more narrative? A man not
so much without qualities, as without a story. Or, rather, does the
necessity of temptation, which the Fall makes inevitable, mean that we
know that such a story without conflict, without a hesitation, without
a crisis, is impossible to tell?

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 chapter 4

Waiting

One answer to the questions posed at the end of the last chapter is to
recognize that Christianity gives new and powerful and transformative
impetus to the question, ‘What are you waiting for?’. That is this chapter’s
subject.
When the disguised Odysseus, after twenty years away, finally sees his
father, the old man is in his orchard, and the pathetic recognition scene
turns on the recollection of how Laertes had once named these trees for his
son.1 Leaves like the things of man . . . The recognition that will guarantee
the full genealogical significance of Odysseus’ constantly repeated patro-
nymic, ‘son of Laertes’, details another act of naming, naming tied to the
long-term promise of husbandry that always plants for the future. To ‘cut
down the olive trees’, a constant threat of ancient warfare, still being
replayed, is not just to damage the resources of another state but to commit
a brutal act that aims to wipe out the possibility of a future for the enemy.
A passage in the Talmud makes the ideology of planting explicit
(Ta’anit 23a):
One day, Honi was walking along the road when he saw a certain man
˙
planting a carob tree. Honi said to him: This tree, after how many years will
it bear fruit? The man˙ said to him: It will not produce fruit until seventy
years have passed. Honi said to him: Is it obvious to you that you will live
seventy years, that ˙you expect to benefit from this tree? The man said to
Honi: I myself found a world full of carob trees. Just as my ancestors planted
˙ me, I too am planting for my descendants.
for
Honi is a celebrated figure in rabbinical mythology whose magical
˙ were strong enough to bring rain in drought. Yet here – a familiar
prayers
trope of traditional tales of traditional wisdom – he learns from a simple
man, tied to the soil and the generations of men, about how to think of

1
Henderson (1997).

85

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 86 The Christian Invention of Time
waiting for the future. The story takes on a more pointed polemic when it
comes to the Messiah. In Midrash Avot Derabbi Natan, a commentary on
Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers, a text which begins with a genealogy of
transmitted wisdom from the revelation on Mount Sinai, there is this truly
amazing injunction (31):
If you had a sapling in your hand and were told that the Messiah had come,
first plant the sapling (and then go out to greet the Messiah).
The announcement that the Messiah has come should not stop you
planting for the future. There is a pragmatic caution when it comes to
eschatology. After waiting so long, and so many false messiahs, better to
guarantee the planting for the future before going to greet the figure who
will bring the end of things as they are. Anticipating, expecting, waiting for
the end is what humans do.
There is a wry recognition of the mix of hope and disappointment in this
pronouncement of Midrash Avot Derabbi Nathan. Back in 1961, the British
comedian Peter Cook, part of Beyond the Fringe, wrote a celebrated satirical
sketch about a millennial group awaiting the end of the world. When the
predicted moment of destruction passed uneventfully (again), the dialogue
concluded with the hilariously bathetic line, ‘Not quite the conflagration
I’d been banking on’. Anticipating the end of days, however, was a deadly
serious concern of early Christianity, a concern which changed how it was
thought possible to engage in everyday life and its continuity. For many
today inhabiting the anthropocene, there is an anxiety of similar propor-
tions, though with a very different hope: if destruction is predicted, how,
then, is daily life to be lived? There is a pressing politics in awaiting the end.
The most read epics of antiquity are structured around delay – about
willed, forced or misguided waiting. In the Iliad, Achilles spends seventeen
books refusing to fight because of the slight to his honour. The death of
Patroclus changes the motivation of his return – it is loss of a different
calibre that drives him to re-commit to his own inevitable young death – but
the structure of delay and fulfilment is integral to the moral compass of the
work: the foundational question of what is it worth dying for is given
narratological form in the narrative of refusal and re-commitment. The
Iliad, however, anticipates but never represents the death of Achilles. For
that, the readers too must wait. In the Odyssey, Odysseus is delayed for ten
years from making his return. Seven years with Calypso, concealed;
one year with Circe: both wish to make him their husband, to extend his
stay in a permanent domesticity that fractures and distorts the home-life to
which he wishes to return. With the deceitful and dangerous Circe,

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 Waiting 87
Odysseus has to be reminded by his crew to leave, as if for once the hero has
found his desire to travel back obscured. Even when he reaches Ithaca, kills
the suitors and returns to Penelope’s bed, he immediately announces that
the end has not yet been attained and he has another journey to make,
a journey to an unmappable place that does not know the sea, which
Teiresias has indicated is a necessary destination before he can reach home
properly. Each step on Ithaca marks thus the ‘not yet’ of return, each
threshold is a temporary point of passage. Odysseus’ unending delay makes
Penelope the archetype of waiting (the sort of time which Fränkel saw as
mere chronos). Weaving and unweaving the shroud of her father-in-law is
a potent symbol of this stasis: awaiting Laertes’ death; awaiting the return
of her husband; doing and undoing, to stay still. The discovery of her
complicity with delay is one catalyst for the plot to reach its end. For both
the Iliad and the Odyssey, however, full of many deaths as well as the
representation of the underworld, the end that is the death of the hero is
deferred, and marks the ends for which they struggle as temporary and tear-
stained: Odysseus will not manage to reach and stay at home; Achilles
wishes to die because he has lost Patroclus. This melancholic structure
invests delay with the double force of the ‘not yet’, not yet the defining
victory, not yet the tragedy of heroic loss.
The two epics that redefine this ‘not yet’ most strikingly are Quintus of
Smyrna’s Posthomerica and Lucan’s Pharsalia.2 For Lucan, the politics of
deferral is a resistance to the principate. The victory of Caesar, the triumph
of Octavian, bring the disaster, as Lucan sees it, of imperial power. As long
as the poet can keep Caesar from crossing the Rubicon, the advent of
imperial tyranny is kept at an imagined distance. The horror of civil war,
mapped in the violent distortions of the language of fraternal equality and
fraternal (self-)destruction, is itself even a terrible bulwark against the
political closure that is inevitable but hated. Lucan’s poetry is a tortured
resistance to its own end.
The Posthomerica begins with a ‘when’ – a connective back to the end of the
Iliad – and ends with a storm, a narrative device that so often marks the crucial
turning point at the start of an epic, and an anticipation of the Odyssey to
come.3 Quintus’ epic is located between Homer’s two epics, as a continuation
and a connection. There are two narrative vectors in the Posthomerica,
however, that pull in opposite directions. On the one hand, there is the
parade of the stories and destructions of major heroes: Penthesileia, Memnon,

2
On Quintus see Greensmith (2020); Maciver (2012); on Lucan see Henderson (1987); Masters (1992).
3
Greensmith (2020); Maciver (2012); Bär (2007).

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 88 The Christian Invention of Time
Achilles, Ajax. Then Neoptolemus arrives. Paris is killed by Philoctetes. In
Book 11, both sides fight to a standstill, and that leads to the opening of 12:
‘there was no end of war’. This vector is the drive forwards of the battle
narrative. On the other hand, there is a second vector which also culminates in
the fight to a standstill in Book 11. This is made up of the continual delays to
this drive. There are more funeral scenes in the Posthomerica than in the Iliad
and Odyssey combined, as the fighting repeatedly grinds to an exhausted halt
for the collecting and burial of the dead. The heroes on both sides, especially
the Trojans, lament the length of the war. Enthusiasm and terror oscillate,
leaving neither side in a dominant position. These thematics of delay are
mirrored at the narratological level by the constant turn to simile, epitaph,
ecphrasis as a retardation of the action. This second vector makes repetitive
gestures of delay the defining movement of the narrative. The poetics of the
interval are defined thus by these competing vectors: on the one hand, the
impulse of battle narrative with its structure of winners and losers, violent
triumph and abject defeat, which cannot however reach the climactic fulfil-
ment of either sacking the ships or sacking the city (and even when the city is
sacked, once simply fighting is rejected, the narrative goes on to the further
destruction of the storm and . . . so on); on the other, the repeated move away
from the battlefield in similes and other gestures of delay – to the extent that
by Book 12 it has become clear that the impulse of battle is a stalemate: but no
end. As Emma Greensmith has brilliantly shown, the interval summons
a poetics of stasis.4 We are left waiting for the sack of Troy. As the prologue
of Book 1 programmatically announces, ἔμιμνον . . . ἔμιμνον, ‘they were
waiting’ . . . ‘they were waiting’. The interval is the place where we wait.
Virgil’s Aeneas may be pius, ‘dutiful’, but he is also invitus, ‘unwilling’:
he does not desire to leave Dido in Book 4 of the Aeneid. In the Aeneid,
written after historiography has recalibrated the writing of time, the
foundational is now necessarily political and imperial.5 The story of
Rome’s beginnings is a story for the powers that be. The vision in the
underworld is a prediction of history to come, a teleology of power. Much
as Hesiod does, Virgil uses the narration of the past to explain how things
must be what they are. It is a prospect that promises its own timelessness:
His ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono; imperium sine fine dedi – Jupiter
promises ‘For the Romans I place no boundaries on things, no time: power
without limit I grant’ (Aen. 1.278–9).6 It is against such a promise of lasting
empire that Aeneas’ crushed desire to stay with Dido is articulated as

4 5
Greensmith (2020). Hardie (1986).
6
For the Christian reappropriation of this phrase, see e.g. Prud. In Sym. 1.542; 2.541.

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 Waiting 89
a necessary step towards the foundation of Rome. Delay here is
a temporary and temporalizing block on the inexorable passage of history.
Yet not only does there remain a provocative openness about the ending
of the Aeneid that, as Philip Hardie in particular has explored, prompted
later Latin poets into varied theoretically and ideologically laden gestures of
closure, but also it is against this foundational tradition embodied in the
Aeneid that Ovid in his Metamorphoses, wilfully, knowingly and brilliantly,
sets his epic’s swirls of narratives of change, a poem without end
(perpetuum . . . carmen, Met. 1.4), where even and especially the origins
(coeptis, Met. 1.2) are ceaselessly open to transformation (mutastis, Met.
1.2).7 Against the empire without end, Ovid constructs the subversive
poem of change without end. The prologue promises a story ad mea . . .
tempora, ‘up to my times’, but the epilogue promises that what will last for
ever (perennis, indelibilis) is the poem itself and with it Ovid’s fame: vivam
is its last word: ‘I will live’. Stories of identity, power, the past, in Ovid’s
hands change and threaten to keep changing beyond the ideological
projection and regulatory power of imperial continuity. What is lasting
across time is not empire and its values, but a poet’s renown and his poetry
of transformation.
Much more, of course, could be said about the dynamics of delay in each
epic here and in other epics too, but enough has been said about waiting to
offer immediately four provisional conclusions. First, epic narrative dis-
plays and manipulates its own temporal unfurling, as an integral function
of the thematics of each poem. Narratives of action do love temporary
blockages to achievement – struggle, difficult tasks, terrifying enemies on
the way to a goal. But epic is particularly concerned to make the hesitations
and refusals of delay significant thematic elements of the work. Second,
each epic develops a narrative that is aimed from the start at an ending
(tantae molis erat . . . Romanam condere gentem, ‘it was an endeavour of so
great a scale to found the Roman nation’, Aen. 1.33). Perhaps what distin-
guishes all narrative, as opposed to the mere span of a life, is what Frank
Kermode calls ‘a sense of an ending’.8 This should be understood most
generally, as Viktor Shlovsky influentially asserted, as the ability of literary
narrative to manipulate time.9 But all the epics discussed in this chapter
project their stories beyond the formal closure of the narrative, towards the
coming death of the hero, the fall of a city, further travelling, or future

7
Hardie (1993); Hardie, Barchiesi and Hinds eds. (1999); Brown (2005); Feldherr (2010). For the
tradition see Barkan (1986).
8 9
Kermode (1966). Lemon and Reis (1965).

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 90 The Christian Invention of Time
foundation. The tension between the epic’s formal narrative closure and
such imaginative open-endedness invests the relation between delay and
fulfilment with a disruptive question about what ending or endings count
and how. The relation between arma and virum, announced (with -que) as
the subject of the epic in line 1, is a question simply not resolved – or
certainly not resolved simply or conclusively – in and by the final scene of
the Aeneid. Third, this sense of an ending embodies the politics of epic’s
foundational desire. ‘What are you waiting for?’ becomes a politicized
question. So – to come to an unfinished story of now – Martin Luther
King knew that the advice to wait for a change to come was a poisonous
encouragement of complicit delay: ‘time itself becomes an ally of the forces
of social stagnation’.10 What is it worth waiting for and at what cost –
Phoenix’s challenge to the recalcitrant Achilles – is a question echoing
through the revolutions of late antiquity. Fourth, the reader’s pleasure is
thoroughly engaged in this structure of delay and fulfilment: what Roland
Barthes famously called ‘the hermeneutic code’ – the enigma that needs
explication or solving in and by the narrative.11 Reading for the plot, as
Peter Brooks puts it, involves the anticipation of retrospection.12 By the
end we know we will have re-evaluated the clues when the murderer is
revealed, and we read from the start with such expectation. Even more so
when we re-read critically. Waiting, in this sense, is endemic to reading.
(What does happen next?) The engagement of expectation, however, is not
only pleasurable but also normative, as the progress towards fulfilment
follows or plays with the tropes of genre, the dynamics of cliché and
surprise, culturally dominant patterns of behaviour, feeling and social
interaction. Stories train their readers, however recalcitrant, to inhabit
the world. Waiting for the end of a story enacts a form of cultural
assimilation.
*
Christianity makes delay and fulfilment a defining structure of religious
narrative. ‘Do not think I have come to abolish (καταλῦσαι) the Law or the
prophets’, says Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew (5.17), ‘I have not come to
abolish them but to fulfill (πληρῶσαι) them’. The repeated quotation of
the Septuagint in the Gospels sounds out a regular tolling, reinforcing the
logic that makes Jesus’ story the deferred completion of the prophecies of

10
King (1964) – the remarkable ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’, dated 16 April 1963, a powerful
statement of what is (un)timeliness, specifically in response to a Christian call simply to wait for
change.
11
Barthes (1975). 12 Brooks (1992).

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 Waiting 91
the Hebrew Bible. The Pentateuch is not an expressly apocalyptic or
eschatological text, but the prophets have many passages that image the
end of days in terrifying and beautiful poetry. Often the comparison is
between the promise of the eternity of God’s salvation and the ephemeral-
ity of the time of man’s achievement (Isaiah 51.6):
Lift up your eyes to the heavens
And look upon the earth beneath;
For the heavens will vanish like smoke
The earth will wax old like a garment,
And they that dwell therein will die in like manner;
But my salvation will be for ever,
And my deliverance will never be ended.
The physical world’s destruction and the death of the humans inhabiting
it are imagined as a majestic foil to proclaim the eternity of God’s power.
Such generalizing rhetoric of doom seeded a profusion of later apocalyptic
literature; much as Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dead bones brought back
to life is instrumental in the later eschatological proclamations of the
Resurrection of the Dead. But the book of Daniel contains a more specific
politicized vision of the empires of the world passing away. In chapter 7, his
prophecy – an interpretation of the dream of Nebuchadnezzar – describes
‘four great beasts’, which are ‘four kings who shall arise out of the earth’. In
contrast to the Son of Man whose ‘power is an everlasting (αἰώνιος) power,
which will not pass away, and his kingdom will not be destroyed’ (7.14),
these four kings betoken empires which will defeat each other until the
fourth king, ‘which will exceed all the kingdoms’ (7.23), comes to devour the
whole world and destroy it. This terrifying king ‘will think to change laws
and times (καιρούς)’. The threat of his violent anarchy reaches to time itself –
either the feasts and ceremonials of worship, or, even more grandly, to the
ordering of months and seasons, the regularity of the cosmos. In a deeply
obscure phrase, this kingdom is said to last ἕως καιροῦ καὶ καιρῶν καὶ ἥμισυ
καιροῦ, which is translated (obscurely) in the King James Bible as ‘until
a time and times and the dividing of time’. This phrase has been taken to
mean – somewhat bathetically – ‘three and a half years’, or, more grandly,
three eras of different lengths; as well as various other calculations for the
length of the rule of this monstrous authority. The threat of the ‘change of
times’, however, seems to anticipate this phrase, which divides time and
times into semantic confusion – an anarchy that prevents secure anticipation
of the precise time of the end. Daniel’s vision is a politicized history of the
unfurling of time as the providential passage of four empires.

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 92 The Christian Invention of Time
The book of Daniel, tellingly, is explicitly named and quoted in the
Gospel of Matthew (and quoted in Mark 13.14), precisely when Jesus
foretells the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem which opens out his
discourse on when the ‘end of days’, or ‘the closing of the age’ (συντελείας
τοῦ αἰῶνος, 24.3) will come. ‘When you see “the abomination that is
desolation”, as spoken of by Daniel the prophet, in the holy place (let
the reader understand), then . . .’ (Mat. 24.15–16). This is a carefully layered
prophetic expression. They are to ‘see’ what the vision of Daniel has
foretold, ‘the abomination that is desolation’ (Dan. 12.11, cf. 9.27; 11.31).
Daniel’s vision, exiled in Babylon, seems to allude to the occupation of
Jerusalem by Antiochus IV Epiphanes of the Seleucid kingdom, which
threatened to destroy cultic worship in the Temple – a desecration and
a regime against which the Maccabees fought. ‘The abomination that is
desolation’ may in Daniel refer to the cessation of worship in the Temple
or the introduction of a Greek cult there. But after Jesus’ prediction of the
Roman destruction of the Temple, the abomination of desolation also
takes on a different force: it is now not so much cultic desecration as the
total annihilation of the site. The Temple will be burned down (and
a temple of Venus eventually erected in its place). What they are to see,
therefore, is not just the empirical evidence of destruction, but also –
a deeper vision – how this destruction is a heightened fulfilment of an
earlier prophecy, an earlier vision, with different implications to be played
out in the later supersessionist historiography. Hence the surprising add-
ition: ‘let the reader understand’ (or as Jesus enjoins his enemies in John
(5.39): ἐραναῦτε τὰς γραφάς, ‘search the scriptures’). We are encouraged
not just to see, but to read through scripture to reach understanding of
what the time portends.13
After Jesus, echoing the prophets, anticipates the clash of nation upon
nation (the ‘beginning of the birth pangs’ (Mat. 24.8)), and predicts the
arrival of the Son of Man in great glory with the trumpet calls of angels
(24.29–31) – a vision of the end – he also tells the disciples explicitly and
through parables that ‘About that day and hour, no-one knows, neither the
angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the father only’ (24.36), which leads to
the repeated injunction: ‘Therefore watch (γρηγορεῖτε); for you do not
know on what day the lord will come’ (24.42); ‘Therefore watch
(γρηγορεῖτε), because you do not know the day or the hour’ (25.13).
Mark adds ‘Look! Stay awake! For you do not know when the time

13
John Chrysostom Adversus Iudaeos 5 is exemplary of this politicized reading of Daniel, in his case also
through Josephus’ reading of Daniel.

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 Waiting 93
(καιρός) will come’ (Mark 13.33) – the arrival of the Messiah is the very
definition of kairos as event or turning point. It could, he explains, be ‘late
or midnight or cockcrow or early’ (13.35), therefore ‘Watch!’. ‘You must be
ready’, says Luke, ‘because the Son of Man is coming at an hour you are not
expecting’ (Luke 12.40).14 (Clement of Alexandria in his genial Hellenism
bathetically parses this as the danger of oversleeping in too soft a bed Paed.
2.77–82.) The prediction of the future demands that our future is one in
which we watch and wait. Vigilance, a vigil, is required. For Christians, the
Gospels demand, anticipating, waiting, expecting is what the faithful do,
all the time. That is how the time of everyday life is to be inhabited.
The Gospels were written after the destruction of the Temple by Rome
in 70 ce.15 Well before this date – the earliest sections of the text are
probably third century bce, the later parts around the turn of the first
century bce or even later – the book known as 1 Enoch stages a long
apocalyptic vision of the cosmos from its beginnings, through the fall of
angels, to the destruction of the wicked in a final all-embracing judgement
of God. Its fascination with angelology, eschatology, demonology, and the
final judgement indicates its radical difference from the Pentateuch and
most of the Hebrew prophets.16 It is indeed not included in the Jewish
canon. It exists now in full only in Ge’ez, the language of the Ethiopic
church, but there are extant fragments in Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic and
Latin. Enoch may not be canonical for authoritative Judaism, but it is
quoted in Aramaic in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and in later Greek Jewish
apocalyptic literature, as well as in the New Testament book of Jude. It is
also cited by Christian writers including Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Origen –
and others up to John Cassian. Jewish apocalyptic literature, and especially
Enoch, is treated by the magisterial Gershom Scholem as foundational
testimony of a tradition of Jewish mysticism, but it is thereby also the
literature of the marginal – mysticism always insists on the elitism and
separation of the elect – and, most obviously after the fall of the Temple
and the destruction of Jewish political self-determination, it is the literature
of the dispossessed and defeated, too. The Talmud has its moments where
the humiliation of the Romans or other foreign tyrants is dramatized as
a self-authorizing and deeply gratifying victory, but rabbinical writing’s
more standard approach to the culture of Greece and Rome is a studied
ignorance and pointed ignoring.17 The rabbis turn their back, even if it is to
14
Becker (2017).
15
A much-contested matter: see Burridge (1992); Vinzent (2014); Robinson (2001).
16
J. Collins (1998) remains the best introduction. See also Himmelfarb (2010).
17
Goldhill (2020) 194–235 with bibliography.

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 94 The Christian Invention of Time
look over their shoulders, on empire culture, even and especially as Judaism
continued and even increased its Hellenisms. But the apocalyptic tradition
takes violent revenge on the powerful for the dispossession of the defeated.
‘The stories incorporated visions of the beginning and the end of the
world, and gave the faithful an idea that in the end the righteous (us)
would be rewarded with eternal resurrection, when the wicked (you, and
the Romans) would be damned and eternally punished’.18 (‘You’ in this
sentence addresses an imagined Christian author, ‘Keith Hopkins’, as
a type for the Christian tradition, as corrected by a fictionalized ‘Seth
Schwartz’, speaking on behalf of the multiplicity of Jewish voices, under
the sobriquet, Avi – as written by Keith Hopkins.) ‘This was another set of
latish Jewish ideas’, continues the passage, ‘that the early Christians took
over’. So in the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus anticipates that ‘you will be
hated by all the nations for my name’s sake’ (Mat. 24.9) – the future
persecution which will include not just the immediately addressed disciples
but also the future readers who hear themselves called in the word ‘you’ –
and when he anticipates that ‘the end (telos) will come’ (24.14), he turns
designedly to the promise of apocalyptic literature in its starkest form
(25.46): ‘And they (the cursed) will go away into eternal punishment, but
the righteous into eternal life’. The end of days, the telos of time, is to be
a comfort for the everyday humiliations and violence of precarity, margin-
alization and persecution. Just you wait . . .
The book of Revelation is the most extended expression of Christian
apocalypse, with the most extraordinary account of the punishments of the
wicked and the blessing of the righteous. It is framed by the declaration
(1.3) ὁ γὰρ καιρὸς ἐγγύς, ‘For the time is nigh’ (kairos, of course), and the
promise ναί, ἔρχομαι τάχυ, ‘surely, I am coming quickly/soon’. The cry of
waiting in the Psalms, ‘How long, O Lord . . . ?’ in Revelations becomes the
promise of immediacy. For Paul of Tarsus, indeed, the present moment
was urgent. ‘For the form of the world is passing away’ (1 Cor. 7.31). The
crucifixion of Jesus and the resurrection were the transformative events that
heralded the Second Coming. Paul’s insistence on the need for every
human, and not just the Jews, to transform themselves is a response to
the promised imminence of the return of Christ. Jesus himself in Mark
(1.15) announces his mission with a demanding prophecy: ‘The time is
fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and trust in the good
news’. As in Daniel, kairos is the time of revelation and the time of the end;
it has reached fulfilment, the fullness of time (πεπλήρωται: a perfect tense,

18
Hopkins (1999) 236.

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 Waiting 95
fulfilled and being fulfilled); and, Jesus declares, the kingdom of God is
‘nigh’ (ἤγγικεν): it is this prophecy which Revelations echoes – and which
makes Paul so insistent.
For Paul writing in the middle of the first century, salvation has already
come through the crucifixion and resurrection, but the kingdom of God
has not yet arrived. Between the already fulfilled and the not yet completed
is the parousia of Christ and the promise of the end: this is the present: ho
nun kairos.19 But how is this eschatological present to be lived? Paul’s
struggle with the sinfulness of his fleshly existence produces an extraordin-
ary expression of his daily existence: ‘And as for us’, he asks ‘why are we in
danger every hour? I die daily . . .’. On the one hand, Paul is rhetorically
displaying the apostles’ willingness to risk their lives hour by hour as
a proof of the firmness of their belief. On the other hand, his personal
declaration, ‘I die daily . . .’ takes the risk of death in a different direction.
John Chrysostom understands this claim to mean ‘By his readiness and
preparation for the event’ of death, that is, by his attempt to live with
a constant eye on the Christian promise of the resurrection. The danger
thus is also the danger of slipping from the path of faith that ‘we too’, καὶ
ἡμεῖς, all risk. Life thus is to be lived hourly with an anxious eye on our
participation in the coming of the kingdom of God.
For Luke, writing in the first century, the present has already been
extended. The Gospel of Luke does not include Mark’s recognition that
the time is fulfilled, and his version of the parable of the faithful servant,
unlike Mark’s (though like Matthew’s), imagines that the returning
master is late (χρονίζει, 12.45). Luke ‘continually tamps down and
reshapes the vibrant apocalyptic traditions that originally shaped what
he had inherited’.20 The Kingdom of God is not impending, but already
inside us (17.20): ‘When he was asked by the Pharisees when the
Kingdom of God was coming, He answered them, “The Kingdom of
God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say ‘Lo, here it
is!’, or ‘There it is!’. Behold the Kingdom of God is within (entos) you”’.
The standard translation ‘to be observed’ underplays the force of the
Greek ek paratērēseōs: the verb paratērēō means not just to observe
carefully but to watch out for. Luke’s Jesus here does not encourage
waiting and watching, but transformation. This move is in itself a sign of
things to come: ‘eventually, as the years stretched on, evolving traditions
would de-eschatologize the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection . . . the resur-
rection itself, later tradition will assert, says nothing about what time it is

19 20
See Nasrallah (2019) 199–223, building on Agamben (2005). Fredriksen (2018) 93.

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 96 The Christian Invention of Time
on God’s clock’.21 Over time, as Christianity became institutionalized
into the empire’s dominant religion and as theology expanded into
a discipline, the delay of the Second Coming developed its own continu-
ally lengthening history.
*
Augustine waited a long time for his conversion to happen: ‘Quamdiu
quamdiu’, ‘How long?!, How long?!’ he cries out even as the moment of
Grace itself approaches (Conf. 8.12).22 Augustine takes the notion of waiting
down to the level of the moment and theorizes it fully as part of his
philosophy of time. Like Aristotle, he recognizes a tripartite system of past,
present and future, and that the notion of the present is both constantly
turning into memory as it happens and is constantly looking forward in
anticipation to the future. The present of human time becomes thus a less
and less stable idea, constantly evanescent. ‘So there is no “present” as such.
And yet, paradoxically, we know the past only as present memory, and the
future as present anticipation. There is, then, no real present and nothing but
present.’23 But since the past ‘is not’ and the future ‘has not yet been’, he
concludes painfully, ‘time tends to non-being’ (11.14.17).24 This conclusion,
however, leaves Augustine with the problem of how he can tell the story of
his past now in the present, how he can relate to God, here and now, and
how his self over time has the consistency necessary to recognize the change
of conversion. His tentative answer to these questions extends the word
‘tends’ tendit – as Catherine Conybeare has expounded with exemplary
clarity and style. Tendit, she notes, is a richly layered term, that gives us
‘tense’, which is how verbs relate to past, present and future, but also
‘attention’ and ‘intention’.25 Augustine builds on this word to suggest that
‘time is a sort of distentio’, a ‘tension’, or ‘distension’. Typically – and
emblematically of his tentativeness – he immediately adds ‘but (dis)tension
of what, I do not know, and I would be very surprised if it is not (dis)tension
of consciousness itself’. Time is measured and registered in the mind – which
leads Augustine to demonstrate his idea of distentio through reading a Psalm,
where each word is understood in relation to the previous words and the
memory of their meaning and in anticipation of the words to come. Reading
and interpretation of the act of reading in the final books of the Confessions
become a test-case of experiencing time.

21 22
Fredriksen (2018) 106. Discussed below, pp. 190–1. 23 Wills (1999) 90–1.
24 25
See Ross (1991). Conybeare (2016) 124–5. See also Pranger (2010) 35–54.

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 Waiting 97
‘Who would deny that the present has no duration, since it passes in an
instant?’, writes Augustine boldly. ‘Yet’, he continues, ‘our attention
(attentio) does endure, and, through our attention, what is still to be
makes its way into the state where it is no more’ (11.28.37). ‘The mind
expects, and attends and remembers’, and this is not just a phenomenology
of consciousness but a theology of waiting. The prefix dis- in distentio, as
Conybeare writes,
suggests distraction, dispersal, straining apart. Distentio attempts to capture
the simultaneous presence and absence of time: the way in which we may be
focused in a particular moment which yet extends out into past and future.
Our awareness of time in its elusive instant is always shaded and inflected by
the dis- of other, evanescent times.26
Chadwick, more simply, a ‘stretching out on a rack’.27 Attentio, by con-
trast, is the attempt to turn oneself towards the immutability of God’s
time, to recognize and search for something beyond such dispersal of the
now. James Wetzel captures the contrast superbly: ‘as the soul enfolds time
into a threefold presence (attention), so does time disarticulate the soul,
resolving memory and expectation back into the “no longer” and the “not
yet” (distension)’.
Augustine describes his life before conversion and his embrace of the
love of God as simply distentio: distentio est mea vita, ‘my life is tension’, or
‘nervous distraction’, as Conybeare translates distentio here. Augustine
describes this feeling with passionate intensity (11.29):
I have leapt down into the flux of time where all is confusion to me. In the
most intimate depths of my soul my thoughts are torn to fragments by
tempestuous changes until that time when I flow into you, purged and
rendered molten by the fire of your love.
To be in time, in the human experience of time, is to not know the order
of things (ordinem nescio) and to have thoughts that are violently ripped
apart (dilaniantur). ‘Time’s imperfection carries into his mind’s efforts at
self-definition.’28 Yet Augustine also explains how this fragmented and
miserable experience of time can be transcended through God’s interven-
tion, his love:
I may be gathered from my old days (veteribus diebus) following the One;
forgetting the past (praeterita oblitus), and stretching undistracted (non

26 27
Conybeare (2016) 125. See O’Daly (1977). Chadwick (1991) 230 n. 19.
28
Wetzel (1992) 37.

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 98 The Christian Invention of Time
distentus sed extentus) not to future things doomed to pass away, but to my
eternal goal.
Distentus, the distraction or distention of the human temporal experi-
ence, is ameliorated by becoming extentus – extended, that is, stretched out
towards the future, but not a future that is the continuity of the present
experience of fragmented time, but the future that is the eternal future of
eschatological promise. Faced by a congregation, Augustine sermonizes
this into a stunning, summary, paradoxical injunction: ut ergo et tu sis,
transcende tempus: ‘So for you too to be, transcend time’.29
Augustine’s exposition of the fragility of the present moment, which
leaves the experience of time as the fragmentation of thought into tempes-
tuous change, finds salvation in the attention that produces a condition of
being extentus, focused on the future of the life to come. For Augustine, to
inhabit time is made bearable only by translating the distentio of the
present, through attentio, to an extentio towards God’s time: time must
be extended. Waiting is transformed into the salvation of eschatology.
Waiting becomes the necessary condition of the Christian living within
God’s love.
*
The power and subtlety of Augustine’s argumentation is highlighted by
a writer such as Tatian, from the second century, and not the sharpest
theologian in the Christian choir.30 In his Address to the Greeks, an angry
apology for Christianity, he writes as follows (26):
Why do you divide time, saying that one part is past, and another present,
and another future? For how can the future be passing when the present
exists? As those who are sailing imagine in their ignorance, as the ship is
borne along, that the hills are in motion, so you do not know that it is you
who are passing along, but that time (ὁ αἰών) remains present as long as the
Creator wills it to exist.
Tatian is attacking contemporary philosophers for borrowing others’
words, like the jackdaw in borrowed feathers, and it is telling about his era’s
expectations that the cliché he sniffs at concerns the division of time. He
seems to mock the Aristotelian tradition of worrying about the separation
of time into past, present and future. For Tatian, stronger on rhetorical

29
In Evan. Joh. Tract. 38.10. Augustine’s sermons have not usually made it into discussions of
Augustine’s views of time.
30
Notwithstanding Hunt (2003). Nasrallah (2005) 299 notes the standard description of Tatian as
‘vicious and brutal’, but defends his ‘passion and humour’.

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 Waiting 99
outrage than coherent argument, it is not the future that is advancing, but
rather humans that are travelling towards death, while the one constant is
aiōn, the unmoving era of the present, dependent on the will of God. If
Augustine takes it for granted that the present has no duration, for Tatian,
the unending present alone exists, which makes any further discussion of
a philosophy of time unnecessary.
How to imagine the time between the Resurrection and the Second
Coming requires increasingly varied stories, with different complicities of
delay and action, and different comprehensions of what the mundane thus
is and how it should be experienced. (Recognizing how Paul’s insistence in
the immediacy of the end of days was just wrong is an ongoing negotiation
of theology.) Adopting and adapting Jewish apocalyptic, Christianity
reshapes the necessary temporality of waiting. For epic heroes, waiting or
delay is not exactly dead time, though it is a time of threat, the threat that
deferral will block the heroic action necessary for immortal glory. So, with
typically Homeric precision of evocative imagery, when he refuses to fight,
Achilles sits by his tent and sings the klea andrōn, the ‘famous deeds of
men’, ‘epics of men’: his very act of performing these tales is keeping him
from the story that will guarantee his own kleos, though in retrospect, after
his return to fight, it will be the beginning of a roll-call of heroic fame that
he is to head. Odysseus is beguiled into sexual relationships that keep him
from the household he craves; he must fight monsters to reattain the
normality of his life on Ithaca; Aeneas’ love affair with the queen and
builder of a city prevents him from founding the city that will sing his
fame. But for the Christian theologian, the transcendence over death,
promised by the salvation that the Resurrection signals, transforms life
into an arena where the struggle for humility and the avoidance of sin make
mundane existence a constant danger and source of anxiety. ‘I die daily . . .’
But above all, waiting and watching are not choices of withdrawal to be
confounded by an explosive return to action. Waiting and watching have
become the human condition of the faithful, in the extended present
between the promise of salvation and the not yet of the end. How such
waiting and watching are to be enacted becomes an ethical question of
Christian practice. What, then, happens to narrative if waiting, waiting for
the end but waiting with no end, becomes the story to be told? If we
concluded the last chapter with the question of how the ordering, measur-
ing, counting of time changed the experience inhabiting time, now we can
see how the distentio, or extensio of time – the very sense of being in
time – becomes for Christianity a theory and practice of waiting.

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 chapter 5

Time and Time Again

The discipline of classics is unthinkable without the notion of the

exemplary.1 On the one hand, for centuries in the West, the classical past
has provided models of the best in literature, style, political system, sexual
freedom – and many other idealisms. The very name ‘classics’ exists
because the great texts of the past give us the first, second and third classes
by which we classify and evaluate the modern. The lure of classicism is its
image of the ideal in the past – a perfection or grandeur or beauty to strive
after. The repeated challenges to the privilege of the Greek and Latin past
in the education system, the hierarchy of cultural value, or in the very
assumption of how the past matters, have sought again and again – often
with a self-defeating obsessiveness – to dethrone this position of classics in
the tradition of the West. In English, the apparent connection between
classics and class has become a byword for such a challenge, insisting on the
complicit and corrupting link between social elites and the fantasies of
entitled genealogy that ground classicism.2 A similar recognition of the role
of classics in the ideological projections of empire, of racial thinking, of
religious dominance, has tried to invert the privilege of classics into
a negative exemplar of the dangerous links between an education into
a sense of superior value and a politics of oppression. Here, too, however,
classics becomes the exemplary discipline of blame or self-laceration.3
On the other hand, the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome, not least
thanks to their own commitment to rhetorical training within their edu-
cational systems, both utilized the exemplum with creative flair and theor-
ized such use with self-conscious acumen. From Homer onwards, Greek
and Latin writing mobilized the mythic or political or heroic figures of the
past to make normative claims on the present. An iconic example of
1
Goldhill (2017); Langlands (2011), (2015), (2018); The Postclassicisms Collective (2019); Güthenke
(2020). See also, for the tradition, e.g. Hampton (1990).
2
Goldhill (2002); Richardson (2016); Hall and Stead (2020).
3
See from a growing bibliography e.g. Malamud (2016); Zuckerberg (2018).

100

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 Time and Time Again 101
examples? The chorus of Aristotle’s exemplary tragedy, Sophocles’ Oedipus
Tyrannus, sings ‘Now I have your example (paradeigma), yours, Oedipus,
I count nothing mortal as blessed’ (OT 1193–5). The chorus insist that what
they have seen in Oedipus’ story is exemplary of the horror of mortal
existence in general; Aristotle takes this play as exemplary of tragedy as
a genre; Freud takes Oedipus as the psychological map of every man. I am
taking it as an example of how exemplification multiplies. Classics as
a discipline is constantly mining the ancient world’s use of examples to
make the ancient world exemplary for the present. If waiting links the now
to the future, the exemplary makes the classical past significant to the
present.
How the past is made exemplary, however, has become for modernity
a highly problematic question.4 Classicism, the turn back to antiquity to find
paradigms of excellence, has traditionally depended on genealogy and ideal-
ism. That is – and, evidently, there would be many nuances and variations of
these generalizing claims in any full-scale history of classicism – classicism
depends, on the one hand, on treating ancient Greece and Rome as the
origins and foundation of Western culture; and, on the other, on not just
privileging this past but idealizing it as the paradigm to which we should
aspire. Modernity has increasingly challenged both vectors. The genealogical
affiliation to the past of Greece and Rome has been questioned by recogniz-
ing the self-serving ideological commitment of the very search for such
origins, as well as by marking the differences and ruptures between antiquity
and modernity. The idealization of the past has been undermined both by
a recognition of the slavery, sexism, imperialism, violence and social divi-
sions of the ancient world and by a symmetrical and self-serving assertion of
the values of modernity. Nonetheless, antiquity has remained integral to the
contemporary intellectual imaginary. This has a profound effect on the
discipline of classics and its institutional epistemology. The challenge to
the dominance of philology as the privileged science of Altertumswissenschaft;
the challenge mounted by literary theory’s questioning of the canon, the
status of the text, and the status of literary knowledge and its inherited
values; the challenge mounted by rhetoric’s question to history, and post-
processual theory to archaeology; in short, the challenge by modernity to
classicism, in questioning both the idealization and the genealogy of classi-
cism, sets out to undermine both the evident object of knowledge and the
established subject who knows. Consequently, the constantly repeated

4
If it is not clear that I am referring to a Western/global north sense of modernity, Chakrabarty (2000)
will make it so.

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 102 The Christian Invention of Time
questions of modernity to the classical tradition have become: If this is an
example, what is it an example of? If this is a paradigm, how does it establish
a politics and an epistemology? How am I to be part of your machinery of
exemplification?
The exemplarity of the past, thus, is one crucial and contested route of
organizing modernity’s temporal relationship with antiquity. How, then,
should the temporality of the exemplar be understood? At one level,
scholars of reception theory have insisted on the present of any interaction
with the past, even and especially when taking an example from the past.
So, as Charles Martindale has been particularly influential in asserting, if
‘meaning is realized at the point of reception’, meaning is not integral to or
inherent in a text of antiquity; and, what is more, later traditions create the
meaning of texts of antiquity, as the filters of the tradition of reading
produce a community’s understanding.5 Thus, with a wilful reversal of the
arrow-like directionality of time, it makes sense to talk of Hegel’s influence
on Sophocles. A recognition of the constitutive role of the history of
reading in the construction of the object of knowledge will inevitably
change its status as a paradigm. At what point, then, it may be asked,
does studying the classical past become no more than a cultural history of
a modern era? At what point is an example only of and for the present?
Yet the move away from genealogy and idealism that marks the moment
of post-classicism insists on a gap between the here and now of modernity
and the past of antiquity, a gap constitutive of critical self-consciousness,
based on an awareness of how the present is different from the past
(‘familiar strangers’ to use Kanaan’s expressive phrase)6. As Aristotle writes,
it is ‘when the mind pronounces that the “nows” are two, one before and
one after, that we say there is time’. The exemplar plays a key role in this
process of seeing oneself otherwise. The exemplar is, certainly, a mode of
encounter with antiquity, a mode of knowing and of organizing knowledge
of the past. It is also a persuasive term designed to construct a particular
and particularized form of attentiveness: it is activated as a normative
template for a present moment. But the exemplar, rhetorically the figure
of a past historical character, event, or locus, emphatically interrupts
context.7 An exemplar is not invoked as a representative cross-section of
a historical point in time and space: it is a singular case designed to

5
Martindale (1993) 3. See also Martindale and Thomas eds. (2006). Nice to be able here to acknow-
ledge more than thirty years of discussion of such issues with Charles Martindale.
6
Kanaan (2019).
7
This paragraph was originally collaboratively drafted with The Postclassicisms Collective and in
particular Constanze Güthenke (see also Güthenke 2020).

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 Time and Time Again 103
illuminate a single case. The exemplar insists that the past is necessary to
explain and frame and comprehend the present. Whatever its claim on
a specific historicity – and an exemplar so often speaks of a lost time with
a hankering for an idealized past – the exemplar speaks across time. The
exemplar, then, is first of all a persuasive genealogy that asserts the past as
a model, that interrupts the context of the present with the claim of an
elsewhere and other time, that reads selectively, normatively, hopefully
(there is, as John Dunn writes, a ‘reckless vulnerability’ in exemplarity).8
Making an exemplar for the here and now is also a way of going beyond the
here and now, of seeing oneself from elsewhere, in the light of another
time.
This very engagement with antiquity as an exemplary model requires,
therefore, a particular dynamics of untimeliness. It requires an explicit
hypostasization – which need not be positive – of a particular past; it
requires a sense that the present is disrupted from that past, while it is also
genealogically linked to it, and that the present needs this ancient past to
find itself; it needs its sense of untimeliness to find self-expression.
Classicism must know it is not classical, that it is out of time with the
models it is adopting and adapting, it must know its own untimeliness.
Untimeliness, in this sense, marks the self-consciousness – in political,
aesthetic, psychological, cultural terms – of one’s self in construction as
a historical subject.
Yet what classicism finds in antiquity is also a highly developed rhetoric
and theory of exemplification. The treatise On the Sublime attributed to
Longinus offers a particularly incisive and insightful summary.9 It begins
with the idea that whenever we strive for a particularly high style we should
imagine in our inner being (anaplattesthai tais psuchais) how Homer, or
Plato or Demosthenes or Thucydides would have striven to express them-
selves (De sub. 14):
Therefore it is good for us also, when we are labouring on some subject
which demands a lofty and majestic style, to imagine to ourselves how
Homer might have expressed this or that, or how Plato or Demosthenes
would have clothed it with sublimity, or, in history, Thucydides. For by our
fixing an eye of rivalry on those high figures they will become like beacons to
guide us, and will perhaps lift up our souls to the fullness of the stature we
conceive.

8
Dunn (2011) 310. See also, less pithily, Rood, Atack and Phillips (2020) 146–68.
9
The exemplary analysis of Longinus is Porter (2016).

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 104 The Christian Invention of Time
The writer must fictionalize the exemplars of poetry, philosophy, rhet-
oric and history – the four greatest genres – in a spirit of rivalry (zēlon).
‘Comparison is inherent in exemplarity’, and here the comparison is
competitive in the search for ‘fullness of stature’. Yet note the ‘perhaps’
(pōs). There is always a gap between the example and the case, a snag in the
fit, as Montesquieu famously put it: ‘tout example cloche’, ‘every example
snags’.10 Especially when you aspire to the greatest literary models of all.
This slight hesitation leads immediately to Longinus imagining these
masters not just as his examples but as his judges (De sub. 14):
And it would be still better should we try to realise this further thought,
How would Homer, had he been here, or how would Demosthenes, have
listened to what I have written, or how would they have been affected by it?
For what higher incentive to exertion could a writer have than to imagine
such judges or such an audience of his works, and to give an account of his
writings with heroes like these to criticise and look on?
Now the writer is to see himself before the jury of the past, or in a theatre
(dikastērion kai theatron) with heroes as both his judges and witnesses
(kritais te kai martusin) for his evaluation (euthunas). Setting oneself against
the exemplary greats makes an example of you.11 It is not just the past,
however, that sits in judgement (De sub. 14):
Yet more inspiring would be the thought: with what feelings will future ages
through all time read these my works? If this should awaken a fear in any
writer that he will speak in a way unsuited to his own life and time it will
necessarily follow that the conceptions of his mind will be crude, maimed,
and abortive, and lacking that ripe perfection which alone can win the
applause of ages to come.
More important still is the idea of becoming an example for the future
(pas met’eme . . . aiōn, ‘every age after me’). This hope of posterity should
not produce a fear of being untimely, of saying something
‘unsuited’ – huperhēmeron, ‘beyond the temporal limit’ – of his own life
and time (chronou)’, because this will prevent him reaching the time
(chronon) of the ‘applause of the future’. As Isocrates expressed it much
earlier, a man’s actions should look forward to ‘the memory that goes hand
in hand with time’ (Phil. 134) – you should anticipate a future time
remembering your past excellence. The process of seeking the great
examples of the past produces a vivid sense of seeing oneself judged by

10
Montesquieu, Essais III.13; Gilby (2006), especially 109–11.
11
Dio of Prusa, Or. 18.12 finds this prospect frightening and recommends against it.

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 Time and Time Again 105
both the past and the future. Exemplification is also setting oneself in time,
seeing oneself in history: the eme in pas aiōn.
Thucydides asserts that his writing of history is a ktēma es aiei, ‘a
possession for always’ (1.22). It is to be a paradigm that will always
work – exemplarity without loss, without the snagging, across time. It is
a claim based on the universality of human nature – to anthrōpinon.
(‘Humanity’, like ‘nature’, is a term designed to create an unbroken
continuity across time.) Pindar, by contrast, will link the victory of today
to the victor’s familial past in a genealogy of excellence, as well as to the
inimitable transcendence of the heroes of the past, with Heracles, say, as
the limit case of contrast. Pindar is fully aware, too, that he, like ‘Longinus’,
is writing not just for the praise of the present but also for the eyes of the
future.12 Exemplarity is in this sense ‘situational and dependent on timing’.
After many centuries of the institutions of rhetoric – teaching and per-
formance – however, exempla are also layered with the history of their use.
As Rebecca Langlands writes in her study of Valerius Maximus, the first-
century ce anthologist of exempla, where each of his cases is an example of
how examples are used,
Roman exemplarity offered a simultaneous display of a wide variety of
exemplary tales that can be envisaged as a heterogeneous and evolving
whole where the individual elements – the exempla – could be played off
against and compared with one another; an exemplum is never interpreted
on its own, but always in the context of others.13
The exemplum interrupts the present with an invocation of the past, which
acts as a richly variegated, normative positioning of the subject in and
against time, both the past and the uses of the past in the past.
So when Livy or Tacitus, say, in their narrative histories offer brief or
longer comments on individuals who star or feature momentarily in the
unfurling of events, there is a broad cultural expectation that such remarks
are to be read within the developed structure of the theory of exempla, the
long history of the role of ēthos within rhetorical exposition, and the equally
long and intricate history of the representation of character as a mode of
constructing and understanding literary narrative. Livy’s Cato is a perfect
example of the complexity of this process of exemplification.14 Livy sums
up Cato’s character thus (39.40):
He was undoubtedly a man of a rough temper and a bitter and unbridled
tongue, absolute master of his passions, of inflexible integrity, and

12 13 14
Spelman (2018); Agocs (2019). Langlands (2015) 69. See Chaplin (2000).

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 106 The Christian Invention of Time
indifferent alike to wealth and popularity. He lived a life of frugality capable
of enduring toil and danger, with a mind and body tempered almost like
steel, which not even old age that weakens everything could break.
Cato’s censoriousness and upright opposition to the direction he thought
Roman cultural life was taking under the corruption of its own imperialism
is itself based on his view of a better past. He speaks out in favour of the
Oppian Law against extravagance, in Livy’s account, partly because women
have protested against it, and partly in sarcastic contrast with the good old
days of the early Republic. In those times, when true Roman values
obtained, if offered extravagant bribes no Roman man or woman accepted
them, and there was no need for the Oppian Law against extravagance,
because ‘there was no extravagance to be restrained’. Cato’s exemplary, old-
style virtue is predicated on his portrayal of an exemplary past.
His opponent in the debate, however, Lucius Valerius, attacks Cato
precisely for his dismissive and aggressive attitude towards the women,
and, with brilliant rhetorical flair, theatrically unrolls Cato’s own history,
the Origines, and claims to read out from it examples of how often women
have acted thus properly for the benefit of the Republic. The Origines has the
status of the first piece of Latin prose, the first history of Rome. The Origines
told the story of the beginning of Rome (and the cities of Italy). Valerius sets
Cato’s own ideological foundational story of Roman beginnings against the
history Cato himself mobilizes in his rhetoric. Livy’s history depicts his
historical characters arguing through historical exemplars – and allows
Cato’s own written history to be quoted against the historian. It is a scene
that demands therefore a certain self-reflexivity about a self-positioning in
history. Livy, looking back at the Republic, has Cato set himself up as
a figure of old and now lost virtue – but he is ambushed by his own history
of Roman antiquity. By dramatizing these conflicting uses of exempla, Livy
offers a carefully layered question to his Roman readers about their own use
of the past in their projection of virtue. The theory and complex practice of
exemplification, with its historical placement of the subject in time, change
the expectations of how stories are written and read.
When Marx writes of the French Revolution that it was enacted in
Roman dress, he epitomizes – exemplifies – the self-positioning in time
that the logic of classicism’s exempla establishes. For Marx, the French
Revolution is itself a complex paradigm of the necessary revolution that
marks the inevitable juncture of a historical process that situates every
citizen in their moment of historical significance. To tell the history of the
French revolution is, for Marx, to locate ourselves in the unfurling of

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 Time and Time Again 107
history. Yet the republicanism that drove the revolutionary ideology,
argues Marx, is a strategic appropriation of a paradigm from antiquity.
The example of the past informs the action of the present. Yet this very
politics of the past is already structured by the past’s rhetoric of exemplarity
which organizes its heroes of republican fervour in line with the heroes of
a Roman past. The temporality of exemplarity, for Marx, is thus integral to
understanding history. In such an argument, Marx is being faithful to his
educational training within the discipline of classics.

*
In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul speaks out against underestimating the power of
temptation and the danger of worshipping idols. To reach his conclusion
he constructs an elaborate parallel between the Israelites in the desert and
the contemporary Christian. ‘Our fathers’, he enjoins, ‘were all under the
cloud and all passed through the sea’ – they all experienced the miraculous
exodus from Egypt. Indeed, they all ate food from God (‘spiritual food’
πνευματικὸν βρῶμα) and drank from the Rock (Moses hit the rock
miraculously to produce water). ‘The Rock’, states Paul baldly, ‘was
Christ’. In Jewish exegesis the water is to be allegorized as the refreshing
nourishment of the Torah: Paul redrafts this easy symbolism to his own
agenda. But, Paul declares, the majority of the Israelites still died in the
desert and thus the Israelites have become ‘tupoi for us’, examples, models,
warnings. We have to learn not to sin as they sinned; and he duly lists the
many sins of the Israelites to be avoided. Thus, he concludes with
a sentence that comes to mark a radical shift in Christian thinking about
time and narrative (10.11), ταῦτα δὲ τυπικῶς συνέβαινεν ἐκείνοις, ἐγράφη
δὲ πρὸς νουθεσίαν ἡμῶν, εἰς οὓς τὰ τέλη τῶν αἰώνων κατήντηκεν, ‘These
things happened to them tupikōs, and were written in scripture for our
instruction, for whom the end of times has come’. Tupikōs is translated
sometimes with ‘as a warning’; the King James version has ‘for examples’.
But the language of tupoi, ‘types’, will take on a special force in Christian
exegesis, which goes beyond the idea of exempla. For Paul, tupoi are for
moral instruction – nouthesia – an instruction which only now makes full
sense because theirs is the generation for whom the end of times (aiōnōn)
has come. As we have already seen, the end of time structures Paul’s
thinking. Here, it makes his contemporary Christians the fulfilment of
a story which will turn out to have always already been prophetic. As the
end of time approaches, they can close the circle. Similarly, Paul calls Adam
tupos tou mellontos, ‘the figure of him that was to come’ or ‘the figure of the

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 108 The Christian Invention of Time
future’ (Rom. 5.14). The grammatically simple Greek is semantically
strained, at least for the first century: elsewhere Paul can use tupos in its
more familiar contemporary sense of ‘model’, something to be imitated
(Phil. 4.17). For later theologians, Paul’s phrase became clear and funda-
mental, however. Christ is a second Adam, Adam a first Christ. They are
tupoi of each other, figures linked as paradigms of each other. What, we can
ask with Giorgio Agamben, is the ‘transformation of time implied by this
typological relation’?15
Now, typology – this device to close the temporal gap between old and
new testaments in Christian thinking by making each an analogy of the
other – has a long history, going back to the beginnings of allegorical
reading in one genealogy, and also, perhaps more pointedly, back to Philo’s
Platonizing conception of the Hebrew Bible, which forms the basis of so
much of Clement’s thinking, through which it becomes a central plank of
Christian argumentation.16 So, when the Israelites arrive at the Grove of
Elim (Exodus 15.27), this story of a staging post in the Hebrew Bible in
Prudentius’ eyes finds fulfilment in the Christian Bible through his typo-
logical reading of scripture, which reveals that the twelve trees in the grove
stand for the twelve apostles. The grove depicts what in chronological
terms would be the far future, but what in theological understanding is
always already present. The text of Exodus is already replete with its future
embodiment in the language of the Gospels.17 Such a poetics of typology,
as we will see, is one frame for understanding late antiquity’s repeated use
of analogy, proleptic and retrospective figuration.
Christianity’s reinvention of the Hebrew Bible as the Old Testament
entails that theological interpretation repeatedly discovers a pattern of
anticipation and fulfilment in scripture. But how such a technology of
reading should be comprehended and utilized became a long-running
theoretical debate among early Christian intellectuals, and consequently
for modern scholars who have argued fiercely the boundaries between
allegory and typology.18 (‘Typology’ itself is a modern term, unlike
allēgoresis, but the vocabulary of tupos and antitupos is prevalent in early
polemics.) Origen – to take an example of a figure who is an excellent guide
15
Agamben (2005) 74.
16
See Dawson (1992), (2002); Struck (2004); Niehoff (2001), (2011). The following paragraphs reprise
Goldhill (2020) 129–33. On Clement, see now Heath (2020).
17
On Prudentius’ use of allegory, typology and symbol, see most recently Hardie (2019) 188–222, and
below, pp. 124–6.
18
This is a hugely intricate and contested area: for guides to the controversy, see Daniélou (1948),
(1950); Young (1997); Herzog (2002a); Dawson (2002); Hanson (2002); Edwards (2002); Martens
(2008).

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 Time and Time Again 109
to where controversy is, if not always to the development of orthodoxy –
contrasts those who read ‘superficially’ (parergōs) with those who read with
‘care and attention’ (met’epimeleias kai epistaseōs) (Peri Pascha 12).19 The
contrast depends on how the Passover of Jewish scripture is to be under-
stood as a tupos of Christianity. The Passover (pascha) should be under-
stood as a tupos of Jesus, Origen argues, but not of the Passion (pathos).
That is, despite the imagined linguistic link between paschein and pascha,
‘passion’/‘Passover’, the dissimilarities between the paschal sacrifice and the
passion are too great: the paschal lamb is sacrificed by holy men, Origen
points out, while Jesus was crucified by criminals. Therefore, and more
importantly, ‘it is necessary for us to sacrifice the true lamb; if we are
ordained or bring sacrifices like priests, we have to cook and eat its flesh’
(Peri Pascha 13). There are two crucial strands of argument intertwined
here. On the one hand, the importance of the typological reading is in its
internalization for the Christian reader who wishes to aspire to the holiness
of a priest (either as an ordained member of the church or as an individual
whose holiness is to be like a priest’s): Passover acts as a type not just for
events in the New Testament but for the daily life of the Christian – the
constant work of sacrificing for God. On the other hand, Passover as
a tupos has a non-literal referent, not to another event simply, but to
something itself non-physical but spiritual. Typology is also a way of seeing
beyond even the miracle of an event into its spiritual significance. For
Origen, then, Passover is not only replete with a future meaning, but also
the meaning demands that the event in its spiritual significance is always
already present in the spiritual struggle for the freedom of service that the
Passover announces. Typology turns temporality away from any direct
linearity.
One figure whom Origen might be engaging with is the second-century
bishop Melito of Sardis.20 His text, also called peri pascha, also theorizes
typology but in a quite different way. He begins by announcing that the
Hebrew scripture of Exodus has been plainly stated, and proceeds with the
general theoretical position that the text is both ‘new and old’ (kainon kai
palaion), ‘everlasting and temporary’ (aïdion kai prokairon), ‘perishable and
imperishable’ (phtharton kai aphtharton). In line with his hostile super-
sessionism, he explains that it is ancient with regard to the law, but new
with regard to the Logos; temporary with regard to the type (tupos), eternal

19
See Hanson (2002); Ayres (2004) 20–31.
20
For a text and translation see Hill (1979); for discussion see especially Lieu (1996) 199–240; also Lieu
(2004) 81–2.

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 110 The Christian Invention of Time
through grace; perishable through the sacrifice of the lamb, imperishable
through the life of the Lord. A tupos is described with the strikingly rare
word prokairos, which means not just ‘temporary’, but – etymologically at
least – ‘before the right time’, ‘untimely’, and Melito will go on to expound
exactly what he means by such an expression. The remainder of the text
explores this logic through a reading of Exodus, centred on a statement of
principle about typology. ‘Nothing is said or happens without a parable or
a prior etching . . . the said through parable, the event through prior
modelling/prefiguration (protupōsis)’ (35). This leads to an extended ana-
logy between an artist’s modelling in clay or wood, as a preparation for an
art work.21 This sketch or preparatory model becomes useless (achreston 37)
once the work comes into being: what was once valued becomes without
value. With a redrafting of Ecclesiastes, he sums up ‘To everything there is
a proper season (kairos); a proper time (chronos) for the model (tupos);
a proper time for the material; a proper time for the truth’ (38). A model is
necessary (and prior to the model the material) because ‘you see in it the
image of the future’: however necessary it is, for the process, it is also,
precisely, prokairos. He explicates the implications at length: the people
and the law were the tupos which is fulfilled in the Gospel and the Church
(40). ‘The model (tupos) surrenders its image to the true nature and is
voided’ (43) . . . the model tupos was dissolved when the Lord was revealed’.
As he rewrites Ecclesiastes to make a new message about supersessionism –
denying the revelation on Sinai as a kairos – so he theorizes typology not as
Origen had, as a key to how the present still reverberates with the past, but
as an aggressive destruction of what was once valued. ‘If you stare at the
tupos, you will see Him through the outcome’, he writes (58), and so Abel,
Isaac, Joseph, Moses and David are each simple types by virtue of being (in
turn) murdered, bound, sold, exposed, persecuted (the sort of simple
analogy Origen criticizes). But this leads finally to a bitter and lengthy
rejection of the Jews as the killers of Christ – and as a misunderstanding of
the scriptural typology. For Melito, typology’s temporality is both linear
and mutually implicative with a hatred of Israel.22 The violence of typ-
ology, which forces past and present into co-temporaneous models of each
other, comes hand in hand with a supersessionist violence against the Jews.
As we will see especially in chapters 14 and 15, the assumptions of super-
sessionism continue in Christian readings of late antiquity with a blithe

21
Kessler (1994) 74–96 argues that Cyril’s use of skiagraphia ‘foreshadowing’ (xli.21) in his discussion
of typology becomes crucial in Christian defences of the use of imagery in churches.
22
See Lieu (1996) 199–240.

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 Time and Time Again 111
failure to recognize the continuing impact of the anti-Judaism of Christian
self-definition. Typology’s political force is politely ignored.
This sense of the buried life of the present and future coming to view in
the reading of the past is enacted at the level of the word. The Prophets are
the place where typology is most pressingly debated. Hosea 1.1 announces
‘The word (d’var) of the lord that came to Hosea son of Berri’. Origen
notes the straightforward historical understanding of this phrasing (kata
tēn historian) but adds that it should be read ‘according to a mystical logic/
argument’, kata mustikon logon. For, he interprets, Hosea in Hebrew
means ‘saved’ (Jo. 2.4). Thus, we can hear not just a general message of
salvation in the prophets but an echo of Jesus, whose name comes from the
same Hebrew root. The prophet’s Hebrew name turns out to speak
a Christian truth.
Such an interpretation then becomes an integral part of the Latin Bible
itself, the Bible of the church for centuries, thanks to Origen’s great
defender, Jerome. The prophet Habakkuk (3.18) wrote (in Hebrew): ‘Yet
I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation’ (the King
James version). The Septuagint translates the final phrase accurately
enough with ἐπὶ τῷ θεῷ τῷ σωτῆρί μου, ‘in God my saviour’. Jerome
translates the whole sentence into Latin as Ego autem in Domino gaudebo et
exsultabo in Deo Jesu meo, ‘Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in my
God, Jesus’. Sōtēri, ‘saviour’, has been translated ‘Jesus’. The Hebrew for
‘my saviour’ is ye’shi, and to Jerome’s eyes this is close enough to the name
ye’shua, ‘Jesus’, which is indeed formed from the root for ‘salvation’. For
Jerome, reading through the Greek to the Hebrew opens a new potential
for seeing the truth of the text. Jerome’s translation is a theologically
creative rendering which not only sees in the name Jesus the root of (all)
salvation, but also regards it as inevitable and right to imagine that
a prophet who lived hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus could
rejoice in Jesus, because in the temporality of Christianity, which through
typology could see Jesus in Adam and Adam in Jesus, it was right and
proper to uncover the timeless truth of Christianity in what was now an
Old Testament. His Latin reads through Greek and through Hebrew to
a deeper truth. Translation into Latin makes patent what the translation
into Greek had buried. The timelessness of God, the co-eternity of Son and
Father, finds here in typology its strategy of reading, where any sense of
past and present becomes rather a revelation of the always already.
Typology, even though tupoi is sometimes translated in the King James
Bible as ‘examples’, changes the temporality of exemplarity. The exempla of
Latin historiography – for example – construct layered and complex

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 112 The Christian Invention of Time
interactions between past and present that depend on the disruptive
difference as well as a genealogical link between past and present, and
locate the subject thus in a self-conscious historical positionality, with the
need to negotiate the snagging of fit between case and example. Typology
by contrast, even allowing for the differences in method that we have
traced, closes the gaps of time and signification between past and present,
resisting linear time, and finding a revealed always already in mutual
figuration, without loss. Typology is not merely a hermeneutic strategy,
however. There is a violent normativity in this redrafting of how time and
exemplars interrelate, which is integral to a politics of supersessionism –
and, as we will see in chapter 15 in particular, allows for a redrafting of what
historical narrative can look like. (The long established and authoritative
power of such a resistance to linear time is inadequately recognized by
theories of ‘queer time’, which seek to re-privilege temporal non-linearity
as challenging to dominant cultural models.) The question which remains,
then, is: how does typology redraft the horizon of expectation for how
stories are told and understood in late antiquity? What is the consequent
impact on the self-understanding of historical positioning? At the very
least, any specificity of Jewish history is subsumed as a version of Christian
narrative. What politics – politics of history and politics of disdain – are
made possible by this version of temporality?

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 chapter 6

Making Time Visible

For any discussion of the politics of history evoked thus by typology it is

basic to ask how a community – a city, a nation, a sect – curates its
memory.
Athens in the classical era is instructive, exemplary even. The polis of
Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries bce was a community which
repeatedly represented itself to itself as a continuing exploration of civic
identity. In a period of rapid social and political change, when the very
constitution of the city as a direct democracy was actively promoted and
resisted, and when the international status of the city depended on its
pronounced differences from other neighbouring cities, the self-
consciousness of what made Athens distinctively and essentially Athenian
was a political project to be performed.1 As ever, war – and imperial Athens
was always at war – sharpens the dichotomies of self-representation. How
did Athens make its memory – its sense of time past – visible? How did
temporality take shape as a political project?
Memory made visible – the display of civic time – took, first of all,
architectural form. Athens, with the new-won wealth of empire, like so
many modern and ancient imperial forces, adorned its own civic frame-
work, and most famously with the Parthenon, that rose above and amid the
ruins left by the Persian invasion and sack of Athens.2 The Parthenon
frieze, the band of statuary that runs around the whole temple, is the only
temple sculpture in the ancient Greek world to represent directly the
human agents of the city that built the temple.3 It depicts a long procession
of Athenians, ideally and iconically pictured, proceeding towards the
presentation of the sacred robe to the goddess Athene, the patron goddess
of the city, whose image dominates one end of the building dedicated to
1
See for the general case: Shear (2011), (2012a), (2013), (2020); Steinbock (2013); Castagnoli and
Ceccarelli (2019) and the chapters in Castagnoli and Ceccarelli eds. (2019) 93–178; on relation to
orality, see Thomas (1989).
2 3
For the pre-Parthenon site, see Rous (2019) 84–125. Osborne (1987); Neils (2006).

113

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 114 The Christian Invention of Time
her. That is, the central religious site of the city represented the city itself
performing a rite of civic, mythological genealogy. Each time a citizen
walked around the Parthenon, he joined the ritual procession above him,
mirrored and mirroring himself in a transition between his own ritual life
and the mythological world that the ritual evoked. As ritual makes time
a commemorative sequence of repetitions stretching back to a mythic
origin, the new temple of the Parthenon set its citizens in line with their
marble, perfected icons of citizenship, still and always processing towards
the annual ritual commemoration of the city and her goddess. After the
Persian invasion was defeated, Greek cities agreed in the oath of Plataea
that burnt temples would be left as visible monuments of Greek survival,
or, as Pausanias 500 years later described them, ‘memorials of hatred’.4 The
Parthenon’s very newness stood – as time rolled on – as a sign of the city’s
memory of victory, monumentalized in a ritual of stone.
One side of the agora, by contrast, was bounded by the Painted Stoa
(stoa poikilē). This long colonnade had three large murals, representing the
sack of Troy by the Greeks, the defeat of the Persians by the Greeks at the
battle of Marathon, and the defeat of the Spartans by the Athenians.5 The
three pictures are set up as analogies of each other. The modern soldier-
citizen, ever at war, is to see himself as the avatar of the Greek heroes who
fought at Troy, their own ancestors who defended the city against the
Persian invaders, and their own military heroes who fought and continued
to fight against Sparta. It is not hard to see this as a full-scale normative
expression of the military commitment to the city which undergirded
democratic expectations of civic duty. Again, a sequence, ritualized, but
now of three singularities, three historical events, made into a sequence by
the act of civic building and self-representation – a sequence for citizens to
join. Even walls, built out of dismantled graveyards and buildings, recalled
how the material of the city was reused in its own defence.6 The topog-
raphy of the city in democracy is rebuilt as a topography for the perform-
ance of citizenship, for the citizen to see himself in the timeline of the city.
Citizens also took part in regular ritual processions, which conceptually
linked the various sites of civic infrastructure into a map of civic engagement,
and also watched them. Social and cultural memory of the collective and for
the collective is conjoined with embodied ‘habit memory’ as the citizen
processes or watches the procession, observing oneself observing, together.7
4
Paus. 10. 35.3: examples were still visible to his historical gaze. 5 Castriota (1993).
6
Rous (2019) 31–61, which is also useful (1–30) on the history of ‘spolia studies’.
7
For ‘habit memory’, Connerton (1989); see also Assmann (2000a), (2000b); Erll (2011); Funkenstein
(1989); Mendels (2004); Nelson and Olin eds. (2003).

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 Making Time Visible 115
This dynamic of participation and representation between the images on the
temple, marching, and watching the marching, makes each procession
a performance of the ‘law’ or ‘custom of the fathers’, the patrios nomos –
something time-honoured, that is, a ritual which, by performing it, maintains
an ideological as well as an aetiological continuity between present time and
the past, even and especially the deep time of myth. In the next chapter, we
will see how the distinction between mythic time and historical time is an
invention of the era that sculpted the Parthenon frieze, its contradiction.
One occasion in the calendar of Athens, which brilliantly used its ritual to
insist that the most singular historical event – the death of a citizen-soldier –
must be seen in a self-defining, repetitive sequence back into the deepest past
of the city, was the public, collective funeral of the war dead, an event which
Thucydides makes a paradigm of the city’s patrios nomos, ‘ancestral custom’
(although the ritual was, in crude chronological terms, a relatively recent
introduction of democracy). The Funeral Speech was delivered by
a distinguished politician each year over the collective dead of the city who
died fighting for the state. Nicole Loraux in particular has analysed how this
event contributed to the civic ideology of Athens, with its praise of unnamed
warriors as the latest to ‘prove themselves good men’.8 Pericles, in
Thucydides’ version, makes the line of citizens back into times past his
starting point of memorial (2.36): ‘I shall begin with our ancestors first: it is
both just and proper to give them this honour of memory (mnēmē) on such
an occasion. They dwelt in the country without break in the succession from
generation to generation, and handed it down free to the present time by
their valour.’ He moves on from this deep genealogy to their own fathers,
founders of empire, before praising the political glories of Athens in the
present. It was typical of such speeches to recall the defeat of Persia and other
victories back in time. The speech did not memorialize any individual heroic
success or name any Athenian, but insisted that, like the figures on the
Parthenon observed by the citizens, the dead warriors were celebrated as
icons of valour in a line of icons of valour. The Funeral Speech idealized
a history of the city, making any individual memory of families subordinate
to the ongoing history of the State. ‘We have no need of Homer’, declares the
Thucydidean Pericles (2.41): these warriors have not died for individual
glory, memorialized in song; but unnamed, they find their honour in the
continuity of the city. The time of death is fully politicized as a duty to the
state’s necessary timeline. As Hobbes and Puffendorf in the seventeenth

8
Loraux (1981a).

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 116 The Christian Invention of Time
century argued, states in their self-conceptualization require ‘an endless
succession of time’.9
Athens was, in Demosthenes’ words, a ‘state made up of speech-
making’, ‘a constitution of discourse’, en logois politeia (19.184). Memory,
not least in contrast to these institutions of civic promotion of an idealized
procession of marmoreal statues, was also profoundly contested, in law,
politics, theatre and the very invention of historiography, the arenas of
logoi. I will return more fully to the self-announcement of the historians in
subsequent chapters, but there is no more evident example of revisionism
in a city’s memory than Thucydides’ acerbic account of the statues of
Harmodius and Aristogeiton. This pair of heroic marble figures was for
many years the only statue in the agora of Athens, and this very placement
exaggerated their celebration as the tyrant slayers.10 The archetypal hate-
figure of ancient democracy is the tyrant; Harmodius and Aristogeiton
were lauded as the liberators of Athens because they killed the city’s last
tyrant; and they were remembered in drinking songs, popular sayings and
the city’s self-understanding of its political history. Thucydides, however,
insists that they didn’t actually kill a tyrant but his brother, and it was
a lovers’ tiff, anyway, not an act of political idealism. Thucydides is arguing
for his own place in the contests of authority, and his intellectualized
corrective had little effect on popular drinking songs. But his insistence
that Athenian civic memory was faulty is testimony of a significant strand
of Athenian democratic culture.
In both law courts and political speeches, there is both a repeated
rewriting of the past in the cause of a persuasive case for the present, and
a rhetorical awareness of such manipulativeness.11 ‘Remember!’, declares
Andocides (1.69), ‘with regard to the truth of my words, and those who do
know much teach the rest that don’t’: truth is defended by an appeal to
memory, an appeal which anticipates multiple possible engagements with
the salient past. Such appeals become part of the rhetorical contest. ‘If my
opponent says a fact is well known to you’, states Demosthenes in
a magnificently disingenuous demand for a cautious self-awareness of
manipulation (40.53), ‘what anyone of you does not know, let him assume
that his neighbour does not know it either’.12 The contest over the past is
a conflict of knowledge and knowingness – of carefully curated memory.

9
Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 46. Quentin Skinner opened my eyes to this. See also Gorham (2014).
10
See Shear (2012b), with relevant bibliography.
11
Hanink (2014); Canevaro (2019); Steinbock (2013); Thomas (1989); Nouhaud (1982); and on
inscriptions see below pp. 132–7.
12
See the excellent discussion of Hesk (2000) 202–21; Canevaro (2019).

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 Making Time Visible 117
So, the memory of political violence in particular, because it is repeatedly
instrumentalized for the fervour of the present, in ancient Athens as in the
modern world, prompts ‘memory sanctions’ and gestures of amnesty –
politicized, compulsory forgetfulness. With varying degrees of success, of
course. The political and emotive instrumentalization of the past go hand
in hand with conflicting narratives of memory, and with competing
strategies of making memory authoritative.
The past embodied in mythic and epic narratives too was subject to
scrutiny, not just in the high intellectual analysis of historiographers (again
deferred to another chapter), but also in the most public arena of theatre.
Theatre, an institution on which Athens prided itself as its inventor,
certainly represents the city to itself at multiple levels – in the rituals
which surrounded the performance, in the organization of the space of
the audience, and in the plays themselves, tragedy, comedy and satyr play.
The comedies displayed a carnivalesque version of Athens’s political and
social system (women taking over the Assembly, old men behaving deplor-
ably in the courts, women stopping war by refusing sex); the tragedies
searingly uncovered the contradictions in the normative language of the
city, again and again exposing fissures between the ideal of family care and
the exigencies of civic duty. Tragedy in particular becomes a way of
rewriting the myths of the past for the contemporary political scenario of
the democratic city – and rewriting them as questions. If the Funeral
Speech idealized the death of the citizen-soldier as the performance of
civic duty, tragedies again and again exposed the internal tensions in such
ideals, setting duties against each other in violent, self-destructive conflict.
Tragedy asks – in public – how the stories and values of the past can and
should speak to the present.13 Tragedy provokes an emotionally raw and
uncomfortable awareness of how fragile the aetiology of the myths we live
by is: in tragedy we are also brought to face the precarity of the political
present.
In classical Athens, then, we see how times past are made visible in civic
architecture, and how the city’s ‘endless succession of time’ is encoded in
ritual’s sequence, and articulated – constructed – in civic self-
representation, both in material form and in the speeches and rituals of
civic ceremony. Yet the fifth-century enlightenment is also characterized
by the self-reflexive questioning of aitiai, the causes of things: the past
becomes a site of conflict, both in how myth as aetiology of value is

13
See Ceccarelli (2019); Scodel (2008); and for the best study of how tragedy enters social memory,
Hanink (2014).

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 118 The Christian Invention of Time
understood in the democratic city, and in the epistemology of producing
a narrative of the past.14 Not only are the past and the memory of the past
argued over in the personal battles of the court, and the political debates of
interstate conflict, but also this argument is conducted with a sophisticated
rhetoric of self-consciousness, which is further embedded in treatises or
theories that discuss the epistemology involved in understanding the past.
In the fifth-century city, the awareness of the gap between the past and
present is not simply troped as decline or progress, but explicitly theorized,
self-consciously manipulated, aggressively instrumentalized: time made
visible.
So can a city be imagined where the foreign country of the past is not
open to the imperialism, border raids, fantasies and mapping that foreign
countries experience? Plato tried such an exercise of the imagination in his
Republic. To establish his state without internal conflict and without
change, he needs a ‘noble lie’, a lie that shuts off his citizens from the
past. Plato’s Republic is designed to embody the ‘endless succession of
time’, where the future will not be different from the present. But to get to
this ideal point of changelessness, Plato also needs to make a lie of the past,
a lie that cannot be challenged.
Except in Plato’s utopian ideal, states inhabit a time of conflicted,
selective, self-serving, mistaken, demanding and embracing memories.
Curating memory is integral to the politics of the state. In ancient Rome,
‘a memory culture par excellence’,15 the institutions and practices of the
state strive to make time visible – the horologium of Augustus in the forum
is a convenient icon – and work to locate the Roman citizen in the
genealogy of historical time. If Athenian processions integrate the citizen
in a time-honoured ritual performance that joins each person to the endless
timeline of the city, Roman funerary processions require an even more
intense impersonation.16 When a Roman noble, who had achieved signifi-
cant political office, died, the funeral procession included actors who wore
lifelike wax masks of his ancestors. At the time of death, thus, in what
became a ‘lavish drama and magnificent spectacle as well as being
a medium for popular history’, the ‘ancestors welcomed and received’ the
dead man ‘as one of their number’,17 an enactment of a ‘ritual joining of the
long line of ancestors’.18 The procession, complete with tituli, titles or
explanations of the images, displayed the family line as a continuing

14
See, most recently, Pelling (2019); Baragwanath (2008). 15 Galinsky ed. (2014) 17.
16 17
Flower (1996) is the standard analysis. See also Gowing (2005). Flower (1996) 141, 91.
18
Hölkeskamp (2014) 69, not dented by Wiseman (2014).

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 Making Time Visible 119
exhibition not just of status but also of nobility across time – a ‘continuous
rehearsing and reconstructing of family traditions’.19 These masks, called
imagines, were kept in the atrium of the noble’s house, and each branch of
the family line had similar masks. When a noble’s clients visited their
patron for the rituals of salutatio, they were greeted thus by a man sur-
rounded by the images of his ancestors – the family line made visible, the
status of the family on display. Hence the shock of Marius, no noble, who
taunted the senate and paraded his own bravery as testimony of his
contribution to the state: ‘My scars are my imagines’, he boasted, collapsing
the possibility of family history into a single person’s singular military
achievement.20
In Roman culture, ‘memory [was] a space, filled with monuments,
inscriptions, portraits, written accounts and other testimonies to the life
of a Roman citizen’, designed ‘to ensure the survival and continuity of the
community and the particular culture of its political families’.21 Statues
displayed ‘the whole city’s ancestral actors’, and a string of lieux
de mémoire, from Romulus’ hut to Nero’s Colossus, enacted the ‘monu-
mentalization of cultivated memory’ in the civic topography.22 Cities
were ‘memory theatres’.23 Imperial authority changed the possibilities
and requirements of such memorialization, and with the conflicts over
dynastic succession came ‘memory wars’, the attempt of each ruler to
‘define and control public memory’, not least by destroying, defacing or
changing the materiality of memorialization of their predecessors.24 The
decree of the Senate from 10 December 20 ce, against Cn. Calpurnius
Piso specifies that despite the mos maiorum, the custom of the ancestors,
which frames and embodies normative collective memory, no mourning
would be allowed at his funeral; that all statues and busts of him should
be removed, destroying his presence in the public view of the city; that his
imagines could not be processed at any funeral, thus excising him from
the public acknowledgment of his family line; and that such imagines
could not be kept at home, removing him from even the domestic history
of his own family. Such damnatio memoriae is a public display of the
redrafting of memory. Some statues were physically destroyed; some were
defaced; some, because marble was expensive and sculptors efficient, were
re-carved into new portraits. Such re-cutting, which always leaves

19 20
Flower (1996) 274. Sallust, Bellum Jug. 85.29–30, with Leigh (1997) 229–30.
21 22
Flower (1996) 276. More generally, see Bettini (1991). Hölkeskamp (2014) 70.
23
Alcock (2002) 54; Nasrallah (2010); Favro (2014); Hughes (2014).
24
Flower (2006); Varner (2004); Vout (2008) and for the later period, Hedrick (2000); also Elsner
(2003) for the Greek case.

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 120 The Christian Invention of Time
a ‘legible reminder’25 of the previous portrait, lets the past be viewed
through the active work of the present: it makes the changing times
visible, embodied. Turning an image of Domitian into a portrait of
Augustus seems even ‘to reverse the march of time’.26 The erasure of
sentences or words in an inscription demands attention to their absence.
(‘Images’, writes Joseph Koerner, ‘are never as vociferous as when han-
dled by an iconoclast’.)27 Damnatio memoriae certainly allowed the
violent expression of vengeful feelings – Pliny tells us the overwrought
story that the statues of Domitian spurted blood and screamed when
beaten – but the destruction or alteration of imperial images also ‘consti-
tuted an active mechanism in the ongoing process of historical emend-
ation’, the paraded re-construction of memory.28 As the Pentateuch
insists, with productive paradox, about the enemy of Israel, Amalek,
‘You must blot out the remembrance of Amalek . . . You shall not
forget.’29 One must remember to block out the memory. But, most
saliently, such a performance of damnatio in imperial Rome also high-
lighted the transition of dynastic rule, not just the passing of time but the
announcement of a new era. Romans knew in what time they lived by
such performances of destruction, and the history of damnatio turns each
new era into the sequence of historical time. The imperial era is concep-
tualized by contrast with the Republican era;30 emperors give their name
to time. Through the practice of damnatio, the materiality of the city is
made to announce the era, a violent curation of time and memory.
Through the continuing history of damnatio, and the traces and relics
that damnatio always leaves, the very constructedness of imperial time is
made visible.
*
How, then, are such sites and rituals of memory to be responded to? How is
the viewer of such memorials to engage, react, express emotion?
For Pausanias, travelling around the major cult sites of mainland
Greece, his perspective is that of the educated, sophisticated observer of
the internal nuances and niceties of Greek culture.31 He wants to lead his
Greek readers to view panta ta Hellenika, ‘everything Greek’ with him: he
curates curated memory. He recognizes the privileged monuments of the

25 26 27
Varner (2008) 134. Vout (2008) 164. Koerner (2003) 106.
28 29
Pliny, Paneg. 52.4–5; Varner (2008) 129. Deut. 25.17–19.
30
Gowing (2005). For the literary history, see the incisive reflections of Vessey (2015).
31
See Elsner (1995) ch. 4; Alcock (1996); Alcock, Cherry and Elsner eds. (2001); Hutton (2005);
Pretzler (2007).

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 Making Time Visible 121
past, and their rituals, but his political investment in such history is
strategically subordinated to a distanced stance of intellectual evaluation
and description. He will look on the Parthenon, he will fail to see the
Roman buildings in front of him, which are thus not permitted to block his
historicizing gaze, but he will not draw aggressive or even explicit attention
to this selective viewing or its implications: he is happy to ‘read the Roman
elements out of the landscape’.32 For Pausanias, seeing the history in the
Greek monuments of the past is not to engage directly the Roman imperial
politics of the here and now. ‘The impious present’ may be ‘a lamentable
ruin’ in comparison with the glorious past, and ‘the list of ruins scattering
the land’ may be ‘long and sad’, but as a ‘Greek nationalist response to the
fact of Roman dominance’, Pausanias nonetheless emphasizes ‘fortune’ as
the prime cause of change.33 Pausanias’ journey invites his readers to share
his melancholic but educated view of ‘everything Greek’ as a recognition of
a lost past, the visible signs of how times were once other.
Such a grand tour of the past is in sharp contrast to Lucian’s roughly
contemporary engagement with the temple of his homeland. In de dea
Syria, ‘On the Syrian Goddess’, Lucian writes in the language and style of
Herodotus – in Ionic Greek, with a fascination for the cults of other
peoples, a nice recognition of his sources as a mixture of first-hand experi-
ence and priests, and with sexy inset narratives along with ethnographic
description.34 The ‘mock innocence’ of such a stance is belied both by its
literary knowingness and by Herodotus’ complex reputation as the lying
father of history and as the lover of barbarians. Yet the author of the piece
not only refuses to name himself but also identifies himself as a Syrian, who
has worshipped at the temple and left his name inscribed there (for us to
imagine). Typically of Lucian’s wonderfully ironic use of self-concealing
masks, this piece claims to be written by an unnamed Syrian, in Greek,
a Herodotean Greek of the classical era, in which he describes his home-
land as if from the perspective of a Greek outsider but who is actually
a Syrian worshipper at the temple. This self-dramatization of a response to
a temple and its cultic practice of self-memorialization uses thus the
Herodotean past to express a sense of the twisty self-defining strategies of
insider and outsider in the multilingual, multicultural empire. The histor-
ian, as a figure of the past and teller of the past, becomes an affordance of
self-representation: playing Herodotus, staying Syrian. A sophisticated

32 33
Hutton (2005) 305. Elsner (1994) 249.
34
See Elsner (2001), with Lightfoot (2003) for philological commentary.

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 122 The Christian Invention of Time
response to such a lieu de mémoire, suggests Lucian, takes shape by
incorporating such foreign historical perspectives from another time.
Such complex imperial responses to visiting sites of worship form
a contrastive anticipation of the pilgrim narratives of late antiquity.35
Gregory of Nyssa captures the normative experience of the Christian
traveller in one telling question: ‘How will it be possible to travel through
places full of passion without passion?’36 How, that is, when faced by sites
of suffering (pathos), replete with the memory of the martyrs dying in
imitation and fulfilment of Christ’s passion (pathos), it is possible to react
without emotion (apathōs), without re-experiencing the suffering? How
could the pathos of the place (topos) not affect or infect the feelings of the
viewer? Gregory is careful to warn against pilgrimage if it turns into a party
(of a Chaucerian kind), which he saw in Jerusalem – his polemic was
consequently used by Protestants in the Reformation to attack Catholic
practice – and he worries that ascetics may be distracted, and women come
into too much contact with men, but despite his own political, theological
disputes in Jerusalem, he cannot repress the joy he felt at seeing the sites
where Jesus had walked.37 Pilgrimage cannot but engage the Christian in
a re-visioning of the past.
Prudentius, writing at the end of the fourth century, dramatizes the
emotionally overwhelming experience of the pilgrim with vivid intensity,
especially in his poem on the martyr Cassian of Imola, Peristephanon 9.38 In
this poem, a micro-version of the whole collection, Prudentius travels from
his native Spain to Rome and back, participating in the developing map of
Christian pilgrimage.39 Egeria had already written her account of her trip
to the Holy Land, and Jerome too had already sent to Marcella his
powerful description of pilgrimage to sacred sites (Ep. 46). Jerome uses
scripture to justify pilgrimage. Elsewhere (Ep. 58), like Gregory, he strongly
advises a monk – Paulinus of Nola – to avoid leaving his ascetic life for the
city, even and especially Jerusalem. God is everywhere and travel

35
To move in a discussion of time to a discussion of memory and memorization, to pilgrims in the
Holy Land, is to trace the intellectual history of Maurice Halbwachs, one father of memory studies,
who studied with the great philosopher of time, Henri Bergson, then under Durkheim’s influence
wrote on social and collective memory, and published, posthumously, a book on the construction of
pilgrim sites in the Holy Land as a test-case of the social frameworks of memory.
36
Ep. 2.5–7. On pilgrimage see Hunt (1982); Sivan (1988), (1990); Ousterhout ed. (1990); Leyerle
(1996); Frank (2000b); Maraval (2002); Elsner and Rutherford eds. (2005); Dietz (2005); the
extremely useful Bitton-Ashkelony (2005); Bader (2018), and more broadly Coleman and Elsner
(1995). On Christian responses to the space of empire, see Nasrallah (2010).
37
Bitton-Ashkelony (2005) 30–64 has a full discussion of Gregory and Basil. See in general Kirk ed.
(2005).
38 39
Goldhill (1999); Clarke (2020). For a full background, see Hershkowitz (2017).

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 Making Time Visible 123
a misprision of religious duty and understanding. ‘The true temple of
Christ is the believer’s soul’ (Ep. 58.7), he writes, echoing Origen’s ‘the holy
place is the true soul’.40 But to Marcella, he outlines a string of injunctions
to travel to find God, starting with the instruction to Abraham to ‘Get you
out of your country’ (Gen. 12.1); he lists all the amazing sites to be seen,
from the very spot at Golgotha where tradition has it that Adam lived and
died (immediately glossed with a reference to the ‘Second Adam’). His
apologetic also analyses and dismisses the counter-arguments against pil-
grimage to Jerusalem, including the instructions to the Apostles to leave
the Holy Land and spread the word to the gentiles. Like Augustine, Jerome
can see pilgrimage as an image of the soul’s rising from its alienation in the
physical world to the spiritual City of God, an itinerarium animae, ‘a
journey of the soul’, where the struggle of the journey itself signifies:
‘Our life is here, but our citizenship is in heaven’,41 declares John
Chrysostom, and Augustine tellingly calls his readers ‘my citizens and
pilgrims with me’ (Conf. 10.4.6). Above all, however, with increasing
intensity Jerome repeats that they will see not just the sites but the events
themselves: ‘We will see Lazarus come forth bound in grave clothes; we
shall look upon the waters of the Jordan purified for the washing of the
Lord . . . we shall see the prophet Amos, upon his crag blowing his
shepherd’s horn’. The vividness (enargeia) of ecphrasis becomes here
a religious vision. So Paula (Ep. 108.10) – and it might be worth noticing
that both Jerome’s paradigmatic pilgrims are women, while it is male
monks he advises to study – when in Bethlehem, ‘could behold with the
eyes of faith the infant Lord wrapped in swaddling clothes and crying in the
manger’; indeed ‘she declared she could see the slaughtered innocents,
the raging Herod, Joseph and Mary fleeing into Egypt’. Pilgrimage is to
change one’s experience of time, to inhabit another time’s present: ‘To be
in the place of revelation is to be in the time of revelation.’42 Finally, he
imagines how Marcella and he will return to the cave where he lives as
a hermit: ‘then we shall sing heartily, we shall weep copiously, and pray
unceasingly’. Jerome provides a template for Christian pilgrimage: justified
by scripture, not just to experience the sites but to re-experience the pathos
of the sites, and to recall them in song, tears and prayer, as an image of the
Christian life, necessarily an alienated journey. As with the hermeneutics of
typology, Jerome closes the gap between the past and the present in his

40
Homily on Leviticus 13.5 41 John Chrysostom, Homily 15 on 2 Cor. 5.
42
Leyerle (1996) 131. On Jerome see Frank (2000b) 96–101; Newman (1998).

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 124 The Christian Invention of Time
passionate vision: this is to make place not so much a lieu de mémoire as
a topos of pathos, a permanent present of shared tears.
Prudentius is not a monk (yet). He is on his way to Rome with
a petition. He stops at Imola to pray at the tomb of Saint Cassian and
there sees a picture of the saint’s martyrdom. The sacristan explains the
picture to him in the long central section of the poem. Prudentius prays to
the martyr for help, and the poem ends with Prudentius declaring that his
mission in Rome was successful, and he returned to Spain to praise
Cassian, praise instantiated in this poem. The recollection of the trip to
Rome thus frames his encounter with the sacristan and the sacristan’s inset
description of the picture. The sacristan explains that the picture ‘recounts
a history (historiam) that is handed down (tradita) in books and demon-
strates the true faith of olden times (vetusti temporis)’ (19–20). So,
Prudentius recalls in the poem hearing a history, now with the status of
scripture (tradita libris) that shows the faith of ‘olden times’. The tempor-
ality of the poem is carefully layered: a memory of being told a history of
a former age. But his response is not so distanced, so framed: Stratus humi
tumulo advolvebar, he begins, ‘I was stretched out on the ground, prostrate
before the tomb’ (7–8):
dum lacrimans mecum reputo vulnera et omnes
vitae labores ac dolorum acumina
While in tears I reflected on my wounds and all the labours
Of my life, and the pricks of grief
Prudentius weeps, as he recalls (reputo) – another layer of time – his
‘wounds’ and the ‘pricks’ of grief. Cassian was martyred by being stabbed
to death with pens: the ‘wounds’ and ‘pricks’ do not merely anticipate
Cassian’s story programmatically or for aesthetic effect, as we might say,
but structure Prudentius’ experience as a form of imitatio, just as every
martyr’s suffering is an imitatio Christi. After he has been told Cassian’s
story, he again weeps: ‘I embraced the tomb, I poured tears too . . . then
I reflected on all the hidden parts of my distress, then on what I sought,
what I feared, muttering’. Unlike a Roman orator or exegete, strutting and
expounding before a work of art, Prudentius depicts himself in emotional
turmoil, weeping, humbled, prostrate – muttering. As Jerome advised:
here is embodied song, weeping, prayer. As Prudentius himself writes
(Perist. 2.529–36), ‘blessed is he . . . who prostrates himself by your bones,
who sprinkles the place with tears, who presses his breast to the ground,
who pours out his prayer, murmuring’. Prudentius before Cassian’s tomb

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 Making Time Visible 125
is representing himself in the authoritative, humbled, physical and mental
position for a good Christian.
The poem also asks a question, however. The poem offers the prostrated
and crying Christian imitator of the saint as a model of response: but how is
a reader of the poem to respond to this response? How tearfully is
Prudentius to be read? Is Prudentius’ poem, as an exercise in devotion, to
become itself a prompt to devotion? How catching are the tears of the faith
of olden times?
Prudentius’ poetry, like Jerome’s prose, is the product of a traditional
training in Roman literary culture, for all that it struggles precisely with the
tension between its Christianity and the values encoded in such training.
Behind the weeping Prudentius stands the most famous response to temple
art in Roman culture, namely, pious Aeneas before Juno’s temple in
Carthage in Book 1 of the Aeneid. When Aeneas sees the pictures of the
Trojan war imaged on the temple, he too cries (lacrimans, 1.459), as he
observes sunt lacrimae rerum, here too ‘the tears of the world exist’. He
‘groans greatly, and moistens his face with abundant flow’. Aeneas sees his
own story, and like Odysseus in the Odyssey hearing a song of his own
exploits, is moved to weeping. Aeneas stands transfixed by the picture.
Prudentius’ bodily performance is quite different from that of Aeneas –
who will meet Dido at the very moment he stands thus in manly reflection
before the temple – just as Prudentius’ murmuring of prayer contrasts with
Aeneas’ address to his faithful Achates, with whom he stands. Christian
tapeinōsis, ‘abasement’, redefines the heroism of the body. Yet at another
level it may seem harder to distinguish Aeneas and Prudentius. Aeneas
weeps to see an image of his own experience, and understands that the
Trojan sufferings speak to the Carthaginians too (et mentem mortalia
tangunt, ‘the human condition touches their minds’); Prudentius sees the
suffering of another as the shared sign of his own human woes. But
Augustine suggests that there is also a crucially different sense of identifi-
cation at work in this Christian response to a martyr story. How, asks
Augustine, is the spectacle of a martyr story different from theatrical
spectacles – the tragedies where we cry at the woes of others? ‘We’, he
answers, ‘in as much as we have a sane mind in us, want to imitate the
martyrs we watch’.43 For the Christian there is no Aristotelian pity and fear
at the spectacles of suffering; rather the Christian’s sanity, his good sense, is
to be seen in a desire for imitation of suffering: to turn the layerings of

43
Augustine, Sermo Denis 14.3.

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 126 The Christian Invention of Time
history, the gaps between the present and the past, into as close as it is
possible to get to a form of typology, where each life is an imitatio Christi.
The cult of the martyrs and the draw of the Holy Land created a new
map of pilgrimage and new places of memory. What distinguishes this
changing topography, however, is a normative expectation of a different
type of enacted response from Greek and Roman culture’s traditions of
travel writing, festival attendance, ritualized embassies, and strategies of
memorialization. The weeping, praying, humbled, prostrate Christian
embodies this contrast. But when Jerome writes, ‘We will see Lazarus
come forth bound in grave clothes’, what his intense religious vision also
demands is that time is made visible, otherwise. This lieu de mémoire works
to efface memory and replace it with the present vision of the eyes of faith;
to suffer alongside; to inhabit Christian time.

*
One tetchy commonplace response within memory studies to questions
such as ‘How does a city curate its memory?’ is that only individuals have
memory and, what’s more, everyone’s memory is different.44 Such
a response is not necessarily shoddy empiricism masked as sniffy common
sense, but also makes a claim to privilege the phenomenology of memory.
It is a claim that has a long history, too. Yet, here too, in late antiquity
Augustine marks a watershed.
Plato, a necessary starting point, does not evidence a systematic theory of
memory, but, as ever, his scattered remarks are hugely productive for later
writers, in at least three areas. His image of the ‘wax-tablets of the mind’,
conceiving of memory as the stylus scratches in the mind’s wax, founds
a long tradition of attempts to explain how impressions enter the mind,
leading up to Freud’s ‘Mystic Writing Tablet’ – the twentieth-century
device with a celluloid sheet set over waxed paper, over a waxed tablet.45
You can write a note or draw a picture on the celluloid and it will appear as
etched letters or an image. Raise the celluloid and it will erase the note or
picture. The inscription of the note or image, however, is still left in the
lowest level of the wax. For Freud – and later Derrida – this was
a marvellous, technological image of the subconscious – a series of overlap-
ping, confused, readable, traces, beneath any explicit message of the
conscious mind, the mere celluloid of the psyche. Although the language

44
Klein (2000).
45
On Plato see Lang (1980); Sassi ed. (2007) especially Cambiano (2007); King (2019); on Freud’s
mystic writing pad Derrida (1967) 293–340.

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 Making Time Visible 127
of ‘impressions’ is still pervasive in everyday speech, the study of the
physical process of memory is currently dominated by the different lan-
guage of cognitive neuroscience; it remains to be seen, however, whether
cognitive science and cultural history will find its long-promised but still
undeveloped integration, in which the phenomenology of mind and social
process can adequately converse.
Secondly, Plato links memory to epistemology. Plato’s depiction of
anamnēsis, ‘recollection’, insists that knowledge must exist within the
mind if a person can be led to realize something he could not immediately
state. Knowledge exists as an incorporeal Form in a time before it is
expressed or accessed: it is then ‘recalled’. For later Neo-Platonists,
whose influence on Christianity is formative, anamnēsis is connected to
the descent of the soul into the physical world – and the desire of the soul to
rise again, a theme Porphyry’s allegorical analysis can find in Homer’s
description of the cave of the Nymphs in the Odyssey.46 The epistemology
of memory, however, has remained a standard topic of philosophy and
psychology, in particular with regard to the errors and distortions of
memory: the epistemology of memory is bounded by forgetfulness, ignor-
ance and the processes of learning.
Thirdly, Plato establishes an argument, which Aristotle takes forward
critically, about the respective roles of the senses and the intellect in
memory, and thus distinctions between memory, recollection,
reminiscence.47 Aristotle’s distinction between memory (mnēmē) and rec-
ollection (anamnēsis) redefines Plato’s analysis to understand recollection
as an active search through the storehouse of memories, a sort of reasoning
that also involves the body because of the sensory basis of the images in the
memory. Proust’s wonder at the flood of memories released by the taste of
a madeleine – a highly intellectualized wonder at his senses – is a distant
echo of such a tradition of philosophical discussion.
Augustine picks up all three of these argumentative traditions in his
Confessions, which redefines how memory is shaped in the history of the
West.48 Augustine begins by spatializing the faculty of memory in an
argumentative journey that begins with an Aristotelian idea of
a storehouse but ends in a quite different topography. His mind, he argues
first, contains images of prior sensations, which can be re-accessed in his

46
See Lamberton (1986), (1992); and for its polemics Edwards (1996).
47
Lang (1980); Annas (1992), Castagnoli (2019a); and the editions and commentaries of Sorabji (2006)
and Bloch (2007).
48
See Hochschild (2012) on Augustine’s view of memory as ‘a right ordering of the soul in relation to
creation’ (2) and ‘the embodied soul’s mode of approaching God’ (139).

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 128 The Christian Invention of Time
mind, without the experience of the sensation itself, so that he can sing
a memorized song internally without using his physical voice, or remember
joy when sad. He expresses this in a stunning bodily image: the memory is
‘the stomach (venter) of the mind’, which does not taste but stores. But
Augustine continues to strive to capture a fuller and more nuanced topog-
raphy of inwardness. He talks of the ‘fields and vast palaces of memory’,
campos et lata praetoria memoriae (10.8.); the ‘huge cavern of memory’
(grandis memoriae recessus, 10.13) with its ‘mysterious secret and indescrib-
able nooks and crannies’; a ‘vast hall (aula) of memory’ – a hidden place,
a crypt within.49 But he also recognizes that his knowledge of the liberal
arts, mathematics, say, is different from the imagines of prior sensations.
With mathematical principles, he knows the thing itself: it does not matter
if it is expressed in Greek or in Latin, the principle does not depend on its
expression, its imago. This memory, writes Augustine, is quasi remota
interiore loco, non loco, ‘as if moved back into a place that is deeper, a non-
place’ (10.9.16). Topography here is strained to the limit, as place becomes
a no place.
There are good reasons for this impasse of topography, this journey to
a nowhere. Discussing memory is prompted by the startling question – ten
books into the Confessions – ‘I turned myself to myself and I asked, “Who are
you?” and I replied “a man” (homo). Look, there are a body and a soul in me,
one exterior, the other interior’ (10.6.9). The ‘interior is superior’, and it is in
the interior that Augustine must seek God. The search to understand
memory is a search to understand the where of his knowledge of God. But
that search necessarily starts with the self. For it is in memory – the cavern,
the hall, the palace of memory – where ‘I meet myself, and recall myself
what, when and where I acted, and in what way I was affected when I was
acting’ (10.8.14). On the basis of what has been experienced, however, ‘I
reason about future actions and events and hopes, and again think of all these
things in the present. “I shall do this and that”, I say to myself within that
vast recess of my mind.’ Memory is integral and fundamental to the process
of change – of desiring to act and making decisions to act. Aristotle saw
anamnēsis as a dynamic activity; Augustine sees it as the core of moral
decision-making. ‘Recollection’ for Augustine is a ‘matter of will’ and thus
is ‘pre-eminently a moral activity’.50 The ‘dynamics of recollection’ here
challenge the ‘static containment’ model of the cavern of the mind.51
49
On the crypt, see Dillon (2007) building on the psychoanalytic theories of Abraham and Torok
(1994).
50
Carruthers (1998) 68; see also the fundamental Carruthers (1990) and behind that Yates (1966).
51
Stock (1998) 216.

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 Making Time Visible 129
Memory is not a stroll around a building (as the Mnemotechnik of rhetoric
suggests, with its loci of memorization) but a precarious, insistent journey of
self-discovery.
‘I myself, O Lord, labour on this, and I labour on myself’ (10.16.5). For
Augustine, the search for morality, which is also the search for how he
knows God, is to work on oneself – on the interiority of one’s being. ‘This
effort of self-discovery is part of his ongoing journey towards integration’,
writes Andrea Nightingale.52 But to do this, Augustine recognizes, is to
seek also to transcend his memory, mired as it is in the continuing physical
impressions from his body and recollections of sensory pleasure and pain.
Memory has immense power (vis), huge and terrifying in its complexity:
‘this’, he declares ‘is my mind, this is what I myself am’: memory is self-
definitional (10.17). It is impossible to plumb the depths of all its complex-
ities, and, listing the multiplicities of the interior world of the mind,
Augustine, in increasingly intense self-expression, concludes: per haec
omnia discurro et volito hac illac, penetro etiam, quantum possum, et finis
nusquam, ‘I run through all these things, I flit here and there, and penetrate
their workings as far as I can; but the end, nowhere!’. The search for the self
in the memory reveals the fragmentation and dispersal of the self, running
and flying through its dark caves, unendingly. Consequently the desire to
transcend memory: ‘I will transcend even my power of memory, I will
transcend. I will rise beyond it to move towards You, sweet light. I am
ascending through my mind up to you who are constant above me . . .’
Augustine seeks the constant of God to set against the dispersal that his
discourse reveals (with what Foucault would insist is etymological fate:
discours is derived from discurro).53 Augustine knows that God is not in his
memory and therefore he has to go beyond memory to find him. Three
times he repeats transibo ‘I will transcend’. Yet he is thrown back into
questioning as (three times) transcendence escapes through his grasp
(10.17.26): ‘I will transcend my memory so that I might find you – but
where? . . . If I find you outside my memory, I am not mindful (immemor)
of you. And how shall I find you if I am not mindful (memor) of you.’
Augustine ends in his self-defeating paradox. ‘He cannot locate God in his
memory either temporally or spatially’,54 but he cannot escape the need to
be memor – to care, to have in mind, to find in the moral activity of
recollection – if he is to locate God. Augustine cannot escape his endlessly
fallible, endlessly regressive human state of mind.

52 53 54
Nightingale (2011) 67. Foucault (1969). Nightingale (2011) 69.

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 130 The Christian Invention of Time
This condition is resolutely bodily, for all the turn to inwardness. Hence
the remainder of Book 10 – less rarely included in discussions of
Augustine’s writing on memory – outlines at length the temptations of
the body and his attempts to control sensuous and sensory pleasures.
Augustine turns to the practical necessity of living morally as a human:
for him, the phenomenology of memory is absolutely integrated, through
his theological vision, with the fundamental social question of how life
should be lived. The failed struggle to transcend the condition of memory
is a sign and symptom of the inevitably failing struggle to transcend the
condition of being human.
Memory thus for Augustine is fully part of the structure of confessio.
To say what one has been and what one now has become is
a fundamental narrative commitment of a Christian. For Augustine,
the before and after of confession structures his narrative and prompts
his reflections on memory, and the deep complexity of his representa-
tion of memory, its power and fallibility, informs and is informed by
this narrative, full of incipient change, false starts and ignorance, along
with the chance interventions that betoken grace: the theory and
exercise of memory are set in a mutually challenging, interactive
dynamic in the Confessions.55 The time of confession is necessarily
retrospective and apologetic: a re-telling of the passing of the past
from the perspective of the here and now. Augustine’s discussion of
memory both theorizes this double temporality and produces an
intense self-consciousness about it: he makes anxiously visible his
struggle with time. The insistence that the Fall is definitional of
humanity, and that Christ’s redemptive power is available to human-
ity – twin pillars of Christian theology – makes the telling of sin and
redemption the necessary grounding of confession; this narrative
requires that living in Christian time is constantly searching backwards
in the hope of a transformed future. Unlike the proliferation of many
later triumphal conversion narratives, however, Augustine’s Confessions
shows a remarkably intricate self-consciousness about how such
a search for the self is necessarily fractured and dispersed by our living
in human time, constantly experiencing a body we must wish to
transcend. It is not by chance that Augustine’s discussion of memory
precedes his extended discussion of time. Both discussions explore the
painfully incomplete and fragmented present of Christian time. We
have moved in this chapter from memorial and memorialization to

55
See Hochschild (2012).

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 Making Time Visible 131
memory: if the ‘memory wars’ of civic time and damnatio show
humans attempting to transcend or politically instrumentalize time’s
ravages, Augustine’s lasting legacy – an irony of sorts – is his deter-
mination to recognize that the fragility and force of memory, the very
grounding of memorialization, is inevitably a changing and unstable
dynamic of fallible human time.

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 chapter 7

At the Same Time

To stand in Rome before the Pantheon and stare up at the huge bronze
letters of the domineering inscription M. AGRIPPA L F COS TER
FECIT is to recognize the memorializing power of the ancient epigraphic
habit – and the degree to which the ancient city was full of sites that made
the past physically, visibly present. The Parthenon parades its anonymity,
proud in its generalization of the democratic ideal:1 the Pantheon broad-
casts its maker’s name. Even or especially here, however, the act of making
memory visible turns out to be more complicated than it might at first
seem.2 The temple itself, originally built by Agrippa, had been burnt down
twice, and the second rebuilding was completed by Domitian, an emperor
so despised by those who remembered him that his statues were said to
bleed and scream (it will be remembered) when beaten in violent damnatio.
There is no record of his name on the Pantheon. This facade was rebuilt by
Hadrian, who nonetheless has also not left his name anywhere on the
building. This may seem an act of surprising restraint, but later history (HA
Hadrian 20.3) records that Hadrian did not care to have his name pro-
claimed on buildings that he established or restored (though he was happy
for cities to be named after him). He imitated what the propagandists cared
to call the pious humility of Augustus – no less a performance of self-
assertion, for sure, but a different display of power, both by Augustus, the
first emperor for whom restoration inevitably had a different ring, and by
Hadrian aligning himself with the first emperor’s memory. It was probably
Hadrian who memorialized Agrippa with these huge bronze letters. The
fascinating suggestion has been made that Hadrian’s display of Agrippa’s
name should be read as a politicized recalibration of Augustus’ own famous
boast to have transformed Rome’s cityscape, adding another agent of

1
Suggestions that Phidias had carved recognisable faces was therefore a scandal: Rood, Atack and
Phillips (2020) 59–60.
2
Thomas (1997) provides the facts for the following paragraphs.

132

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 At the Same Time 133
power to the history.3 Underneath the proclamation of Agrippa’s name,
however, there is another long inscription, now barely visible, which attests
that Septimius Severus and his son, Caracalla – they are named with full
honours, in contrast to Agrippa’s ‘consul three times’ – ‘restored with full
refinement the Pantheon, which had been damaged by age (vetustas)’,
memorializing a further rebuilding more than fifty years after Hadrian.
(The words ‘damaged by age’ are . . . damaged by age, a melancholy to
warm the love of ruins in any Romantic poet.) For a Roman emperor, the
act of restoration is charged with political assertiveness. It announces that
there has been the need for such work – which implies the failings of
previous regimes; it denotes a return to what in such political rhetoric in
Rome is always the ‘good old days’ of the mos maiorum (though not in
more cynical minds); it associates the emperor with such values of the
honoured past. The building is ‘entangled in a web of diachronic cross-
referencing’.4 Thus the phrase corruptum vetustate, ‘damaged by old age’ is
not merely a surveyor’s report: as vetustas ‘manifested time’s continuing
power’5, so corruptum ‘damaged’ (as opposed to delapsum, say, ‘fallen
down’) suggests a moral framework for the emperor’s restorative interven-
tion. The facade of the Pantheon, in its inscriptions and in its silences,
displays at the same time a multiform history of memory-making and
imperial attempts to record their interventions in the public life and
memory of the city. It makes visible a politics of time.
Such imperial endeavours to create and display a topography of sacred
architecture for the city and the empire, and to use it to monumentalize
also a cursus honorum, express the position of the emperor with regard to
the divine and with regard to the institutions of human power. Other types
of epigraphical display in both Greece and Rome construct quite different
frameworks.6 The Lindos Chronicle (as it is known) is a monumental
inscription, set up in 99 bce, from the stunningly beautiful site of the
temple of Athene at Lindos on the island of Rhodes.7 It describes first the
decision to research and record the dedications made at the temple, and
then, at far greater length, offers not only a list of dedications but also brief
historical comments including in particular the textual sources which attest

3
Boatwright (2013).
4
Howard (2018) 64 – of Renaissance Venice, on which Trachtenberg (2010) contrasts ‘building-in-
time’ with the idealism of ‘aesthetic immutability’.
5
Thomas and Witschel (1992) 143.
6
Ma (2002) and particularly (2015) are especially good on Hellenistic materials; on classical see most
recently Low (2020); on Roman material see the exemplary Woolf (1994), (1996), (1998).
7
Higbie (2013) is excellent on this.

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 134 The Christian Invention of Time
to the dedications. It does not record all the dedications that were in the
temple, however. Pliny the Elder (NH 35.71) notes austerely that the temple
had an amber cup dedicated by Helen of Troy, and that ‘history adds it was
the size of her breast’, adicit historia, mammae suae mensura, but this
surprisingly does not get a place in the inscription as we have it. How,
then, does the selectivity of the Chronicle and its specific expressivity
construct its own historical framework? It certainly takes the history of
Lindos and Rhodes back to the Homeric poems. In Homer, Rhodes
appears only briefly and for the most part inconsequentially, with
a handful of ships under Tlepolemus, who had founded the three cities
of the island, of which Lindos is one. (Tlepolemus dies in the first battle of
the Iliad, though his wife gets a murderous and lurid afterlife in much later
mythography.) These three communities in the classical period founded
a new city called Rhodos, to which they willingly ceded political authority.
By recording gifts from Homeric heroes, Rhodes, which by 99 bce, was
central to the grain trade, demonstrated a more central place for itself in the
deep past, a genealogy of significance. The Chronicle does not mention
Homer by name, but does create an unbroken time-frame from the time of
the Trojan war forwards.
It is particularly striking for such a public document that the provenance
of many of the gifts is supported by a specific citation from a string of
ancient authors. These writers are largely what we would call historians or
local historians; but this scholarly apparatus has the effect of locating
Lindos as an integral node in the network of the intellectual history of
Greek culture. The difference between ‘local historians’ and ‘historians’ is
not just a nicety of historiography in this case: how local a history Lindos
should have is precisely the question this inscription poses. Rhodes became
well known as an intellectual centre.8 The orator Aeschines, after his defeat
by Demosthenes, retired to Rhodes, still a celebrity from a world much
larger than the purview of the island. Later, Mucius Scaevola studied in
Rhodes; Julius Caesar visited, and Cicero himself chose to spend time there
to study with the rhetoric teacher, Apollonius. The very form of inscrip-
tion, with its network of citations, speaks to this self-representation of the
community. This is a site that has been written about, and this is
a community that prides itself on its ability to research and record such
writings. That the list records gifts also from great political figures –
Alexander, say – is to be expected, but such a roster also establishes
a significant continuity between the Homeric heroes and the political

8
On local history see Clarke (2008) which is not superseded by Thomas (2019).

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 At the Same Time 135
grandeur of a more contemporary history. In a way that the later Greek
writers of the Roman empire would recognize, there is also what appears to
be a studied silence about any gifts from Roman notables (though such
dedications certainly existed). The temple of Athene is to have therefore
a Greek history, placed within the history of Greek historians, and thus
Lindos is to find its place on a Greek map of significance, its place in time.
It is not possible to trace in Lindos as detailed a political intervention as
is evidenced in the restoration of the Pantheon by Severus; and in the drive
towards memorialization as well as in the inevitable expression of the
power of divine articulated in the record of the epiphanies of Athene,
there are continuities with other such inscriptions in this era across the
Mediterranean. Nonetheless, the Lindos Chronicle demonstrates
a revealingly specific framework for understanding the timeline of
a temple and the cultural significance of such a timeline – in a way
which is quite different from the Pantheon.
The Parian Marble (Marmor Parium), another large-scale Greek inscrip-
tion that, like the Lindos Chronicle, is exceptional and exceptionally
surprising in its style and content, indicates a further way of proclaiming
how a local history relates to a broader political world.9 The Parian Marble
lists events of ‘world history’ down to the 260s bce; it dates these events
according to the list of archons in Athens, which is one of the authoritative
chronological schemata (used in Athens in particular, of course).10 Because
it includes stories from deep history, such as the flood and Deucalion, and
because of its record of the archons, the Parian Marble has most often been
discussed in terms either of the distinction between myth and history – not
a concern of the Marble but one to which I will return – or of chron-
ography – how the ancient Greek communities calibrated and recorded
time. Yet what is also crucial is how this chronicle places Paros in the world.
By linking its history to Athens, Paros is located side by side with the
dominant power of the region; by placing this history on the grandest of
scales – from the beginning of time forwards to the contemporary
moment – it gives Paros a place in such a history. ‘Whoever governs
simultaneity controls the temporal dependencies derivable from it.’11 It is
a place Paros never held: it is an island of quite undistinguished political
impact. But it was the island where Archilochus was born and about which
Archilochus wrote. Alongside the development of his tomb as a cult site, we

9
For description and discussion see Rotstein (2016), with full bibliography.
10
For the later history of ‘world history’ as synchronization see Jordheim (2017), (2019).
11
Nowotny (1994) 10.

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 136 The Christian Invention of Time
can see strong hints in the Parian Marble, as in the Lindos Chronicle, that
the culture of Greece – its literary tradition – is also a salient framework of
history. For the battle of Marathon, for example, it is recorded that the
playwright Aeschylus fought in it, but not the names of the generals. Just as
Pausanias finds in poets’ tombs a ‘root system . . . that in [his] imagination
nourishes the sacred Greek landscape’,12 the Parian marble links its literary
life to the outside world, synchronically. It demands a historical perspective
that includes how Athens is a paideusis to the world. The Parian Marble is
not exactly ‘a continuous time map’.13 Its vision of time, of what counts in
the passing of history, and of Paros’ place in it, is a form of self-placement
in time, a placement where the types of event recorded construct a map of
displayed significance – where Aeschylus is privileged over a military
leader – a map on which Paros is to find its place.
The epigraphic culture of antiquity can be seen thus to create
a framework of self-representation, a framework that is revelatory about
the broader concerns of social change, within its acts of memorialization. It
is not by chance that the democracy of Athens recorded in stone so many
decisions by its institutional bodies of civic authority, or listed its war dead
generally without marks of social status, nor when ‘anxiety about social
mobility occupied a significant place in the collective imagination of early
imperial Italy’,14 is it arbitrary that so many inscriptions from this time of
rapidly expanding empire wealth record in detail the social status and
changes of social status of the country’s citizens – or, for example, that
Pliny can write with such twisted political ambivalence about the honours
accorded to and denied by a eunuch freedman, Pallas. (Much writing from
within the British empire’s expansion shows a similar obsession with social
distinction, hidden truths of identity, and the possibilities of social mobil-
ity.) The chronology of an inscription such as the Parian Marble, as much
as the grandest texts of ancient historiography, functions, as Reinhart
Koselleck would argue, to locate the self in time.

*
For Koselleck, the late eighteenth century marks a turning point in this
self-defining function of historiography, and it is difficult to avoid the
impact of this modern sense of history.15 It is hard now, it is often

12 13
Hanink (2018) 249. See also Clay (2004); Höschele (2018); Platt (2018). Feeney (2007) 81.
14
Woolf (1996) 35.
15
Kosselleck (2004): for him too, historiography is the problem of die Gleichzeitigkeit des
Ungleichzeitigen, ‘the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’.

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 At the Same Time 137
asserted – with some justification – to imagine the experience of living
without a single, unified calendar or clock-time, even when it is the case
that our current scheme of dating, which takes Jesus’ (imagined) birth year
as a starting point, became prevalent only in the seventeenth century, and,
as I have already mentioned, a national clock becomes a requirement only
after the railway system is up and running in the nineteenth century. But it
is a failure of the imagination. Simply taking Jesus’ birth as ‘an arbitrary
point’ from which ‘Newtonian absolute time’ can be ‘indefinitely extended
forwards and backwards’ on a single scale,16 not only ignores the imperial-
ism of this necessarily Christian perspective on how time is to be organized,
but also represses the Enlightenment values from which Newtonian abso-
lute time emerges. There is no doubt about the usefulness of such a shared
scale. But we also organize and express time in many other ways. We Jews
and Muslims (and many other societies) have a different calendar, where
festivals shift against the Christian calendar, though are regular enough to
our own communities. Ramadan moves through the seasons predictably
and on a fixed time-scale, part of time’s order; Easter moves because of the
regularity of Passover in the lunar calendar. To tell the story of our time to
ourselves and others, we can overlay university or school routines; a sense of
a career or places of work; before and after marriage; children; partners;
ageing. Self-placement in time is far more complex than the familiar single
scale of counting years allows. How counting time and experiencing time
interrelate is not a mathematical expression.
The usefulness of the single clock and single time-scale is predicated on
the problem of simultaneity. How to know when trains start at different
places in the rail system? How to know what day to agree to hold an
international meeting? How to understand the connection between events
in different places? What, in short, is ‘the same time’? (This problem will
also motivate the development of post-Einsteinian quantum theory, but
that is another story.17) The politics of ‘the same time’ is a grounding
problem of historiography. How local is history to be? The Lindos
Chronicle and the Parian Marble show how smaller polities could strive
to associate themselves to larger-scale narratives, to inhabit the same time;
and there was, it seems, a flourishing genre of such parochial histories –
stories of a local community, from foundation to contemporary recogni-
tion. Yet the connection of events in different places across ‘the same time’

16
Wilcox (1987) 7–8. Herder (1998) 360 imagines it: ‘There are (one can say it earnestly and
courageously) in the universe at any time innumerable different times.’ See Jordheim (2014).
17
Well-told by Galison (2003).

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 138 The Christian Invention of Time
is the founding claim of so-called universal history. Polybius provides the
locus classicus. His opening methodological statement needs quoting at
length (Hist. 1.3):
The date (chronoi) from which I propose to begin my history is the 140th
Olympiad, and the events are the following: in Greece the so-called Social
War, the first waged against the Aetolians by the Achaeans in league with
and under the leadership of Philip of Macedon, the son of Demetrius and
father of Perseus; in Asia the war for Coele-Syria between Antiochus and
Ptolemy Philopator; in Italy, Libya, and the adjacent regions, the war
between Rome and Carthage, usually known as the Hannibalic War.
These events immediately succeed those related at the end of the work of
Aratus of Sicyon. In the times (chronoi) before these events, the actions of
the world had been, so to say, dispersed, as they were held together by no
unity of initiative, results, or locality; but ever since this crucial juncture
(kairoi) history has been like an organic whole (hoionei sōmatoeidē), and the
affairs of Italy and Libya have been woven together (sumplekesthai)18 with
those of Greece and Asia, all leading up to one end (telos). And this is my
reason for beginning their systematic history from this crucial juncture
(kairoi).
Polybius offers a starting point for his history and justifies it. He
determines that at this one juncture (kairos), in Greece, in Asia, and in
Italy and North Africa, three different battles for imperial supremacy were
being fought out. But the importance of this juncture is that from this time
(chronoi) the three theatres of political power were integrally woven into
a single, organic whole – ‘like a body’, a natural, and in Aristotelian terms,
perfected whole. Previously history was necessarily local, because it was
dispersed, without any unifying narrative to link different aims, conse-
quences, or places. What is now possible is systematic history – a single
time-scale, to capture the significance of events in different places ‘at the
same time’, to tell the single story of the rise of Rome – which is the
remarkable transformative world-making event that Polybius, like other
Greek writers, wishes to explain.19 Local history from now on can only be
insufficient in its partiality (1.4). To make sense of history, argues Polybius,
is to recognize the significance of what happens ‘at the same time’.
Polybius here provides a systematic view of his own commitment to
systematicity. He includes further methodological comments scattered
throughout the unfurling of his history that reflect back on this opening.

18
On this term see Maier (2018).
19
On universal history see the somewhat dyspeptic Sacks (1981) 96–121; on Polybius, Hartog (2010);
for a brilliantly stimulating reflection on what ‘universal history’ entails, see Garcia (2014) 287–302.

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 At the Same Time 139
He recognizes that this interest in simultaneity has implications for his
narrative. ‘I am not unaware that some will find fault with this work on the
grounds that my narrative of events is imperfect and discontinuous’, he
writes (38.6), noting that he began the story of the siege of Carthage but
broke it off to go to Greece and then Macedon before returning to what he
had left in suspense. But, he disarmingly adds, he ‘obviously grants liberty
to students (tois philomathousi) to carry back their minds to the continuous
narrative and the repeated interruptions of the action so that nothing is
imperfect or deficient to the careful listeners of what has been said before’.
Simultaneity may come at the price of immediate continuity, but the
intelligent reader – the demand for complicity is disarming – will put
together the necessary continuity.20 The breaks in the narrative are not an
issue of digression, but a vision of causality and interconnectedness, in
which the reader plays a necessary role. The aesthetics of discontinuity,
which Callimachus in the Alexandrian Library made a watchword of
contemporary poetics, here is further intellectualized as an engagement
with how events may be understood in and through time.
Polybius is himself a juncture from which any telling of the history of
historiography could go back towards Herodotus and Thucydides and
forward to Livy and Tacitus (and far beyond) to look at how different
understandings of the rise and fall of powerful states incorporate and
express their theories of time, both at the grandest levels of the translatio
imperii and at the more local level of the interconnectedness of events and
the structuring of narrative form. There will indeed be more to say about
the time of historiography, if not an account to match the hundred-book
scale of ancient histories; but there are immediately two further issues
opened by Polybius’ challenging prose.
First, he begins by determining boldly a fixed starting point by reference
to the 140th Olympiad. The scheme of Olympiad dates appears to offer
a single time-scale, like the Christian dating system of bc and ad, to match
Polybius’ claim of a unified, organic history of things. The Hellenistic
scholar Eratosthenes seems to have proposed the usefulness of precisely
such a way of systematizing events to a single temporal scale. Scholars of
chronography have been assiduous in collecting and comparing such
ancient techniques for recording events against a time-scale, an intellectual
project that finds its paradigmatic opening salvo in Thucydides’ rejection
of the Athenian archon list as inadequately discriminating for his desired

20
On the failures of Polybius’ narrative teleology and its ‘horizon of uncertainty’ (251), see Wiater
(2016), with bibliography to earlier discussions.

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 140 The Christian Invention of Time
level of accuracy.21 Yet even Polybius, like many other writers, refers only
occasionally to the Olympiads for dating specific events in his historical
narrative, and it is the confluence the three streams of history that domin-
ates the logic of his narration. Donald Wilcox puts the point with sharp
simplicity: ‘The time did not give meaning to the events, they gave
meaning to the time-line.’22 The recognition of a single story – Rome’s
rise to power – produces a single time-zone out of what had previously
been local histories with their own temporalities. Rome sucks the tempor-
ality of others into its orbit, as, once again, power defines time. Yet even
when the value of a single chronological scheme is acknowledged; even
when empire provides a condition of possibility for the adoption of such
a temporal scheme; even when annalistic historians, Livy or Tacitus, say,
continue to mark each year by the elected consuls; it remains an open
question to what degree any one absolute timeline functions for any
individual historian let alone historians of different times and places in
the empire. It is not a question of a failed teleology – why did ancient
historiography not develop a single timeline like us? – but rather
a recognition of how these multiple and relative time-scales continue and
create differing possibilities for narrative form in historiography. As
Plutarch concludes (Life of Solon 27.1):
I do not think it is right to give up [the chronologically unlikely meeting of
Solon and Croesus] to any so-called fixed chronological tables (chronikois
kanosi). Although countless people have been revising them right up to
this day, they have been unable to bring their contradictory arguments to
any point which is agreed amongst themselves.
Time-scales are recognized as sources of contention and interest, rather
than simply useful measures.
Second, Polybius (12.11) cites the historian Timaeus as a predecessor,
who, he says, compares different time-scales, the dates of the kings of
Sparta, the archons at Athens and priestesses of Hera at Argos, three
regularly used lists, against the Olympiads – and finds a damaging inaccur-
acy or inconsistency between them. It is hard to tell how systematic
Timaeus’ work was from this citation. But another fragment of Timaeus
shows that he established that Rome and Carthage were founded in the
same year. The date of the foundation of Rome was intensely contested by
ancient authorities, however, and Timaeus’ case is most likely to be making

21
E.g. Bickerman (1968); Samuel (1972); Wilcox (1987); Salzman (1990); Grafton (1995); Möller
(2001); Grafton and Williams (2006); Mosshammer (2008) – all with bibliographies.
22
Wilcox (1987) 89.

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 At the Same Time 141
a symbolic point. As rabbinical writings insist that the first and second
Temple of Jerusalem were destroyed on exactly the same date in the
calendar, or as Syncellus’ chronology states that the creation and the
crucifixion took place similarly on the self-same date, so the parallel
foundation of the two great imperial enemies suggests providence at
work. ‘At the same time’ here implies: fated to go hand in hand.23 (The
‘axial age’, beloved of some modern historians, shows a similar moral and
political imperative of simultaneity.) The imperial success of Rome
prompts a sort of reverse teleology. Once it is determined that the local
histories are ‘all leading up to the one end’ of Rome,24 it is hard to resist
seeing local histories from elsewhere than such a teleology, and thus narra-
tives are reshaped towards such an end. Universal history retrospectively
makes Rome central from the beginning, as an attempt to explain Rome to
Greece.
Diodorus Siculus, however, utilizes such a strategy to develop a counter-
genealogy of political and cultural affiliation. Like Polybius, Diodorus
announces that his is a universal history, which starts with the antiquities
of Greeks and barbarians and moves up through to the Roman empire. He
states that he has deep knowledge of the empire, that he has learnt Latin
well (a rare admission by a Greek writer) and visited the countries about
which he writes over thirty years. Nonetheless, when he comes to write
about Sicily, a local history of his homeland within his universal modelling,
he links its story to events at the same time in mainland Greece – and
significantly not to Rome or Italy. He makes his ‘choice of chronological
frameworks to create a Sicilian historiography with aspirations to
Greekness’, writes Katherine Clarke:25 simultaneity is designed to form
the Greek political world which Diodorus Siculus wishes to inhabit, to
assert a cultural genealogy against a political reality. ‘At the same time’,
thus, functions as a trope of the political rhetoric of history. Its organiza-
tion of temporality is in service of an ideologically laden narrative.

*
‘Thucydides invented historical time.’ So, trenchantly, Bernard Williams,
in his pursuit of truth and truthfulness.26 By this he means that it is with
Thucydides first that there is ‘a rigid and determinate structure for the
past’, which in narrative form is open to critical analysis; and thus categor-
ies of truth and falsehood can be applied rigorously to such narratives. This

23
Feeney (2007) 47–51. For Orosius, a Christian version, see van Nuffelen (2012) 49–53.
24 25
Polybius 1.4.1. Clarke (2008) 236. 26 Williams (2002) 162.

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 142 The Christian Invention of Time
‘historical time’ is to be contrasted with myth or legend: ‘of many events in
myth or legend, there is nothing to be said about when they are meant to
have happened’.27 Indeed, it makes no sense, we know, to ask if
Thumbelina lived at the same time as Jack and the Beanstalk. It may be
trivially true that Thucydides and Thumbelina do not inhabit the same
time, but, for Williams, it is a significant category error to see myth and
history as referring to the same temporality.
The distinction between myth and history is an invention of the fifth
century bce, a persuasive if self-serving claim of historians, philosophers
and natural scientists within the battle over authoritative discourse in the
conflicts of the rapidly changing culture of the intellectual hot-house of the
classical city.28 So, natural scientists and historians, and Thucydides prime
amongst them, contrast the research and accuracy of their methodology
with what is denigrated as mere myth, stories that circulate without the
groundings of truth and authority. Similarly, Plato inaugurates
a philosophical method which sets the procedures of dialectic, always
aimed at truth, against the vivid stories, but no more than stories, of
myth. Yet, as Bernard Williams knew as well as anyone, Plato also utilizes
myth profoundly within his philosophical system.29 When Socrates cannot
fully persuade his audience of the immortality of the soul by logic, he turns
self-consciously to myth with a depiction of the underworld and its
punishments, a story that has its desired effect of luring his listeners to
his case. More tellingly, however, there is no more seductive – or epis-
temologically influential – passage in the Republic than Plato’s description
of the cave with its figures staring fixated at the shadows on the wall –
a myth, if ever there were one. The boundary between myth and method is
less well fortified than Williams would have it.
Demosthenes – not a favourite source for philosophers such as
Williams – shows the porosity of the boundary between what is explicitly
called myth and the events of contemporary military and political history
with vivid self-awareness. Demosthenes’ Funeral Oration, his version of
the institutionalized speech over the war dead, is inevitably a text where
self-conscious acknowledgement of tradition is high, both because it is
a heavily conventional genre, and because the conventions demand a tour
of the historical traditions of the city. (As Loraux writes: ‘the funeral
oration reveals an ever more imaginary installation of the city in a time
27
Williams (2002) 162.
28
Detienne (1981); Lloyd (1987); Marincola (1991); Morgan (2000); Grethlein (2010); Baragwanath
and de Bakker eds. (2012).
29
E.g. Collobert, Destrée, Gonzalez eds. (2012); Morgan (2000); Brisson (1998).

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 At the Same Time 143
that is ever more timeless’.)30 After Demosthenes, with suitable generic
deference, has recalled the Athenians’ fight against the Amazons (familiar
from the statues on the Parthenon), the Athenian support of the
Heracleidai, and of the Seven Against Thebes, he transitions to events
closer to the present time (60.9):
Now, I have left out many deeds that are classed as myths (muthoi). Of the
events that I have recalled to mind, each has provided many charming
stories (logoi), so that our writers of poetry, whether recited or sung, and
many historians, have made the deeds of those men the themes of their art.
But now I shall be describing deeds, which, though in merit they are not
inferior to these former events, because they are closer in time, have not yet
become myth (memuthologeitai) or even been raised to heroic rank (tēn
hērōikēn taxin).
Demosthenes does not merely refer back to what he has discussed as
myth, but specifically as events ‘classed as myth’, τῶν . . . εἰς μύθους
ἀνενηνεγμένων ἔργων: he acknowledges the work of classification between
myth and other categories. These events have provided logoi for the
multiple public voices of the city, different genres of writing. Myth is not
opposed to logos here, as Plato would often have it. But the more recent
endeavours of the city, Demosthenes continues, because they are closer in
time, have not yet become myth – μεμυθολόγηται – ‘been told as myth’,
nor even have they entered the rank of the heroic. The implication is that as
time passes so contemporary events in history will become myth. ‘Heroic
rank’ may imply that in the future events of today will be the subject of epic
poetry, or that its heroes will become cult figures as with the men who
fought at Marathon. As time passes, the status of stories changes. Myth is
reserved for the stories of the deep past. Where Thucydides demands that
his history is a ‘possession for all time’, Demosthenes suggests that history
passes into myth over time.
Thucydides’ austere definition of what counts as history denigrates the
mere pleasure of to muthōdes, ‘the mythical’, ‘the fabulous’, which has all
too often been taken to refer to Herodotus’ Histories. Yet Herodotus’ own
stance on what constitutes historical authority has often been underesti-
mated in its sophistication (not least, it seems, by Thucydides). Bernard
Williams’ contribution is, again, provocative. He turns his attention to
what has become a key passage for many critics, where Herodotus states
(3.122): ‘for Polycrates was the first of the Greeks whom we know to aim at
the mastery of the sea, leaving aside Minos of Cnossus and any others who
30
Loraux (1986b) 131. On Demosthenes, see now Westwood (2020) 45–7.

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 144 The Christian Invention of Time
before him may have ruled the sea; of what may be called the human race,
Polycrates was the first.’ What Williams nicely calls ‘the problem with
Minos’31 turns on the phrase tēs anthrōpiēs legomenēs geneēs, which is given
one of its traditional translations above as ‘what may be termed the human
race’. For Williams, this shows that Herodotus is only just beginning to
become anxious about the status of the deep past and the stories of Greek
tradition – in contrast to Thucydides who invented historical time. The
participle legomenēs, ‘so-called’, ‘what may be termed’, draws attention to
the phrasing and demands that we read with especial care. Geneē, we have
seen, is usually translated ‘generation’; or in Herodotus it appears also to
have the sense of ‘nationality’ (‘group linked by common generation’?),
when applied to a specific community. He also uses elsewhere the phrase
anthrōpion genos, ‘human race’, which, as we noted with Plato’s use of the
idea, is not in general a common expression. The expression ‘anthrōpiē
geneē’ specifies, therefore, that Minos is of a different generation from
Polycrates, which may indicate both that there is a significant temporal
difference between the two figures and that this difference is related to their
generation, that is, that Minos has a divine father, whereas Polycrates has
two human parents. Legomenēs is also a characteristic Herodotean self-
distancing: it is another’s wording. This may imply contemporary intellec-
tual discussions about how the past is to be divided, Hecataeus’ interest in
genealogies, for example,32 or it may indicate a more general sense of
tradition, which must then include the most famous use of the ‘generations
of humans’, namely, Homer’s, the archetypal representation of the past
where men with a divine parent strode the battlefields alongside the
divinities, and where the boundaries of the human are a repeated theme.
History also separates itself from epic, and the sorts of stories ‘that Homer
or one of the poets from past times invented’ (2.23), that sort of myth.
Herodotus’ gestures of self-distancing are always also self-authorizing.
The dismissiveness towards Minos (and his ilk, ‘any others’) is con-
nected not just to his status in time, however, but also to epistemology.
Herodotus uses the word muthos only twice, on both occasions to dismiss
stories connected to Egypt that he thinks have no authority. In the first
case, he rejects a theory because ‘it cannot be tested’ (ouk ekhei elenchon); in
the second case, because it reveals the ignorance of Greeks about Egyptian
culture. The use of the word muthos, as in Thucydides, is a persuasive
definition of where authority lies, part of the historian’s self-authorization.
The ‘problem with Minos’ thus is also that, unlike Polycrates, we do not

31 32
Williams (2002), the title to ch. 3. Dunn (2007) 29.

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 At the Same Time 145
know about him, do not know, that is, in the way that the historian
constructs acceptable forms of knowing.
Herodotus’ ‘presentation sensitizes readers to the difficult question of
whether the difference’ between Minos and Polycrates ‘is purely temporal,
or whether it runs deeper than that; or indeed, whether we simply cannot
know’. The problem with Minos thus becomes ‘the problem of whether
our ignorance or his status is at issue’.33 This ambivalence about what can
be called mythic narratives runs deeply in Herodotus’ history from his
opening redrafting of the first conflicts between Greece and Persia, revealed
but studiedly distanced under the name of Persian logioi and narrated
under the aegis of rationalizing de-theologization. The recognition of the
role that such stories play in the self-understanding of the actors of history
is balanced against a critical and sceptical awareness of the unreliability of
these narratives. Herodotus does not excise the doubted past but mobilizes
it. Herodotus circulates stories he does not credit, talks about the instru-
mentality of circulating stories, criticizes the foolishness of circulated
stories, attributes such stories to different sources and audiences, and
thereby explores and creates the imaginary of cultural difference that
grounds the narrative of war he tells. Griffiths captures something of the
effect of this, jauntily: ‘Herodotus not only rides the two Phaedrian horses,
muthos and logos, with ease, but he knows it, delights in it, and consciously
exploits it. And the listeners collude in the enterprise.’34 But this should not
efface the historian’s careful self-positioning as an authority, and certainly
does not conceal the seriousness of the endeavour. His desire to stop the
amazing deeds of the present becoming exitēla, ‘wiped away’, like the
fading inscription on a temple or the lost features of a statue, is to stop
events turning, as Demosthenes has it, from history into myth. No less
than Thucydides, Herodotus seeks to stop the effacement of events by
time, events that, in his account, are constantly becoming embroiled in
mythologization.
Herodotus’ understanding of the past and how divisions in it may be
conceptualized is not, then, a step on a journey towards Thucydides’
invention of historical time. Rather, he is acutely aware that the divisions
between temps des dieux, temps des hommes, or spatium mythicum, spatium
historicum, are fractious and fragile; negotiating his discourse of history
becomes a complex cultural map of self-discovery for the reader. And
nowhere more clearly than in his description of Egypt and its time.
Herodotus’ engagement with Egypt demands a recalibration of his

33 34
Baragwanath and de Bakker eds. (2012) 25; see also Munson (2012). Griffiths (1999) 180.

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 146 The Christian Invention of Time
audience’s expectations of time.35 Herodotus dramatizes this shock of the
old most tellingly when he tells us the story of Hecataeus, his rival and
predecessor in writing history.36 The book opens programmatically with
Psammetichus experimenting to find out the oldest language to challenge
the Egyptian belief that they are the oldest people on earth, and with the
announcement that the Egyptians were the first to understand how the
solar system gives the markers of time. To visit Egypt is always for a Greek
to stand at the edge of the abyss of time. Hecataeus boasts to Egyptian
temple priests that he is descended from a god sixteen generations previ-
ously. He is taken into the temple and shown a line of wooden statues, each
dedicated as a representation of the temple’s high priest in a line of
patriarchal genealogy. Herodotus tells us that he has had the same demon-
stration, though he had not searched out his own genealogy. The priest
pointed to each statue in turn and counted (the prose is as sticky as the
process), listing 345 priests, father and son, all humans. It was to them
unbelievable that a man could be descended from a god: and they had the
record to prove it. Before these priests there was a time when the gods ruled
the land. But there is an uncrossable divide between the time of the gods
and the time of human priests. Hecataeus’ response to this crushing
demonstration is not recorded. But Herodotus here allows for a quite
different time-frame for Greeks and Egyptians, and faces Greek readers
with the insufficiency of their self-understanding of time (‘and
I myself . . .’, writes Herodotus, putting himself in the same line). Plato
has Solon have a similar experience: ‘he discovered that neither he nor any
other Greek knew anything at all’ about the depth of time: the Greeks
were, in the eyes of Egyptians, ‘all children’ (Tim. 22a–b). The claim of the
anthropologist Arjun Appadurai that ‘cultural consensus as to the relative
values of different time-depths’ is necessary for regulating the resources of
the past only functions in a society that has no contact with another
culture, no access to different sciences of the past.37 The simultaneity of
lining up Hecataeus’ genealogy and the priest’s genealogy becomes
a demonstration not just of ignorance about the self in time, but of cultural
difference; of not inhabiting the same time (scale).
Egypt offers a topographical and chronological othering to give Greece
a different perspective on their war with Persia, and its polarizations. Above
all, its manifestation of deep time means that history, for the Greeks,
35
Vasunia (2001) 133–5.
36
The nature of his disagreement with Hecataeus is much discussed, most recently by Dillery (2018)
with references to earlier positions: see in particular West (1991); Fowler (2006); Munson (2012).
37
Appadurai (1981) 203.

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 At the Same Time 147
always starts somewhere else and before its own narrative can begin.
Diodorus Siculus’ universal history faces the problem head on. He starts,
he says, with Egypt because this is where mythological accounts insist the
gods first appeared and because the very oldest observations of the stars
were made there – two points that Herodotus emphasized. But he starts
with barbarian stories, he also claims, not because they are older than the
Greeks, ‘as Ephoros said’, but to avoid bringing in such foreign elements
when he does turn to the earliest history of Greece. Even if it is important
to be seen to correct the claim of Ephoros, one of the founders of universal
history, that barbarians are simply older, the precedence of Egyptian
civilization, as the following chapters demonstrate repeatedly, is taken for
granted – and his narrative puts Egypt first. Much as wealth is re-estimated
and moralized when Greeks encounter the Persian empire, and space
changes its ideological coordinates when Scythian nomads enter Greek
historiography,38 so time – a sense of scale and hence simultaneity – is
dangerously recalibrated when Greeks visit Egypt. To look down over so
great an abyss of time is dizzying, as Victorian geologists discovered. As
Hecataeus is set up by Herodotus’ narrative to find out, this perspective
from Egypt challenges how the self in time is to be comprehended.

*
Eusebius’ Chronicon begins with a robust declaration of inevitable failure.
‘I warn and advise everyone from the start, that no-one should ever pretend
that he can be completely certain about matters of chronology.’ He has
biblical authority for this view: ‘It is not for you to know the hours and
seasons which the Father has set under his own authority.’ This quotation
is from the opening of Luke-Acts, the first historical account of the earliest
days of the community of followers of Jesus, and constitutes Jesus’ final
warning that humans will not know when the end of days will come;
Eusebius takes it to refer to knowledge about dates in general. ‘It is not
possible to gain an accurate knowledge of the whole chronology of the
world.’ In contrast to the naive and certain chronological predictions of
Julius Africanus, whose dated prediction of the end of days meant ‘time
itself would fairly soon be no more’,39 and in contrast also to the deep time
of Berossos or Manetho, whose mythological past of tens of thousands of
years no Christian could accept, Eusebius parades caution. Nonetheless,

38
See Hartog (1988) for the Scythians. In general, Purves (2010).
39
Grafton and Williams (2006) 152. See also Feeney (2007): 7–43; Kelly (2010); Corke-Webster (2019)
40–2; de Vore (2020).

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 148 The Christian Invention of Time
his project – with the provisos that no-one should be deceived about
accuracy and that the whole is ‘for discussion’ – is first to provide in his
chronographia chronologies of the major kingdoms (Assyria, Egypt, Israel,
Persia, Greece and Rome) through extensive quotation from earlier histor-
ians, and second in his chronikos kanōn to represent these chronologies
comparatively in tabular form. The form echoes his master Origen’s use of
tables in his Hexapla, but in his alignment of national histories he seeks to
demonstrate key moments of synchronism, in order to prove the superior-
ity of Judeao-Christian antiquity. ‘By comparing individual histories to
one another . . . the reader could see the hand of providence at work’:40 or
as Arnaldo Momigliano, with a characteristic widening of the question,
puts it, ‘unlike pagan chronology, Christian chronology was also
a philosophy of history’.41 The technical expertise of tracing what hap-
pened ‘at the same time’ in world history is to demonstrate the new order of
world history in Christianity. ‘Chronology should serve eschatology.’42
So, Eusebius duly notes that the Septuagint and the Hebrew Bible differ
greatly in calculating the years between Adam and the flood. The Hebrew
Bible has the shorter span of 1,656 years, the Septuagint 2,242. The
difference is accounted for by shorter times of life before marriage in the
genealogies of the Hebrew Bible. Eusebius suggests that the Septuagint,
which he calls ‘ours’, that is, the privileged Christian version, is right, and
that the Hebrews deliberately shortened the years to encourage early
marriage, presumably in unstated opposition to the ideal of Christian
celibacy. Unlike the rabbinical writings, Eusebius can imagine that the
Hebrew Bible, the original, has been altered in response to the Greek
translation, despite the apparent temporal order of their production. This
academic polemic demonstrates its underlying supersessionism.
Tabulating time, again, serves an ideological purpose: how does
Christianity, with its claim on eternity, fit into history’s time? What
happens – we will find out in chapter 15 – when history, starting from
‘In the beginning’ no longer allows for the contrast between spatium
mythicum and spatium historicum, when (no doubt to Bernard Williams’
dismay) the invention of historical time is disinvented? For Censorinus,
summarizing a long tradition in 234 ce, there were still three ‘distinctions
of time’ (discrimina temporum), the ‘unclear’, the ‘mythical’ (from the first
flood to the first Olympiad), and the ‘historical’, from the first Olympiad
40 41
Rosenberg and Grafton (2010) 15. Momigliano (1977) 110.
42
Grafton and Williams (2006) 151. For Jerome’s Latin redrafting of the Chronikos Kanōn see Vessey
(2015). For the Byzantine reception and Syncellus’ importance for understanding Eusebius,
Sevcenko (1992). For later versions of such tables, Jordheim (2017).

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 At the Same Time 149
‘to us’ (tellingly, this technical vocabulary is in Greek).43 For Christian
historiography, all was a clear and single story, from the beginning.
The fractured, horrified, sardonic vision of Tacitus’ Annals, far from
Eusebius’ tabulations, can allow no such ordered godly system. Despite the
repeated annalistic structure of consular years, his common temporal
markers are sub idem tempus, ‘about the same time’, or ‘interim’, ‘mean-
while’, or the ablative absolute, which does not specify its temporal
relationship with any precision. And ‘about the same time’ can refer to
a single year in Rome and about six years outside it, even when the
single year is the 800th anniversary of the foundation of Rome. Such
disjointedness is part of the disordered and disordering world that is
Tacitus’ image of imperial corruption. By contrast, the apologetics of
simultaneity are immediately on display in the opening of Eusebius’
Ecclesiastical History (1.5.2):
It was then in the forty-second year of the rule of Augustus – and the twenty-
eighth after the subjection and death of Anthony and Cleopatra with whom
the dynasty of the Ptolemies over Egypt met its end – when our Saviour and
Lord, Jesus Christ, was born in Bethlehem in Judaea, following the proph-
ecies about him, at the time of the first census, when Quirinus was governor
of Syria.
Although this may sound like similar moments of significant dating in
the tradition of Greco-Roman historiography, Eusebius is also picking up
on earlier Christian recognitions of the parallel between the pax Romana
and the dawning of the age of Christianity, and, as James Corke-Webster
has argued so well, taking such claims further. ‘By Eusebius’ logic’, Corke-
Webster writes, ‘the pax Romana did not spark the spread of Christianity,
but the reverse. The nine books of the History that follow merely prove the
point: Rome had always owed its greatest successes to Christianity.’44
This goes to the heart of Eusebius’ project. He announces in his prologue
with great flourish that his is the first history of the church, that no-one has
ever taken this lonely and unworn way before, and that he has ‘anthologized’ –
‘plucked’, apanthisamenoi – from ‘intellectual meadows’ (logikōn leimonōn –
‘textual fields’) and historians (sungrapheōn) of antiquity, and he will ‘try with
a historical guiding line to make of them an organic whole (sōmatopoiein)

43
Censorinus, De die natali 21. Scaliger, whose discussion of Eusebius was so important (Grafton
[1983–93]; Grafton and Williams [2006]) was fascinated by this passage: Rood, Atack and Phillips
(2020) 107. Primum tempus, he writes, sive habuit initium si semper fuit, certe quot annorum sit, non
potest comprehendi, a blitheness unavailable to Christians: ‘It is not possible to understand if the first
time had a beginning or was always existent; certainly how many years it lasted.’
44
Corke-Webster (2019) 83.

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 150 The Christian Invention of Time
(1.1.4). The language here is deeply layered with the history of critical
discourse. The ‘path’ – beaten or empty, narrow or broad – is an image for
literary production that runs from Homer through Parmenides up to
Callimachus’ search for exclusivity. ‘Plucking flowers’ and ‘anthologizing’
joins the prose of Plato and the lyric verse of Pindar with the characteristic
poetics of late antiquity, where anthologizing, collecting, selecting – the
poetics of spolia – becomes a dominant literary strategy not just for the high
tradition of Greek and Roman literature but also for Christianity, especially in
the shape of Clement of Alexandria, a constant influence on Eusebius.45 The
historical ‘guiding line’ (huphēgēsis) is the term used by Plato for the lines on
the page to help a budding writer (Prot. 326d), and, as we have already seen in
Polybius, sōmatopoiein does not mean simply to ‘embody’ but to structure into
an organic whole, the universal historian’s task par excellence. In his very claim
of near complete novelty, Eusebius’ rhetoric embeds him intimately in a long
tradition of methodological reflection.
This double assertion of newness and tradition is both an aesthetics and
a politics. Eusebius is writing at a turning point in imperial history. The
third century experienced a military, political and economic crisis, with
multiple emperors vying for powers, and multiple experiments in power
sharing collapsing into violence. The ‘great persecution’, inaugurated by
the imperial edicts of 303 forbidding Christian worship and demanding
conformity with traditional Roman religious practices, had been over-
turned by the Edict of Milan in 313, and Licinius, the prime mover of
the persecution, was removed in 324. Constantine’s regime brought some
stability and allowed Christianity to practice, but Christianity’s institu-
tional position remained not fully established. The complexities of
Eusebius’ own role in church and state politics, especially with
Constantine himself, do not need rehearsing here, fascinating though the
reception of the History through such a lens is, especially with regard to the
more recent and necessary sea-change away from the sneers of a Gibbon
(‘less tinctured with credibility, and more practised in the arts of the courts,
than almost any of his contemporaries’) or Joseph Burckhardt’s equally
dismissive judgement (‘the first historian of antiquity dishonest to the
bone’), or even Overbeck’s nasty ‘stylist to the emperor’s theological
wig’.46 Nor is it straightforward to determine how the bare outline of
elements of third- and fourth-century history listed above constitute

45
For a discussion of the significance of this language see Goldhill (2020) 71–113; Goldhill and
Greensmith (2020). See also Elsner and Hernández Lobato eds. (2017), for the Latin side of things.
46
Quotations from the very stimulating Corke-Webster (2019) 2.

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 At the Same Time 151
a historical contextualization specifically for Eusebius, studying away in
Caesarea. Indeed, even the dating and form of publication for the History is
highly contested. Rather, this turning point is the condition of possibility
for Eusebius’ mix of new intellectual perspective and self-conscious aware-
ness of a long intellectual tradition grounding it. As Corke-Webster
concludes, Eusebius was ‘not just writing history. He was world-
making.’47 A new history, then, for a new time: ‘People learnt a new history
because they acquired a new religion. Conversion meant literally the
discovery of a new history from Adam and Eve to contemporary events.’48
Eusebius’ history is driven by many small character sketches of Christian
leaders and clerics, with the longest reserved for Origen. These figures are
offered as exemplary, and Eusebius is explicit about the values by which
they are to be judged. The Christian man ‘through the knowledge and
instruction of Christ is outstanding in self-control and justice; and in
endurance of life and in manliness of virtue; and in the confession of
piety to the one and only God above all’ (1.4.7). These qualities are evident
in the precursors from the Old Testament too, Abraham and the other
founders of God’s covenant. These values have a specific Christian com-
mitment, of course – in the ‘knowledge and instruction of Christ’, the
paideusis that Gregory emphasized too, and in the language of confession
and the one God. But the qualities are also the most traditional of Greco-
Roman values: sophrosunē, dikaisosunē, karteria, andreia, aretē, ‘self-
control’, ‘justice’, ‘endurance’, ‘manliness’, ‘virtue’. In Eusebius’ vision,
the Christian combines Roman and Christian values and excels in them all:
Eusebius ‘set out to argue that it was the Christians who best represented
traditional Roman values and who were thus best placed to inherit
Rome’.49
Eusebius was faced by many Christianities, and many possible routes
through the past to get to where the church now was, in his view. Although
Origen, his leading example of a Christian intellectual, was at the centre of
arguments about zealotry and heresy – whether the story that he castrated
himself because he read scripture’s instructions literally is true or not, the
fact that it circulated as an exemplary warning is telling – nonetheless
Eusebius constructed a picture of the church that brought it closer to the
emperor’s court and further from the extremism of the increasingly evident
desert ascetics. Throughout the History, Eusebius praised not just educa-
tion but specifically Greek learning – a paideia tēs tōn Hellēnōn philosophias,
‘an education in the philosophy of the Greeks’ (7.32.6), especially for

47 48 49
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 152 The Christian Invention of Time
bishops, which, as with Gregory and Basil, was both contributing to an
internal argument among different Christian groups, and speaking to the
wider Roman imperial culture. For Corke-Webster indeed ‘responding to
elite Greco-Roman prejudices about Christian status and education’ and
thus positively ‘comparing the intellectual abilities of Christian and non-
Christians’ was ‘the first – and most fundamental – aspect of his new vision
of the Empire and its place in the Empire’,50 a place negotiated actively and
dynamically in the cities of the empire.51 It made his history a ‘roll-call of
effective academics’52, a demonstration of the growing linkage between
paideia and power.53 As Grafton and Williams lay out with such elegance,
Eusebius set himself in a line through Pamphilus to Origen, and con-
structed in Caesarea a library and a way of living in and through a scholarly
book collection that changed the image and practice of Christian
scholarship.54 Eusebius combined this view of the Christian intellectual
with a carefully nuanced picture of asceticism and martyrdom. Both
commitments had deep roots in the practices of Greco-Roman society,
and its philosophical schools; and while Eusebius praises the spiritual
heights of asceticism, and praises the bravery of martyrs, he also resists
more extreme forms of self-isolating behaviour. He celebrates the Christian
family as a model for Roman society. In this way, Eusebius’ History
provides ‘a carefully constructed moderate picture of the Christian past
designed for its new fourth-century world’.55
Genealogy is crucial to how Eusebius shapes this moderate and well-
ordered picture of the Christian Church – a picture which, it has often
been noticed, designedly smooths over the rough intellectual and physical
violence that continued to be endemic to the development of the church.
Eusebius took part in the church councils that were the sign and symptom
of such dissention; his History takes a clear line, however, which emphasizes
the clerical succession lists and the transfer both of authority and of
doctrine from generation and generation back to the unchallenged know-
ledge of the disciples. Heresies were minor splinter groups in this story,
who relied on what Irenaeus, the master of heresies, programmatically
terms ‘useless genealogies’, genealogias mataias (Adv. her. 1 pr. 1). A heresy is
a failure in the pedagogical transfer of authoritative knowledge from
generation to generation. The connection between the Chronicon, with

50
Corke-Webster (2019) 91–2. 51 Eshleman (2012); Sandwell (2011).
52 53
Corke-Webster (2019) 120. Brown (1992).
54
Grafton and Williams (2006); on Caesarea, see also Levine (1975). The archaeology has advanced:
see e.g. Patrich (2011).
55
Corke-Webster (2019) 72.

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 At the Same Time 153
its lists of events across time, and the narrative of clerical lists in the History
is telling. In the History, ‘the basic building block of time . . . is the bishop
holding office’,56 and the passing of time becomes meaningful as the
passing of authority and authorized knowledge.
Even so, Eusebius cannot finally and absolutely conceal ‘the fault line
between the seemingly permanent edifice of the succession of the Church
and the practical, inevitable plasticity and imperfection of the bishop
lists’.57 Nor can he repress the differences that constantly threatened the
Church’s harmony. Yet the way in which he tries to do so, itself signifies. In
Book 5, Eusebius records an argument about the dating of Passover and its
implications for when Christians should end their ritual fast of Easter
(arguing about the date of Easter would not stop for centuries).58
A flurry of letters is taken as the source evidence for the disagreements
(‘A new chapter of historiography begins with Eusebius not only because
he invented ecclesiastical history, but because he wrote it with
a documentation which is utterly different from that of the pagan
historians’).59 Epistolary exchanges exhibit the network that links the
Christian community as a community, just as synods, for Eusebius, are
not public displays of difference but rather, in their decisions, demonstrate
how (5.23.2) ‘all, of one mind, through letters between every place, regu-
lated by agreements an ecclesiastical decision (dogma)’, and all ‘declared the
same opinion and judgement and cast the same vote’ (a view that scarcely
captures the bitter infighting and long-lasting conflict that the synods
failed to resolve). The word translated ‘regulated by agreement’ is dia-
tupoun, which by basic etymology means ‘to put a thorough stamp on’, ‘to
mould perfectly’, and is used for a range of significant or authoritative
utterance, often hierarchically (anōthen ‘from on high’), including, as in
John Chrysostom, God’s commands to man. Eusebius finally quotes the
end of the letter of the Palestinian synod, which in his eyes closes the
matter. The bishops speak, he writes, with the authority of the apostolic
succession (diadochē), giving the genealogy of authoritative knowledge that
is required (5.25.1):
We are making it clear to you that on this day in Alexandria also they keep
Passover on the very same day (τῇ αὐτῇ ἡμέρᾳ) as us. For letters are brought

56 57
Johnson (2019) 207. Johnson (2019) 198.
58
Mosshammer (2008); Beckwith (1996) 51–70. John Chrysostom Adversus Iudaeos 4 is a good example
of such arguments entering wider polemics.
59
Momigliano (1977) 118. A view not contradicted by Becker (2016), (2017).

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 154 The Christian Invention of Time
from us to them and them to us so that we keep the holy day harmoniously
and at the same time (συμφώνως καὶ ὁμοῦ).
To celebrate ‘on the same day’ is made possible by the exchange of
letters – enacting the community as a community – and the aim is
harmony, to speak in one voice – sumphōnōs – which means to celebrate
‘at the same time’ (homou). Synchronicity is the sign of a single, harmoni-
ous community.
This wish for the one self-same day is at the heart of Jewish liturgical
hope too. Eusebius is concerned with ordering a succession (bishops,
knowledge, authority) to transcend contentiousness. The aleinu prayer,
already attested in late antiquity, and still part of daily services, shows the
universalizing desire that lies behind Eusebius’ pragmatics.60 The aleinu
imagines the future day when all the world will be perfected under the rule
of God, ‘when all humanity will call on Your name’. This will be a time of
eternity – ‘You will reign over them soon and for ever.’ For, ‘on that day,
the Lord will be One, His name One’. For both Jews and Christians, the
hope is for a single regime of a single God, a single day when the differences
between peoples will be erased, and time will be an undifferentiated
eternity: the idealism that makes synchronicity a non-issue.
Eusebius’ History is world-making in that it sets out to tell a history that
synchronizes the Roman imperial state and the Christian Church through
its exemplary clerics and their work. This is not a history of triumph or
takeover so much as a narrative of integrating different orders of time, place
and power. It imagines a world where Christian time makes sense to the
Roman empire: the history of the church and the history of empire can
rhyme.
Here, then, we see how the historiographical question of what is at stake
in ‘at the same time’ has fully taken on a new theological framing.
Synchronicity becomes an issue – a problem or a potential – only when
there are different regimes, different perspectives, different possibilities of
power, different histories in play. Christianity building on the Jewish
prophets, makes an ideal out of a single regime of God’s kingdom, and
a single theological present, where the son and the father are co-eternal,
typology collapses past and present in a single model, and the threat of
change or conflict is absent, as the lion and the lamb lie down together.
Now and for evermore. Christianity, however, takes shape and has
a history of itself to write only when there are different regimes, different

60
Historical evidence in Reif (1993) 208–9.

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 At the Same Time 155
possibilities of power, different perspectives visibly and dynamically pre-
sent. Eusebius’ intellectual work between the Chronicon and the History is
formed in this tension between hope and pragmatics.
Eusebius gives a crucial nexus of questions, thus, for this book, which
will become most pressing when we turn from Nonnus’ flamboyant stories
of the beginning of things to the Christian histories of the world discussed
in chapter 15. How is the self to be placed in historical time? How, that is, is
the self to be comprehended and represented in this new Christian history,
when Christianity is now becoming no longer an illicit religion of alienated
resistance, and when Paul’s promise of the imminent end of things is
continuously delayed? The hermeneutic thrust of typology – to make
present and past and future models of each other in a single theological
normativity –finds a historiographical equivalent in the hope of a single
narrative, an integrated story of the world, from the beginning to the end of
days. As typology encodes a violence, so too this is an authoritarian
projection. But subtending it, demanding it, is the deep anxiety of
a lasting question: can the Christian live a Christian and a Roman or
Greek life at the same time?

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 chapter 8

Timelessness and the Now

The messianic religions that came to dominate this lived life of late
antiquity made waiting central to their sense of temporality, as we
have seen. As the poets of erotics have always known, there is certain
headiness in the combination of fervour and deferral. Waiting, how-
ever, structures the sense of the present – the now – with a question
of its value, its temporariness. ‘Who would deny that the present has
no duration?’, asked Augustine. In the nineteenth century, William
James tried to answer this anxiety about the duration and thus
evaluation of the ‘nowness’ of the now with an empirical, experimen-
tally tested answer: ‘the practically cognized present is no knife-edge’,
he concluded, ‘but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on
which we sit perched and from which we look in two directions into
time’.1 It was possible to count in seconds, and then in fractions of
seconds, a human experience of now, a breadth measured ‘from one
hundreth of a second to twelve seconds’.2 James was engaging with
a host of neurological scientists who were exploring the space between
sensation and its mental recognition; but this was also part of a moral
argument, with deep roots back to Plato and Augustine in particular,
about ‘momentary pleasure’ in contrast with a timeless ideal.3 Must
waiting inevitably and always turn the now into empty time? Can ‘the
now’ be reinvested with value?
Modernity – or, to be precise, the self-proclamation of modernity – has
indeed repeatedly tried to rediscover the now, the ‘tyranny of the
moment’.4 The self-help gurus who currently encourage their readers to
‘live in the moment’, are a pale echo of a passionate movement, for which

1 2
James (1890) I: 609. Zemka (2011) 209.
3
See Zemka (2011) building on Dames (2007). Daston and Galison (2007) is a crucial overview here.
4
Hartog (2011) 217.

156

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 Timelessness and the Now 157
William James is an iconic scientific authority. D. H. Lawrence provides
a characteristically (over-)heated statement of principle:
Give me nothing fixed, set, static. Don’t give me the infinite or the eternal:
nothing of infinity, nothing of eternity. Give me the still, white seething, the
incandescence and the coldness of the incarnate moment: the moment, the
quick of all change and haste and opposition: the moment, the immediate
present, the Now.5
For Lawrence, the moment, the Now – the capital letter marks the
intensity of his striving for a general point here – is full of potential: it is still
and seething, burning and cold, and it is what gives burgeoning life (‘the
quick’) to speed, conflict, alteration, and this is in contrast to eternity and
infinity which are unmoving, in all senses, without emotion, without
transition: ‘the moment that remains and blows up the continuum’.6
Lawrence rejects what is ‘fixed, set, static’. The religiosity of this incanta-
tory rhetoric is evident, not just in the ‘incarnate moment’ – the use of
incarnate rather than embodied, say, is a pointed rejection of the Christian
dismay at the fleshliness of life – but also in the very opposition of eternity
and infinity to the immediate present, again redrawn to dismiss the
standard Christian tenet of focusing on eternal life as the goal. Lawrence
establishes the Now as the rejoinder to such idealism:
The ideal – what is the ideal? A figment. An abstraction. A static abstraction,
abstracted from life. It is a figment of the before or the after. It is a crystalized
aspiration, or crystalized remembrance: crystalized, set, finished. It is a thing
set apart, in the great storehouse of eternity, the storehouse of finished
things.7
The ideal is something invented for a time before or a time after – rather
than the Now. In language that recalls Augustine’s topography of memory,
the ideal exists only as hope or as a ‘crystallized remembrance . . . in the
great storehouse of eternity’. Unlike the presentness of the now, the ideal is
always lost in a past or future. So much for Plato.
It may be something of a surprise that in this paean to the Now, despite
his familiar turn to raw and bloody nature (and, in his final poetry, even to
the gods of Olympus), Lawrence echoes most intently Walter Pater, an
‘illusive, inscrutable, mistakable self’ of a writer,8 and, in particular, Pater’s

5
Lawrence (1994) 616. This passage is discussed in Dillon (2007). 6 Nowotny (1994) 152.
7
Lawrence (1994) 618.
8
Hext (2013) 184. On Lawrence and Ruskin, see Landow (1985). On Pater and classics, see Martindale,
Evangelista and Prettejohn eds. (2017), and especially Porter’s chapter in it.

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 158 The Christian Invention of Time
infamous final section of The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry.
(Lawrence railed at the ‘deadly Victorians’, but read Pater and Ruskin
avidly.) In these paragraphs, Pater lauds the ‘exquisite intervals’ of physical
life, ‘the moment’ of joy. He revels in the sensuality of his body’s sensations
and the flow of thought and feeling. Each of these sensations, he recog-
nizes, is ‘limited by time’, ‘a single moment, gone while we try to appre-
hend it’. These vanishing moments are what make the self a shifting,
changing, sensible being: ‘It is with this movement, with the passage and
dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off – that
continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving
of ourselves.’ Pater offers a profoundly challenging image of the unstable
subject, like Penelope at the loom, weaving and unweaving a self,
a ‘continual vanishing away’, without even the closure of the
Odyssey’s narrative. How, then, to live?
How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at
the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest
energy?
To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is
success in life.9
To many of his readers, especially those from a normative Christian
commitment, Pater seemed here to be scandalously proposing an amoral
life that privileged sensation over duty, ethics, or even a career: the moment
without consequence. Pater, deeply upset by the reaction, censored the
paragraphs from the second edition, thus ensuring their continuing celeb-
rity and influence, especially in modernism’s search for epiphanic
‘moments of being’.10 He still has Marius, his hero in Marius the
Epicurean, declare that ‘the little point of the moment alone really is’.11
No stranger bedfellows than Lawrence and Pater, but both reveal not
merely how time is moralized, especially in a capitalist system where time
is money, but also, and more specifically, how the conceptualization of the
here and now becomes an ethics of existence – how to live one’s life with an
eye on the passing of time.12 Not merely: can the now be fully enjoyed
without a sense of consequence, as Pater was accused of promoting? But
also: can the now be comprehended without the idealism of eternity?
9
Pater (1910) 235–6.
10
The phrase is Virginia Woolf’s (Woolf (1939/1986) 70). See Zemka (2011) for its context, and a fine
history of the momentary.
11
Pater (1900) 143.
12
On capitalism’s moralization of time, see from a large bibliography Thompson (1967); Schivelbusch
(1986); Chakrabarty (2000) 47–113; Jameson (2003); Zemka (2011).

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 Timelessness and the Now 159
Pater, ‘the patriarch of aestheticism’s epiphanic figures’,13 is important
to Lawrence, but we could add Kierkegaard, whose modernity George
Pattison defines as ‘the culture of those whose horizons are completely
filled by “the-time-that-now-is”, the momentary, the shock of the new ’,14
or Nietzsche (in some moods) – ‘He who cannot sink down on the
threshold of the moment and forget all the past, who cannot stand
balanced like a goddess of victory without growing dizzy and afraid, will
never know what happiness is’,15 and others, back to Schleiermacher, a font
as so often: ‘it is an infinity of past and future that we wish to see in the
moment (Augenblick) of utterance’.16 We shall recall this visual language of
epiphanic ecstasy when we turn in chapter 10 to the sudden, the moment-
ary, the rupture in time, and its religious instantiation in the leap of faith.
Pater’s joy in the now, however, was anticipated with a symmetrical
anguish in Thomas De Quincey. For De Quincey, who read Augustine’s
Confessions, of course, before writing his Confessions of an Opium Eater, the
intensity of ‘the now’ led down into the pits of despair. To ask how long
the now lasts, De Quincey reflects, leads to an inescapable paradox,
a paradox outlined most vividly in Augustine’s Confessions. De Quincey
uses the image of the klepsydra, the ancient water-clock, to try to capture
the passing of time, and imagines a drop of water squeezing through the
funnel: ‘You see, therefore, how narrow, how incalculably narrow, is the
true and actual present.’17 It is barely there, but that it passes away. ‘Yet,’ he
adds, ‘even this approximation to the truth is infinitely false.’ The solitary
drop which represents the present can itself be broken into tinier and tinier
droplets. ‘Therefore the present, which only man possesses, offers less
capacity for his footing than the slenderest film that ever spider twisted
from her womb.’ The idea of the present, all we have, is no basis to ground
the self: our footing is slipping above the abyss of time. Thus, concludes De
Quincey, turning, as ever, his misery into stunning phrases, ‘All is finite in
the present; and even that finite is infinite in its velocity of flight towards
death.’ For De Quincey, to seek the finite present is to end up in the
infinity of its divisibility, and to view such instability as a sign of the rapid
human journey towards the end of death. Infinity and eternity are not as
easily escaped as Lawrence’s exclamations insist. The paradox of ‘the now’
for De Quincey, following Augustine, is that it must and cannot be
inhabited. The contrast with Pascal here is particularly striking: for
Pascal too ‘the present is the only time that is truly our own’; the past

13
Zemka (2011) 220. 14 Pattison (2002) 19. 15 Nietzsche (1997) 62.
16 17
Schleiermacher (1998) 23. De Quincey (1998) 159.

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 160 The Christian Invention of Time
and future are beyond our control. But Pascal concludes from this that we
ought to live ‘according to the will of God’ and seek ‘repose’.18 For De
Quincey in this Suspiria de profundis, ‘Sighs from the Depths’, the trauma
of reflecting on time’s Now leads not to the wild joy of Lawrence or the
ecstasy of Pater, nor to ‘repose’, but to melancholia and the horrors of his
deepest, most lasting memories – and a recognition of how slender the
films that support the self are.19
For Martin Heidegger, the positivity of Lawrence or Pater and the
negativity of De Quincey about the experience of the now are equally
the regrettable heirs of Aristotle, whether any of them read Aristotle or not.
Ever since Aristotle all discussions of the concept of time have clung in
principle to the Aristotelian definitions . . . Time is what is ‘counted’, that is
to say, it is what is expressed and what we have in view, even if unthema-
tically, when the travelling pointer (or the shadow) is made present. When
one makes present that which is moved in its movement, one says ‘now here,
now here and so on’. The ‘nows’ are what get counted. And these show
themselves in every ‘now’ as ‘nows’ which will ‘forthwith be no-longer-now’
and nows which have ‘just been not-yet-now’. The world-time which is
‘sighted’ in this manner in the use of clocks, we call the ‘now-time’ [Jetzt-
Zeit].20
Now is a moment, and time – ‘now-time’ – is made up of a series of
nows that can be quantified. Heidegger wants to find another way to
understand time and being, another way of being in the world, without
such service to clock-time, its travelling hands or sundial shadows.21 For
him – and you can hear the cry of Lawrence behind this – ‘Temporality
ensnares itself in the Present, which, in making present says pre-eminently,
“Now!”, “Now!”.’
For psychologists, philosophers and poets what it means to cry out ‘Now!
Now!’ – can the now last? Can the now be invested with meaning? Is the now
the only place of meaning? What is ‘being in the world’? – has become, then,
a defining question of modernity, the now of our time. To be modern is to
be self-conscious about the nowness of the now – and thus needs such
explication, brief though it is, as the place from where this discussion takes
shape. The discipline of anthropology, however, has given another, critical,
painful perspective on what we might thus call the ethics of the present
tense – which demands of us a further level of scholarly self-consciousness.
18 19
Pascal (1963) 270, given a context by Prendergast (2019) 141–2. See de Maniquis (1985).
20
Heidegger (1962) 473–4; a much-discussed passage; for our purposes, see Kennedy (2013) 139–52.
21
For a stimulating attempt to escape the now, based on a wonderfully lucid explanation of its
difficulty, see Garcia (2014) 177–88.

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 Timelessness and the Now 161
Johannes Fabian’s agenda-setting book Time and the Other: How
Anthropology Makes its Object offers a pointedly different, politicized analysis
of the use and abuse of ‘the now’, which will lead us back slowly into the texts
of antiquity. Written in the 1980s at the height of a crisis of self-criticism that
characterized the anthropology of these years, Fabian’s attack on ethnog-
raphy trenchantly exposes its ‘moral complicity’, ‘ideological and even
epistemological’,22 with a distanced objectification and thus exploitation of
other communities. Specifically, and with bravura rhetoric, Fabian anatom-
izes the tradition of the ‘ethnographic present’, the depiction in the present
tense of the culture of Others. He calls this language ‘the denial of
coevalness’.23 The Other does not inhabit the same ‘now’ as the observers.
The ethnographic present tense is used ‘for the purposes of distancing those
who are observed from the Time of the observers’.24 Such discourse estab-
lishes the temporality of the West in a privileged position with regard to the
‘primitive’, ‘savage’, ‘ritualized’, ‘ancient’, ‘unchanging’ time of Others. In
this way, ‘the anthropology of Time becomes the politics of Time’, a strategy
of colonizing self-definition in a historical period of political
decolonization.25 In the period of such modern political dominance,
which is the era of anthropology too, imperialism requires ‘Time to accom-
modate the schemes of one-way history: progress, development,
modernity . . . In short, geopolitics has its ideological foundations in
chronopolitics.’26
Like other critiques from this era, Fabian’s analysis is set in a history of
approaches to time in anthropology.27 Two main lines of this history can
be articulated (with many interstitial positions and differences of detail
between the dozens of significant theoretical expositions). The beginnings
of anthropology, first of all, are closely intertwined with stadial and then
evolutionary historical theories that argued that all human societies
develop according to the same schema, beginning in savagery and gradually
achieving the heights of civilization, represented by the Western imperial
powers. The discovery of communities of ‘undeveloped’ peoples allowed
a vision of the childhood of all human culture, and also justified attempts
to raise their levels of civilization through missionary work and imperial
improvement. A lack of coevalness is integral to such theorizing, and to the
politics with which it is enmeshed: the tribes of anthropological enquiry
simply did not inhabit the same moment in the time-scheme of human
22 23 24
Fabian (1983) 96. Fabian (1983) 31. Fabian (1983) 26.
25
Fabian (1983) 51. For critiques of Fabian’s periodization of secular modernity, see the introduction to
Davis (2008), Harstrup (1990) and, generally, the stimulating Chakrabarty (2000).
26 27
Fabian (1983) 144. Gell (1992).

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 162 The Christian Invention of Time
development as the anthropologists. It is also fascinating that many of the
founders of the discipline of anthropology turn out to have stridently
evangelical parents, as Tim Larsen has detailed, and the consequent inter-
face between eschatological religious commitments, secularized history,
and personal intergenerational strife creates an extraordinarily complex
environment for research.28 This history of the discipline inscribes the
different time of its objects of research at its core.
Secondly, Durkheim’s sociology of time – the analysis of ‘the time
common to the group, a social time’29 – is foundational for a long history
of anthropological projects that record how different societies have their
own sense of time, from Gurvitch, Zerubavel, Schutz, Geertz to Lévi-
Strauss, Leach and so on.30 (It has often been noted that the English
translation of Durkheim appeared the same year as Einstein’s seminal
papers (1915), though without noting the irony that synchronicity was
the very problem.) Modernity’s time-discipline, where the factory’s
‘machinery requires the kind of mentality that concentrates on the present
and can dispense with memory and straying imagination’ makes industrial
society an alienated example of its own theorizing.31 For Fabian, both
functionalism and structuralism ‘put on ice the problem of Time’, because
both involve ‘a freezing of the time frame’.32 As Lévi-Strauss states, his aim
is to reveal ‘a system that is synchronically intelligible’,33 a system, for
example, that wilfully represses the different times in which different
versions of mythic narratives take shape, as classicists have often com-
plained about his analysis of the Oedipus myth. Lévi-Strauss generalized
about ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ societies, where ‘cold’ societies did not possess the
complex sense of historical change and self-consciousness about history
that distinguished the societies from which anthropologists came. Even
Clifford Geertz, in his celebrated discussion of time in Bali, described an
intersubjective sense of time that allowed social interactions to take place
‘in a motionless present’.34 For Fabian, the theoretical turn in anthropol-
ogy towards synchronicity, with its concomitant dismissal of history,
distorts the necessary analysis of ‘social time’. In fieldwork, anthropologists
engage in dialogic interaction with other communities and participate in
their now; but in writing ethnography, the ‘you’ becomes a ‘they’, and this

28 29
Larsen (2014). Durkheim (1915) 11.
30
Gell (1992) has been particularly influential in writing this history; see also Adam (1990); Nowotny
(1992). The references are to Gurvitch (1961); Schutz (1962); Geertz (1973); Lévi-Strauss (1963);
Leach (1961); Zerubavel (1981).
31
Quotation from Horkheimer (1994) 22; ‘Time-discipline’ is taken from Thompson (1967).
32 33 34
Fabian (1983) 20. Lévi-Strauss (1963) 216. Geertz (1973) 404.

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 Timelessness and the Now 163
‘specific cognitive stance towards its object’ creates for these other societies
another time.35 The ethnographic present, for Fabian, is a grammatical
process of objectification.
Now, Herodotus’ history has been regularly enlisted as a precursor,
even a founder of anthropology since the first reflections of the discipline
on its own development. About the same time as Fabian also rehearses
this unreflective genealogical cliché, François Hartog and James Redfield,
directly in engagement with the discipline of anthropology, and in
Redfield’s case, his father’s contribution to the field, were demonstrating
the complex, self-aware and world-building constructions of the other in
Herodotus, the sophistication of which discredits the more naive and
patronizing appropriations of Herodotus as the father of anthropology
(as well as of history and lies).36 Herodotus’ present tense is fundamental
to his rhetoric. On the one hand, his description of Egypt, say, takes place
in a timeless present, for all that it recognizes the profound difference
between the time-scales of Greece and Egypt.37 Greece and Persia are
countries with histories of change: change of constitutions and the
shifting fortunes of grandeur and humiliation are structuring principles
of the history for these protagonists. But the opening four books, with
their descriptions of other communities, are primarily constructed
through the observer’s eye as a synchronic picture, as if Herodotus was
looking as a scientist at the unchanging objects of natural history.38 On
the other hand, Herodotus repeatedly uses legetai, ‘it is said’ (and other
such phrases) to mobilize the various stories that make up the swirl of
events or the comprehension of a phenomenon. Rumours, lies, theories
from different sources or eras are all viewed as making up the event, or the
framing of a phenomenon. The present is where such stories come
together; the present is formed in and by the circulation of such historic-
ally layered but now contemporary narratives. Herodotus’ grammar
performs the effects of the past on the present.
The plupast – the time before the past of the war, which remains the
explicit subject of the history – is manipulated in multiple ways both by the
characters who speak in Herodotus, and by the narrator’s account of
things, to construct persuasive normative paradigms;39 the future, too, is
a brooding element in the history’s rhetoric of exemplarity, as imperial
Athens emerges as the potential subject of a warning tale of excess and
35
Fabian (1983) 86. 36 Hartog (1988); Redfield (1985). 37 Vasunia (2001) 133–5.
38
Thomas (2000); more generally, Daston and Galison (2007).
39
Grethlein and Krebs eds. (2012); Baragwanath and de Bakker eds. (2012); Rood, Atack and Phillips
(2020) 119–43.

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 164 The Christian Invention of Time
collapse.40 But Herodotus’ utilization of the present tense shows how what
has often been criticized as his indiscriminate repetition of unsubstantiated
or simply false anecdotes or observations is a strategic element in his
mapping of the cultural forces he sees as necessary to understand the
war, now.
If the present tense marks Herodotus’ performance as a scientific observer,
the present tense also marks the scene of performance in Homer – to go right
back to the beginnings, again – through the moment of apostrophe or
invocation. That Homer’s heroes live in a past lost to now is explicit: ‘ten
men of today could not lift the rock that Hector lifted with ease’. We should
recall how the failure of memorialization is troped by the washing away of
walls by the waves, much as Achilles’ singing of the klea andrōn foreshadows
the epic’s own promise of eternal glory. When Homer invokes the Muse at the
beginning of each epic, ‘sing, Muse’, and even more strikingly when he
addresses the divinity in a hymn, ‘Come here, appear . . .’ – and all the
Homeric Hymns have such ritual apostrophes – he inhabits his own scene
of performance, of course, but more importantly he invokes the god into
presence. The hymn welcomes the god into the sacred space of performance
and bids farewell at its close. This performed ‘control over absence and
presence’41 images the scene of epiphany. Sappho’s prayer to Aphrodite
most vividly dramatizes such epiphany in the stunning counter-address of
the poet-lover by the goddess – ‘Who, Sappho, is wronging you?’ – an
exchange of names to match the dangerous exchange of roles promised in
the poem’s narrative of desire (‘if she flees, she soon will chase’). The hymnic
invocation, however, also projects the circle of an audience, participants in the
ritual moment. This projection of an audience – a community sharing in the
ritual – is fundamental also to Pindar’s poetics of praise, which, ever aware of
the dangers of the victor’s success, is careful with the boundaries of
a community’s welcome of the hero’s return.42 This sense of bringing the
addressed hero into the community of the performance may also help us
appreciate the strange moments when in the epic narratives of the Iliad and
the Odyssey Homer apostrophizes his heroes in the second person. Menelaus
and Patroclus in the Iliad and Eumaeus in the Odyssey are addressed by name.
For Patroclus in particular this invocation occurs when he appears to be at
mortal risk and the poet, like Achilles, reaches out in sympathy and care
towards him in the second person.43 Such structures of sympathy seem harder

40
Redfield (1985); Raaflaub (1987); Moles (1996); Fowler (2003); Buxton (2012).
41
Bergren (1982) 90. 42 Kurke (1991).
43
Bergren (1982); Block (1982); Allen-Hornblower (n.d.); Klooster (2013).

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 Timelessness and the Now 165
to maintain for Eumaeus or Menelaus even. But in all cases, the second-
person address pulls the narration into the scene of the present performance,
and projects, as it were, a ritual circle of shared song in which the hero is
present, like the epiphanic god of cult. The ‘as it were’ is crucial here. The
desire for presence in both lyric and epic poetry is mediated by the poet’s
projection. Future performances, like the past of the klea andrōn, already
haunt the here and now. It is hard simply to live in the present.
Or to appreciate fully what the apparently self-evident claim to live in
the now means. From Homer to Heidegger, as we might say, to insist on
‘the now’ turns out to be an ideologically fraught moment of self-
positioning. Against the now of performance, the now of the scientific
gaze, the now of the moment of battle glory, the now of immediate
sensation, and, worst, the now of momentary pleasure, Christian thinkers,
looking back to Plato, strive to create a different sense of the present,
turned towards a timeless ideal (as Lawrence knew well and so resented).
Perhaps now we can begin to see more clearly what the ‘now’ of waiting
demands of us, in its requirement to turn ourselves towards a future; to
make the performance of the now such a turning, such a conversion.

*
The present time, ‘which only we have’, may nonetheless not be the time
we wish to live in. In Hesiod’s hard world, the five ages of man move from
the golden age to the iron age, which is ours. ‘Would that I had been born
earlier or later’, laments Hesiod (W&D 175), since in today’s world ‘men
never rest from work and sorrow during the day, and being destroyed at
night’ (176–8). And it will get worse before it is over. Humans will be born
grey, intergenerational strife and disrespect will be rampant, legal and
moral order will collapse, justice will be no more than force, and the
wicked will harm the good (179–200). ‘There will be no defence against
evil’ (201). The horror of the present is not mitigated by the thought of the
future or the lost glory of another, better time. ‘Better’, indeed, ‘not to have
been born’, as Greek wisdom depressingly repeats.
Plato’s response to what he saw as this instability of the mundane
world – physical, moral, epistemological – is to turn away from it towards
the timeless eternity of the Forms. In the Timaeus, a dialogue which had
a deep and long-lasting influence on the development of Neo-Platonism
and the reception of Platonic idealism by Jewish and Christian writers44 –

44
Reydams-Schils ed. (2003); Runia (1986). Proclus’ commentary on Timaeus is one of the most
significant contributions to fifth-century thinking on time.

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 166 The Christian Invention of Time
indeed it is ‘the most seminal philosophical or scientific text to emerge
from the whole of antiquity’45 – Timaeus begins his account of the genesis
of the world with a founding distinction between, on the one hand, what is
‘ever being’, ‘continually existent’, (to on aei, 27c–d), ‘has no coming into
being’ (genesis), and, on the other, what is ‘coming into being’ (gignome-
non) but is ‘never existent’ (oudepote on). That which is existent is always
the same and is apprehended by the mind; but that which comes to be and
is destroyed (gignomenon kai apollumenon) is perceived by the unreasoning
senses: it is not ‘really existent’, ontōs on, its material existence is not reality.
It is a hierarchical opposition. When a creator wishes to make something,
continues Timaeus, if he looks at a model (paradeigma) which is in a state
of sameness (to kata taūta echon), the outcome will be fine (kalon); if he
looks at something which has come into being and thus uses a created
model, the created object will not be fine. So, is the universe, which, as it is
made, must be an image (eikōn) of something, created according to
a generated or a self-same, ungenerated model? The arguments they use
to broach such a question, he adds with gentle irony, must be like the
objects themselves, ‘stable, firm’ – unchanging in time.
So, how did God – the Demiurge – create the cosmos? The universe is
conceived by the mind of God as a living creature with a soul; a single,
unified, perfected animal (zōon). Timaeus spends many paragraphs show-
ing that the universe must be single, and that it must be perfected (teleon),
to which he adds ‘unageing’ (agērōn, 33a) and ‘without sickness’ (anoson),
adjectives traditionally applied to divinities. Timaeus takes even more
paragraphs of dense mathematical exegesis explaining how God created
a third form of being, a mixture of indivisible being and divisible being in
order to allow for the ordered movement of the cosmos.46 It is his far from
easy conclusion that is crucial here, however (37c–d):
When the Father that engendered it, recognized it in motion and alive, an
object of joy to the eternal gods, he rejoiced, and in his happiness decided to
complete it all the more like its model. Now, the nature of the ideal being
was everlasting (aiōnios), but to bestow this quality in its fullness upon
a living thing was impossible. But he resolved to have a moving image of
eternity (aiōnos), and when he set in order the heavens, he made this image
eternal (aiōnion) but moving according to number, while eternity (aiōnos)
itself is stable in unity; and this image we have named time (chronon).
It is, first of all, evident how such language attracted later Jewish and
Christian thinkers. This is an account of genesis with a Father who
45 46
Sedley (2007) 96. Lloyd (1968).

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 Timelessness and the Now 167
engendered (gennēsas) the universe, who rejoiced at his creation (as in
Genesis, ‘he saw it was good’, kalon), and who brings order to chaos (the
starting point of Genesis). Plato, alone of Greek philosophers, it seems,
does not take for granted the impossibility of creatio ex nihilo, the require-
ment of Jewish and Christian narratives of creation. Philo, and later
Christian writers too, take up the idea of the creator using a model, an
archetype, or an image in mind, to create the world. Justin Martyr is
programmatic in claiming the Timaeus as a proof that Plato was following
a Mosaic cosmology.47 The problem Plato faces, however, is how to have
a physical, moving universe, if it is to be an image of a stable, unmoving
ideal. He mediates this tension by invoking order and number, an eternal,
regular movement. This he gives the name Time. Time, for Plato, requires
such motion; there is no time before the heavens with their regular moving
parts come into being. ‘It is only when the regular motion of the heavenly
bodies comes into being that time exists’.48 Alongside the creation of the
heavens, were created the divisions of time: days, nights, months, years,
which the heavenly bodies demarcate. Aristotle, in turn and in response, as
we saw, goes on to define time as ‘the number of motion with regard to the
before and after’, but not before, as we have seen, he wonders whether time
exists, which Plato’s birth story takes for granted (29a–b);49 and, against
Plato, Aristotle will go on to argue that time has no beginning: it is eternal,
infinite. In the Timaeus, however – and it is a profoundly disconcerting
claim – Plato’s story of the genesis of the universe is the story of the birth of
Time (chronou genesis, 39e).
It is disconcerting not least because if there was the motion of disorder
before the creation of the heavenly bodies, as Timaeus allows, how can
there not have been time, in this before? How can motion be conceived
without time? David Sedley, who here follows Gregory Vlastos – both
deeply uncomfortable with the very idea of the ‘birth of time’ – argues that
for Plato before the creation of heaven there is actually a sort of unmeas-
ured, chaotic time.50 This is a ‘compromise’ (Vlastos’ term) that cannot
quite remove its own inconsistencies. Such a ‘before’ is ‘disorderly but not
altogether’: ‘it is not utterly disordered change. Wholly devoid of form it
would be, on Platonic standards, wholly devoid of Being; i.e. nothing at all.
But obviously it is not that. It is something.’51 Thus, concludes Vlastos, the
birth of measured time ‘is not the contrary of timeless eternity, but an
approximation to it’: it has come to be but is now regular and eternal. The

47 48 49 50
First Apology 60. Vlastos (1939) 75. Annas (1975) 97. Sedley (2007) 95–132.
51
Vlastos (1939) 76.

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 168 The Christian Invention of Time
work philosophers have to undertake to find a precarious coherence to
Plato’s thinking here is telling. Plato, indeed, immediately indicates the
continuing difficulty of finding expression for his understanding of this
timeless eternity. ‘Was’ and ‘will be’, he underlines, are unconsciously but
wrongly applied to eternal being (aidios ousia). Only esti, ‘it is’ or ‘it exists’
is properly applicable to being. Only the present tense . . . The language we
use of time cannot capture the nature of timeless being, Plato writes, but he
quickly and ironically cuts short the discussion: now might not be the
kairos, the right time, for clarifying such matters (38b). As Augustine too
will find, the everyday language of time is a barrier to the comprehension of
time.
Nonetheless, this is the very language Timaeus immediately uses. The
model (paradeigma) is existent for all time (panta aiōna); the universe, its
copy, has come into being (gegonos) and is (on) and will be (esomenon) for
all time (ton panta chronon). (The asymmetry of the world coming into
being but being eternal – no passing away, as the Stoics demanded –
seemed impossible to the point of craziness to many later philosophical
writers.) Plato concludes firmly, however: ‘such was God’s thinking with
regard to the birth of time (genesis chronou), so that time should be born
(chronos gennēthēi), with the result that the sun, moon, stars and planets
were set in the sky in regular circulation.’ That was what was required for
the collaborative construction of Time (sunapoergazesthai chronon). The
creation of the universe and the creation of time are coterminous; the
existence of the so-called heavenly bodies in the heavens gives us regulated
time, for all time. Plato’s commitment to the stable, permanent, timeless
model cannot do without time, and thus the possibility of change, which is
nonetheless controlled by the regularity and order of number as embodied
in the motion of the sun and moon and stars, now eternally in place.
Timaeus offers the grandest scale of Plato’s idealism and its turn to
timelessness as a constant and stable present. The theory of Forms supposes
that any example of a table is recognizable as a table because it partakes of
an abstract, unchanging, timeless model of a table, its Form (eidos). The
Timaeus itself continues into a supremely complex argument about the
nature of materiality and space, and the connection between Mind and
Necessity; but its difficult, strained discussion of the ‘birth of Time’, with
its repeated striving for eternity, underlines the degree to which the
timeless present is integral to Plato’s idealism. The universe itself is created
according to a timeless model; so too are the mundane realities of the
everyday. To contemplate the Good itself – one ideal that Socrates, at
a party, imagines, before he is interrupted by the very physical presence of

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 Timelessness and the Now 169
the drunken Alcibiades – is to turn away from this material world with its
instabilities and to focus on what is truly stable and truly real: to find what
is the timeless.
Cicero, central to the mediation of Greek philosophy to Roman culture,
seems to respond directly to these passages of the Timaeus. In his On the
Nature of the Gods, his Epicurean speaker, Velleius, engages with the
problem of the time before the creation of the heavenly bodies, and
the intervention of divinity, which, for Plato and for the Stoics, is the
necessary creative change for measured time to come into being. He writes
in direct criticism of Plato (1.21):
For if there was no world, it does not follow that there were no centuries
(saecla). By ‘centuries’ here I don’t mean the ones made up by the number
of days and nights (dierum noctiumque numero) as a result of the annual
orbits (annuis cursibus). These, I concede, could not have been produced
without the world’s rotation (conversione). But there has existed a certain
eternity from an infinite time past (ab infinito tempore), which no bound-
ing of times (circumscriptio temporum) measured, but in its extent (spatio)
it can be understood what sort of thing it has been, because it is not even
thinkable that there existed a time (tempus) at which time (tempus)
was not.
Velleius, the speaker, admits that without the heavenly bodies there
would be no measured time, no regulation, no order. But, he argues, there
must still have been unmeasured time before this creation (as Sedley and
Vlastos argued was the implication of Plato’s argument for the birth of time
in the Timaeus) – though the language of saecla, however redefined, makes
it hard not to hear a trace of measurement. Eternity is a time without
bounds, without delimitation (conscriptio) which has infinite extension
into the past. We can understand what sort of thing this eternity is, its
extent, because, Velleius’ argument runs, it is impossible even to conceive
of a time when time does not exist. Velleius does not simply assert the
necessity of the infinity of time as an Epicurean principle, but insists –
tautologically? – that the attempt to imagine unmeasured, formless time is
not possible because it is not possible for human consciousness (cogitatio)
to imagine a lack of time. Humans cannot get out of time, even in the
imagination. We can try, haltingly or intently, to imagine infinity or
eternity or God’s being beyond and outside time, but we cannot in our
minds inhabit no time.
Lucretius has no truck with Plato’s longing to escape materiality. His is
a resolutely material universe, grounded in his reading and promoting of

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 170 The Christian Invention of Time
Epicurus’ atomistic understanding of nature. Time in this vision, Lucretius
asserts directly, does not exist in itself (1.459):
tempus item per se non est, sed rebus ab ipsis
consequitur sensus, transactum quid sit in aevo,
tum quae res instat, quid porro deinde sequatur.
nec per se quemquam tempus sentire fatendumst
semotum ab rerum motu placidaque quiete.
Even Time in and of itself does not exist, but from events themselves
Sense follows what happened in the past;
Then what event is insistent, what then after follows.
No person, it must be agreed, senses time in and of itself,
Separate from the movement and the calm resting of things.
Time, although it is not a quality like colour or size, does not exist except
when human sense perception recognizes it through events that have
happened, are happening or are anticipated; it is an accident produced
by the impression of movement or lack of movement of things. It would be
hard to construct a view more trenchantly opposed to the notion of
Providence.
Lucretius’ language here strains against itself, as with so many discus-
sions of time. Aevum ‘age’, ‘era’, might be thought to imply that time
does stretch backwards in a significant way. Lucretius continues, how-
ever, immediately to worry away at this idea of the past, as if a counter-
argument might attempt to use the self-evidence that some things did
happen before now as a proof of the necessity of time itself (1.464–71):
denique Tyndariden raptam belloque subactas
Triugenas gentis cum dicunt esse, videndumst
ne forte haec per se cogant nos esse fateri,
quando ea saecla hominum, quorum haec eventa fuerunt,
irrevocabilis abstulerit iam praeterita aetas.
namque aliud terris, aliud regionibus ipsis
eventum dici poterit quodcumque erit actum.
Next, when people say that Tyndareus’ daughter was kidnapped,
Or the Trojan peoples were beaten, we must take care
They do not force us to say that these things exist in and of themselves,
When those generations of men, whose accidental properties these were,
Have now been stolen away by the irrevocable passage of time.
For whatever will have taken place will be able to be called an accident,
In one case, of the earth, in another case, of particular regions.

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 Timelessness and the Now 171
These are difficult lines to follow.52 It does not seem that Lucretius is
arguing that only the present exists (‘presentism’), as some philosophers
have essayed.53 Rather, he is suggesting that when people retort, ‘Helen was
taken’, ‘the Trojan war took place’, it does not require him to say that such
events existed in and of themselves (per se) – and thus agree that this is an
argument that time exists in and of itself. He can say – and simply
does – that ‘time’ – now aetas, ‘age’ – has passed, and, in the most
traditional of language, it cannot be summoned back (irrevocabilis), and
the generations (saecla, another term for time) have been lost. There were
‘accidents’, eventa in the past, as there will be in the future. For ‘whatever
will have taken place, will be able to be called an “accident”’. That is, it is
a category error to think that events in the past, just because we say they
‘exist’, have a different status from the ‘accidents’ in the present or future.
The infinitive esse also plays with the grammatical necessity in Latin that to
say ‘it has happened’, actum est, will use est ‘it exists’: it is hard in Latin to
use the past and not assert its existence. All events are eventa, ‘accidents’,
the coming together of atoms in movement and in rest.54 So, although
Lucretius uses aetas, aevum, saecla, quando, the past tense, none of these
expressions imply for him the existence of time per se. Discussing events
from the past – stating ‘Helen was taken’ – is no evidence that time in and
of itself exists.
Time, especially vetustas, ‘old age’, and other words which ‘manifest[]
time’s continuing power’,55 indeed recur throughout Lucretius’ depiction
of the materiality of things precisely as an agent of change. So, in Book 5
‘time’ (aetas) is said to ‘change the nature of the whole world, and one
condition after another must overtake everything, nor does any thing
remain the same as itself: everything changes place, nature changes every-
thing and compels it to turn’ (528–30). Where Plato had demanded that
the only real truth must be firm and remain the same and be unmoving,
Lucretius describes reality itself, the nature of things, as necessarily in
a constant state of transition and alteration. Even time itself seems open
to such transformative swerving. So Lucretius writes of how precious
metals shift in value (5.1276), sic volvenda aetas commutat tempora rerum.
It can be translated ‘Thus rolling age changes the seasons of things’, which
makes the verse a truism at best (the dictionary gives only Lucretius as
a source for the meaning ‘seasons’ for tempora); it has a more unsettling and

52
See Warren (2006); Zinn (2016) for discussion and bibliography.
53 54
Warren (2006) and Zinn (2016); also Berns (1976). On eventa, see Wardy (1988) 117–21.
55
Thomas and Witschel (1992) 143.

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 172 The Christian Invention of Time
transformative force, however: what is changed is ‘the circumstances of
things’, even ‘the crises of things’ – how things inhabit time is changed by the
very passage of time. And time’s passage is infinite, unceasing: ‘Nothing
which is in a mortal body, because of the infinity of time (ex infinito tempore),
could still now have had the ability to deny the powerful strength of
immense age (aevum).’ The infinity of time and immensity of age are set
here against even the sea and the heavens and the sun, no less open to violent
destruction and the reordering of matter (Civ. Dei 20.25). (An end that is no
surprise to Jews or Christians: ‘The heavens are the work of Thy hands: they
shall perish’ (Ps. 102), though the causality and anticipation of destruction
are quite different.) Where Plato saw an image of eternity and order in the
natural world, an ensouled creation of a beneficent Demiurge, Lucretius
splinters this vision, this language, the expressivity of language, into clashing
and crashing and swerving stoicheia, elemental particles, on the move.
The atoms themselves cannot be destroyed, however: matter remains.
The eternity of matter is at the deepest level of difficulty for later orthodox
Christian readers of Lucretius. If matter itself cannot come to be or pass
away, what then of God’s creation or the end of the world? Synesius,
bishop of Cyrene, and a fully-fledged philosopher, especially of the
Platonic school, before and, to a degree still debated, also after his conver-
sion and immediate appointment as bishop, was quite clear that philoso-
phy was not easily refuted here.56 Nothing could convince him that
creation could be made out of nothing (nihil ex nihilo) or that matter
would pass away, even though such a position stood against the founding
principles of Christian theology. Synesius’ unorthodox stance reveals
a precise tension between normative Christianity and its appropriation of
Greek and Latin wisdom, and especially Epicurean physics with all its
implications for theology. In Lucretius, then, it is not immaterial Forms
but matter itself that is timeless.
Neither Plato nor Lucretius would have you fear death, for the very
different reasons of the immortality of the soul for Plato, and the dissol-
ution of the body back into insensate matter for Lucretius. Yet both seek to
find the timeless, the everlasting, against which to view the instability of the
here and now. For both writers, how to live, and how to face death as an
ethical question of living, are issues shaped by what is determined to
transcend time’s vagaries. So, to be in the now, does it require the timeless?
*

56
Bregman (1982).

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 Timelessness and the Now 173
The geographical and political ambition of empires is enacted at the level of
temporality, too. The topographical and the chronological are easily over-
lapped from the beginning. When Xerxes in Herodotus declares (7.3) ‘we
shall extend the Persian territory as far as God’s heaven reaches; the sun will
then shine on no land beyond our borders’, he inaugurates the rhetorical
tradition of lauding the ‘empire on which the sun never sets’ – the boast,
first made popular in the Holy Roman Empire of Charles V, that one’s
territory is so extensive that it is always daytime somewhere in it. The
imposition of a single time of empire redefines the lives of its subjects.
Imperial time reconstructs not just the daily lives of the empire’s inhabit-
ants, but also their sense of history, the past and the future.
The Seleucid empire of the second century bce, according to Paul
Kosmin’s superb analysis, has a claim to have invented imperial time,
and thus to be ‘the first truly historical state’.57 It achieves this status for
Kosmin because it constructed the first numerical system of ordering years,
rather than using regnal titles to mark eras, as is usual in the region. It
structured ‘the kingdom’s visibility and institutional practices around
a continuous, irreversible, and predictable accumulation of years’58 (and,
Reinhart Koselleck reminds us, a sequence of years, human order, always
indicates an ‘historically and philosophically impregnated experience of
time’).59 Although the centralized power of an empire such as the Seleucids
was always mediated through continuing local authorities, and was flexibly
attuned to regional variation, its fiscal control was more standardized. ‘The
arrangement of fiscal life into an annually serialized grid established an
orderly geometry of imperial time at the heart of the city’s public life,
a locus of maximal temporal conformity and rationalization that idealized
and euphemized the messiness of the greater societal pattern’.60 The
imperial temporal regime reorganizes the timing of administrative pro-
cesses and thus reshapes the social life of its citizens under administration.
Empires also need to narrativize their own rule across time. Unlike
the birth of time in Plato, or the creation as told in Genesis – or, for
that matter, unlike the claims of nationalism to a timeless, continuous
and unbroken national character – empires come into being in a year
one, and there is a pre-story to be told (305 bce, in our calendar,
is year one for the Seleucid kingdom). There is also always
a projection of the future. As J. M. Coetzee, in Waiting for the
Barbarians, evocatively writes: ‘One thought alone preoccupies the
submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how

57 58 59 60
Kosmin (2018) 76. Kosmin (2018) 76. Koselleck (2002) 149. Kosmin (2018) 59.

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 174 The Christian Invention of Time
to prolong its era’.61 The Aeneid may have promised imperium sine
fine, ‘empire without end’, and Horace may have imaged the everlast-
ing life of his poetry through ‘for as long as the priest ascends the
Capitoline Hill’, but Polybius and other historians encouraged the
darker picture that Coetzee draws: ‘by night [empire] feeds on images
of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of
bones, acres of desolation’. Polybius himself, an eye-witness to the
event, was there when Scipio, the Roman general, looked down over
the city of Carthage as it was being destroyed by his troops.62 Scipio,
with tears in his eyes, quoted Hector from Homer’s Iliad, ‘A day will
come when holy Troy will fall, and Priam and his people’.63 Polybius
who had been tutor to Scipio, asked him what he meant by the
quotation, and Scipio, who had been musing on the fall of the
empires of Assyria, Media, Persia and Alexander’s Macedon – ‘whose
brilliance had been so recent’ – freely admitted he was thinking of
Rome itself, and its inevitable fall. The scene has a deeply layered
sense of the transience of empires. ‘He sees the fate of Rome in
Carthage and Troy is the model for both’64 – with the added exempla
of the other empires of the eastern Mediterranean. Polybius’ History is
prompted by his wonder at the rapid rise of Rome; he offers as one
cause the flexible stability of the Roman constitution. But he not only
anticipates a general reversal of fortune as a pattern of existence
(Herodotus, too, of course, sees such a turn in the lives of kingdoms),
but also sees the time of empire as necessarily ‘the time before the
end’.65 Rome’s triumph must of a necessity prefigure its fall. The
duration of empire is no more than the deferral of an inevitable end.
Julia Hell has wonderfully mapped how the fall of Rome, including its
anticipation at the acme of its triumph by Scipio, became a repeated model
for empires to discuss their own impending history. ‘Romans invented the
very concept of imperial ruins’ and became the privileged example of such
necessity.66 In her richly evidenced and sophisticatedly argued book, Hell
takes us from Charles V (on whose empire the sun never set) marching in
celebration along the roads of Italy flanked by statues proclaiming him to
be Scipio, through to the proclamations of the Third Reich (along with its
authoritative philosophers, Heidegger and Schmidt). ‘Obsessed with the

61 62
Coetzee (1980) 133. His title is taken from Cavafy. Dio. Sic. 32.24.
63
Il. 4.164–5 (Agamemnon); Il. 6.448–9 (Hector) – once by each side.
64
Feeney (2007) 55. See also Rood (2007) 181; Wiater (2016), especially 257–8 for other scenes of tears
over victory.
65
Hell (2019) 44. 66 Hell (2019) 87.

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 Timelessness and the Now 175
problematic of duration and ruination’,67 Hitler’s team used the model of
Rome to fortify their empire, militarily, ideologically, symbolically. ‘Hitler
alone’, wrote Simone Weil prophetically in the midst of the war and his
military success, ‘has understood correctly how to imitate Rome’.68 The
imagination of modern empires is haunted by Roman nightmares – not
just its fall but also the inevitably failing attempts to maintain its security,
made physical in the ruins across the landscape of the now. If the anthro-
pologist’s gaze is articulated in the present tense of objectification, empire
is always self-aware of its own future perfect – of what its ruins will declare
it to have been. Thus Macaulay in 1840, great historian of the British
imperial project, famously imagines a Maori sketching the ruins of St
Paul’s from a ruined arch of London Bridge – a colonized barbarian now
calmly, civilizedly, observing the ruins of the former imperial power.69
Yet the subjects of empire do not need to wait for their oppressors’
ruination to write back against imperial control of time and history. Much
of the evidence Paul Kosmin utilizes to demonstrate the Seleucid king-
dom’s regulation of chronology comes from resistance to it, and a good
deal of that is from Jewish groups. The festival of Chanukah, now part of
the Jewish calendar, is inaugurated as a memorial of the armed resistance
against the Seleucid regulation of Jewish ritual life. The book of Daniel is
paradigmatic in that by prophetically framing the here and now as an age
that is one of a series of empires past and to come, it constructs a symbolic
historiography that stands aggressively against the chronological reach of
the Seleucid rule (as Kosmin analyses in great detail). Daniel is ‘an
interrogation of political change, Hellenistic imperial rule and the nature
of meaning and justice in history’, with ‘an overriding concern with the
periodization of history and the temporal location within it of the Seleucid
kingdom’.70 Daniel’s polemic is to redraft the place of the Seleucid empire
in time. Indeed, the Babylonian Talmud’s intense focus on the regulation
of daily time, especially the Sabbath, the dating of festivals, and even the
broadest ideas of chronology, aims to construct a counter-world of self-
enclosed time, counter to the dominant cultures of Persia, Greece and
Rome in which the rabbis were living. As Sacha Stern has argued,71 Jewish
groups in Judaea/Palestine and in the diaspora, as an act of cultural
resistance, continued to maintain their lunar calendar even and especially
when the Roman empire made the Julian calendar the standard of imperial
67 68
Hell (2019) 309. Weil (1962) [1940] 101.
69
See Dingley (2000); Skilton (2007), with further bibliography – and for a contrast with Thucydides,
see Rood (2016).
70 71
Kosmin (2018) 139, 140. Stern (2001) 157–75.

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 176 The Christian Invention of Time
rule for their subjects; and, what is more, Stern shows that through late
antiquity there was a conscious, concerted effort by the rabbis to regularize
the previously flexible and empirical calendrical systems, in which different
communities celebrated festivals on different days:72 ‘The gradual fixation
of the Palestinian rabbinic calendar was thus the result of an attempt to
unify and standardize the calendar of the rabbinic communities of
Palestine and Babylonia’,73 as a function of the disintegration of society
after the destruction of the Temple and the gradual development of
rabbinical authority over the subsequent centuries.74 The calendar
becomes a way of regulating the community and setting it apart from the
surrounding society. In a remarkable act of writing from below, the rabbis
even superimposed Jewish history on Roman time. Thus, the origin of the
Roman festival of Kalends, the first day, is found in Adam, the first man.
Adam was terrified when the days first shortened; he quotes the Psalms to
express his fear of encroaching darkness; but when he realizes that light
returns, he exclaims, ‘kalon dies’, ‘Good is the day’, a mixture of Greek
(kalon = good) and Latin (dies = day). In this rabbinical time Adam can use
the Psalms, Greek and Latin – and the result is an appropriation of the
Roman calendar to a Jewish narrative through aetiology and etymology.75
‘The Jews wrote more about their calendars . . . than just about anyone else
in the ancient world until the late Roman period’,76 when Easter started to
become a major issue for Christian chronographers.77 This is not an
intellectual idiosyncrasy of a marginal group but a continuing politics of
community through telling time.
What, then, happens if the resistant group becomes the power in place?
Will Macaulay’s Maori also have sketched an anticipation of his own
people’s future ruin? Augustine’s City of God is written after Rome has
been sacked by the barbarians in 410 and also after Rome has become
a Christian city, and broaches, therefore, precisely these issues.78 The City
of God begins as an explanation of how it is possible that Rome could have

72
Including the ‘marginal and dissident’ 364-day calendar in the Dead Sea Scrolls of Qumran (Stern
(2012) 359–79, quotation 362; Ben-Dov (2008)); the use of time to mark ‘inter- and intracommunal
difference’ (228) by Jews is the central thesis of the fine work of Gribetz (2020).
73
Stern (2012) 335. For the continuation of pagan festivals in the Christian empire, and attempts to
stop them, see the pungent account of MacMullen (1997) 32–72, and from the Jewish perspective
Gribetz (2020) 55–91.
74
Heszer (1997); Schwartz (2001); Goodman (2000).
75
Y. Avodah Zarah 39c, excellently discussed by Gribetz (2020) 55–91; see also Schäfer (1996).
76
Stern (2012) 331. 77 Mosshammer (2008).
78
Wetzel ed. (2012) is an excellent introduction with bibliography to a huge field of study. General
background in Kahlos (2007).

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 Timelessness and the Now 177
been sacked by the Visigoths – nuns raped, churches desecrated. With
a battery of arguments, Augustine rejects the pagan response that the sack
has been a demonstration that the Christian God could not protect his own
pious ones. This immediate defence opens into a 22-book contrast between
the city of heaven and the city on earth, which constitutes no less than
a systematic theological engagement with the prospect of world history
through a reading of scripture, with a vision of the end of days as the
justification and culmination of the whole narrative. What, then, is the
historical now for Augustine?
Augustine responds to Paul’s insistent, intense waiting for the Second
Coming by quoting the repeated paradox of St John’s Gospel, erchetai hōra
kai nun estin (4.23, 5.25), ‘the hour is coming and now is here’, venit hora et
nunc est. The existence of the now is always and necessarily marked by what
is to come. This sense that the now is to be experienced through the future
is explained through a full-scale chronological scheme across the history of
the world. As the world was created in seven days (and that ‘as’ is a sign of
the typological strategy of reading), so the world’s time is organized into
seven ages. The first runs from Adam to the Flood; the second from the
Flood to Abraham (these both have ten generations). The span from
Abraham to Jesus has three periods each of fourteen generations, as the
genealogy from the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew calculates –
Abraham to David, David to the Babylonian captivity, the captivity to
Jesus. We are now thus living in the sixth day. How long is this day?
Augustine answers that ‘It cannot be measured by any number of gener-
ations, as it has been said, “It is not for you to know the times, which the
Father hath put in His own power”.’ But he also says, following the book of
Revelation, that it will last a thousand years. The kingdom of the Saints
will last a thousand years, he asserts, and this is now (20.9). (It is debatable
whether the final three and a half years of persecution by the Devil which
herald the end are included or not (20.14).) After this sixth day closes, then
we shall be in the seventh day, the Sabbath, when ‘God will cause us to rest
in Him’, in se ipso Deo faciet requiescere. This seventh day will not end with
an evening but with an eighth day, an eternal day when the body as well as
the soul will find eternal rest, a day when ‘we will rest and see, and see and
love, and love and praise’ (a beautifully simple promise after so much
detailed theological analysis). Augustine summarizes: Ecce quod erit in fine
sine fine, ‘Behold, this is what will be in the end without end.’ The end will
be endless. Time will become timeless. That is what it means to inhabit ‘the
kingdom without end’. The fall of Rome becomes finally the story of the
everlasting kingdom.

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 178 The Christian Invention of Time
To get to this conclusion Augustine has had to work hard. In Book 11, he
has reprised his argument from the Confessions that time, which requires
motion, has a beginning, in contrast to eternity which is motionless. In
Book 12, he argues with pagan historians about chronology, denying that
the thousands of years of human history in pagan accounts can be a true
figure. Similarly, and at even greater length in Book 12, he earnestly strives
to refute claims of any circularity for time. He has already demonstrated
that time has a beginning, of course, but now – with a nice reference to the
poetry of the Psalms that ‘the sinner walks in circles’ – he argues against any
notion that times repeat or return. His final salvo that ‘the eternal life of the
saints completely refutes any idea of the circularity of time’ will convince
only the faithful.
Seneca, the Roman philosopher whose Stoicism was felt to be so close to
the austerity of Christian commitment that letters between himself and St
Paul were creatively imagined, sums up perfectly the pervasiveness of the
language Augustine is striving to redraft. He expresses the temporality of
human life precisely in terms of a set of concentric circles (Ep. 12.6–7):
Tota aetas partibus constat et orbes habet circumductos maiores minoribus:
est aliquis qui omnis complectatur et cingat – hic pertinet a natali ad diem
extremum; est alter qui annos adulescentiae excludit; est qui totam puer-
itiam ambitu suo adstringit; est deinde per se annus in se omnia continens
tempora, quorum multiplicatione uita componitur; mensis artiore praecin-
gitur circulo; angustissimum habet dies gyrum, sed et hic ab initio ad exitum
uenit, ab ortu ad occasum.
Our span of life is divided into parts; it consists of large circles enclosing
smaller. One circle embraces and bounds the rest; it reaches from birth to
the last day of existence. The next circle limits the period of our young
manhood. The third confines all of childhood in its circumference. Again,
there is, in a class by itself, the year; it contains within itself all the divisions
of time by the multiplication of which we get the total of life. The month is
bounded by a narrower ring. The smallest circle of all is the day; but even
a day has its beginning and its ending, its sunrise and its sunset.

This system of analogous circles will be reprised throughout later literature

in Greek and Latin, as the ‘circling years’ of Homeric diction are rearticulated
into a broader discourse of temporality. In these books, then, Augustine sets
himself explicitly and most intently against the philosophers of the Greco-
Roman tradition, as he has against the historians and other learned traditions.
The comprehensive vision of the City of God explains the universe against the
authoritative discourses of antiquity. Including Christian theologians: not

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 Timelessness and the Now 179
only does he refute Origen on the circularity of time, but he discusses in Book
15 the different lengths of time that the Hebrew manuscripts and Greek
translations have for the ages of the figures who lived before the flood. These
detailed arguments about aspects of time throughout the City of God are all
subordinate, however, to the overarching problem of how to conceive of the
now of the earthly city in relation to the final timelessness of the heavenly city.
Can and should Christian Rome be different from other empires that come
and go? An individual’s life and ethics are judged by accession to or rejection
from eternal life among the sancti – what, then, of a kingdom?
In Book 20, Augustine analyses scripture’s depictions and prophecies of
the ‘end of days’, including the prophecies of Daniel with their promise of
the collapse of kingdoms. In this discussion, Augustine frankly admits that
he is uncertain whether Paul refers to the Roman empire in his warnings of
the destruction of evil, but, he says, it is ‘not absurd’ to assume some of his
prophecies allude to it (a very cautious approach). In Book 21 he describes
the end for the wicked; in Book 22, he outlines the end for the saved. The
eternal punishment of the damned is contrasted to the eternal life of the
sancti. In these final three books, the end, Augustine is concerned with the
eternal city of God at the end of days; in the previous books, Augustine has
traced the presence of the city of God in earthly guises. In contrast with his
own earlier views of tempora Christiana, or, say, Prudentius’ typically
triumphant vicimus: exultare libet, ‘We have won: we can rejoice’, or
even of Ambrose’s or Origen’s views that the unification of the empire
under Augustus was providentially designed to enable the Gospel to be
spread more easily, Rome, for Augustine, is not the earthly representative
of the city of God, an imperium Christianum. Rather, the heavenly city can
only be at best a peregrina on earth (19.17) and even in this earthly peregrina
city of Rome its citizens are peregrini, ‘foreigners’, ‘sojourners’ or ‘pil-
grims’ – not just incapable of being full citizens, belonging to this city,
but also both inhabiting the now (sojourners) and on a journey (pilgrims)
to a greater sanctification.79 The church at its best is a community of these
peregrini on earth, living together in peace or striving to do so. For
Augustine, however, a Christian empire can only ever be a precarious
regime, in a time before the end. Yet unlike other empires’ nightmares of
dissolution, it is this end of destruction that Augustine positively seeks, to

79
Vocabulary back to Tertullian at least: De cor. 13: ‘peregrinus mundi huius et civis civitatis supernae’,
you are ‘a foreigner of this world, a citizen of a higher state’ – where it is also linked to the idea of the
saeculum. See Vessey, Pollmann and Fitzgerald eds. (1999); McLynn (1999), (2009).

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 180 The Christian Invention of Time
discover the endless peace that will follow it. This anticipated, perfected,
desired end, for him, is history’s story, time’s narrative.
Aristotle declared that tragedy was more profound than history because
tragedy expressed to eikos, what is likely, probable, natural, whereas history
only told what had actually happened. Historians, ever since and even
before, have looked to find the general laws of to anthrōpinon in contradic-
tion of Aristotle’s dictum. For Augustine, however, there is only one
history, which is both what has happened and what must happen: that is
the logic of providence. Or as Augustine writes in De vera religione (7.13):
‘the essence of Christianity is the history and prophecy of the temporal
dispensation of divine providence for the salvation of the human race
which must be reformed and healed into eternal life’. Augustine’s is
a narrative that seeks its end in timelessness, a contradiction of the condi-
tion of narration. Simply to live in the now is not a possibility: to say nun
esti, ‘it is now’, is already to have said erchetai hora, ‘the hour is coming’.
The promise of timelessness haunts the now: the time which the Christian
inhabits is between an already and a not yet.
We began with God’s time and Augustine’s project of imagining divine
timelessness, and moved through Christian attempts to rewrite the flow of
time both as a constant truth of the present through typology, and as
experiencing the past in the present in the vision of pilgrimage, through the
exploration of what ‘at the same time’ means, to (now) Augustine’s all-
embracing history, a single passionately assertive story that seeks to end in
the ideal timelessness of the eternal kingdom. Christian temporality. Yet
timelessness can only remain an impossible projection for human striving
and failing. The unimaginable imagined, barely, hopefully, as an end. The
question Augustine places on the agenda of this book, then, is to wonder
about the consequences of such a self-placement in historical time. What
does it mean to live thus in this regime of a still unending time between the
already and the not yet? How is the now to be experienced if your eyes are
turned always towards the promise of timelessness?

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 chapter 9

Life-times

If we ask, then, what it means to live in this regime of a still unending time
between the already and the not yet, one answer to the question must come
from how a life is represented, how life-writing is shaped by the times of its
production and how it shapes time for the readers and writers of life-times.
So, how does Augustine – to continue where we left off – begin such
a biographical story? With a contorted statement of ignorance (Conf. 1.6.7):
What is it that I want to say, lord, except that I don’t know from where
I came to this place (nescio unde venerim huc), I mean, into this life that dies
(vitam mortalem) or death that lives (mortalem vitalem)? I just don’t know
(nescio).
This is the first question that Augustine asks about himself in the
Confessions, and it begins with a stumbling into speech. He does not
know where he comes from.1 This is the question which stalls Sophocles’
Oedipus in his domineering argument with Teiresias, starts his search for
his parentage, and thus begins his downfall into knowledge and self-
destruction. Oedipus does not know where he comes from, an ignorance
displayed even and especially when, with multiply-layered ironies, he calls
himself ‘the know-nothing Oedipus’. It is also the foundational question
for Freud, reader of Oedipus, who insists that for all the productive work of
analysis of the self we can never fully and properly know our own self, and
certainly not the answer to where the self comes from. Augustine specifies
huc ‘to here’, which he immediately glosses as ‘this life that dies or death
that lives’. The horizon of expectation is defined – in a way that is alien to
Sophocles or Freud – by this definition of a life-time as a hesitation
between a journey towards death, or an already living death:
a theologically defined time shaped between the already and the not yet.

1
Great thanks to Catherine Conybeare here, who discusses this passage in a forthcoming article (and
discussed it with me at length). I use her translations here.

181

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 182 The Christian Invention of Time
Augustine continues (1.6.9): ‘Look, my one-time infancy is dead, and
I’m still alive’, Et ecce infantia mea olim mortua est et ego vivo. The ego, the I,
lives on although its past is declared dead. As Augustine goes on to explore,
‘infancy’ has its full etymological significance: the loss of infancy is
a coming into speech, the ability to ask the question of where he comes
from, to ask what it means to say vivo. Although he has not yet in the
Confessions laid out the theology that lies behind such statements (and that
I discussed in the first chapter), he addresses God as the creator who exists
before it is possible even to say ‘before’, and transcends all instability of
time and change, and who can therefore answer Augustine’s increasingly
insistent and recessive questioning:
tell me whether my infancy succeeded some previous dead age of mine. Is
that the one that I lived in my mother’s womb? For something of that has
been made evident to me, and I have seen pregnant women. And then what
was before that, my sweetness, my god? Was I anywhere or anyone (fuine
alicubi aut aliquis)?
Augustine does not know where to start. Should his life-story begin in
the womb, which, he suggests, is a ‘previous dead age’ (mortuae aetati)
(before his now dead infancy). Each successive age, it seems, for Augustine,
dies, as he progresses towards the death that opens its way to eternal life.
The time in the womb is a potential beginning – and his apparently naive,
if strongly expressed empiricism, ‘I have seen pregnant women’, seems to
be because he can have no memory of this time, no words for this
experience – but what, then, about the time before conception? He does
not so much cue the long philosophical tradition, with its Platonic source,
of debating the pre-existence of souls, as allude to it in the designedly
childlike question, ‘Was I anywhere or anyone?’.
The paragraphs that immediately follow show how different from
Plato’s Augustine’s response to this question is. First, he acknowledges
not just that God is the only possible source for such knowledge, but also
that God’s time, the fact that God has no today, no here and now, is the
limiting frame for Augustine’s all too human attempt to understand the
mysteries of his own timeliness. How Augustine became flesh is not
comprehensible without God’s incarnational power of creation. Second,
even more arrestingly, he turns to man’s inevitable sinfulness: Exaudi, deus.
Vae peccatis hominum: ‘Listen, God! Alas for the sins of man’. Original sin
takes Augustine’s search for where he comes from, back to the beginning of
humanity itself, because he is still marked by that moment of the fall. How
the self comes into being in time and through time – the narrative of the

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 Life-times 183
Confessions – is shaped by the continuing theological compulsions of
incarnation and original sin. Telling his own life-story, for Augustine, is
structured through a relation to the divine time of God.
*
Augustine’s Confessions is a unique text, atypical in structure and purpose
in the life-writing of late antiquity (and barely with direct impact, it seems,
through the Middle Ages). Yet in one respect at least it is paradigmatic: its
focus on conversion as a central, life-changing event. The turn towards
God, which is the turn towards the future from the here and now, is the
condition of conversio. Conversion changes the temporality of the narrative
of a life-time.
From the cry of John the Baptist, metanoeite, metanoeite, ‘Repent!
Repent!’, as it is usually translated, Christian narratives have maintained
the process of conversion as a fundamental vector of how a life can be
narrated. Augustine’s autobiographical story of conversion is especially
long and complex, and performs his later belief in the agency of Grace in
the repeated encounters which seem to be by chance (forte); and, although
the moment in the garden, when he hears the voice of what may be a child’s
game crying ‘tolle, lege’, becomes the critical turning point, the hesitations,
questions and slow recognition of change stand against many conversion
narratives, ancient and modern, which imagine a sharp rupture of ‘before’
and ‘after’ (Augustine’s theory of time will inevitably make any notion of
‘the moment’ problematic).2 Conversion, however, becomes a retrospect-
ive, teleological narrative that organizes a life-time around a pivot of the
fundamental alteration of self-understanding and perspective of how to
live this life, here and now. It becomes the paradigmatic story of a Christian
life-time.
Metanoia, often translated into Latin as paenitentia, ‘repentance’, or
even ‘penance’, in its earlier usages, means a ‘change of mind’, and in its
locus classicus is tightly tied to timing.3 Thucydides relates how the
Athenians voted to execute all the men of Mytilene after its revolt from
the empire; they then had a change of mind (metanoia) the next day,
reconvened the Assembly, changed their decision, and sent a boat in a race
against time to overtake the boat carrying the original order (3.36).
Metanoia is a change of judgement. The word does not occur in the
Septuagint’s translation of the Pentateuch (however familiar the language
of repentance is in the King James Bible), and in the Prophets it usually
2
See Wetzel (1992) 112–60 for a wonderful discussion of grace and will.
3
Goldhill (2020) ch. 5 for a fuller discussion of metanoia.

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 184 The Christian Invention of Time
means a change of mind either of God towards punishing humans, or of
humans towards following the law: for humans, it marks a return to what is
the already agreed system of God’s laws, a coming back to the true path of
observance. Yet, through the texts of Christian late antiquity, building on
the Septuagint as well as the paradigm of Paul on the road to Damascus, its
range of significance stretches to mean something close to what Arthur
Darby Nock’s celebrated book on conversion defines as a ‘renunciation
and a new start . . . not merely acceptance of a rite, but the adhesion of the
will to a theology, in a word faith, a new life in a new people’, a will to
‘belong body and soul’ to a godly community.4 Nock’s definition certainly
privileges his deeply held Protestant understanding of inward commitment –
what Lambert nicely calls ‘the evangelism of interiority’5 – and there are
certainly many more complexities to the philology of this language of
change, as well as to the anthropology of conversion over the centuries.
I have written about this transition of metanoia specifically between Jewish
and Christian texts in late antiquity, and Christopher Prendergast’s sharply
funny and erudite book on counterfactuals takes forward the analysis of
penitence, regret, remorse, reproach and moral luck beyond the
Enlightenment into modernity – and demonstrates how unconvincing
claims to any essential stability in this vocabulary and its underlying presup-
positions are.6 But here and now I want to focus on the temporality of the
narrative of a life with conversion at its heart. How does the injunction to
repentance and conversion invite us to live in time?
A contrast with the standard biographical models of Greco-Roman elite
culture is emphatic and revelatory for this question.7 There are, of course,
texts from the non-Christian literary tradition that centre on transform-
ation: Apuleius’ novel, Metamorphosis, is structured between the episodes
of the hero being turned into an ass, and finally becoming a priest of Isis,
with the remarkable erotic tale of Cupid and Psyche (‘Desire’ and the
‘Soul’) in between, with its precarious allegoresis. The status of the final
religious transformation – a conversion of sorts – cannot escape its desta-
bilizing relationship with the picaresque and filthy adventures of the
human soul inside an ass’s body.8 Augustine marks the problem for the
reader when he calls Apuleius’ story of the transformed self ‘either

4
Nock (1933) 14. 5 Lambert (2015) 6. 6
Goldhill (2020) ch. 5; Prendergast (2019).
7
Discussed in Goldhill (2020) ch. 6. For the background of what follows see Cox Miller (1983);
Momigliano (1983); Edwards and Swain eds. (1997); Hägg and Rousseau eds. (2000); McGing and
Mossman (2006); de Temmerman and Demoen eds. (2016); Hägg (2012); Fletcher and Hanink eds.
(2016); Burridge (1992).
8
Winkler (1985); Harrison, S. (2000).

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 Life-times 185
demonstrated or made up’, ‘either real or fictional’ (aut indicavit aut finxit,
Civ. Dei 18.18). Apuleius’ novel is not so much a biography, as, at best,
a calque or parody of the genre’s scope for teleology. Similarly, Ovid’s
Metamorphoses revels in the materiality of bodily change, but has no
interest in a biographical model of inward repentance or affiliation to
a new community. A rhetorician like Dio of Prusa may praise his own
discovery of philosophy as a sort of personal transformation, but such
stories are rare, and the process of transformation is articulated less forcibly
than the self-congratulation.9 In any case, our main evidence for such
a ‘conversion’ comes from a Christian, Synesius, who may have reframed
Dio’s self-dramatization in a more Christian manner. Augustine, too, has
his transformative discovery of philosophy, more fully described as part of
his intellectual and emotional journey. (Unfortunately, there is no evi-
dence that Synesius in Cyrene and Augustine in Carthage ever knew each
other, although Charles Kingsley in his novel Hypatia wonderfully drama-
tizes them presenting their contradictory views on marriage.)10 From the
Odyssey onwards, the disguise of a hero, which can be a full bodily
transformation, demands revelation, but here too ‘conversion’ is scarcely
at stake. None of these texts from the Greco-Roman tradition is straight-
forwardly biographical; many tell a story of change, but none shows
a strong exemplary model of what will become the paradigm of conversion.
Within the self-defined genre of biography, there is a recognition that
people do fundamentally change. Tiberius, for example, was a successful and
respectable young politician who became a reprobate tyrant in old age. But
Tacitus merely notes in summary morum diversa tempora, there were ‘differ-
ent times/periods of his behaviour’.11 Suetonius has an extended arsenal of
explanatory factors for Tiberius’ character from his opening account of his
family background to the emperor’s early predilection for heavy drinking.
He notes how at the high-point of his career as a young man, he suddenly
entered retirement – and suggests several possible causes that circulated to
explain this change, without offering his own privileged explanation. The
shifts into his foul behaviour on Capri are listed with horrified attentiveness
but scarcely related to any cause beyond the cruelty of corruption and
opportunity of power. In these biographical accounts of Tiberius there is
no narrative of a moment or process of change to organize his diversa
tempora, no rupture between his noble youth and corrupt old age.

9
Moles (1978); Whitmarsh (2001) 156–66.
10
Kingsley’s novel finds academic heritage in Lane Fox (2015) who compares Synesius and Augustine.
11
Ann. 6.51.3. Hoffmann (1968).

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 186 The Christian Invention of Time
Nor would we expect such a ‘conversion’ narrative from Plutarch’s Bioi,
or from a historiographer’s inset character descriptions and diffused stories
of the lives of the actors in their histories.12 Plutarch is paradigmatic both in
locating moral, political, intellectual character as instructive, and in
explaining such character as a mix of education, natural talent, and
circumstance. The writer’s training in rhetoric’s mobilization of the stereo-
types of personality and the expectations of probable narrative make
character a determining causal factor in the narrative of a life, but it is
a character that is formed to act and be judged – to be, as we have discussed
in chapter 5, exemplary. Plutarch’s standard practice of synkrisis, ‘compari-
son’, between a Greek and Roman figure is designed to set two formulated
models of cultural and political virtue against each other. As in tragedy,
a peripeteia, a sudden reversal, happens to a figure and the figure responds,
but the reversal of fortune is not a conversion.
The depiction of Socrates accepting his death as a fulfilment of his choice
of life as a philosopher provides one model for making the prohairesis ‘the
choice of a way of life’, a key decision in such biographical narrative (and this
is the obvious model behind Dio’s paraded, new commitment to philoso-
phy). Josephus describes how he travelled through Palestine, visiting differ-
ent groups of philosophers, as he calls them, to decide which offers the best
regimen for life (Vit. 9–12). The schools of philosophy competed for adher-
ents. Both Origen, from the Christian side, and Galen from the pagan,
complain that all too few people make such a rational choice between rival
sects (Orig. Cels. 1.10; Galen, Libr. Ord. 1). Stories of instant conversion to
a philosophical teacher appear in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers,
to boast how a philosophy can become a total transformation of a life: the
drunk, domestic abuser, Polemo, becoming the sober pupil and lover of
Xenocrates is iconic – afterwards, he could be bitten by a dog or even listen to
Homer without being emotionally disturbed (DL 4.16.19).13 Lucian, with his
usual leery eye, mocks the pretensions of dress, behaviour and language that
such converts or leaders adopt, skewering the hypocrisy of the multiple sects
of empire society, though some modern critics have strangely preferred to
take him as a convert himself, or even to use him to postulate a ‘rich tradition
of protreptic conversion literature in the Hellenistic and Imperial eras’14 of
which there is very scant indication.15 The educated man reveals his educa-
tion by the choice he makes of a life-style, and its underlying principles. This
12 13
See Duff (1999); Goldhill (2002) 246–93. See Eshleman (2007/8).
14
Grethlein (2016) 257–8.
15
See Schäublin (1985); Cancik (1998); Grethlein (2016), and, more generally, Branham (1989);
Goldhill (2002) 60–107.

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 Life-times 187
discourse of ‘choice’, hairesis, will become in later Christianity the accusation
of ‘heresy’, the wrong choice of a way of life, or of a dogma or belief –
formalized and institutionalized not so much in texts such as Irenaeus’
Against Heresies, or Hippolytus’ compendious Refutation of All Heresies, an
obsessive, projected, anxious map of the other, as in the Councils, which, as
we saw in chapter 1, attempted to formulate and regulate God’s time for the
faithful. Prohairesis provides a cultural link between Christian lives and the
practice of the educated elite of Greco-Roman society, but the strong
emphasis on metanoia or conversio remains a Christian narrative trope of life-
writing. Despite the occasional story of instant change towards worshipping
the one God in rabbinical writing, and the rabbinical commentaries on the
story of Ruth, an intense focus on conversion also distinguishes Christian
life-writing and Christian practice from Jewish normative expectations. The
catechumen, the person institutionally undergoing conversion, is a
specifically Christian development of religious life in late antiquity.
It would be easy to continue to trace examples of the multiple forms of
life-writing in Greco-Roman antiquity, both within self-determined genres
of biography – the brief sketches of Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists or the
full-scale Life of Apollonius of Tyana – and within other genres – Horace’s
poetic explorations of Heu . . . fabula quanta fui, ‘alas, how big a story
I became’, for example, or Cicero’s self-aggrandizing epic of his own career.
We could add Aelius Aristides’ diary of his painful medical history; Pliny’s
or Cicero’s letters are edited and partial accounts of an embedded political
life. The foundational models for the culturally dominant forms of life-
writing, however, are to be found in the classical city. Xenophon’s
Cyropaidia, The Education of Cyrus, is repeatedly echoed in the Greek
prose of the Roman empire as an example not just of the didacticism
integral to representing moral character, but also of erotics as a key scene of
self-control. Likewise, Xenophon’s Memorabilia, his recollections of
Socrates, in its structure of brief paragraphs of biographical anecdote not
only stands behind the form of a miscellany or anthology such as
Philostratus’ or Eunapius’ Lives, but also is at the start of the tradition of
Socraticoi, so-called disciples of Socrates who preserved his memory in
prose, often dialogues. The variety of forms and long history of life-writing
is complex enough, then. Yet it is possible to summarize without too much
distortion that biography is a major and recognized genre of Greek and
Roman writing, albeit with very porous boundaries; it is a genre with
a powerful agenda of how to conceptualize the narrative of a life, what
values are at stake in telling a life, and with a recognizable pattern of

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 188 The Christian Invention of Time
education leading to character formation leading to the revelation of virtue
and vice in a competitive national and cultural context.
Yet what one strikingly does not find in this tradition are stories of
conversion such as Paul on the road to Damascus. Paul’s own account has
no vocabulary of metanoia, though Acts already rewrites the story with
a new emphasis on conversion. Paul falls from his horse and experiences
a silent, three-day unconscious trauma (nothing could be more different
from Augustine’s highly intellectualized and reflective, halting passage
towards conversion). Paul is transformed by his trauma, and like the
patriarchs of Genesis, his transformation is marked by a change of name
as well as by a change of life. In the ‘Acts of Paul and Thecla’, a long-
lastingly influential narrative, Thecla hears Paul preach through an open
window and goes into a three-day silent trance, from which she emerges as
a committed Christian, to reject her marriage and family, and to leave
home to follow Paul and spread the word of the Lord.16 In both cases, the
three days of silent trauma echo the three days between the death and
resurrection of Jesus as they are reborn into their Christian identity. In
neither case is there any discussion of any internal process, or any access to
the subjectivity of the convert (as is relentlessly explored in Augustine). For
Paul and for Thecla, there are threats from social authority and eventually
martyrdom as a consequence of their new status. Likewise, Perpetua, as
represented in the ‘Passion of Perpetua and Felicity’ must reject her father
and her own role as a mother to bear witness in death to her Christianity,
and alongside her, Felicity must give up her generative possibilities as
a pregnant woman.17 In these three texts, Acts, the ‘Acts of Paul and
Thecla’ and the ‘Passion of Perpetua and Felicity’, conversion comes
from outside, from God or God’s word; what then appears to the world
as a choice is challenged and threatened from the forces of a dominant
culture, and the converts bear witness to their Christianity to the point of
death. Life is divided between a before and after of conversion, and after
conversion, life is structured as a process of witnessing with the constant
anticipation of death as its climax. In contrast to the life-writing of Greco-
Roman culture, education and character are not formative in the key
moments of life. Because the key choice of a life is compelled or at best
accepted, the models of agency are different: although, as we have seen,
suffering, fearlessness, and calm have their philosophical and cultural roots
in Greek and Roman virtues, the logic of suffering has been redrafted to

16
Johnson, S. (2006); Cooper (1999).
17
Heffernan (2012) is now the standard edition; Shaw (1993).

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 Life-times 189
a new theological agenda. The timeline of a life-time is now structured
around a moment of rupture. As human history is structured between the
Fall of Adam and the Resurrection of Jesus, the Second Adam, so an
individual life needs its crisis of change and rebirth.
Such conversion narratives are necessarily retrospective. Although these
paradigmatic accounts of conversion present a transformative moment of
change, it is a moment that exists only in retrospect. As Paula Fredriksen
has written, ‘To see a content-filled moment of conversion is to have
constructed a narrative whereby the moment emerges as the origin of
(and justification for) one’s present’. The here and now is shaped by this
past transformation. But, continues Fredriksen, ‘the convert thus sees the
subsequent events in his life in light of his conversion, but à l’inverse, his
description of his conversion should be read in light of those subsequent
events’. In short, ‘the conversion account is both anachronistic and
apologetic’.18 Conversion stories rewrite the past, and such rewriting is
always open to re-reading (and further rewriting) by its audiences. In
particular, a first-person account of conversion has therefore a certain
precarity, and a consequent heightened investment in integrity. The third-
person narratives of conversion, destined as models for future first-person
enactment, engage readers in an anticipated retrospection of their own
experience – as beautifully captured by Augustine’s first-person recollec-
tion of hearing the story of Victorinus’ conversion and then the story of
Ponticianus reading the Life of Anthony, as part of Augustine’s retrospective
narrative of his not yet happened experience of conversion – a chain of
conversions, which Augustine and then his readers can join through this
‘internalization of exempla’.19 Ponticianus, Augustine tells us, reads the Life
of Anthony and, he says, immediately rejects his secular, civic life to be
a friend of God: ecce nunc fio, he concludes, ‘behold, I become so now’: the
moment of change (fio) displayed (ecce) precisely as a moment (nunc), in
the present tense. Augustine is fired up, humiliated, ashamed by this story
of transformation – but spends the remainder of the book recalling how
God brought Ponticianus’ story to prompt Augustine to turn back to
himself (retorquebas me ad me ipsum, ‘you were turning me round to
myself’), to face himself, to look at himself intently, to struggle with his
own self-loathing story. He is tortured with doubt and indecision, volvens
et versans me in vinculo meo, ‘rolling and turning myself in my chain’, as he

18
Fredriksen (1986) 33; see also Kennedy (2013) 1–42.
19
Ayres (2009) 263; see also Johnson (1991); Keevak (1995); Kotzé (2004). On Petrarch as one in the
chain see Beecher (2004); Robbins (1985).

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 190 The Christian Invention of Time
‘hesitates to die to death and live in life’, haesitans mori morti et vitae vivere.
His opening biographical question about the death of his infancy now has
its full moral impact: he must kill not just his past but the deathliness it is
(in his retrospect) to live in the present of a true life. He is still desperately
broken by the lure of the pleasures he must deny, however, and in his
misery he cries out quamdiu, quamdiu cras et cras? quare non modo? quare
non hac hora finis turpitudinis meae?, ‘How long?! How Long?! Tomorrow
and tomorrow? Why not now? Why is this not the hour of the end of my
sinfulness?’ Conversion has become a question of time. The Psalmist’s cry
to God (‘How long, how long, O Lord’ (Ps. 13)) is Augustine’s tortured
recognition of his own delay, his inability to act, which is also the deferral
of Grace. ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow’ in its very utterance performs the
delay it laments. What Augustine desperately demands is ‘the now’, the
nunc, that Ponticianus celebrated: ‘Why not now?’. He needs the immedi-
acy of the moment: ‘Why is this not the hour?’ (Is ‘the hour’ in fact
coming? Is it now? Venit hora et nunc est). Augustine’s extraordinary
narrative is a desperate plea to experience the immediacy of a present
that because of his divided self, his human interior life, he cannot reach
by himself without God’s grace.20 In the garden, his turnings finally make
the turn of conversio. He hears the children repeating tolle lege, ‘Pick up and
read’, and ‘immediately’ (statim) his faces changes; as Anthony had read
one verse and become immediately converted (confestim . . . conversum), so
Augustine picks up a text of Paul and reads one verse at random, and
‘immediately’ (statim) it is as if his heart is flooded with light. After all the
delays (cras, cras), the moment of immediacy (statim . . . statim) is fully
experienced. ‘You converted (convertisti) me to you’, concludes Augustine,
and ‘you converted (convertisti) my mother’s grief to joy’. Now, now
Augustine will no longer seek a wife, nor any ‘hope of this age (saeculi)’,
nothing the age can offer. He and his mother will no longer seek the
immortality of family, ‘the grandchildren of my flesh’ (nepotibus carnis
meae) – which his father too had hoped for, to adolescent Augustine’s
dismayed embarrassment. Immediately on conversion, Augustine and
Monica, son and mother, recognize that he has rejected the possibility of
the future of their family, a rejection of the most insistent injunction of
both Greco-Roman and Jewish communities, namely, the continuity of
the family – a fulfilment of the most shocking radicalism of Christianity’s
call to change. Conversion, that immediate moment, is to transcend the
saeculum, the time that is the mundane world, in the name of vitae vivere,

20
For the relation between grace and will, see the crucial discussion of Wetzel (1992).

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 Life-times 191
to live for a life beyond; and conversion is a rejection of the immortality of
the generations which drives so much of Greco-Roman and Jewish moral
and social expectation. Augustine makes visible what has to die for his
future to take shape. Augustine’s theoretical exposition of the unstable,
disappearing moment of the present, his ‘philosophy of time’, which we
have already discussed, comes after this extraordinary narrative of his
search for the transformative immediacy of the now of conversion. The
tension between the theory and the narrative is profoundly eloquent.
Augustine’s longing for the now of grace is, then, also a longing for an
instant of rupture that stands out against his long-drawn out process of
gradual change over time. For later Latin monastic writing, however,
conversion – the turning towards God – becomes a daily process, an
ongoing and continuous dynamic of religious growth, through a striving
repetition (a process that goes beyond Fredriksen’s model of retrospective
rupture). So, Cassiodorus writes that ‘the soul [is] converted by an unstable
and shifting will, nor does it abide in one firm purpose of the will, but even
against its own disposition is changed in its orientation (se conversione
mutari)’ (De an. 4.214–18). The temporality of the monk’s regula is
a constant effort of conversion: the precarious construction of the self
over time in its dynamic relation to God. Here, the moment of conversion
is constantly deferred, or rather the moment of now is always ongoing.
Augustine boldly manipulates the time of his retrospective narration.
Ponticianus’ intervention is followed by several chapters of tortured reflec-
tion on his process of tortured reflection, his conflicting desires, his pain,
before returning to the scene of his tearful conversation with Alypius. By
contrast, when Alypius is given the same passage of Paul to read, he reads
a little further, but also converts ‘without any turbulent delay’, a phrase
that marks the narrative style as much as the psychology of Alypius. They
go to see Augustine’s mother together; they tell her what has happened;
and she celebrates – but this part of the story is told in just three verbs
(ingredimur, indicamus: gaudet). It is as if after the moment of conversion
everything now has a narrative immediacy (the verbs are all in the present
tense). It is also an immediacy that emphasizes how atypical the Confessions
is as a narrative of conversion. Paul and Thecla, like Perpetua in her
martyrdom, are more typical of saints’ lives: they have no doubts, and no
hesitations, and their conversions are not framed by any conflicting desires
for a former life. (As we will see, later lives of saints certainly emphasize the
temptations of former pleasures of the body, in the case of Mary of Egypt
for fully seventeen years of solitary torture.) For Paul and Thecla it is what
happens after their conversions that is significant and the narrative is

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 192 The Christian Invention of Time
shaped to this agenda. The ‘before’ has little importance for Perpetua’s
story, either, except in the form of her baby or her father, which are also
rhetorical strategies to emphasize the total commitment of the martyr to
her witnessing: already a Christian but not yet having won the crown of
martyrdom. She too, like Augustine, denies the continuity of her family in
the name of a Christian future for herself. Augustine is profoundly out of
line with these other ways to tell a life in that he goes back to ask where he
comes from and continues his story in the Confessions not just to his
mother’s death but also into the theoretical discussions of memory and
time and, further, into the analysis of the book of Genesis, the narrative of
where we all come from. All these texts are designed to change lives
through their normativity – as Augustine dramatizes in the reception of
the Life of Anthony and his sortes sacrae in Paul – but they differ not just in
theoretical sophistication, intellectual scope or literary power, but also in
their conceptualization of how conversion takes shape in time and how
a narrative of conversion embodies that temporality. Augustine not only
looks back in time in a ceaseless search for the causes he knows will escape
his human comprehension, but also theorizes such a retrospective narra-
tion through his discussions of memory, time, interpretation,
a theorization which is part of his experience of his human temporality
and its attempt to reach towards God and the eternity of God’s promise. If
Paul’s vision leaves humans between the already and the not yet, the hour
that is coming and the now, Augustine frames this as a tension between the
overwhelming now of God’s grace at the transformative moment of
conversion and the constantly unstable and slipping now of mundane
time in which human life is necessarily lived. The very first question
asked after the climactic moment of conversion is still Quis ego et qualis
ego?, ‘Who am I and what am I?’. Whatever conversion did for Augustine,
it did not stop the insistent pertinence of these questions, or their uncertain
answer.
*
Augustine’s theologically laden description of the death of his past times is
strikingly intense, and provides our first answer to how the ‘now’ is
inhabited with a gaze on timelessness, but it will also have recalled to
some readers, ancient or modern, a particular argument of Plato. In his
Euthydemus, Socrates recalls a discussion he had with two sophists, the
brothers Euthydemus and Dionysodorus. The dialogue is dramatic, funny,
parodic and, although it starts with a testing of the claim of the brothers to
teach virtue, which was a central concern of contemporary didactics, its

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 Life-times 193
extended focus is on a series of problems of self-refutation and contradic-
tion, a set of issues that run through the philosophical literature to
Augustine.21 In Euthydemus, these arguments, conducted with both playful
hooliganism and serious intent – and both tones are discussed explicitly in
the dialogue – focus in particular on education and change: what is the
dynamic of alteration between not-knowing and knowing, between being
wise and being ignorant? Augustine’s Confessions obsessively reconstructs
the process by which his self became what it is, which includes reading
Platonic or Platonizing philosophy; Plato establishes the philosophical
agenda of exploring how the self alters or stays the same over time. Am
I still the same person when I change? Quis ego et qualis ego?
What, then, does the becoming mean in ‘becoming wise’? That is Plato’s
question.22 After the long opening skirmishes, Dionysodorus gets the
ironic Socrates to agree to be serious and asks him if he wishes to make
their young friend, Cleinias, wise (283c–d). Socrates agrees to this aim.
Dionysodorus gets Socrates to assent that, as Cleinias is not wise now, but
ignorant, Socrates wants him to become what he is not, and not to be what
he is now. Socrates therefore wants to destroy (apolōlenai) the Cleinias of
the now. ‘What friends and lovers they must be who would give anything
utterly to destroy their beloved!’. To want to change a person from one
state to another is to aim to destroy the person of now. Cleinias’ lover,
unlike Augustine when he recognizes the necessary ‘death’ of his past, is
outraged by such a suggestion that he wants to destroy his lover, and the
dialogue nearly collapses into chaotic dissolution. The aim of the sophists’
display of technique is to ‘turn (protrepein)’ the young Cleinias ‘to philoso-
phy’ (274e), to convert him. Augustine, too, had his life-changing turn to
philosophy; but Augustine’s willing recognition that he lives (vivo), while
his infancy and other former conditions are ‘dead’, in Plato’s dialogue is
seen as a challenging paradox about the continuity of the self through
change and time. For Cleinias to be destroyed as he now is, is seen as
a threat both to his being and to his lover’s care.
The sophists’ case seems to depend on a determination that qualities or
conditions undergo change by replacement rather than by process. Either
one is wise or one is ignorant; one knows or one does not know (or, as
Augustine might say, either one is Christian or one is not). One cannot be
both at the same time. For Dionysodorus and Euthydemus, as
M. M. McCabe argues, ‘truths are episodic’.23 Thus, as Socrates himself
recognizes, there is no place in their argument for learning as a process,

21 22 23
Castagnoli (2010). I follow here McCabe (2013/14). McCabe (2013/14) 493.

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 194 The Christian Invention of Time
only for knowing or not knowing. The dialogue opens with Socrates
talking about how he is learning to play the lyre, old though he is, and
this apparently passing mention of musicianship carefully cues one area
where the possession of knowledge is least convincingly explained without
a process of gradual acquisition. For Socrates, McCabe continues, wisdom
itself is a quality which alters the areas of life in which it is embodied: it is
a ‘transformative good’. By contrast, the sophists argue that even contra-
diction is impossible because it assumes a continuity across truth’s episodic
conditions. The sophists themselves have moved from city to city
(Socrates, of course, almost never left Athens), and have changed profes-
sions, reinventing themselves as they progress. Their characters and their
arguments are of a piece. To understand what it is to become wise, then, to
have a particular character, depends on negotiating a tension between
a continuous process of change over time, and a recognition of the ruptures
of difference. In a life-story, is there a point of change or only a process? If
there is only a process, how can you articulate the difference between
contrasting states of being?
The beginning of Euthydemus is marked by a surprising focus on ageing.
Yet ageing – as Augustine with his insistence on the death of infancy
underlined – is the very basis of the question of continuity and change in
the self. Cleinias is introduced by Crito, who is talking to Socrates, as the
‘youth (meirakion) whose father is Axiochus’ (217b). Meirakion is a specific
age-class in Athenian culture: not a child, and not yet reached the military
age of the ephebe.24 Cleinias has grown a good deal, notes Crito, and,
although he is the same age (hēlikian) as his own son, is bigger and better
looking. One of the other young men is described as ‘arrogantly aggressive’
(hubristēs) ‘because of his young age’. Crito asks Socrates if he is not
worried to fence with the new younger sophists, as ‘he is rather old’.
Socrates retorts that the brothers themselves, Euthydemus and
Dionysodorus, are ‘old men’, because they became sophists only ‘a year
or two ago’. Socrates tells Crito that he has already been mocked by boys
because he goes to lyre-playing class with them, and they call the teacher
gerontodidaskalon, ‘tutor to the old’. And Socrates adds that he brought
some old men with him for support, and asks Crito to help make up the
team, and remarks that his own boys will be a lure to encourage them to
come along. Banter, for sure, but designed. The opening paragraphs
remind the reader of the transitions of life, growing up, passing through
the prime of life into old age, the distance between the young and the old.

24
On the importance of age-class see Davidson (2006).

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 Life-times 195
Biological continuity grounds the continuity of the self. When
Dionysodorus actually argues that he knew how to dance with swords as
a new-born, even Socrates sniffs his dismissal of such a claim without the
need for an argument. There is a recognized pattern of to eikos, what is
natural, likely, in the biological continuity of the body. It is a sign of
horrific chaos if humans are born grey-haired, as in Hesiod’s vision of the
future of the Age of Iron. The dialogue has already ambushed the claims of
the two sophists, by establishing a continuous process of ageing as the
norm for social and biological life.25 Isn’t ageing a necessity of any life-
story?
Cleinias is the object of erotic attention by the men who accompany him
(erotics and education are so often overlapped in the elite pederastic
environment that Socrates and his chums inhabit), and erotics also negoti-
ates this tension between continuity and rupture through its familiar
patterning of a life of loving. Plato’s dialogue Protagoras begins with an
unnamed friend asking Socrates if he has just come from ‘the hunt to catch
Alcibiades’ moment (hōran, 309a)’. I have translated hōra as ‘moment’
because the word implies the right or perfect time of desirability (‘the
freshness and vigour of youth’, as the standard dictionary has it). A boy is
attractive only for a short season. Sappho lyrically captures this connection
between hōra and erotics, but from the perspective of ageing: ‘The moon
has sunk, and the Pleiades; it is the middle of the night. The hōra has passed
by (para d’ erchet’ hōra). And I sleep alone’.26 The time of this night, like
others, the season of the year, and the moment for love in her life as Sappho
ages, have all passed (hōra has these senses), and the juxtaposition of the
fading time and sleeping alone is eloquently poignant.
In the Protagoras, the friend goes on, indeed, to suggest ‘between us, as it
were’, that Alcibiades is actually a man now, with a beard – and thus
according to normative expectations no longer fit for such a hunt. Socrates,
performing the elite banter of such erotic discourse, quotes Homer in
response, retorting that actually the most attractive time is when the
beard just appears, as Alcibiades now is: the margin, the moment of
transition, the scene of impending loss is the most erotic . . . The gossip

25
Augustine uses the ages of man further to express the ages of the world in In Gen. contra Manichaeos
and De ver. relig.: see Ladner (1959) 232–8. This parallelization continues up into medieval Irish texts:
Clarke and ní Mhanoaigh (2020).
26
Fr 168b Voigt. It has been much debated whether this fragment is by Sappho, as our ancient source
attributes it. I take mesai nuktes, translated usually as ‘it is the middle of the night’, to suggest by its
plural that this is not the only night for such a reflection. Which de answers men structures the
reading(s) of the poem.

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 196 The Christian Invention of Time
continues: ti oun ta nun, asks the friend, ‘so, what’s the case now?’: how is
the moment for the moment (hōra) developing? The ‘now’ is the hōra
which desire seeks: a kairos to be grasped or missed, in the moment, the
lover’s now.
The timing of desire is a cliché that organizes not just erotic discourse
but also the lived life of the citizen (and the women of the city too). In
classical Athens, the social organization of the biological requires that the
young male who is the object of desire, as he becomes a man, will become
the one who desires; manhood expects marriage and children; a girl when
she becomes a parthenos is expected to marry as soon as possible. So much
of the literature of desire in antiquity is concerned with this timing. New
Comedy’s plot (in all senses) is to get the right girl married at exactly the
right time. Or in epigram the constant repetition of the kairos of the
epigram’s wit creates the kairos of the erotic moment. Or in the novel or
other extended love stories there is the constant delay of erotic fulfilment:
the waiting for the moment that becomes its own erotics of fervour and
deferral. Desire may be episodic – amores plural – but there is a continuity
of ageing that structures each self’s expected position. Aristophanes’ joke
scenario, where a young man is forced to sleep with increasingly older
women, before he can sleep with his own young girlfriend, has the shape it
does partly because of these expectations of timing, partly because of its
amused glance at the power of the old in enforcing social norms, the senum
severiorum, ‘the all too severe old men’; Horace’s satiric aggression towards
old women – or the epigrammatists who write without sympathy about the
decrepid fate of old prostitutes – have a similar mix of not just misogyny,
but also a fierce conservatism about the proper sense of time, the necessary
timeline of erotics.27 To have sex with someone whom society judges too
young or too old is scandalous, then and now. The chronos of a life of loving
depends on its recognized moments of kairos.
Imagining time is organized through the body: a biological clock, time
of the month, onset of puberty, arrival of bodily hair, loss of hair, meno-
pause and so on. ‘Any ethics we might wish to derive from a consideration
of temporality must contend with the irreducible force of time’s movement
on our bodies’, writes Valerie Traub.28 Both the language of ageing and the

27
For how temporality gets queered, nowadays, by sexuality and its corporeality, see e.g. Edelman
(2004); Halberstam (2005) and, with a medieval spin, the excellent Dinshaw (2012), and, for
a slightly later era, Traub (2016); Freccero (2006).
28
Traub (2016) 75. On women’s time, see the influential Kristeva (1981); also for summaries of more
recent discussions, Radstone (2008) 56–111, on the body, 71–111. For the Jewish story of gendered
time and the body see Gribetz (2020) 135–87.

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 Life-times 197
language of erotics in Euthydemus project a culturally embedded timeline
of the lived experience of the body – a continuity of the bodily self – to set
against the episodic truths of the sophists. How can a self-consciousness of
bodily continuity be denied, without denying something basic about
a human sense of the self in time? The Gospel may proclaim that
‘the hour is coming’, erchetai d’ hōra, but Sappho knows that para d’ erchet’
hōra, ‘the hour is passing by’.
*
The rupture of Christian conversion, however, is not so much a bodily
change as a turning of the soul towards God. A turning of the soul which
demands a denial or repression or suppression of the bodily; which makes
life in a body – the biological journey from birth to death, and its erotics – a
deathly experience, a vita mortalis. Conversion disrupts how time is organ-
ized through the body. The life-writing of Christianity sets out to alter the
culturally embedded narrative of the body, its organization of time.
Augustine in the Confessions describes his erotic desires with a focused
fleshliness, from his recollection of how his father happily recognized in the
bathhouse that he is now capable of siring children, to his own admission
that even after conversion he has longing sexual dreams that result in fully
physical experiences. Augustine testifies that his turn from the body is
a painful, ongoing struggle. In later, ascetic writing, especially in the lives of
saints, there is a more violent intimacy with the bodily.29 The Life of Mary
of Egypt, as written in the seventh century, tells of one Zosimas who thinks
he has nothing left to learn about ascetic practice, but travels to the desert
beyond the Jordan in the hope of finding a holy father who can inspire him
further.30 He finds instead an old naked woman, her skin blackened by the
sun and her flesh emaciated. She tells him her story: how she left home in
Egypt when young because of her desire for sex, and how she lived a life of
complete debauchery, offering men sex for the pleasure of it – she never
took money – until she arrived in Jerusalem, where at the Church of the
Holy Sepulchre, thanks to the virgin Mary, she has a religious experience of
conversion that leads her to immediate chastity and her ascetic life in the
desert. She took only two and a half loaves of bread with her, after which
she has existed solely on what she could find in the desert. For seventeen
years, she recounts, she struggled with the demons of temptation, as she
recalled her experiences of wine, song and sex. There is a lurid narrative of
remembered sin; but after conversion, the only story is temptation.
29
On the role of saints lives, see especially Perkins (1995); Clark (1999); Castelli (2004); Kelley (2006).
30
Burrus (2004) 147–54; Burrus (2019) 93–117.

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 198 The Christian Invention of Time
Temptation is the poetics of asceticism. When temptation is conquered,
there is no story for the remaining thirty years. She describes the thirty
years of her life after temptation simply as ‘Lasting calm after a violent
storm’, a calm defined by negativity: she has seen no one, read no book,
heard no voice. The life ends with Mary’s miraculous death and burial
(with the help of a passing lion). Zosimas has learned of a greater ascetic
than himself (asceticism is always competitive). Mary has crushed her
bodily desires by her suffering and repentance in the desert, and this
leads to a timeless present, ended only by the transformation of death. In
the life of another Mary, the niece of Abraham, this Mary, after being
seduced, goes in shame to a brothel, from where she is rescued by her uncle
Abraham, and returns to an uneventful solitary life of penance. In the ‘Life
of Pelagia’, Pelagia, an actress lavishly adorned with jewels, after her
conversion – a complex, erotically charged story – cuts her hair, takes on
male dress and becomes a solitary ascetic monk, unrecognizable as herself,
and lives without event until her death, when her gender is revealed to
a shocked world. In all three cases, the women separate themselves from the
expected timelines of the female body; their bodies are transformed; and
they finally enter a life without differentiated events, without the measure-
ment of time, except for the memory of the before and after that is
repentance.
Simeon Stylites is even more aggressive towards his bodily condition.31
He lives on a series of high pillars: the height of each pillar and the years he
sits on it are carefully recorded, as if to compensate for the indiscriminate
repetition of daily suffering. His ascetic violence ties ropes so tightly to
himself that they fuse with his flesh; he stands on one foot for two years
because of an ulcer on his thigh; his flesh crawls with worms and stinks
foully. His body oozes from open wounds. Here the mortification of the
flesh takes on a grim literalness: like a corpse, his stinking body crawls with
animals and is decaying. When worms fall from the pillar, he has them
gathered back and welcomes them again onto his flesh. For Simeon, the
holy man, the arrival of other humans for advice or blessings or reproach is
no more than an interruption of his desired continuity of physical suffer-
ing, his turning of his body into a display of mortification, a vita mortalis;
an interruption of his unmeasured time. Fasting, the primary practice of
asceticism, as Peter Brown eloquently demonstrated,32 is designed to
control physical desire and, for a woman, to stop menstruation, the
physical symptom of the Fall, in order to get back to the state of the

31 32
Burrus (2019) 123–34. Brown (1988).

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 Life-times 199
Garden of Eden. Asceticism aims to break the social and biological time-
lines of bodies, hoping to reverse time to a time before, while waiting for
the time to come.
‘The Life of a saint’, writes Virginia Burrus, ‘breaks with the chronolo-
gies inscribed by both the biographical and novelistic conventions’.33
‘Birth’ she continues, ‘does not anchor a social identity’, as it does in
Greco-Roman literature. The social conditions of the beginning of a life
are ‘unknown, ignored, transformed or abandoned’. The standard time-
lines of ageing, with the social expectations of marriage and children, are
rejected. The careers of civic duty or family property are resisted. The body
and its desires become an enemy of the self. It is not, however, quite that
‘time, for the saint, is unhurried, open, meandering’.34 Rather, against
threat or temptation, there is a narrative hope for the timelessness of
waiting, which is also the continuity of unmeasured suffering (‘to be
Christian is to suffer’35); a hope that until death the vita mortalis should
be uninterrupted by any irruption of the saeculum. In such a challenge to
biological and social norms, such Lives of the Saints offer their faithful
readers a new narrative of a life, a precarious, impossible idealism of how
the self can inhabit time.
*
In retrospect – as all narratives of conversion are (re-)written and (re-)read –
these later lives take to a further, more extreme level trends that are already
evident in earlier Christian life-writing. Gregory of Nyssa, for example, wrote
a Life of his sister Macrina.36 Her birth is marked by her mother having
a vision of a guardian angel who instructs her three times to call the child
‘Thecla’ – after the saint who converted at the sound of Paul’s words. This
secret name, reveals Gregory, was a sign of Macrina’s future life as a holy
virgin. So, indeed, when Macrina is engaged to be married to a young man of
talent, who promptly dies, she takes this engagement as binding and refuses all
other possibilities of marriage – sexual threats which, unlike the case of Mary,
niece of Abraham, or, indeed, Thecla, disappear easily and without enact-
ment. The story of her life is framed as a commitment to ‘philosophy’, the
term often appropriated by Greek Christians for their faith, and which we
have seen in quite different guise in Augustine’s self-transformative reading of

33 34
Burrus (2019) 140. Burrus (2019) 140.
35
Perkins (1995) 32 – the conclusion, she suggests, to be drawn from such hagiographies. Boyarin
(1999) 93–126 focuses rather on identity formation.
36
Burrus (2004). On Gregory of Nazianzus on his sister see Burrus (2006); Elm (2006), and, more
generally, Momigliano (1985).

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 200 The Christian Invention of Time
Neo-Platonic texts. In his dialogue On the Soul and Resurrection, also set at
Macrina’s deathbed, Gregory depicts himself as her pupil, a Socrates to
her Diotima, or, since the dialogue is a deathbed discussion on the
immortality of the soul, a Cebes or Simias to her Socrates.37 He calls
her ‘The Teacher’, hē didaskalos, throughout, a displayed commitment, as
ever, to paideia, typical of the Cappadocian fathers’ ‘project of cultural
reclamation’,38 though it is particularly worth noticing that here the
teacher of philosophy is female.39 Macrina stays by her mother (as
Augustine does with Monica), and encourages her too to greater levels
of ‘philosophy’, as well as comforting her at the death of her son,
Macrina’s brother.40 In a strikingly self-reflexive phrase, Macrina, unable
to rise from her bed, tells Gregory her life-story ‘as if a written history’
(sungraphē, 20.3) – the story he then writes for us (sungraphē, 18.13).
Gregory’s biography of Macrina, with its inset account of Macrina’s
autobiographical story, ‘as if a written history’, presents ‘a dying
woman willing herself into prose, easing her own transition from life to
memory’,41 which turns hagiography’s ‘narration itself into a pious act’,42
a liturgy where the text replaces the body, and becomes the stimulus to
spiritual change, and a transformation of the reader’s lived life: memorial
as a continuing praxis – the askēsis of a life becoming the askēsis of writing
and reading a life to encourage the askēsis of a life . . .
Gregory himself has returned home at the point of Macrina’s death,
and the scene of death and burial takes up a good proportion of the
whole life. This life is full of stories of death (the destruction of this
holy family’s future as a family). Surprisingly – to him and to us –
Gregory at the end is shown his sister’s partially uncovered body where
there is a small mark on her breast. It is explained to him that this is
a sign of a miraculous cure. Macrina had a tumour, but refused to
allow any doctor to view her body out of her heightened sense of
modesty; she treated herself with mud moistened from her own tears,
shed in an all-night vigil, at the foot of the altar, and when her mother
made the sign of the cross on the breast, she was cured. The mark
remained as a sign of the miracle and a proof of her sanctity. As with
Odysseus, as Georgina Frank has outlined, Macrina’s heroic identity is

37
See Ludlow (2015); Muehlberger (2012); both with extensive bibliographies to earlier discussions.
38
Muehlberger (2012).
39
Ludlow (2007) 202–19 has a full discussion of responses to the issue of gender.
40
For the family/private frame of these scenes see Bowes (2008) 202–16.
41
Krueger (2000) 492, an excellent article more broadly contextualized in Krueger (2004).
42
Krueger (2000) 497.

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 Life-times 201
proven by a scar.43 Her body is transformed by being cured rather than
by rotting (though Simeon would no doubt say his mortified flesh is
a cure of the sins of life). As with Mary and Pelagia, the truth of her body
can be seen only at death. A saint’s body does not corrupt, it outlasts its
own temporality, and, Gregory suggests, here is the first sign of this
sanctity to be witnessed on his sister’s breast. The slow, withdrawn life
of Macrina, committed to a home-life without marriage, and marked for
sanctity on her body at death, anticipates the more extreme isolation and
bodily transformations of a Mary or Pelagia.
In a similar way, Jerome describes an idealized Paula at her death.
Jerome knew a thing or two about the temptations of the ascetic. He
admitted to seeing visions of dancing girls during his own time of retreat in
the desert (‘How often I longed for the delights of Rome!’, Ep. 22.7), and,
in his Life of Paul the Hermit, conjures a more detailed, self-exposing scene
in which a young man is tied up naked in a beautiful grove, and then visited
by a prostitute. Unable to move, he bites off his own tongue and spits it at
her to avoid kissing her, but not before she has stimulated his genitals and
mounted him. For the ascetic, the necessity of internal life is a temptation
to acute erotic fantasy. Jerome had, of course, lived at the heart of Roman
society, and, unlike Mary, did not stay in the desert. Paula’s temptations
are not like Jerome’s, however. He describes Paula leaving her children as
she sailed to the Holy Land, without a tear in her eye (Ep. 108).44 No
temptation for her to stay home and play out the role of mother, even
though ‘no mother ever loved her children so dearly’ (Ep. 108.6). Jerome’s
letter emphasizes that Paula was so holy that she had no longing memories
for her wealthy past in Rome, troped through the biblical narrative of the
Israelites’ inability to forget Egypt in the travails of freedom: ‘To the day of
her death, she never returned to Chaldaea, or regretted the fleshpots of
Egypt or its strong-smelling meats’ (32). ‘Strong-smelling’ is Jerome’s
addition to the biblical language, increasing the sensuality of longing.
Her settled life in Bethlehem – I have already discussed his description of
her pilgrimage in chapter 6 – is also elevated, in a way that the later saints
will dramatically embody, into a form of martyrdom: ‘It is not only the
shedding of blood that is accounted a confession: the spotless service of
a devout mind is itself a daily martyrdom’ (32). The mundane becomes the
exceptional, as the passing of time is a continuous martyrdom. The
transvaluation of waiting . . . The only temptation he does allow Paula is

43
Frank (2000a); Burrus (2004) 69–76, differently; and Macrina’s ring, Burrus (2019) 151–6.
44
Standard edition is Cain (2013).

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 202 The Christian Invention of Time
the argument of an Origenist Christian, whose views on the resurrection of
the body are called heretical by Jerome. This leads him to speak passion-
ately about the continuity of biological time and the body as a grounding of
the self (24):
No difference of age (aetatum) can affect the reality (veritatem) of the body.
Although our bodies (corpora) are in a perpetual flux, and lose or gain daily
(cotidie), will we be therefore as many persons as there are daily changes?
I was not one person at ten years old, another at thirty and another at fifty;
nor am I another now when all my head is grey.
His epitaphium, ‘funeral oration’, for Paula is a life-story, and for him the
continuity of the life of the body and the daily work of self-sanctification
constitutes a narrative of martyrdom, crowned now by her death. Her
journey from Rome culminates in the long, still years of prayer and
worship, a time without the change or eventfulness of narrative: ‘day and
night alike a time of almost unbroken prayer’ (15). Her very obscurity is her
glory, declares Jerome. Jerome rewrites the celebrated phrase of Pericles’
Funeral Oration in Thucydides, that ‘a woman’s greatest glory is to be least
talked about by men’. Paula is to be talked about and praised volubly, as he
here performs, precisely because she turned her glorious birth and wealth
into this humility of withdrawal from social process, her turn to daily
martyrdom.45 Similarly, in the company of virgins, she was ‘least remark-
able’, minima omnium, which pointedly rewrites the classical praise of
Nausicaa in the Odyssey or Electra in Aeschylus’ Choephoroi or Artemis
and her devotees, each of whom stands out in stature and beauty from the
band of women they are surrounded by. Her life-story turns on her
conversion. She prays that she must disfigure her face that had worn make-
up; she must afflict her body that has had pleasures; she must cry because
she has laughed; because she has pleased a husband, now she must please
Christ. She makes her journey from Rome and her noble life, through
pilgrimage, to the nunnery that she builds at Bethlehem and whose order is
described at length by Jerome. Jerome even goes so far as to suggest that
Paula herself in her daily piety is an object of pilgrimage for others.
Paula’s life-story in Jerome’s letter tells of her repeated illnesses, and her
patience and survival of such difficulties, and of her care for the other
virgins in the nunnery: her daily round. The structure of the narrative is
clear, however: her married life in Rome is broken by her conversion to an

45
Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 43.5 uses the phrase ‘living martyrs’ on which Rousseau (1994) 5
comments: ‘In those simple phrases, fearful refugees were brilliantly transformed into pioneers of
a new age’.

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 Life-times 203
ascetic ideal; her pilgrimage – described at length – leads her physically and
symbolically to Bethlehem, where she stops, and, in ceaseless prayer about
her conversion and commitment to an ‘afflicted body’, lives out her
liturgical life over many years of daily martyrdom. Again, these are the
terms that later Lives of the saints will take to heightened levels of absolute
withdrawal, continuous supplication, and violent mortification of the
flesh.
Perhaps the fullest expression of autobiographical writing before
Augustine is found in Gregory of Nazianzus. He writes three long poems
on his own life; he edited and published a collection of his own letters (the
first Greek writer to do so); he writes funeral orations for family members,
sermons for his community, and as discussed in chapter 2, his funeral
epitaphs include dozens of poems about himself, his mother and his
extended family. Gregory, as we saw, for all his own commitment to
virginity, is constantly negotiating an ameliorative and assimilating pos-
ition between his vision of learned and civilized urban Christianity and the
tradition of Greek culture in which he has been educated.46 In their
different ways, Gregory of Nyssa, Jerome, Gregory of Nazianzus, and
Augustine show how in both Greek and Latin communities these earlier
life-stories are consciously and intricately engaging with the traditions and
practices of the life-stories of the dominant Hellenic and Roman culture of
empire, finding a space for a Christianity that recognizes the institutions
and lures of contemporary society, and strives to articulate a new place for
itself that will engage Christians and non-Christians in the ‘philosophy’ of
an educated life. The later Lives of saints, written in an established
Christian empire, offer more extreme acts of social rejection and bodily
punishment, narratives which are both lived up to in ascetic practices and
good to think with for their reading communities – maps of a life to find
one’s self on. How such life-writing becomes normative, how such life-
times are lived up to, forms one crucial history of the formation of
Christian sociality over time.
The two strands of this chapter, then, are intimately connected. On the
one hand, how to narrate the turning point of conversion? How much is it
a question of process, how much a blinding flash? On the other, how is the
life after conversion to be narrated? Is it to be a mission of converting
others? Or a constant repetition of repentance, a performance of self-
punishment? In both strands, time plays a fundamental role, not least in

46
Hofer (2013) argues well that Gregory’s theology can only be understood through this autobiographical
mode, ‘an appropriation of Christ’s life to his life’ (6).

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 204 The Christian Invention of Time
how narrative is shaped. Is conversion to be expressed as a ‘before’ and
‘after’ where the ‘now’ of process is minimized? Is there a continuity across
time in the self or the body which remains beyond conversion? How is the
time after conversion to find a narrative form? Fairy stories accustom
Western children to an ideal or a fantasy of the changeless time of marriage
with the closural formula ‘they lived happily ever after’. Saints’ Lives, the
lives of the converted sancti, work to find their own formulae, with death as
their closure. ‘She lived with an awful but necessary recognition of sin ever
after’, ‘He lived in constant and increasing self-inflicted physical anguish to
find increasing spiritual transcendence ever after.’ The stretch of time
I characterized in chapter 4 as ‘waiting’ becomes thus the problem and
resource of the narration of a life-story. To discover a certain timelessness
in the now.
*
The history of Jewish life-writing in late antiquity contrasts with both the
Greco-Roman and the Christian traditions. I have written at length
elsewhere about the complexities of this story.47 Although there are early
cases of biographies and even autobiographies by Jewish writers – Philo’s
Life of Moses, say, or Josephus’ Life which is a turncoat’s apologia pro vita
sua – these examples come from the most Hellenized strata of Jewish
culture, written in Greek in Hellenistic Alexandria in Philo’s case, and in
Rome in Josephus’, and they follow the conventions and expectations of
Greco-Roman genres of life-writing: Greek texts for a Greek-speaking
community. But in the rabbinical writings of late antiquity, written in
Hebrew and Aramaic, there is a refusal to write continuous life-stories,
even when the material is easily available. Unlike the scriptural accounts of
David or Moses, the celebrated rabbis of the Talmud have no birth to death
narratives, no explanations of behaviour according to character or educa-
tion; little motivation by family circumstance or even social setting,
beyond the recognition, say, that the upper classes communicate better
with the rulers of Greece or Rome. Nor are the lives of scriptural figures
retold as continuous stories, though midrash produces anecdote after
anecdote of discrete biographical events that do not appear in the Bible.
Nor is there much interest in conversion either as a narrative of transform-
ation or as a ritual possibility, until Christianity makes such an issue
unavoidable. With the exception of the strange novella Joseph and
Aseneth,48 the representation of such internal or social change is at best

47 48
Goldhill (2020) ch. 6. See Goldhill (2020) ch. 5.

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 Life-times 205
scattered and without the anxious obsession that Christian texts demon-
strate. The ideological and narrative focus is on the precarious and porous
boundaries of community and how they are to be policed. Life-writing
focuses on episodic incidents with an implication for halacha, Jewish law.
The narrative style of the Talmud – quite unlike anything in Greek,
Roman or even Christian traditions – places the self differently in history,
as we have already discussed, and insists on a constant rabbinical perspec-
tive that life is to be measured by halacha. The narrative style of the
Talmud engages the Jewish reader in a constant set of discrete questions
of what it is to be a good Jew, which thus also performs the demand that
such questioning is itself part of the answer. The self in time here is
represented in and through such repeated questions of ritually and legally
correct behaviour. This is how belonging and commitment are regulated.
Christianity in late antiquity, in its aggressive and self-defining gestures of
separation from Judaism, repeatedly argues against what it thus defines
negatively as the legalism of Judaism. Polemics between Judaism and
Christianity are enacted in and through these different narratives of what
a life-time looks like.
Biography is a form of writing where narrative most evidently depends
on an idea of time, where the self in time finds narrative expression.
Rabbinical texts show with remarkable sharpness how a particular sense
of self is constructed by a particular style of temporal narrative. But both
Christianity and Judaism reveal how rewriting the form of life-writing –
a contesting rewriting that contrasts and engages with the traditions of
Greco-Roman culture – is integral to the development of their sense of
community, belonging and commitment. Life-writing projects models to
live by: how life-writing is lived up to, however, is always a question. In
what ways these changing models of the self in time inform the literature of
late antiquity will remain a structuring concern of this book.

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 chapter 10

The Rape of Time

One of the most surprising expressions that captures a self-conscious

positioning in time comes in a remarkable poem in Book 1 of the
Palatine Anthology. The poem is not an epigram at all, despite its inclusion
in the anthology, but rather a 76-line poem of dedication celebrating the
construction of the church of St Polyeuctos in Constantinople.1 The
church was rebuilt in the early sixth century by Anicia Juliana, who came
from one of the most distinguished family lines in eastern Greek Christian
nobility. Indeed, the original church had been built in the fifth century by
the empress Eudocia, who was Juliana’s great-grandmother. Juliana, in her
act of rebuilding, was certainly engaging in the familiar competitiveness,
aimed at both contemporary and historical rivals, that continued
Hellenistic euergetism – the public display of wealth and authority through
the sponsoring of public buildings – in order to contribute to the splendid
redesign of Christian urban space. Juliana was also inevitably engaged in
the still rumbling arguments between the supporters and opponents of the
settlement at the Council of Chalcedon, and it has been plausibly sug-
gested that such building projects were likely to be embroiled in such
public statements of religious affiliation as well as political clout. The first
book of the Palatine Anthology is entitled ‘Christian Epigrams’, which
justifies the inclusion of this poem in itself, but there are also several
epigrams collected in the book, which are written as if they were intended
to be inscribed on the walls of a church, and some of which may have been
so.2 Thanks to a stunning archaeological discovery back in the 1960s, it has
been demonstrated that this long poem, or at least the first 41 lines for
certain, were actually inscribed in the church of St Polyeuctos, making it
one of the longest verse inscriptions to have survived from antiquity – and
testimony of the lavish scale of the church and its decoration, which other

1
See Whitby (2006); Bardill (2006).
2
See Agosti (2018) and Agosti (forthcoming) for other examples of church inscriptions.

206

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 The Rape of Time 207
evidence confirms and extends.3 This was a major building project in the
capital of the eastern empire, and it made a statement, both in itself and in
the words with which it was decorated.
The moment which is so surprising, however, comes in the second section of
the poem for which there has been no archaeological evidence for its presence in
the church yet discovered, although the manuscript indicates that it was also
inscribed in the building (although exactly where is less clear). Let me quote the
surrounding lines, too, as the whole passage is salient (AP 1.10.43–51):
ποῖος Ἰουλιανῆς χορὸς ἄρκιός ἐστιν ἀέθλοις,
ἣ μετὰ Κωνσταντῖνον ἑῆς κοσμήτορα Ῥώμης,
καὶ μετὰ Θευδοσίου παγχρύσεον ἱερὸν ὄμμα,
καὶ μετὰ τοσσατίων προγόνων βασιληίδα ῥίζαν,
ἄξιον ἧς γενεῆς καὶ ὑπέρτερον ἤνυσεν ἔργον
εἰν ὀλίγοις ἔτεσιν; χρόνον ἥδ᾽ ἐβιήσατο μούνη,
καὶ σοφίην παρέλασσεν ἀειδομένου Σολομῶνος,
νηὸν ἀναστήσασα θεηδόχον, οὗ μέγας αἰὼν
οὐ δύναται μέλψαι χαρίτων πολυδαίδαλον αἴγλην
What chorus is sufficient to the efforts of Juliana?
After Constantine, who ornamented his Rome,
After the all-golden holy eye of Theodosius,
After the royal tree of so many ancestors,
She completed a work worthy of her descent and even grander
In a few years. She alone raped time
And surpassed the celebrated wisdom of Solomon,
When she rebuilt a temple to receive God, for which a great span of
years
Could not hymn the multiform splendour of its beauties.
I have translated the Greek verb ebiēsato with the unpleasantly violent
word ‘raped’ for its full shock value. It has been translated more decorously
as ‘overpowered’,4 or, even more blandly, ‘conquered’.5 It is a very strong
term, however, most often used of sexual or physical violence, or aggressive
compulsion (‘force’), and is a very strange and unparalleled verb to take
‘time’ (chronos) as its object.6 What does it connote here? It indicates that
Juliana’s building project must be seen as an intervention in history, an
intervention that not only turns history on its head – violently – but that also
she alone (mounē) could achieve. This intervention has different instrumental
trajectories. First, Juliana is placed within a particular genealogy (geneē – the

3
Harrison (1983), (1986), (1989). 4 Whitby (2006). 5
Bardill (2006); Whitby (2006).
6
Clement of Alexandria (Stro. III.8.61.1) accuses those who select texts self-interestedly to support
their pleasures, of ‘forcing’, ‘raping’ scripture: biazomenoi graphas.

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 208 The Christian Invention of Time
line of generations celebrated by Homer and rejected by Augustine’s
Christianity, as we saw). This genealogy includes noble ancestors by name –
Constantine, Theodosius – and the many unnamed nobility who make up the
chorus evoked in the first line; it also specifies the great builders of previous
generations, Constantine who decorated ‘his Rome’, Constantinople; and
Theodosius, probably Theodosius II, who built the walls of Constantinople.
Juliana’s project is said not just to be worthy of such ancestry but also to
surpass it – celebrating her competitiveness with the heroes of the past. And
her project has been achieved in only a few years. The speed of her transform-
ation of the cityscape is part of her attack on normal time.
But beyond this, her temple is praised as a triumph over the lauded
wisdom of Solomon. Aeidomenou, ‘lauded’, ‘sung’, ‘celebrated in epic
verse’, recalls both scripture’s praise of Solomon especially in the book of
Kings, and also the long pagan tradition of recording fame in song, which
we discussed in chapter 2. Sophiēn is not only the iconic quality of
Solomon, his ‘wisdom’, but also comes trailing clouds of the long tradition
of calling not just Christian theology, ‘wisdom’, but also specifically the
transcendent mind of God, as incarnated in Jesus. This claim to surpass
Solomon’s wisdom also and most saliently indicates that this naos, this
temple built by Juliana, rivals the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, and is
the Christian spiritual triumph (sophiē) over the Jewish Temple of ritual.
Solomon’s Temple of Jerusalem, destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in the sixth
century bce, was reimagined by the prophet Ezekiel in a heavenly form of
perfection, and the second Temple, rebuilt by Zerubbabel after Cyrus’
return of the Israelites to Jerusalem, and reconstructed by Herod, was razed
to the ground by the Romans in 70 ce. The book of Revelation prophesied
that the Temple, as imagined by Ezekiel, would reappear in the eschato-
logical era. It would descend from heaven. The church of St Polyeuctos is
being heralded thus as the earthly copy of the new and better Temple
foreseen in the scriptures (Hebrews 8.5). Juliana is not the first to make
such a claim. Eusebius in the Life of Constantine declares that Constantine’s
basilica over the site of the crucifixion – what we now call the site of the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre – was a ‘New Jerusalem’ (3.33), and he
praised Paulinus’ temple at Tyre as the New Temple to surpass Solomon’s
or Zerubbabel’s (Hist. Eccl. 10.4.2–72).7 The praise of Juliana is also
competitive with the praise of Constantine and Paulinus. Her Temple,
and it is not without point that this is a woman as builder, is overwhelming
(ebiēsato) previous times of praise. An age – aiōn – would not be enough to

7
On Paulinus’ Temple see Wilkinson (1982).

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 The Rape of Time 209
praise it adequately: this project not only surpasses the past but also
requires the future for its adequate celebration, conquering competition
to come. Ironically, the most famous claim to have surpassed Solomon is
meant to have taken place only a few years later in 537, when the emperor
Justinian is said to have declared when he entered his new church of Hagia
Sophia in Constantinople, ‘Solomon, I have defeated you (nenikēka)’ – at
least according to the ninth-century Diegesis in which the story is first
attested, as part of the legend of the construction of the church.8 Hagia
Sophia, too, is imaged as the fulfilment of the prophecy of Ezekiel.9 St
Polyeuctos and Juliana are overtaken by Justinian and Hagia Sophia in the
competition to defeat time.
Juliana thus ‘forcibly overwhelms time’ at multiple levels: she embodies
and surpasses her own genealogical excellence; she has bettered the great
city-builders of the past; above all, she has triumphed over the wisdom of
Solomon, in embodying a Christian spiritual vision over the ritualism of
the Jewish deep past, thereby going beyond the praise of former gener-
ations, and defeating in anticipation future rivalry. The startlingly strong
vocabulary of ebiēsato captures the scope of this vision of supersedence.
Juliana does not merely inhabit time, but bestrides it like a colossus.
*
Ebiēsato is a surprising word not least because its subject is emphatically
female, and, in Greek discourse of all periods, bia, ‘force’, ‘violence’ –
especially with the sexual sense of ‘rape’ – is strongly associated with men,
and rarely in a straightforwardly positive sense. Especially in a public
context of praise for an authoritative female figure, the term is arresting,
and the very surprise has a functional effect in drawing heightened atten-
tion to exactly how Juliana’s achievement is temporal. The function of
surprise in language is integral both to Aristotle’s discussion of metaphor
and to the practice of comedy (to take but two specially well theorized
examples).10 For Aristotle, in contrast to the eikos of semantics, the nor-
mality and normativity of expression, the surprising conjunction of terms
in metaphor is productive of new meaning. In comedy, the twist of the end
of a phrase to an unexpected sense is a staple of jokes, captured simply in
the standard recognition by commentators of the aprosdokēton, ‘the unex-
pected’. Freud, of course, discusses the pleasure of such a transgression of

8 9
Dagron (1984) 191–314; Mango (1992); Brubaker (2011). Gerhold (2018).
10
For Aristotle see Kirby (1997) with huge bibliography 518 n. 3; Lloyd (1987); Laks (1994). On
laughter, see for classical material Beard (2014); Halliwell (2008). In modern theory, Bergson (1911)
has been especially influential. No surprise to see theorist of time also writing on comedy – timing.

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 210 The Christian Invention of Time
the normal pattern of language and the desires it embodies. The hooligan-
ism of wit and the sublimity of lyric poetry share their desire to disrupt the
authoritative ordinariness of language.
The unexpected, the sudden, the unanticipated goes to the heart of how
narrative and time are interconnected. Viktor Shlovsky, we noted in
chapter 4, made the manipulation of time the defining characteristic of
literariness. Suddenness – which Karl Heinz Böhrer has analysed with
regard to the moment or the flash of a glance (Augenblick) as a key term
for modern literature under the rubric of Plötzlichkeit – depends on an
intervention in the normal or expected timing of events or their telling.11
For historians in antiquity, and for rhetoricians alike, responding to the
unexpected is a sign of extemporizing brilliance which is a product of
character and training. History itself, said Polybius, was a ‘spectacle of
surprise’, paradoxon theorēma, which requires us to recalibrate the lesson
that its narrative can provide.12 Communication between gods and men is
a key site of the unexpected – either in the epiphanic disruptions of a god’s
sudden presence or absence in Homer, say, or in the demand for the
discovery of the hidden meaning of an oracle.
Plato, however, makes ‘the sudden’, to exaiphnes, a technical term in his
philosophy of time and a crucial device in his narrative of change. In
general, Plato insists that philosophy, unlike the time-bound and competi-
tive performance of the law court, requires the slow, careful labour of
dialectic towards the truth. Yet at crucial moments, dialectic gives way to
the sudden. In the Republic, the crucial transition of the prisoners of the
cave is a ‘sudden’ (exaiphnes, 515c) and unexplained freedom. In the
Symposium, Diotima describes the celebrated ladder of desire as a slow
process of growth, but the vision of the Beautiful itself is a ‘sudden’
(exaiphnes, 210e) flash of recognition. This sudden, transformative inter-
ruption, however, is immediately performed in quite a different way by the
‘sudden’ (exaiphnes, 212c) interruption of the Symposium’s discussion by
the arrival of the drunken Alcibiades; and his rambling, charismatic
greeting is itself interrupted by his ‘sudden’ (exaiphnes, 213c) spotting of
Socrates, a sign of his own philosophically longing desire for the master.
Just as Aristophanes’ hiccoughs disrupt not just Aristophanes’ ability to

11
Bohrer (1981). For the nineteenth-century history of ‘the moment’ with regard to psychology,
philosophy and the novel see Zemka (2011); for the background in neurology, see Dames (2007);
for the seminal importance for aesthetics of Lessing’s idea of the ‘pregnant moment’, see Mitchell
(1984); Lifschitz and Squire eds. (2017).
12
Polybius 1.1.2: see Maier (2018), with Miltzios (2016), especially 147–51.

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 The Rape of Time 211
give a speech but also the planned order of speakers in the dialogue, the
pointed repetition of the word ‘sudden’ draws attention to suddenness in
transition as a question of the relation between rational argumentation and
insight as a key tension in understanding the philosophical process.
Plato’s dialogue Parmenides, however, goes on to make ‘the sudden’
into a technical term with regard to time and change. The argument
(155e4–157b5) – extremely complex and much debated by modern
philosophers13 – is struggling to understand the relation between move-
ment and rest for the One, and introduces ‘the sudden’ (to exaiphnes,
156d – the definite article is used to make it a technical term or concept) as
a ‘strange’ concept (atopos – out of place, like Socrates). ‘The sudden’, it is
argued, is the moment when movement stops and when rest starts, which
is itself ‘not in time’ (ouk en chronōi, 156e). ‘The sudden’, it seems, is an
instant without duration, which divides states or processes: the very
moment of conversion. This remarkable idea of a moment of being that is
not in time was apparently hailed by Heidegger as representing ‘the deepest
point to which Western metaphysics ever penetrated. It is the most radical
advance into the problem of being and time, an advance that was afterwards
not taken up (by Aristotle), but rather closed off’.14 (Only Herbert Marcuse’s
notes on Heidegger’s course exist for the detail of this argument, hence
‘apparently’. Heidegger was due to teach this course with Wolfgang
Schadewaldt, whom classicists will recognize as a celebrated classical scholar,
like Heidegger deeply tainted by a Nazi affiliation.) Heidegger’s dismissive
treatment of Aristotle’s version of ‘the now’ which I quoted earlier, takes on
a further colouring from this sense of the whole history of metaphysics taking
a wrong turn. Surprisingly, Heidegger appears not to have referred to
Kierkegaard here, who in his Concept of Anxiety used Plato’s notion of the
sudden (to exaiphnes) – and precisely this passage – not just as a route towards
thinking through his critical idea of the ‘leap of faith’, but also as an anticipa-
tion of a specific Christian theological understanding of time. From
Kierkegaard, that is, we can see a forged link between Plato and Augustine’s
immediate moment of conversion as well as the Christian debates about the
immanence of temporality and timelessness in the Incarnation: ‘only with this
category [of the moment] is it possible to give eternity its proper

13
Strang and Mills (1974); Bostock (1978) indicate the classical philosophical interest; more telling here
are Backman (2007); Rangos (2014); Gonzalez (2019) on the impact of Plato’s formulation.
Cimakasky (2017) is pedestrian.
14
Marcuse’s notes translated and cited by Gonzalez (2019) 329; discussed also by Backman (2007) and
Rangos (2014).

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 212 The Christian Invention of Time
significance . . . It is only with Christianity that . . . temporality, and the
moment can be properly understood, because only with Christianity does
eternity become essential’.15 Both of Plato’s necessarily interrelated questions –
What is the process of transition? What is an instant? – echo back through the
chapters of this introduction. For Plato, ‘the sudden’ becomes a necessary but
necessarily disruptive – violent – element in philosophical process: is the flash
of insight the culmination or the contradiction of methodical argumentation?
Examples of how the unexpected or the sudden is mobilized in ancient
and modern narratives could easily be multiplied, but Frederic Jameson
brilliantly generalizes this pervasive relationship between temporality and
narrative. Suddenness, he argues against Bohrer’s depoliticized aesthetics,
constructs ‘a privileged relationship between violence as content and the
closure or provisional autonomy of a temporal form’.16 This is a dense
and expressive comment. Suddenness is a way of doing violence to
timing: it disrupts the expectation of the flow of events. For Jameson,
this can embed also a political violence. ‘Meaning, violence and the
moment categorically infect each other’.17 (Heidegger engages in
a profoundly melancholic narrative of buried violence when he wrote
in 1950, still in Germany, in a letter to Hannah Arendt, anatomist of
Nazism, his former lover, in New York: ‘the sudden . . . requires a long
time to be delivered’. What grim complicities would need to be unpacked
in the infected politics of such a remark about time!)18 But, in Jameson’s
account, what such disruption of ‘the sudden’ makes visible is how the
expected embodies the closure or provisional autonomy of a temporal
form: that is, the expected is aimed at closure, closure of a sequence of
events or a generic form. The unexpected may be provisional and
autonomous – it was not expected that the dead body in the cave was
the servant and not the mistress, to take an example from the narrative of
Achilles Tatius’ novel, Callirhoe and Cleitophon – or it may involve
closure in a stronger generic sense – marriage at the end of a novel, say,

15
Kierkegaard (1980) 84.
16
Jameson (2003) 174; see also Jameson (2002) 195: ‘intimate relationship between violence as content
and the “moment” as form’. See also Friese ed. (2001).
17
Zemka (2011) 216. She overstates her case when she writes ‘Modern violence pollutes the purity of
suddenness’ (221).
18
Letter 47, 8 February 1950, in Arendt and Heidegger (1998) 74–5. See Villa (1996) for the philosophy,
with Sluga (1993) for the contextualization, and Maier-Katkin and Maier-Katkin (2007) for the
fascination with the salaciously personal.

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 The Rape of Time 213
disrupted or reinstated (‘Reader, I married him’), with its full ideological
bearing. But what is crucial is that narrative as a temporal form is made
visible in a privileged way by the disruption that is Plötzlichkeit. Literary
narrative, for Jameson, does not just manipulate time, as Shlovsky has it,
but forces it into the ideology of form, revealed by the willed and
complicit disruption of the unexpected or the sudden.
Aristotle made movement and change essential to the recognition and
definition of time, as we saw in chapter 3. In part, his argument engages,
implicitly at least, with Parmenides and Zeno, the philosophers who
challenged in the most extreme and vexing way common-sense notions
not just of movement but also of becoming, and even of time itself,
therefore, as a measurement of movement and change. Zeno’s well-
known paradoxes, which prove that an arrow never reaches its destination,
or that swift-footed Achilles will never overtake the slow tortoise, depend
on infinite division, which we have already seen repeatedly recurring as
a crushing problem for those who try to define the present through
duration. But Parmenides’ insistence on the primacy and unity of esti ‘it
is’ overlaps the ontological and the temporal in such a way as to deny the
possibility of change in and across time: what is, is. Arguments among
scholars from Plato onwards about exactly how to engage with the logic of
Parmenides are motivated initially by the recognition that his conclusions
do a certain violence not just to ‘common-sense notions of time’, but to the
most fundamental phenomenological sense of change; violence, that is, to
the personal, human experience of being in time.
I have already discussed how sacred calendars organize the pattern of
the year, and how the theology of Christian eschatology changes the experi-
ence of time, and how the present of everyday life can become a ritualized,
self-absorbed waiting. Since the work of Arnold van Gennep in the early
years of the twentieth century, expanded by the anthropology of Victor
Turner, it has also become a commonplace that rituals, and especially rituals
of initiation, divide time into a sacred period with passages of transition into
and out of such a period, and the otherwise usual passage of days and weeks,
where within sacred time the usual rules of exchange and hierarchy may be
inverted or distorted.19 Dividing the flow of time into different types of
times, diversa tempora, is a constant of social process. Such acts of separation
in the sequence of events find full intellectual expression in the practice – and
debates about – periodization in historiography, which have become in turn
part of the politics of self-recognition. Achille Mbembe, for example, to take

19
van Gennep (1960); Turner (1967), (1969).

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 214 The Christian Invention of Time
a particularly influential and provocative contemporary theoretical interven-
tion, calls for a resistance to the inheritance of colonial time systems, to find
an African time that is a precursor to another not just post-colonial but
uncolonized or decolonized history: ‘The time has finally come’, he writes,
‘to begin-from-ourselves’, as if dechronolization (to apply Freccero’s coin-
age) could take place by fiat.20 Mbembe wants to force time into a new story.
Classicism itself, whether it is conservative or revolutionary, is an
aesthetics and politics of untimeliness. In chapter 5, I indicated how the
long tradition of classicism in Western culture mobilized two main strat-
egies of affiliation, namely, genealogy and idealism: finding an authorizing
origin for contemporary society, identity, ideas or art, in the cultures of
Greece and Rome, and finding in the antiquity of Greece and Rome an
idealized art, society, identity or body to aspire to. Both of these strategies
of self-expression recognize a rupture between the past and the present
(even in the assertion of genealogical descent). The now looks back to the
idealized and lost past of classical antiquity. Revolutionary classicism insists
that the ideal of the past is exemplary and drives the need to make new for
the future: a new society in Shelley’s or Marx’s political use of Greek
freedom (‘We are all Greeks’) or Roman Republicanism (‘The French
Revolution was enacted in Roman dress’); a new art-form in Wagner’s
opera-festival or Gluck’s new emotional opera; or a new sexuality for the
nineteenth-century sexologists and littérateurs who avidly read Plato. But
both for each of these revolutionary claims – which could, of course, be
extended – and also for the more conservative branches of classicism that
use the past to resist the claims of the modern and of change, there is an
insistence not just on the insufficiency of the present but on a sense of
untimeliness, of not inhabiting the right time, of not being at home in the
now.21 Nietzsche most fully theorized this sense of what he called
Unzeitgemässheit (untimeliness) in his search for disruptive wisdom.
Classicism is a rupture in the self-sufficiency of the present; it asks to
make the now otherwise; it forces a new self-awareness of time; it forces
time.
To see thus revolution as a politics that demands a rupture in time – the
new calendars of the French or Russian Revolution mark this conceptual
insistence – remind us how the Christian revolutionary invention of time,
embodied in the violence of typology or the church’s authoritarian,

20
Mbembe (2017) 7; Banerjee (2006); Freccero (2006), on which see Holmes (2020).
21
The Postclassicisms Collective (2019) 161–81; Grosz (2004).

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 The Rape of Time 215
eschatological history, has also been integral with a violent politics of
exclusion or missionary compulsion, both between different Christians as
in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and between Christians
and others in, say, the imperial expansion of Europe; just as the history of
classics, entangled as a subject with Christian institutions, in its claim to
genealogical value has also been complicit as an educational and justifica-
tory force in the darker forces of Western nation-states and their imperial
engagement with the other. The history of temporality – its revolutions in
time – is never without self-implication – or self-justification.
I have been looking so far in this chapter at the elite poetry of memori-
alization, at literary theory, at philosophy, anthropology, religion and
modern post-colonizing agendas, but the necessity to mark out time in
divisions is pervasive in human culture. ‘I have measured out my life in
coffee spoons’, writes T. S. Eliot, and the repeated gestures of smoking
a cigarette to mark the passing of time, or glancing at a watch or pouring
a cocktail to emphasize a point in time or a process of transition is vividly
captured in all its repetitive insistence, as we discussed, in Christian
Marclay’s installation, ‘The Clock’.22 As Bakhtin wrote, ‘Time, as it
were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible’.23 When
Hobbes describes the life of uncivilized man as ‘solitary, poore, nasty,
brutish and short’, amid the signs of no civilization – lack of agriculture,
architecture, navigation, arts, letters and so forth – he specifies ‘no account
of time’.24 It is a basic principle of human society to break up time into
eras, periods, divisions. Parmenides’ extremism is unsettling because it
denies not just the evident shared experience of time passing, but also the
essential act of civilization, to give an account of time. Without an
account – as ever, both counting and telling – it is hard for humans to
recognize themselves. Time’s expected order is what makes doing violence
to time the threat and promise of a potentate like Juliana, a philosopher
like Parmenides, or a writer like Augustine. Modern Western culture has
inherited thus a triple compulsion: the desire to see time as a natural and
inevitable linear flow from birth to death; the desire to impose the order of
measurement and regulation on this flow; the desire to break free from this
linearity and transcend the bounds of time.
*
The praise of Juliana that she ‘forced time’, ‘violently overwhelmed time’,
may be a semantically rich expression with implications about different
22 23 24
Smith (2011). Bakhtin (1981) 84. Leviathan 1.13.

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 216 The Christian Invention of Time
understandings of a placement in time, from her family background to the
history of Solomon’s Temple, but it scarcely constitutes or even embodies
a systematic theory of time, even if in its theological assertion of supersed-
ence it cannot but allude to such systematization. Where, then, do we look
for a theory of time? Or, rather, what levels of abstract thinking about time
can be traced in and through ancient texts and practices? How systematic,
how coherent can any society’s expressions of being in time be?
One answer from within the disciplinary silo of philosophy would have
no difficulty in tracing the technical, theoretical expositions of time as
a philosophical problem, with high points in antiquity that start with
Aristotle, with a nod to the influence of Plato’s Timaeus, or even earlier
notions of the creation of the universe as a question for a theory of time,
and move through a host of contributions, including the masterpiece of
Augustine – with the potential to link contemporary philosophy back to
this tradition, as Heidegger does with his recognition of Aristotle’s import-
ance, or Wittgenstein, who starts, famously and obsessively, with
Augustine. The value of such disciplinary thinking is not undone by
Ricoeur’s melancholic conclusion to his three-volume study of time and
narrative that thinking about time must fail, that each theory produces
a new aporia. But the role of Neo-Platonism and Stoicism in the develop-
ment of Christianity also allows for an intricately shared platform of
exposition, which can move such a history away from merely a roll-call
of theoretical responses to a theoretical question into an appreciation of
how theological arguments about time come to ground the experience of
time in daily practice and the engagement of individuals in a temporal
world (which is where the discipline of philosophy all too often starts to
part company, and leave discussion to theology or church history). Simeon
Stylites, to take an extreme example, may have had little theoretical
understanding of time and the written Lives which describe his painful
experience never focus on such theorizing; it seems evident that he has no
place in the history of philosophy, but his actions make sense only with
a Christian comprehension of temporality. So, if we do trace a theory of
time through philosophy, the more such theorizations have purchase in
a community and have a formative impact on the experience of time, the
less philosophy as a discipline seems likely to provide the right tools for
analysis.
The buildings that I looked at in chapter 6 are some of the loudest
expressions of time, in that they dominate the cityscape and fill the
imaginations of citizens, and express forcibly their patrons’ will to define
how the history of the city or empire is to be comprehended. Yet they are

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 The Rape of Time 217
rarely explicit in this aim, and certainly not systematic or theoretical in
their expressivity. The boast of Augustus to have changed the cityscape
of Rome may help define the era as Augustan, but it makes no contri-
bution to a theory of time. Yet for Roman historians and other writers,
the divide between the Republic and the Principate, which Augustus
embodies and his policies enact, becomes the defining precipice of the
political history of the state, the key ‘before’ and ‘after’, a necessary way
of organizing time. Much as the Christian theology of time becomes
embedded and embodied in Christian practices of living, with varying
degrees of tacit or explicit engagement, so the silent physical markers of
a claim over time can enter the more theorized written reflections of
those striving to explain the unfurling of history to themselves and their
readers.
It is because of this porous dynamic between theoretical expositions
and social practices and behaviour; between explicitation and tacit
knowledge; between intellectual debate and physical embodiment; that
I have concentrated in these essays on what might be called ‘the dis-
course of time’, and not dedicated chapters to such discrete areas as the
anthropology of time, the philosophy of time, the time of historiog-
raphy, the history of timepieces or calendars, the representation of time
in epigrams, and so forth. Rather, what has interested me have been the
cross-cutting, interconnected questions that explore the porous dynamic
in which a discourse is shaped. To see how time changes in late antiquity
for a Christian community in comparison both with a Jewish and with
a Greek or Roman community, with their different histories, zones of
contact and antagonism, forms of normative writing and social regula-
tion, it is necessary to cast the net of analysis much more broadly than
such discrete disciplinary projects would allow. Every attempt to discuss
so broad a field commits a certain violence to its integrity by dividing it
into delimited subjects – and a further violence to its mess by categoriz-
ing, collecting, organizing its disparate elements. Any discussion, that is,
including, of course, this one, forces time into a form. Can formless
time, time without the normativity of form, without regulation or
measurement, be imagined? Perhaps not, not fully.
The day, the month and the year are categories shared across the world
because the circulation of the earth around the sun gives every commu-
nity the appearance of sunrise and sunset, the repeated pattern of day and
night; the moon provides the lunar months; and the year as a period is
also tied to the movement of what we still call the heavenly bodies. Yet
the week, used throughout the modern, industrialized world, is

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 218 The Christian Invention of Time
a determinedly artificial construction with no referent in the natural world.25
The seven-day unit does not divide months easily (except February, three
times out of four), nor the year. The week exists because – in the beginning –
in six days God created the world and on the seventh he rested. The
invention of the Sabbath is the invention of the week. For the Greeks and
Romans, who did not have weeks until they became Christians, the oddity of
the Sabbath was one of the paradigmatic ways in which they saw the Jews as
incomprehensibly different from themselves. It is the Sabbath that stops
seven being just an arbitrary figure, however useful or familiar, like the
number of innings in a baseball match or the number of balls in a cricket
over. We can thus end these essays where we began, with the translation of
the opening of Genesis, in this case into the practice of communities, an
inherited theology: our time, still.
But, before we conclude, this ring composition itself also signifies. Yukai
Li writes, ‘Ring composition is the structure of untimeliness’, by which
I understand him to be pointing towards something that reading Homer
tells us: ring composition expects us to read from the beginning with an
anticipation of retrospective recognition, and to end not just with a sense
of fulfilled closure but with a turn back to the beginning to find signifi-
cance in the juxtaposition of two scenes, and in the transition between
them.26 Ring composition, as Daniel Mendelsohn has it, embodies the
elusive melancholia of recognizing that things can, temporarily, cohere.27
The first word of Western literature is mēnin, ‘wrath’, which in itself and in
the founding, divisive, opening scene of argument poses a question to
which the final scenes of the Iliad offer a variety of closures: Achilles’
reconciliation with Agamemnon; the funeral games, where the earlier
combative rage is turned to the reconciliatory order of prize-giving; the
return of the body of Hector to Priam; Achilles’ tears of regret and
mourning; Achilles’ recognition that he could still be angry with Priam if
pushed too far; the funeral of Hector as the end of Achilles’ wrathful
revenge. The narrative itself dramatizes what is at stake in the rage that is
to be assuaged by this narrative of multiple ends. How much is Achilles’
fame the result of his violent willingness in his rage to transgress the norms
of others – by refusing to fight, by refusing to listen to his companions’
entreaties, by refusing supplication, by refusing in his grief to sleep, eat, or
rest? Ring composition sends us back to the beginning to retrace the
coming of the end.

25
Zerubavel (1981) 11, expanded fully in Zerubavel (1985); Salzman (2004); Henkin (2018).
26
Li (unpublished). 27 Mendelsohn (2020).

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 The Rape of Time 219
It is, then, not just with the first word of Western literature but with the
problem of how narrative makes sense of time, its time, that I end these
essays, as an introduction to the readings to come, readings that aim both
to extend what is currently understood as the institutional canon of
Western literature, and to explore how time is reinvented within the
writing of late antiquity. This discourse of temporality is crucial not just
for classicists or theologians, but for the self-understanding of Western
historical self-placement. In this first section, we have seen how the
formative categories of temporality are reshaped under the jurisdiction of
Christianity in late antiquity. It is time now to turn to see how the
imaginary of time is formulated in detail across the texts and genres of
the era.

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part ii
 chapter 11

Beginning, Again
Nonnus’ Paraphrase of the Gospel of John

We ended with first words. Let us start there again. And with a startling
beginning.
There is no more influential opening to a piece of Greek prose – no
shock in this judgement – than the first five words of St John’s Gospel: ἐν
άρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, ‘In the beginning was the Word’. The Gospel begins with
the word ‘beginning’, which, as we have already discussed, is an assertive
reappropriation of the opening of the Septuagint’s translation of Genesis:
ἐν άρχῇ ἐποίησεν ὁ Θεὸς τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ τὴν γῆν, ‘In the beginning God
made the heaven and the earth’ – the beginning of everything. The
opening of John marks a new start, in all senses.
But it is truly startling, therefore, when we turn to Nonnus’ Paraphrase of
the Gospel of John, to read its first word: achronos, ‘timeless’, ‘non-time’. It
would seem that Nonnus, from the start, has aggressively replaced the
proclamation of a beginning with an assertion of no beginning – timelessness:
an infinite scope. How can a retelling of the word of God bear so drastic
a reformulation? In an era when an assertion of theological principle could
risk both one’s career in this world and one’s soul in the next, why does the
poet hazard such a different framing of temporality for his story of Jesus?
This chapter is an attempt to explain the power and logic of Nonnus’
extraordinary gesture, which could seem to challenge the very narrative
moorings of the Gospel it paraphrases.
We will need to circle back to this originary moment, if we are to
understand it. Let us start with the act of rewriting the Gospel. What is
the status or authority of such acts of recomposition of holy writ? One
strand of response to the fixity – the unalterable authority – of scripture
stems from within text of the Bible itself. In Deuteronomy 4.2, the people
of Israel are instructed ‘you shall not add to the word which I am com-
manding you, nor take away from it, that you may keep the command-
ments of the Lord your God which I command you’, an instruction which
is reprised in Deuteronomy 12.32 with ‘What thing soever I command you,
223

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 224 The Christian Invention of Time
observe to do it: thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it’. The
Gospel of Matthew seems to echo this injunction (5.18): ‘For truly I say to
you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from
the law until all is accomplished’. Jesus is explaining that he has not come
to abolish the laws but to fulfil them. He continues with the warning that
a person who relaxes a single law is the least (elachistos) to be called to the
kingdom of heaven (5.19). Both Deuteronomy and Matthew insist that it is
essential that the materiality of the text is not changed: no words or letters
or even marks are to be added or taken away, because such material
consistency is integral to observing the laws inscribed in the Bible.1
These injunctions demand that the text of scripture is seen to be
unalterable and determined – and, by one trajectory at least, such demands
culminate eventually in the Evangelical insistence that the literal and
certain message of the word of God is evidenced in the Bible, a text ‘written
in stone’, like the tablets that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. In
the bitter and violent theological arguments which prompted and followed
the Council of Nicaea in the fourth century, and especially in the subse-
quent disputes between Cyril and Nestorius, the rhetoric of ‘not adding or
diminishing’ became a compelling commitment – that orthodox theology
should not add a word to or remove a word from the Nicene creed. This
was upheld as a principle even when it was demonstrably not the case:
Cyril, whose twelve anathemas redirected understanding of the Nicene
creed in the most provocative fashion, declared that he followed a ‘simple
and undefiled tradition’, and ‘we follow the opinions of the holy Fathers in
all things . . . We refuse to differ from them in any respect’.2 ‘Change was
most effectively achieved’, summarizes Mark Smith, ‘by denying that there
had been any change at all’.3 Theological conflict, itself deeply tied up with
the power structures not just of the church but of the empire too, made
language – the precise words used and their meaning – a battleground of
politics. So in turn, earlier opponents of the Nicene creed attacked its
wording for including terms such as homoousios ‘consubstantial’, that were
not in the Bible, terms which could thus be thought to have been ‘added’ to
scripture. They also claimed to follow ‘the undefiled apostolic tradition’.4
More generally, Tertullian tellingly calls the Greek philosopher an inter-
polator, the figure who adds words into the text and thus falsifies the word
of God.5 The Talmud argues that even the finials on the tops of letters, the
1
Both Judaism and Islam add an ‘oral law’ to temper – extend, modify – the written law.
2
Cyril, Letter to John of Antioch. 3 Smith (2018) 209. See also Wessel (2004).
4
Thedoret, Eranistes 63.3–4.
5
Veritatis interpolator, Tert. Apol. 46.18 – not the interpreter, philosophy’s usual role.

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 Beginning, Again 225
ornaments without apparent semantic content, must be reproduced accur-
ately because they too, like any letter of the text, are open to
interpretation.6 Rewriting the Bible seems banned from within the Bible
itself, and this fixity is integral to the proclamation and observance of its
laws. The material certainty of the text provides the grounding of the moral
certainty of its guardians.
The Codex Sinaiticus from the middle of the fourth century, and the
earliest surviving full-scale manuscript of Christian scriptures when it was
discovered in the nineteenth century, tells a slightly different story. The
manuscript contains some 23,000 corrections by six different hands. Of
course, the scribes routinely overwrite faded letters or correct spelling
errors; but they also insert words or lines that have been omitted, change
wording and even delete material. In some cases, phrases are deleted by one
corrector, and then re-added by another. The Codex Sinaiticus proved that
the ending of Mark in the received text was an interpolation. At very least,
the Codex Sinaiticus shows the belligerent polemics involved in how ‘early
Christian groups or individuals’, around the time of the Council of Nicaea,
‘read and altered the text’.7 That is, it was already recognized that even
a luxury manuscript of the Bible such as the Codex Sinaiticus was corrupt,
alterable, altered and open to dissent. The material text of scripture, like
the canon, was not fixed and certain, but needed to be made so.
There is, however, a further strand of response to fixity that also finds its
source in the Bible itself. The Greek name ‘Deuteronomy’ (‘Second
(recitation of the) Law’) indicates how the fifth book of the Pentateuch
retells the history of the Israelites and the regulations outlined in the first
four books. Since the nineteenth century at least, Deuteronomy has been
read as an ideological reconstruction of the Mosaic law along new and
more committed priestly lines, a rewriting. Yet from the earliest commen-
tators also, who did not follow the agenda of critical history, it was noticed
and debated that even the Ten Commandments have a different wording
in Exodus and in Deuteronomy. The books of Chronicles and Jubilees also
retell the same Israelite history from their own agendas. At a more granular
level, specific laws are told more than once, in different contexts and thus
with different emphases: the law not to seethe a kid in its mother’s milk is
listed among sacrificial regulations, as if it were a matter of cultic propriety,
and among dietary laws, as if it were a question of the rules of food taboos.8
6
bMenachot 29b. Seth Schwartz has pointed out to me that there are actually no examples of such
analysis. It is a limit case of future interpretative possibilities.
7
Parker (2010) 3. The figures in this paragraph are taken from his discussion.
8
Ex. 23.19; Ex. 34.26; Deut. 14.21.

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 226 The Christian Invention of Time
The synoptic Gospels, since their canonization was established and since
the Marcionite solution of producing one harmonized Gospel was rejected
as a heresy, provide a fertile space for interpretation precisely because they
have different narratives, different wordings, and different agendas in their
announcement of the good news.9 The history of canonization is an
integral trajectory in the politics of Christian language, the authorized
forms of Christian narrative. John, in turn, provides a further telling of the
story, a different engagement and perspective. The Gospels quote lines
from the Septuagint – turning the Hebrew Bible into the Old Testament
by appropriative recomposition. The texts of the Hebrew Bible and the
Gospels perform their own rewriting.
Indeed, numerous examples of rewriting or expansion of biblical texts,
complete with those scriptural claims that nothing should be added or
removed, remain fully part of the authoritative tradition of both Judaism and
Christianity. Philo of Alexandria in the second century bce, as we discussed
earlier, rewrites the texts of the Hebrew Bible into Greek prose through his
Platonizing, allegorical reading, his assimilationist intellectualism.10 Allegory –
‘reading otherwise’ – enables Philo to straddle Greek and Jewish cultures, and
both his methodology of reading and his ready adoption of Plato into scripture
allow him later to become an authority for Christian Neo-Platonist thinking
from Clement to Origen and beyond – though not for the rabbis, who largely
ignore Philo, even when they themselves approach the subject of allegory or the
wisdom of the Greeks. Josephus – again, as we saw earlier11 – also redrafts the
Hebrew Bible into Greek prose in his Antiquitates, as he translates himself from
leader of the Jewish revolt into an imperial historian. We began this book, too,
with the Septuagint’s designed mistranslation (according to the rabbis) of the
creation story of Genesis: the Septuagint itself is a sign and symptom of a society
which was unfamiliar with the Hebrew of the Pentateuch and needed its own
rewritten version. Similarly, the Aramaic Targumim, glosses or translations of
the Hebrew words for an Aramaic-speaking congregation, are markers of the
transitional cultural and linguistic vectors of a society in change, when Hebrew
is no longer the vernacular of the community committed to the Hebrew
Bible.12 The Bible is rewritten not just into different languages but into different
forms.

9
It was much argued from the early modern period onwards whether the Gospels themselves were
Greek rewritings of earlier Aramaic or Hebrew texts: see Levitin (forthcoming) with the general
background of Shuger (1994) and Sheehan (2005).
10
See pp. 21–2. 11 See pp. 21–2.
12
See Alexander (1992b); McNamara (2010); Alexander, Lange and Pillinger eds. (2010); Najman
(2010); Hayward (2013).

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 Beginning, Again 227
Reading the Bible also prompts the further rewriting of midrash and
commentary.13 Much midrash, specifically aggadic or narrative midrash, starts
as a form of interlinear re-reading, finding the gaps in the texts and filling
them with stories. Many stories which contemporary Jewish communities
now take as Bible truth are in fact midrashic invention. Indeed, the very
status of midrash – just how authoritative such stories are – is a deeply
contested issue. By the thirteenth century, rabbinical writing, self-
reflexively, discusses four levels of reading, known by the acronym formed
by their first letters, as Pardes or ‘Garden’/‘Paradise’. The four levels, each
valorized and not hierarchically opposed to the others, are Peshat, ‘literal’ or
‘surface’ meaning; Remez, ‘allegorical’ or ‘symbolic’ meaning (the space Philo
inhabits); Derash, ‘comparative’, ‘expository’, ‘homiletic’, the space of mid-
rash; and Sod, ‘secret’ or ‘mystical’, where eventually kabbalah will take root.
Rabbinical reading flourishes and sprouts in this garden of meanings
through variety and hybrid vigour. Commentaries – Cyril’s 600-page com-
mentary on John will be especially salient for Nonnus’ Paraphrase – often
follow a line-by-line exposition, expanding, like midrash; glossing linguistic-
ally like targumim; exploring allegorical senses, like Philo’s treatises; arguing
theological import, like a sermon of Gregory. From Origen onwards,
commentary becomes a standard form of internal Christian polemic.14
The idea that the Bible ‘speaks for itself’ in an unmediated clarity is starkly
contradicted by the religious tradition it underpins.
If we put together the translations, the retellings, the paraphrases, the
commentaries, it is evident that the Bible is something other than the
authoritative, original, fixed text that some fundamentalist fantasies
demand. Rather, it is a textual world in a constant state of retelling,
recapitulation, redrafting. When Augustine turns in the final books of
the Confessions to his theoretical exposition of reading and interpretation,
focused predictably on Genesis, granted his fascination with creation and
beginning throughout the Confessions, his profound sense of the insuffi-
ciency of human language grounds the need for this constant labour of
reading and re-reading.15 Scripture’s very nature, according to Augustine,
requires that we recognize that it is unfinished and unfinishable. Rewriting
is what the Bible does and what it produces, in theory and in practice.
Christian paraphrases – and there are significant examples in both Greek
and especially Latin before and after Nonnus16 – must, therefore, be
13
Boyarin (1994), (2009), (2015); Zornberg (1995); Kugel (1997); Rubenstein (2003).
14 15
See Goldhill (2021). See Ando (1990); Conybeare (2016); Stock (1998); Wetzel (1992).
16
Latin examples of paraphrase and cento have been particularly extensively discussed: see e.g. Herzog
(1976); Roberts (1985); Springer (1988); McGill (2005); Green (2006); also Kartschoke (1975); Kirsch

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 228 The Christian Invention of Time
located between the desire to regulate meaning, control interpretation,
assert theological authority, and the recognition of the slippages and
insecurities of language that both demand and hinder such regulation.
What, then, is the status of a paraphrase? Within this arena of rewriting
scripture, paraphrase strives to distinguish itself generically and polemically
from centos and translations (as well as commentaries), an act of definition
that is itself, as we will see, part of the politics of language. In centos,
Homer’s and Virgil’s verses, the very materiality of the foundational
language of the dominant culture, are cited and deracinated to make
them speak otherwise. Centos denaturalize the ideological apparatus of
classical epic, by rebuilding its material parts into a new construction for
a new community. Translation, by contrast, makes the texts of one culture
available to another, and by such very activity makes evident the linguistic
and cultural differences, even and especially when, as we saw with Philo,
the gap between different languages and cultures is earnestly denied. The
boundaries between these forms of cento, translation and paraphrase,
particularly between paraphrase and translation, are fragile, and, as we
will see, become increasingly contested when the politics of language – the
authority of authoritative texts – becomes an insistently and publicly
fraught cultural issue, as is the case with the long and bitterly fought
arguments over the Nicene creed in the Christian East. In contrast with
the transformative strategies of both cento and translation, however,
paraphrase rewrites an authoritative text within and for its own commu-
nity. It performs its new authority while insisting on the continuing
authority of the paraphrased text. This doubleness is its specific ideological
affordance, and its danger. Fear and rejection of ‘novelty’ in the spreading
of the revolutionary, Good News are dominant impulses in the fourth and
fifth centuries – kainotomia, ‘novelty’, is a thoroughly negative accusation,
along with a corollary insistence on the positive value and authenticity of
tradition.17 What better genre, then, to make an intervention than para-
phrase, a form which disavows its necessary newness and proclaims its
dependence on the authority of tradition?

(1989); Bažil (2009); and, more generally, Pollmann (2017); Vessey (2004); Schottenius Cullhed
(2015); Fontaine and Pietri eds. (1985); on Greek examples, see Usher (1998); Jarick (1990); Golega
(1960); Bevegni (2006); Smolak (2001) – and the works cited below.
17
As Pope Stephen I said (Cypr. Ep. 74), nihil innovetur nisi quod traditum est. This theological
rejection of novelty is not contradicted by political claims, especially in the West, of Christianity as
a nova Roma: see Hardie (2019) 135–62 (coins minted by Constantius II and Constans had the slogan
felicium temporum reparatio); nor by the constant Christian interest in reform – ecce facta sunt nova 2
Cor. 5.17 – discussed by Ladner (1959).

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 Beginning, Again 229
Paraphrase redirects – remediates – the reading of the Gospel; it calls
for the reader’s complicity with a new framing of the Gospel’s sense; it
triangulates the reader between the Gospel and the Paraphrase. The
redirection – the triangulation – is predicated on the Gospel’s openness
to re-reading and on the need to make reading the Gospel better, though
how it is to become better remains contested. Erasmus, for example, – and
it is an example which vividly demonstrates the politics of how the
boundary between translation and paraphrase is determined – saw his
Paraphrases of the New Testament placed in every church in England by
fiat of the king, at a moment of bitter and violent contention over the text
of the Bible, when all too recently it had been a capital offence to translate
the Bible into the vernacular.18 The striving of authority to distinguish
between translation and paraphrase could not be better displayed than
this case: translation is banned on pain of death; paraphrase is
a compulsory mediation. In self-justification, Erasmus wrote, ‘it is not
I who speaks in the Paraphrase anywhere’, which did not stop one of his
critics sniffing at one of his interpretations, with good reason, ‘Luke never
said this; it is Erasmus speaking with his usual audacity’.19 Paraphrase can
only and hopelessly disavow its act of rewriting the word of God. To read
a paraphrase of the Gospel requires, that is, an uncomfortable shuttling
between the Gospel and its new form. The Paraphrase is read with an eye
on the Gospel; the Gospel through the Paraphrase. Scheindler’s standard
modern edition of Nonnus’ Paraphrase prints the Gospel beneath the
Paraphrase so that the shuttling between the two texts is performed
bodily by the eye.20 Without the physical presence of the Gospel, as in
the ancient manuscripts we now possess of Nonnus’ Paraphrase, the
shuttle is between memory and enactment. When Augustine in
Confessions analyses the reading of a Psalm, you will remember, he talks
about how the presence of meaning is constructed in a shuttle of memory
between the recollection of the words that have passed and the anticipa-
tion of the words to come in the Psalm. Reading the paraphrase of
a Psalm overlays a further temporal structuring, as we shuttle also
between the words of the paraphrase and the words of the psalm, as

18
On Erasmus, see in particular Pabel and Vessey eds. (2002); also Boyle (1977); Chomarat (1981);
Ferrier and Mantero eds. (2006); Henderson ed. (2013); Bloemendal ed. (2016); on Erasmus in
parish churches see Craig (2002); on vernacular translation of the Bible see Mandelbrote (2016),
(2018); François (2008), (2009) and especially (2016).
19
On Béda’s critique of Erasmus see Rummel (2002); Bedouelle (2002); Phillips (2002); Leushuis
(2016).
20
Scheindler (1881).

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 230 The Christian Invention of Time
well as the sequence of words in the paraphrase itself. Paraphrase makes
for re-reading.
One particular translation of the psalms from late antiquity demonstrates
vividly how the recalibration demanded by Christian rewriting is also and
explicitly an agonistic engagement with the inheritance of Greek and Roman
culture. Ps-Apollinaris’ Metaphrasis of the Psalms is difficult to date with
certainty but is probably from the 450s, in the decade after the Council of
Chalcedon, perhaps as late as the 460s.21 The Psalms are a foundational text
for Christians, the basis of a Christian education and an engagement with
the past of inheritance and the future of prophecy, as well as of Christian
liturgy.22 To turn the familiar koinē Greek of the Septuagint, embedded in
memory and ritual, into the high verse of hexameter is thus an especially
combative cultural act: it transforms the furniture of the Christian mind.
This hexameter translation has a long introduction, known as the Protheoria,
which explains the work’s genesis and purpose. The work is titled
a metaphrasis, ‘translation’, but its transformation not just of Hebrew into
Greek, but the prose of the Septuagint into verse – unlike the versions of
Philo or Josephus, which retell the Septuagint in prose – bring it close to the
form of a paraphrase, an immediate indication of how precarious the
boundaries between different forms of rewriting can be.23 It does not merely
render Hebrew verse into Greek verse, but triangulates the Hebrew text
between the long-inhabited Greek of the Septuagint and the long tradition
of elite Greek culture. The Protheoria indeed sets out to indicate the theory
of language and language’s transformative nature, the thinking which
grounds the work’s cultural practice. The very fact that the translation
opens with such an explicit and enacted agenda to explain itself as a form
indicates the politics of language in action – and the text’s intervention in the
contest of cultural authority between Hellenic and Christian cultures.
Strikingly – and I know of no parallel for this – its first word is elpomai, ‘I
hope’.24 In the Homeric hymns, one inevitable touchstone for any

21
See Golega (1960); Agosti (2001) 87–91; Faulkner (2014). Faulkner (2020) most recently has argued
cautiously to attribute the piece to Apollinaris and to date it thus in the fourth century. I remain
unpersuaded that the Nicaean theology expressed in the Protheoria is reconcilable with the accusa-
tions of Apollinaris made by Gregory in Ep. 101 and 102. Thanks to Andrew Faulkner for sending me
proofs of his book ahead of publication.
22
See McKinnon (1991); McKinnon (1994) which talks of a late fourth-century ‘psalmodic
movement’.
23
On the distinction between metaphrasis and paraphrasis, see Philo, Vit. Mos. 2.38 – though we have
already seen Philo’s commitment to a perfect rendition between Hebrew and Greek which colours
his discussion. On translation and paraphrase see Faulkner (2014) with further bibliography.
24
The last line of Nonnus’ Paraphrase, as discussed below, starts elpomai. For a suggestion of a link
between these two verses see Agosti (2001) 95–6.

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 Beginning, Again 231
introduction in hexameter verse, it is standard to announce the subject of
the poem with archom’ aeidein, ‘I begin to sing’, and/or the future verb
mnēsomai, ‘I will proclaim’, sometimes with an invocation also of the
Muses. The explicit vocabulary of beginning, including any invocation
of the Muses, is occluded in Ps-Apollinaris, now in the language of hope or
expectation. This poem’s beginning is in the commission of patronage, and
its introduction dramatizes in direct speech the request of one Marcian,
a request that the author should produce a poetic version of the Psalms in
Greek.25 The inherited language of patronage is clear enough in the
opening lines (1–4):
ἔλπομαι ἀθανάτοιο θεοῦ κεκορυθμένος οἴμῃ
σοὶ χάριν ἀντὶ πόνων φορέειν καὶ κέρδος ἐπ᾽ ἔργῳ
καὶ τυφλὸς γεγαὼς δοκέειν φάος ἄλλο κομίζειν,
Μαρκιανὲ κλυτόμητι
I hope, armed with a song of immortal God,
To bear you thanks in recompense for your toils, and profit for the work;
And although I am blind, to seem to convey another light,
Marcian, famous for wisdom.
The poet indicates that his poem is an act of charis, reciprocal exchange,
a term that Theocritus, for example, makes central to his appeals for
support.26 So, too Ps-Apollinaris mentions kerdos, profit. Hope here is the
mode of anticipating the success of an appeal for the rewards of patronage.
The poet describes himself as blind, as if he were Homer; but, with a turn to
the familiar language of Christian scripture, he is to bring ‘another light’, the
revelation of scripture’s promise.27 The signature of Homer is in order to
signal difference – an embodiment of the poetics of paraphrase. The koinē
prose of the Septuagint’s Psalms is overwritten by the verse lexis of Homer,
itself redrafted by the poet’s intertextual creativity: the poetics of paraphrase
transforms everything it brings into its purview.
Both the reference to Homer and the language of charis prove important
as the introduction unfurls. For Marcian requests a verse translation

25
This may be the emperor Marcian, who convened the Council of Chalcedon and who died in 457.
That he is called pater (5), assimilating the title of Augustus (pater patriae) to an ecclesiastical model
of religious subordination, is no bar to the identification. That Marcian is depicted surpassing
Ptolemy may encourage it. From Golega (1960) 5–24 onwards, however, the dedicatee is usually
taken to be the oeconomus of St Sophia, Marcian.
26
See Theocritus 16, with Griffiths (1979) 9–50; Gutzwiller (1983); Goldhill (1991) 273–83; Hunter
(1996) 77–109.
27
Komizein, ‘to convey’, may recall this verb’s use in Pindar’s poetics of exchange, a further element of
the language of patronage.

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 232 The Christian Invention of Time
precisely as an act of competitive rewriting with the great works of the
Greek tradition in order that everyone can perceive what he calls the charis
of the Hebrew songs. First he lays out the status of the Psalms (15–18):
οἶσθ᾽, ὅτι Δαυίδου μὲν ἀγακλέος ἤθεα μέτροις
Ἑβραίοις ἐκέκαστο καὶ ἐκ μελέων ἐτέτυκτο
θεσπεσίων τὸ πρόσθεν, ὅθεν φόρμιγγι λιγείῃ
μέλπετο καὶ μελέεσσιν
You know that the ways of famous David
Are superlative in Hebrew verse, and were fashioned
Previously from divine song, when he performed with his high-pitched lyre
And songs
The Psalms are ancient (to prosthen), divinely inspired songs (thespesiōn
meleōn) in verse (metrois) and Hebrew (Hebraiois); but David’s singing to
a high-pitched lyre also directly echoes Homer’s Achilles (another famous
hero) who sang the deeds of famous men outside his tent in Iliad 9 to
a high-pitched lyre (Il. 9.186). Achilles and Homer are salient predecessors
also because this paraphrase is in hexameters, when you might expect
Psalms to fit more obviously into lyric metres: Achilles is a heroic paradigm
of epic verse, hexameters, performed to a lyre, David’s instrument.28
Josephus, with greater interest in persuasive assimilation than metrics,
reports that Moses’ song at the sea and his final address to the Israelites
in Deuteronomy are in hexameters;29 and the Psalms in diverse metres
including trimeters and pentameters.30 Philo, also discovering the Greek
roots of Hebrew, tells us that the Therapeutae use trimeters and also sing in
antiphonal strophic choruses.31 Most saliently for Ps-Apollinaris, Origen
cites as an authority ‘a certain man’, probably Josephus, to claim that
Hebrew verse uses trimeters and tetrameters, and the discussion is picked
up by Eusebius (and, most fully, by Jerome).32 It is unclear that any
particular knowledge of Hebrew metrics grounds these remarks, but the
cultural politics of bringing Hebrew verse into the culturally privileged
narrative of specifically Greek literary history is evident.33

28
For other potential echoes of Homer in these lines see Faulkner (2014) 202–4.
29 30 31
Ant. 2.16.4; 4.18.44. Ant. 7.12.3. De vit. contemp. 2.6.68–9.
32
Origen, Scholion on Ps 108; Eus. Praep. Evang. 2.5; Jer. Ep. 155; Praef. Chron. Eus. 2.
33
The problem is taken up insistently in the Renaissance and beyond: see Baroway (1935), who notes
(71) that ‘The hexameter in some form was imputed in whole or in part to nine books and poems of
the Old Testament’. Reuchlin, Scaliger and Vossius, for example, were all instrumental, until the
seminal intervention of Robert Lowth (1787/1753): see Haugen (2012). Thanks to Konstantinos
Lygouris who initially drew my attention to the passages in Josephus.

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 Beginning, Again 233
Marcian continues to make explicit the competition between Greek and
Hebrew, prose and verse, their literature and ours (18–23):
ἀτὰρ μετ᾽ Ἀχαιίδα γῆρυν
αὖτις ἀμειβομένων κατὰ μὲν χάρις ἔφθιτο μέτρων,
μῦθοι δ᾽ ὧδε μένουσιν ἐτήτυμοι· οὐ γὰρ ἀοιδῆς,
ἀλλ᾽ ἐπέων Πτολεμαῖος ἐέλδετο. ἔνθεν Ἀχαιοὶ
μείζονα μὲν φρονέεσκον ἐπὶ σφετέρῃσιν ἀοιδαῖς,
ἡμτέρας δ᾽ οὐ πάμπαν ἐθάμβεον·
but when turned again into a Greek voice
the grace of the verse perished,
while the truth of the narratives stayed. For Ptolemy did not expect
song but words. For that reason the Greeks
thought more highly of their own songs,
and did not wonder at ours at all.
When the Septuagint was written and the Psalms were translated into
Greek, their grace – charis – as poetry was destroyed, because their patron,
Ptolemy, was interested in getting the basic sense of the stories (muthoi)
rather than the experience of bardic song (aoidē). There is no hint of the
stories of the divinely inspired translation of the Septuagint we discussed
earlier: this is a human, pragmatic transaction. The beauty of the verse
‘perishes’ (ephthito) with the archetypal Homeric word for the loss of fame
and life. Prose has its place but the result is that the Greeks – named in the
Homeric manner as ‘Achaeans’ – continued to prefer their own literature,
and, when they encountered this Christian writing, did not experience the
wonder or amazement which is the response great poetry demands.
Consequently, continues Marcian, now that the empire is Christian (23–
8), it is fitting to provide verse to astonish the world (29–33):
ἡμεῖς δ᾽, ὥς κ᾽ ἐπέοικε, τά περ πρότεροι λίπον ἄνδρες
ἐκ μελέων, μέτροισιν ἐνήσομεν, εἰς δὲ μελιχρὴν
Δαυίδου βασιλῆος ἐγείρομεν αὖτις ἀοιδὴν
ἑξατόνοις ἐπέεσσιν, ἵνα γνώωσι καὶ ἄλλοι,
γλῶσσ᾽ ὅτι παντοίη Χριστὸν βασιλῆα βοήσει
We, however, as is suitable, will set into metre the songs
That earlier men have left behind, and we will raise again
The honeyed song of king David
In hexameter verse, so that other people too may learn
That every type of language will shout out Christ the King.
Ptolemy only wanted ‘words’ (epeōn), but now we will have heroic metre
(hexatonois epeesin). The task is to set the heritage of the church into

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 234 The Christian Invention of Time
poetry – the appropriation of the Hebrew to the Christian passes without
notice, of course, in his supersessionist assumption – so that ‘every (type of)
tongue’ – both every language and every sort of person – will acclaim the
name of Christ. The language of ‘raising again’ (egeirein autis) is the
religious promise of the Gospels, now applied to literary history, investing
the composition with a fully religious command.34 This verse version will
be a religiously demanded transformation, designed to transform its
readers into amazed celebrants of the Christian message.
The proclamation of ‘every tongue’ leads to a remarkable fulfilment in
the subsequent lines of the protheōria.35 For the triumph of the resurrected
Christ is described first as the destruction of ‘the sound of different tongues
and different voices’ (alloglōsson allothroon audēn, 59), which is the sign and
symptom of the confusion of human sin (60), and secondly (and conse-
quently), as the return of a single language for the world (62). This is not
literally one language, but the all-embracing ‘language’ of Christianity. As
with Augustine’s history, this universalism is a desire for one single story for
the world, the removal of difference. In contrast to the babble of the
sinning opponents of Christianity, the ‘speaking in tongues’ of Pentecost
is seen as the single message of Christianity echoing through each and every
language – which is evidenced in an epic catalogue of the nations who have
become Christian (67–79), and ‘heard the divine virtues in their own
tongue’ (78), as the Christian message, even from ignorant cries, finds
voice around the whole world (79–80). In contrast to the sinful hubbub of
strange voices, with Christianity comes the sound of different languages all
singing the same tune. The conclusion of this history of a Christian voice is
Marcian’s demand for these songs of praise to be translated into the Ionic
language (glōssan Iēona 105), because it too comes from a divine beginning,
because (107) every sort of language (pantoiē glōssa again, picking up the
promise of the verse translation (33)) and every sort of song (aoidē) comes
from a single birthing. The protheoria may not have opened with the
language of beginning, but it closes by taking us back to the Garden of
Eden to explain how Greek, the Ionic Greek of Homer, is a descendent of
Adam’s language, and therefore fit to sing the praise of God: Homeric
Kunstsprache is tied to the Ursprache.36 A single beginning to ground the
single story. Remarkably, the theoretical reflection on writing a Greek verse
version of the Psalms leads to a poetic account of the spreading of the word
of God, which finds its beginning in the origin of language itself.

34
Useful note on egeirein in Spanoudakis (2014a) 189 ad 41c. 35 See Agosti (2001) 88–91.
36
The Adamic language returns as a major issue in the eighteenth century: Aarslef (1982).

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 Beginning, Again 235
Ps-Apollinaris’ introduction to his version of the Psalms speaks to
a nexus of polemical issues, and the very act of dramatizing this self-
reflection draws emphatic attention to the process of mediating scripture
to its new audience. It recognizes that the educated, Greek-speaking world
finds the language of scripture unimpressive – they do not share the
amazement that the Gospels expect as the reaction to the story of Jesus.
In particular, he admits that the prose translation of the authorized
Septuagint falls short: it lacks the grace of the Hebrew poetry, and the
complaint allows the religious sense of charis to colour the literary critical
term. This version is to better the Septuagint: it promises to be transforma-
tive, for text and readers alike. Yet, not least because the Psalms in the prose
of the Septuagint are so formative a text for the Christian reader, the poet
also feels the need to defend the decision to write in hexameters and in
Ionic Greek – epic form. He does so first by insisting that any and every
language can celebrate Jesus – in contrast, say, to Jerome’s return to the
determinative specifics of Hebrew, or the Jewish insistence on the absolute
privilege of the holy language of Hebrew – and, as his proof, he mobilizes
both the image of ‘speaking in tongues’ and the successful spread of
Christianity across the language communities of empire. Secondly, he
declares that all languages come from their father in Eden, and all are
thus fit for the purpose of the celebration of God. This introduction may
have the narrative form of a patron’s commission but it sets this commis-
sion in a theological framework of some sophistication, which performs its
engagement with classical and scriptural traditions as it discusses them. Yet
the poet also explicitly notes that there are actually only a few people (‘one
or two’, 27) in the empire who are not Christian. This poem thus is
primarily a work for the Christian community, redirecting their engage-
ment with the Psalms. His Metaphrasis is designed to re-embed the Psalms
within a classical tradition of heroic celebration, as it assimilates the heroic
tradition to the celebration of the Christian God. It projects an audience
that is educated, and comfortable in its mix of Greek and Christian
education, and wants its Christianity in its literary form as well as in its
theology to match the models of philosophy or poetry inherited through
their education. It is a designedly instrumental contribution to the forma-
tion of an elite Christian culture.
Around seventy-five years earlier, Gregory of Nazianzus, whom we have
already witnessed defending an elite Greek education as a fundamental
strut of Christian paideusis, against the Christians who would spit at
learning, also defended his practice of writing poetry precisely as
a competition with classical tradition. With a wry elegance that is rather

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 236 The Christian Invention of Time
different from Ps-Apollinaris, in a poem that is also an apology for his
practice of writing poetry, he writes:
I know this is how I have felt – it’s rather a petty thing (pragma mikroprepes
ti), but it is how I feel – I won’t grant that pagans (tous xenous) are stronger
than us even in literature. I am speaking about their rhetorically elegant
(kekhrōsmenois) literary composition, though beauty is for us in contempla-
tion. Anyway, we have made these amusements for you, the men of wisdom;
let there be for us too a certain leonine grace/gratitude.37
With a nice self-deprecation, he confesses that his feelings of competi-
tion are not quite dignified – a statement of intense confidence, of
course – and his demurrals reveal a carefully sophisticated vocabulary.
Pagan logoi are kekhrōsmenoi, which I take to mean ‘tinged by chrōmata’,
that is, constructed out of rhetorical figures, a product of education in
rhetorical schools, a formation which he sets against Christians who,
with an evident Neo-Platonism, find beauty (to kallos) in contemplation
(theōria), as Diotima advises in the Symposium. Yet his description of his
poetry as paignia (epaixamen), ‘amusements’, is thoroughly classical in
its assumption and language, as is his complicity-demanding descrip-
tion of his audience as ‘the wise’. He requests for himself charis leontios,
an unparalleled phrase which is not straightforward to translate. In the
world of fable, the lion learns to show gratitude to the mouse or to
Androcles. Is he describing himself as the apparently trivial figure who
turns out to be crucial? And the sophoi as apparently kingly beasts who
do not yet understand all they should?38 Later in the poem (80), Gregory
compares poets who are ‘pretentious apes’ or ‘lions’, again drawing on
the world of fable. His defence of Christian poetry, as his opponents
may have feared, is fully embedded in the language and culture of
Hellenism.
Yet Gregory still feels the need to continue to defend the very act of
writing poetry.39 There is, he reminds his imagined opponents, ‘plenty of
verse in scripture, as the authorities (sophoi) of the Hebrew race declare’
(80–1). But he is fully aware that Hebrew verse forms are difficult for Greek
readers to access or appreciate (not for him the comfortable assimilation to

37
II.1.39 In suos versus 47–53.
38
My thanks for discussion of this odd phrase to Michael Reeve, Nicholas Richardson and Christos
Simelidis. De Blasi (2017/18) ad loc. lists other, more unsatisfactory suggestions.
39
Christians wrote hymns in non-classical metres, but in the Greek East (in contrast to Latin) only
rarely in classical metres before Gregory, it seems: see den Boeft and Hilhorst eds. (1993); Schwab
(2012); on his self-defence in terms of being metrios (‘reasonable’/‘metrical’) see Hawkins (2014)
142–80.

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 Beginning, Again 237
hexameter or trimeter): ‘If the pluckings of those strings too are not metre
to you, recognize that men of old sang lyrical compositions; they composed
pleasing vehicles for the good, and made models of behaviour out of song’.
Again, Gregory’s language is a beautifully poised mixture of Greek literary
theory and Christian purpose. He assimilates the lyrical voice of the Psalms
to the lyrical tradition of ancient classical tradition. The Psalms, like those
early Greeks, used to terpnon, ‘what is pleasing’, to express something
morally useful – Gregory utilizes here one of the most familiar oppositions
of Greek literary theory, the pleasant and the useful – and, he continues,
they modelled (tupountes – ‘made types’, a central Christian theoretical
term, too) character (tropous – also a term for ‘tropes’) out of lyric song (ek
meleōn). This is an elegantly doubled-edged expression. On the one hand,
it recognizes that different metres in the classical tradition were said to have
different characteristics – one metre was warlike, another for mourning,
and so on. On the other hand, it also suggests that individual characters are
made better by listening to good poetry. So, his argument’s conclusive
example is Saul, who was cured by listening to David, the singer of the
Psalms. Gregory’s own writing of poetry thus is defended by a double and
interlocked tradition of Hellenism and scripture, an assimilation of what
many Christians would set in opposition. He calls this mixis eugenestera
(93), ‘a nobler mingling’, or what we might call a hybrid vigour. His literary
theorizing is a cultural polemic.
There is one final twist to his argument, however, which takes us back
to our earlier discussions of time, the moment, and conversion. Poetry
can lead the young, he has argued, through enjoyment towards God. But,
he states, this is not a question of ‘an immediate conversion’, ‘a change all
at once’, athroa metastasis (92). Rather, the good needs time to achieve
some fixity (94–6): ‘When the good attains stability (pēxin) in time (en
chronōi), we will draw away the delight (kompson), like struts from an
arch, and will protect the good itself’. Nothing could be ‘more useful’
(97). Pleasure, then, is in service of the useful, defined with a Neo-
Platonic gesture as ‘the good itself’ (that is how the rhetorical opposition
of ‘pleasure’ and ‘usefulness’ is to be resolved), and the refinement of
Greek learning is precisely a strut that can be removed, a swagger that
leads to true goodness. That is why desired stability must come not in
a moment of conversion but in the passage of time (en chronōi), the time
of reading. As with Augustine, reading is conceptualized through
a theology of time and change.
Mixis, ‘mingling’, is a crucial term for Gregory. In an extraordinary
outpouring, that could inspire a Walt Whitman, he declares ‘I sing my

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 238 The Christian Invention of Time
mixing’, melpō mixin emēn.40 This mixing is his intermingling of human and
divine, his mortality and immortality as a Christian. This proclamation
comes at the end of a praeteritio where he sets aside a list of classical subjects,
songs he will not sing, starting, of course, with Troy. What he will sing
culminates in this couplet (83–4):
καὶ Χριστοῦ παθέων κλέος ἄφθιτον, οἷς μ᾽ ἐθέωσεν
ἀνδρομέην μορφὴν οὐρανίῃ κεράσας
[I sing] also the immortal glory of the sufferings of Christ, by which he mixed
My human form with the heavenly and made me immortal.
This is his ‘mixing’.41 Yet after his dismissal of the subjects of classicizing
poetry, it is striking that he adopts the distinctive language of Homer –
kleos aphthiton, ‘immortal glory’, Achilles’ promise – to celebrate Christ,
his own subject. He is triumphantly appropriating the privileged aim of
Homer’s hero and Homer’s poetry for his own Christian project, as the
echo of Homer is ironically turned against Homer. What immortality is, is
now defined by the Christian promise, not Homer’s. But it is the language
of Homer, and the poetry’s theological import depends on the recognition
of it. Theology and poetics together are working to create an elite and
knowing Greek Christian culture in the image of Gregory, the author. In
the declaration of the mixis of divine and mortal in the human, the mixis of
cultural authority is being performed.
Defending poetry itself was necessary for Gregory because there were
certainly voices raised against it. Apollinaris – the fourth-century figure
who gives his name to the author of the Metaphrasis of the Psalms – wrote
poetic versions of Christian scripture and turned the Gospels into Platonic
dialogues, in response, we are told by John Zonaras in the twelfth century,
to the emperor Julian’s edict against Christians teaching pagan literature.42
But his work was condemned as heresy by the Council of Constantinople
in 381. Gregory himself also viciously dismissed Apollinaris’ works for their
Arian views,43 as his sixth-century biographer, Gregory the Presbyter, also

40
II.1.34, ‘On Silence at a Time of Fasting’ 85. See also below, pp. 325–8, and e.g. Or. 38.13 ‘O new
mixing’ of the incarnation, with Beeley (2008) 131, who notes the language of mixing was con-
demned at Chalcedon; or Ep. 101.21.
41
Kuhn-Treichel (forthcoming) refers it rather to Gregory’s mixing of genres.
42
The accounts of Sozomen and Socrates are discussed with bibliography in Agosti (2001) 85–7;
Spanoudakis (2016) 603–4, who notes that Sozomen (HE 5.18), some decades later, called
Apollinaris’ books ‘equal . . . to the works most celebrated among the Hellenes’, a remark which
again indicates the competition between Christian and pagan cultural achievement.
43
See Gregory, Ep. 101; Ep. 102. Faulkner’s otherwise excellent discussion of the authorship of the
Metaphrasis (Faulkner 2020) underplays the significance of these attacks.

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 Beginning, Again 239
noted – at least in the latter parts of Gregory’s career.44 The threatening
‘novelty’ of Apollinaris was as much theological as in the form of his
rewriting. But St Nilus of Ancyra – who may stand for the voice of the
ascetics opposed to the education Gregory championed, for all that he was
himself a supporter of John Chrysostom – simply dismisses poetry as
‘without use’ and a ‘denigration of the Cross of Christ’ – morally corrupt
for what it embodied.45 The Letter of Aristeas, many centuries earlier,
insisted that Theodectes went blind because he attempted to turn stories
from the Bible into dramatic verse.46 It was not simply poetry as a pleasing
form that made Christians anxious, but the Hellenic culture it
encapsulated.
This anxiety is especially salient with the Gospel of John. The opening
of John in particular marks a difference from the other Gospels. Matthew
begins with the genealogy of Jesus and announces itself as the biblos
genēseōs, the ‘book of the genealogy’, a new Genesis, and proceeds from
Abraham, through David, to Jesus. Mark announces ‘the beginning (archē)
of the Good News’, and takes its start from a prophecy of the Messiah in
Isaiah – that is, it starts in the authority of the Hebrew scriptures. Luke, as
befits the writer of Acts also, adopts the pose of a historian, and authorizes
his account as an eye-witness statement, addressed to one Theophilus (and
his genealogy for Jesus in chapter 3 goes all the way back to Adam: no
spatium mythicum in this history, no mists of time in the Christian gaze,
however mysterious the theology proclaims itself to be).47 It is only John
who begins not in human history, but with the beginning of everything,
the first principle, and who declares this first principle to be the Logos –
a term which is inevitably redolent with the tradition of Greek philosophy.
If Christianity sets itself against Greek culture, as the dominant intellectual
force in the Mediterranean, a threat and promise also to both Romans and
Jews alike, what is the place of John in such a dynamic?
There is a very long and complex history of answers to this question, all
based on the recognition that the early church gradually and increasingly
assimilated itself to the dominant Greek culture from which it continued
to distinguish itself, especially through the influence of Neo-Platonism.

44
Beeley (2008) 285–92 offers necessary nuance to this standard view.
45
Ep. 2.49. ‘Do not devote yourself to verse’, he continues, ‘lest you neglect your own salvation
through enthusiasm for poetry.’
46
Letter of Aristeas 315–16. His sight was restored after days of prayer, a model obviously based on
Stesichorus’ palinode experiences.
47
On the generic signs in Luke’s preface, Moles (2011) is right to critique Alexander (1993), though
Dawson (2019) – with full bibliography on the issue – offers a tempering of Moles.

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 240 The Christian Invention of Time
Augustine already noted with sardonic annoyance that ‘a Platonic philoso-
pher’, with equally sardonic wit, proposed that the first lines of John should
be inscribed in gold on the walls of every church, presumably because they
would lead the congregation towards philosophy rather than
Christianity.48 Indeed, Adolf von Harnack – to take one extreme, authori-
tative, modern example – declared that the Gospel of John itself already
indicated the decline of the early church from its pure origins because of its
engagement with Greek philosophy. The foundational Gospel as a sign of
decline . . . In contrast to this doyen of Protestant theology, Pope Benedict
XVI – another extreme, modern, authoritative example – in his
Regensburg Address, delivered a quite different version of this history.
Although the Address became notorious for its perceived dismissiveness
towards Islam, it is far more radical and challenging in its attitude to
Hellenism, which passed without notice in the press.49 For the former
Cardinal Ratzinger, Hellenism was integral to and necessary for
Christianity. The Septuagint was ‘a distinct and important step in the
history of revelation, one which brought about the encounter between
faith and reason in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of
Christianity’, and the New Testament itself ‘bears the imprint of the Greek
spirit’.50 Against centuries of anxiety and even aggression, the Pope cele-
brates Hellenism in Christianity as essential to Christianity’s engagement
with reason and faith. And his test case for the ‘intrinsic necessity of
a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry’ is, of course,
the opening verses of the Gospel of John. John’s first words are, he writes,
‘the final word on the biblical concept of God’. The many stages that lead
from Augustine to this fascinating and continuing modern engagement
need not be detailed here. What is crucial is that the tension between the
commitments of traditional elite Greek culture and Christian faith, which
we saw enacted in the defence of writing Christian poetry, finds its most
compelling test-case in the opening words of the Gospel of John.
Nonnus himself remains a figure who acts as a lightning rod for debates
about such cultural conflicts or assimilation. Both the fact that Nonnus
wrote a huge, sexy epic about a pagan god, Dionysus, alongside his
paraphrase of John’s Gospel, and the fact that he composed a verse rewrit-
ing of the Gospel in itself, continue to provoke questions about his
religious and cultural identity – or his political or theological agendas or
48
Aug. Civ. Dei 10.29. For Neo-Platonic readings of John, see Dillon (2002); Dörrie (1976).
49
von Harnack (1892). See Gagné (2020) for a discussion of this history; also, with a different focus, see
Buch-Hansen (2018).
50
Benedict XVI (2006) 20, 28. Benedict cites von Harnack in particular as influential.

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 Beginning, Again 241
lack of them.51 The questions are made more emphatic by the recognition
that the Dionysiaca, despite much searching by critics, appears to show very
few explicit signs of Christian commitment in its vocabulary or moralization,
although, as we will see in the next chapter, this is not the only way to
calibrate the import of its narrative: in different ways, its symbolism, its
narrative style, its echoes of the Paraphrase, have each been utilized to locate
the Dionysiaca within a Christian context. The Paraphrase, conversely, is free
with Dionysiac imagery, which has often both been trivialized as merely
decorative and anxiously overemphasized as a sign of deep-seated discomfort
with Christianity.52 It has become a commonplace of contemporary criti-
cism to note that previous scholarship attempted to harmonize the image of
Nonnus by postulating a biographical narrative of conversion, either that
Nonnus the Christian, who wrote the Paraphrase, lost his faith and wrote the
Dionysiaca, or, more commonly, that the uncommitted poet of the
Dionysiaca repented and wrote the Paraphrase as a sign of his new
orthodoxy.53 Such stories are predicated on an assumption, easily evidenced
from one extreme brand of Christian apologetics from late antiquity, and
equally easily paralleled by later evangelical fervour, that either you are for
Jesus, heart and soul, or an enemy of Jesus. Conversion, thus, and loss of
faith become the privileged explanatory models of difference, as we saw in
chapter 10’s discussion of temporal rupture. Commitment becomes the
yardstick of belonging.54 Critics in the last three decades, authors of this
commonplace, insist by contrast that in late antiquity, although there are
clearly ideologues who promote such extreme boundaries between the
church and its enemies, there are many citizens – and many writers – who
were far more comfortable with multiple cultural and ideological
frameworks.55 The parting of the ways between Christians and Jews has
been dated later and later; the interaction between the church and the
institutions of empire have been recognized as more and more intertwined;
even the role of martyrdom, the ‘blood of the church’, has been argued to be
evident more in rhetoric than in actual cases of physical suffering. Hybridity
becomes the privileged explanatory model of difference. In this picture,

51
Somewhat world-weary summary in Chuvin (2014); better by far is Shorrock (2011).
52
Not by more recent critics, see Chuvin (2014); Doroszewski (2014), (2016); Shorrock (2011) 58–91,
(2016); Spanoudakis (2014a) 41–51, (2016); Dijkstra (2016). This issue is further discussed in the next
chapter.
53 54
Bogner (1934); Cameron (1965), (2016). See Goldhill (2020) 149–93.
55
Shorrock (2008), and especially (2011); Spanoudakis ed. (2014); Accorinti ed. (2016) and the Italian
editions of Nonnus have been especially instrumental here.

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 242 The Christian Invention of Time
Nonnus becomes a ‘poster child’56 of the vigour of Greek literary tradition
within a Christianizing world.
The pursuit of the empire’s ‘last pagans’ is always in danger of reprodu-
cing the teleological and ideological commitments of the polemical texts of
the period. The sheer complexity of the map of affiliation and the network
of power in the empire of late antiquity requires especial sensitivity to
a writer’s self-positioning. Aelia Eudocia, the wife of emperor Theodosius
II, who converted to Christianity as a young woman before her marriage,
in maturity supported groups in the East opposed to the Council of
Chalcedon’s conclusions, but then, with pressure from the imperial centre,
reconverted to the orthodox church, is only one of the most high-profile
cases of shifting intellectual and political roles in turbulent times – and she
is also one of the best-known composers of both verse paraphrases and
Homeric centos, bringing the politics and aesthetics of religious interpret-
ation, articulated between Hellenic and Christian cultural authority, to the
heart of the power structures of empire. Nonnus inhabits a culture where
religious commitment is major force, and where differences of religious
understanding are being aggressively enacted not just in theology but also
in the state’s exercise of power. On the one hand, conversion is a privileged
narrative trope and a strategy of enacted authority; on the other hand, the
boundaries of belonging to the orthodox church were articulated and
contested in strident arguments about specific words and their use: the
politics of language. Nonnus, as we will see, utilizes the poetics of para-
phrase to engage both with the long literary tradition of pagan Greek
culture and with the dynamics of contemporary Christian theology: to
transform both. As his Dionysiac poetics puts the narrative of the
Dionysiaca under the sway of the god of transformative othering, so the
Paraphrase by virtue of its poetics of paraphrase becomes a strategic inter-
vention in the development of Christian culture. When religious trans-
formation becomes an overriding anxiety for society, and the politics of
language the crisis point of such anxiety, which is the case in late antiquity
as in the early modern era of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation,
then paraphrase becomes a genre that speaks to its time.
*
We are now in a position finally to return to the opening of Nonnus’
Paraphrase of John. Rewriting scripture as an interpretative intervention,
within the prescription of fixity; reinvesting prose with the historical,

56
Johnson (2016) 269.

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 Beginning, Again 243
heroic grandeur of hexameter verse; conceptualizing scripture within
a cultural competition between elite Greek literature and the demands of
Christian affiliations; the competing demands of different strands of
Christian theology with regard to the value of poetry – all provide histories
and frameworks to understand why this text is a compelling performance
of cultural transvaluation. It is remarkable how often modern critics use the
denigratory word ‘exercise’ to describe and trivialize Christian poetry,
especially when it follows ancient Greek forms, as if the schoolroom or,
at best, the literary salon, is the right frame of comprehension.57 Better to
understand ‘exercise’ as askēsis, the work of self-formation through what
Gregory would call metastasis en chronōi, transformation in time. Nonnus’
opening as a reading of John’s beginning is not just stunningly bold, but
also an extraordinarily intricate, theologically charged response, that
requires close reading to tease out its impact.
Here, then, are the first five lines with an attempt at translation, a far
from straightforward task:58
ἄχρονος ἦν ἀκίχητος ἐν ἀρρήτῳ λόγος ἀρχῇ·
ἰσοφυὴς γενετῆρος ὁμήλικος υἷος ἀμήτωρ,
καὶ λόγος αὐτοφύτοιο θεοῦ φάος, ἐκ φάεος φῶς·
πατρὸς ἔην ἀμέριστος, ἀτέρμονι σύνθρονος ἕδρῃ·
καὶ θεὸς ὑψιγένεθλος ἔην λόγος
Timeless, unattainable was the Word in the ineffable beginning;
of equal nature to His coeval begetter, a Son without a mother;
and the Word was the light of self-begotten God, light from light;
from the father he was indivisible, on the same throne on the boundless seat,
and the Word born on high was God.
John’s syntactically simple opening five words, with its powerfully simple
vocabulary, has become three hexameters, rebarbative in their syntax and
terminology. Achronos, ‘timeless’, ‘non-time’, redefines a beginning within
a Christian invention of time. As we have discussed already, the timelessness
of God, or in this case the Logos, is the grounding of theology’s temporality:
Gregory of Nazianzus, prodigiously prolific as ever, uses this term, achronos,
for the Son, the Father and the Holy Spirit.59 Cyril, like Augustine, is explicit
that timelessness is a denial of beginning: ‘No beginning that is the least bit
57
Agosti (2001) discusses the slight evidence for the actual use of such poetry in schools. Educational
papyri give us paraphrases only in prose, not in hexameters.
58
Hadjittofi (forthcoming) is the best available English version; Agnosini (2020) came out after this
chapter was finished and is a useful Italian translation with comments.
59
Discussed below, pp. 327–8. See Carm. I.1.27; I.1.5.55; II.1.11.649; II.1.14.41; I.1.2.21, as noted in de
Stefani (2002) 104; on Nonnus’ use of Gregory, see Simelidis (2016) 298–307.

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 244 The Christian Invention of Time
temporal can be applied to the Only Begotten because he is before all
time . . . he will elude any notion that he came to be in time. Through all
time he was in his Father’.60 By this beginning, Nonnus reframes the
narrative, away from the human history of the other Gospels and even
from the foundational moment of John’s beginning, and places what is
to come under the permanent sway of theology. Achronos makes the verb
that follows (‘was’) not just an echo of John but also a specifically anti-
Arian and pro-Nicean statement. As we outlined earlier, ‘There was
a time (pote) when he was not’, ἦν ποτε ὅτε οὐκ ἦν, along with the
parallel idea that ‘Before he was begotten, he was not’, were singled out
by the Nicene creed as the most dangerous and false ideas of the Arians:
different concepts of time are at the base of the different comprehen-
sions of Christology.61 The birth of the Logos, taken, as the second line
makes clear, as the Son, is here immediately defined as timeless, no
before, no after. ‘What mind, tell me, can over-leap the force of the
was?’, asks Cyril with his characteristic rhetoric in his commentary on
John.62 Beyond any general ‘spiritualization’,63 Nonnus is marking out
a doctrinal affiliation.
I translated akikhētos as ‘unattainable’ in the sense of ‘cannot be grasped’
(akatalēptos is the commoner prose term in theology) – that is, beyond
human comprehension. For the pro-Niceans, an insistence on the incom-
prehensibility of God – an apophatic theology – was an essential and
proclaimed difference between themselves and the Arians.64 But
akikhētos is a word that occurs only once in Homer (Il. 17.75), and barely
anywhere else in what survives of Greek literature: it is a perfect example of
how Nonnus marks, appropriates and rewrites Homeric lexis, and thus
overwrites koinē with the language of elite verse. Apollo warns Hector not
to chase what is ungraspable, that is, what cannot be touched – specifically,
perhaps significantly for Nonnus’ usage, the divine horses of Achilles,
which Hector, mere mortal, could not hold, attain, drive; and the imma-
teriality of the Logos as divine reason is fundamental. As the Paraphrase
continues, these two senses – physical and spiritual – of this programmatic

60
Cyril, In Joh. 1.18.2–16. Sieber (2016) is unconvincingly hesitant about Nonnus’ exegetical purchase
here.
61 62
See Sieber (2016) for Nonnus’ Christology. In Joh. 1.1.17.
63
Spiritualization is the characterization of Nonnus’ religiosity in Spanoudakis (2014a) 34, although he
also notes well and frequently the influence of Cyril on Nonnus, concluding even that the
Paraphrase was written with Cyril’s commentary ‘ante oculos’ (18); see also Franchi (2016) 244–6.
64
See below, p. 319, where we will return to this idea with Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa
in particular. Hartog (2020) makes ‘ungraspable’ – ‘insaisissible’ – a key term in his opening analysis
of time, but without reference to this ancient discourse.

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 Beginning, Again 245
adjective are explored through the narrative of the theos anēr, ‘god man’. It
is used a further seven times of Jesus. In the early stages of the story, each
time it is used for the failure of his enemies to get hold of him, either
retrospectively or proleptically.65 Its immediate sense is physical, as if
activating the Homeric sense. Jesus slips through his enemies’ grasp. But
as the narrative progresses, it is used only of Jesus’ ascension to the house of
his father – once in the words of the baffled disciples – where he is both
unattainable and beyond human comprehension.66 The movement from
the bodily escape to spiritual transformation is significant, and encourages
a re-reading of the earlier occurrences as more than physical safety, that is,
as signs of the power of Christ to transcend his enemies, and the human
condition.
These examples also culminate in a remarkable, specific human enact-
ment of unattainability, where the physical is also the symbolic instanti-
ation of the spiritual. In chapter 20 of John, Mary Magdalene goes to the
tomb, sees the stone is rolled away and runs immediately to tell the
disciples. In Nonnus’ version of John, however, Mary has brought myrrh
to anoint the corpse, and she feels around inside the tomb for the absent
body: ἀλλά μιν οὐκ ἐκίχησεν, ‘But she did not touch/attain him’ (20.12).67
There is a mention of spices for anointing in Mark and Luke, and in Luke
a group of women enter the tomb,68 but Nonnus has constructed this scene
from a silence in John to create a scene of the pathos of Mary on her own,
her feeling around the tomb, and her failure to ‘attain’ Jesus: the physical
act here stands for the true unattainability of the risen Christ, his tran-
scendence of the material world.69 So, in contrast with the Gospel of Luke,
where Jesus tells the amazed and terrified disciples to ‘touch and see my
hands and feet’, precisely to demonstrate his continuing physicality (Luke
24.39), Jesus tells Mary (20.74) ‘Do not touch my robes’, and Thomas, who
wanted to put his finger in the wounds of Jesus – he does not do so in John
or Nonnus – is rebuked for believing only after he has seen with his eyes
(20.134–5): ‘more blessed are those who have greater faith if they do not see
and lack sight’.70 The transcendence of the physical is made integral to

65
7.123; 8.191; 10.139; 12.2. 66 13.137; 14.18; 14.53.
67
Accorinti (1996) 129 ad 12 notes without comment Homer, Od. 23.524, alla min aipsa kikhanen,
which, if it is echoed here, indicates a contrast.
68
For Nonnus’ use of the synoptic gospels see Golega (1930) 131–8; Spanoudakis (2014a) 17.
69
Thus Gregory of Nyssa Cant. 89.19 writes: ἀπρόσιτόν τε καὶ ἀναφές ἐστιν καὶ ἄληπτον
(unapproachable, untouchable, ungraspable).
70
On Thomas here see Whitby (2007). Spanoudakis (2014a) 78 analyses well Mary’s and Martha’s
different responses to the approachability of the person of Jesus: ‘Martha approaches Christ as man,

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 246 The Christian Invention of Time
Christian belief and expressed in Nonnus through this language of
unattainability.
This pointed and systematic use of akikhētos71 may help clarify
a particular textual issue too, and reveal a second highly charged use of
the word at the close of the crucifixion narrative. At 19.178, Scheindler
prints the manuscript reading, ἀλλὰ θορὼν ἀκίχητος ἀνὴρ ἀνεμώδει λόγχῃ
‘But a man leapt up ungraspable and with a spear, swift as the wind . . . ’. In
the apparatus Scheindler duly notes that akikhētos is not completed in
V and corrected, and that Marcellus proposes θορὼν στράτιος λόγχης
ἀνεμώδιος ἀνήρ, ‘a man of the army leapt up with a spear swift as the wind’,
a version designed both to reintroduce the man as a soldier, and to remove
the surprising use of akikhētos – which Hadjittofi translates ‘swift’, marking
also her discomfort with its use here. At one level, the adjective – which has
no equivalent in John – implies simply that someone might have stopped
this soldier, but did not. More significantly, this is the first time the
adjective is used of someone other than Jesus/Logos. Now that Jesus has
died, his body is not only ‘graspable’ but attacked by a human, a human
who ‘cannot be grasped’. The act of the soldier raises the question of the
status of Jesus’ body and his pain during the crucifixion: does Jesus suffer as
a human, is this a different body (as Gnostics claimed), does his willingness
to die include a willingness to experience anguish? What does it mean to
‘grasp’ Jesus’ body, at this juncture in the narrative? The focus on the
materiality and spirituality of the flesh of Jesus is emphasized by a further
linguistic detail, and by the continuation of the narrative. The spear
(longkhē) is also described as a makhairē, ‘dagger’ in the same sentence
(19.179). This is not a confusion. Makhairē is a familiar enough word, of
course, but it is used uniquely and strangely in the Septuagint as
a translation of the Hebrew ‫מאכלת‬, which itself occurs only once in the
Pentateuch, to describe the knife Abraham picks up to sacrifice Isaac (Gen.
22.10). Isaac’s sacrifice is taken as a typological understanding of Jesus’
death on the cross. The strange use of makhairē by Nonnus here is designed
to evoke this typology. This is followed by the mysterious flow of blood
and water from Jesus’ wound – both symbolic liquids, the water of life and
the blood of the Eucharist – an event which is described as a fulfilment of
prophecy and as a ‘harbinger (proanggelos) of his blameless flesh’
(187) – that is, the body pierced and flowing with liquid is to be understood

Mary Christ as God’ (a reading also in Cyril, less sharply expressed). On Doubting Thomas as
a figure see Most (2007).
71
Akikhētos is used regularly in the Dionysiaca but without either the spiritual sense or the systematicity
of the Paraphrase.

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 Beginning, Again 247
as a sign of the ‘body of Christ’ in a fully theological sense. The description
of the soldier as an ‘ungraspable man’, after the repeated use of the adjective
for Jesus, cues this transformation of the body of Jesus. Jesus is only in one
physical sense ‘graspable’, even on the cross, and the human act of stabbing
him is ‘ungraspable’ only in its incomprehension of the body in front of
him, a misunderstanding of its own lack of restraint. Akikhētos again
indicates the narrative’s struggle to articulate what is ‘(un)graspable’ in
the figure of Jesus, in the human world and transcending it.
The final use of the adjective is also richly evocative. Joseph of
Arimathea carries the body of Jesus, ‘an ever-living corpse’ (21.223), to
the tomb, with the help of Nicodemus, and gets home akikhētos. Again, the
simple sense is clear enough: Joseph escapes his enemies’ grasp – Jesus’
enemies’ grasp. Both Joseph and Nicodemus, however, were secret dis-
ciples, who visited Jesus at night and did not announce their beliefs: their
religious commitment is ‘ungrasped’. Their task of carrying Jesus to the
tomb is described as amarturon (19.224), ‘unwitnessed’, although here it is
described precisely as part of the ‘witnessing’ of the miracle of Jesus’
resurrection. Their journey continues their narrative of paradoxically
concealed witnessing of the revelation. As they visited Jesus at night, so
here at night, they have carried the body of the ‘ungraspable’ Jesus to the
tomb where its ‘ungraspable’ nature will be evidenced, in the light, to
others (222–3). Joseph’s physical escape is stressed (there is no such com-
ment in John) as he transfers the body to the tomb, to contrast with the
transcendent transformation that is about to happen. The human
‘ungraspable’ is not the ‘ungraspable’ of Jesus. The soldier, Joseph, and
Mary in the tomb – three scenes within 60 lines – in their different ways
each pose a question about the physical nature of Jesus, after his death,
a question about how the materiality of his body is to be comprehended,
grasped: the central question, that is, of Christology, the boundary
between human and divine in the form of Jesus Christ.
Akikhētos in Nonnus’ opening line is truly programmatic: it opens
a theological perspective on both the physical nature of the body of Jesus
and the comprehensibility of the mystery of Christ, a perspective which is
articulated through the narrative by the salient and systematic usage of the
term. Nonnus takes a term from Homer and makes it resound through his
text, not just reframing and negotiating its significance through its repeti-
tions, but also redrafting John’s narrative towards a more theologically
demanding understanding. This is his paraphrastic poetics at work.
Let us continue reading this first line . . . The ‘beginning’, archē, is
displaced from the first word in John to the last word of this first line,

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 248 The Christian Invention of Time
and qualified by arrhētos, ‘ineffable’, ‘unspeakable’. The beginning which
was foundational for John is an inexpressible mystery for Nonnus. Of
course, ‘ineffable’, like ‘mystery’, is the language mobilized when the
argument of reason fails in theology, but here it is more pointed: what
can the term ‘beginning’ mean in the context of timelessness? If timeless is
taken in its full theological sense, then, as Cyril made plain, there is no
beginning, no end: beginning is unsayable. Hermes Trismegistus described
the logos as aporrhētos, because the name of the Son is inexpressible and
unknown to humans and will not be known till the end of days.72 Logos is,
in a manner which is both literal and theologically expressive, unsayable.
Here, the ineffable is a challenge to the very idea of beginning such
a narrative, because of the always already of timelessness. God’s time
transforms the narrative of beginning, the beginning of narrative.
Nonnus uses aporrhētos only once more in the Paraphrase, again in the
context of the Incarnation, where it expresses ‘a certain ineffable principle’
(thesmos, 1.40). John writes simply and powerfully ‘the word became flesh’
(1.14). Nonnus expands this to (39–41):
And the self-created Word became flesh, God, man,
he who was born late, earlier born, in an ineffable manner
bringing together in a common yoke the divine and the human-like form.
Nonnus again strives to express the complexity of the concept of the
Incarnation. ‘Self-created’, autotelestos – another obscure word filled now
with Christological import73 – is followed by the simplest terms in bare
juxtaposition, a juxtaposition that captures the paradox of this theology:
theos anēr, ‘god, man’ – a semantic tension signalled as ‘ineffable’,
echoing the ‘ineffable beginning’ of the opening – and recalling also
Cyril’s theology, who called the genesis of Jesus, ‘the ungraspable
(akatalēptos) and ineffable (aporrhētos) generation that is outside time
(exō chronōn)’.74 For Nonnus here, too, the issue of temporality is
foregrounded. The logos is opsigonos progenethlos, ‘born late, earlier
born’ – another juxtaposition that prompts the declaration of its ineffa-
bility. Opsigonos is a common enough word from Homer onwards, often
in the phrase opsigonōn anthrōpōn, ‘the men of future generations’, ‘men
who are born later’. But progenethlos appears to be a word Nonnus has

72
Lactantius, Inst. 4.7.
73
On the text here, see de Stefani (2002) 136 ad loc. Nonnus is particularly fond of auto- compounds,
a self-reflexivity.
74
Cyril, Comm. ad Ioh. 1.1.22. On the use of paradox on Christian rhetoric see Cameron (1991) 154–88.
Sieber (2017) 162–3 is unconvincing on this phrase.

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 Beginning, Again 249
coined for the sake of the emphatic juxtaposition.75 Timelessness is here
articulated as the apparently paradoxical – ineffable – combination of late
and early. For Nonnus, John’s expression of the Incarnation needs this
temporal exposition and reframing: the verb egeneto, ‘became’, in order to
be fully expressive of Christian theology, must be glossed with opsigonos
progenethlos so that generation extends from a moment into a timeless
continuum.
John’s first sentence repeats the word logos three times, and so does
Nonnus, each time still firmly in the nominative: the logos stays fixed and
true in its form. But each usage is glossed in Nonnus with a string of
theologically charged expressions, which extend and refine the bare prose
of the Gospel (the very richness of expressivity is a continuing enactment of
the tension between the struggle to articulate the ineffable and the exuber-
ance of demonstrative praise) – and which speak directly to the arguments
over time to which the Nicene creed speaks authoritatively. So the Logos is
the Son, the Son who is ‘of like nature’ to the father, that is, who fulfils the
claim of consubstantiality, which the bitter rows over the adjective homo-
ousios contest. The Son is homēlikos, ‘of the same age’ as the Father – again,
the reinforcement of the theology of the Nicene creed’s temporality is
aggressively stated: the Father and Son must be of the same age, and thus
not in hierarchical order. Timelessness is also a promise of temporal
equality between Son and Father. The Son is also ‘without a mother’.
The specific cause of Cyril’s vicious dismissal of Nestorius was the unwill-
ingness of the church of Antioch to use the term theotokos, ‘bearer of
God’.76 The status of Mary’s motherhood was a simmering issue for
decades in Christological debate.77 The phrase ‘son without a mother’
significantly separates the Logos from the messy business of a human birth:
‘no one hearing the expression “son of God” should conceive such evil in
his mind to think that God procreated as a result of marriage and inter-
course with some woman!’.78 Hence Nonnus terms the Logos the ‘light of
the self-begotten God’. ‘Self-begotten’, like ‘self-created’, again is a rare,
reflexive word that displays the effort of expressing a relation of son and
father that can escape the standard temporal relation of creator and created.
The full expression ‘light, light from light’ has no immediate equivalent in
John, though it anticipates the use of light towards the end of John’s
introduction (1.5; 1.8–9). The imagery of light and darkness will flow
75
See Dion. 47.29 for similarly pointed language of first and later birth, of Zagreus and Dionysus.
76
Smith (2018); Wessel (2004). 77 Cameron (1991) 165–70.
78
Lactantius, Inst. 4.8. For the Jewish background of the expression ‘Son of God’ see García Martinez
(2013) 83–100, with further bibliography.

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 250 The Christian Invention of Time
throughout the Paraphrase.79 What is telling, however, is that Nonnus
glosses ‘light’ with the further phrase ‘light from light’. The added expres-
sion is not scriptural, but it is taken directly from the wording of the
Nicene creed – as if the creed is the expression of the Gospel, the Gospel
contains the creed, an unbroken tradition. Cyril uses the same phrase
stridently in his commentary on John. The theological intensity of
Nonnus’ verse is evident.80
The second phrase of John’s opening sentence is transformed into (only)
one line, but it still constitutes another extended theological rewriting.
‘The Word was with God’ becomes ‘from the father he was indivisible, on
the same throne on the boundless seat’. The openness of ‘with’ becomes the
explicitness of ‘indivisible’, a theological argument also central to the
Nicene creed and in particular to Cyril’s defence of it. ‘I and the father
are one’ (John 10.30) is repeatedly cited as proof that there is no distinction
of time or authority – or substance – between the Son and the Father,
against the Arian and Neo-Arian claims of a hierarchical relationship. Thus
Nonnus specifies ‘the same throne’, the same seat and exercise of power,
that is, the ‘throne of heaven’ – the site of ‘sovereignty’, as, again, Cyril’s
commentary makes abundantly clear – which is a seat that is – as an
expression of power – without limit. This adjective atermōn occurs nine
further times in the Paraphrase, to qualify God the Father, the universe
(kosmos), the honour of Jesus, and time itself: it links the power of divinity
to time in their shared boundlessness.81 So, as the poem opens with the
‘boundless seat’, its final line declares the poet’s expectation that if anyone
were to try to write the miracles of Jesus into books, they could not be
contained by ‘the boundless universe’. Nonnus’ Paraphrase is itself one of
the future boundless library of books predicted by John – a wonderful
moment in which paraphrase turns into self-fulfilled prophecy (autoteles-
tos). Here in the final line, for the first time, the author enters the text in the
first person (elpomai, ‘I expect’), and John’s voice and Nonnus’ are coter-
minous, a moment of perfected disavowal, complete impersonation.82 The
narrative’s end comes in the proclaimed endlessness of narrative’s poten-
tial: the story of Jesus goes beyond even the ‘boundless universe’. At the
beginning and end of the Paraphrase, the limitless is thematized.

79
Ypsilanti (2014); Johnson (2016) 273–80.
80
Agosti (2009) 329 sums up the Paraphrase as ‘an ideologically committed work into which an intense
exegetical and doctrinaire effort has been poured’.
81
Aiōn, 3.31; 6.147; God the Father 10.134; 19.81; kosmos, 17.53; 18.33; 21.143; timē 6.146; pistis as
‘boundless mother of kosmos’, 1.19.
82
On impersonation in late epic, see Greensmith (2020).

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 Beginning, Again 251
The third phrase of John, ‘and the Word was God’ becomes ‘and the
Word born on high was God’, apparently a close equivalence, with only the
addition of a single adjective. But this adjective also makes a pointed
difference. ‘Born not made’ is a strident phrase of the Nicene creed,
designed precisely to attack the Arian idea that God made the Son, who
is thus subordinate and later in time. The adjective could go with either
noun, of course, and God is traditionally praised in Hebrew as ‘on high’,
and in Greek as hupsistos, ‘the highest’: but the echo of the Nicene creed is
compelling, and again shows Nonnus designedly redirecting the language
of John towards a fifth-century theological significance.83
Nonnus’ first five lines need at least this much care to appreciate the full
scope of their extraordinary redrafting of the Gospel’s already challenging
first words. John’s Greek, which already strains the agenda of the simple
language of faith into an extreme of semantic expressivity, is turned by
Nonnus into a glossolalia of theological normativity. On the one hand, this
is intense intellectual poetry at the very highest level of elite understanding,
which is closer to commentary or exegesis. It projects an audience that is
educated both in Greek tradition and in Christian thinking: it creates
a reader whose sophistication is demanded, a reader very different from the
figures who populate Jesus’ audience in the Gospels, and who match the
performatively simple koinē Greek of the Gospel texts. The Paraphrase is an
act of cultural transformation, a rewriting designed to effect a continuing
change in the culture of Christianity. On the other hand, Nonnus’ lan-
guage is deeply imbued with the theological controversies of his time, and
seems to embed into his verse the language of the Nicene creed and Cyril’s
commentary on John, already anticipated in the Cappadocian Fathers’
attacks on Eunomius and his new Arianism (paraphrase here draws on and
comes close to commentary as a form). John is made to reveal a pro-Nicene
Christology and a theologically engaged view of temporality. This is not
just polemics, or a change of perspective, but also an attempt by Nonnus to
make the Bible – in his terms – more Christian. It is an act of theological
transformation. Nonnus’ Paraphrase thus is a cultural, political and reli-
gious intervention in the discourse of Christianity.
*
How, then, does this new agenda of theological time unfurl in the
Paraphrase? As in the opening, programmatic lines, time is transformed
by Nonnus into his version of Christian time by glossing and expansion of
83
In Goldhill (2020) 84–5 I discussed translations which take hupsigenethlos with ‘God’, but
I underestimated the force of -gen- in the context of arguments over Nicaea.

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 252 The Christian Invention of Time
John’s language into a new direction. Critics have often dismissed with
distaste the profligate excess of adjectives and subordinate phrases in
Nonnus’ poetry – or occasionally, as we will see in the next chapter,
celebrated such fecundity in the name of his Dionysiac poetics, where
words spread and flourish like vines under the sway of the transformative
god of change, Dionysus. Such expansiveness is central to the strategy of
transformation in the Paraphrase. Consider this passage, where a single
adjective works like a theological depth charge on the surrounding phrases
to create a new theological perspective of time. In John 8.55, Jesus says:
‘Thus I said that you will die in your sins; you will die in your sins, unless
you believe that I am he’. Here is Nonnus’ version (8.55–9):
ἀλλ᾽ ὑμῖν ἀγορεύον, ὅτι φθαμένῳ τινὶ πότμῳ
εἰσέτι μαργαίνοντες ὁμιλήσητε βερέθρῳ
ἀμπλακίην μεθέποντες ὁμόχρονον· ἀτρεκέως δὲ
εἰ μὴ ἐμὲ γνώσεσθε, τίς ἢ τίνος εἰμὶ τοκῆος,
θνήσκετε δυσσεβίης ἐγκύμονες
But I keep saying to you that in a fate that outstrips you
Still madly raging you will come to the pit
Still pursuing sin cotemporaneous. Truly,
If you do not recognize who I am and who my parent is,
You are dying pregnant with impiety.
The term I have translated as ‘cotemporaneous’ is a very rare compound
adjective, homochronos, ‘of the same time’. It is an arresting expression. It
seems to imply that this sin is something that goes from birth to death, that
is, in Christian terms, original sin, the sin into which all humans are born.
Indeed, a few lines earlier, when Jesus first declares in John ‘you will die in
your sin’ (8.21), Nonnus (8.39–41) paraphrases this into a striking image of
a life-time of sin and an old age of horror: ‘you will see an end to chill you
after old age, pursuing (methepontes) white hair the same age (homēlika) as
your sin’. Death here is a chilling terror (this language is common from
Homer onwards), but again the temporal adjective homēlix, ‘of the same
age’, reframes our comprehension. Homēlix is used repeatedly in theo-
logical debate to insist on the coevalness of the Son and Father, as it is in
the opening lines of the Paraphrase, but here it again implies that far from
wisdom coming with old age, for the disbelievers, old age – something
pursued – becomes a sign of a life-time of sin, a life lived in original sin,
unchanged by the promise of the coeval Father and Son. So, as Jesus recalls
this first declaration, he again states, with a repetition of the participle
methepontes, that sin is also something that these disbelievers ‘pursue’.

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 Beginning, Again 253
Humans are born into sin, that is, but can still choose sin – or choose to
escape by faith. This choice of sin is their ‘mad raging’, a greed or lust that
corrupts. This leads to the extraordinary final phrase: ‘you are dying
pregnant with sin’. In John the same word ‘you will die’ is repeated three
times, each time in the future tense. Nonnus, who also uses the future tense
up to this point, now puts death in the present. Death is a continuous
process in the here and now for the disbelievers, who do not choose the
eternal life Jesus promises. ‘Pregnant’ becomes therefore a richly evocative
term. On the one hand, pregnancy and the travails of childbirth are the
sign of the fall, the mark of original sin for women (along with
menstruation).84 Living in human time, with its materiality of the flesh,
finds its female embodiment in pregnancy. On the other hand, there is
a long philosophical tradition, back to Plato, of men claiming the power of
reproduction through spiritual or philosophical creativity.85 Sin is also
wrong thinking, to be pregnant with heretical ideas. Dying in sin is now
dying in childbirth. The adjective ‘pregnant’ also asks a question, absent in
John, about where sin comes from.
The arresting adjective homochronos opens a vista onto the overlapping
temporal frames mobilized in Nonnus’ paraphrase. John’s repeated ‘you
will die in your sin’ is now translated into a life-time of sin till the terror of
death in old age; a life-time of sin that is also a life lived under the shadow
of original sin; which is also the material distress of the fleshliness of human
existence; which is a constant experience of death in the present – and all of
these grim experiences of human time are to be transcended by the belief
that Jesus demands in his promise of eternal life, a promise evoked by the
language of coevalness, which takes us back to the programmatic opening
of the Paraphrase. Nonnus’ paraphrastic technique translates John’s ‘dying
in sin’ into a narrative layered with a fully theological temporality, where
‘synchronicity’ takes on a fully normative force. Time made Christian.
Nonnus is particularly expansive when it comes to eternity. In John,
Jesus explains that a slave to sin ‘does not remain in the house for ever; the
son remains for ever’ (8.35). The repeated phrase eis ton aiōna, ‘for ever’,
prompts this four-line paraphrase (8.90–4):
ἐν ἀθανάτῳ δὲ μελάθρῳ
δοῦλος ἀλιτροσύνης αἰώνιος οὔποτε μίμνει
ναιετάων· μίμνει φερέσβιος υἱὸς ἀμύμων

84
Explicated in Brown (1988).
85
From a large bibliography see Burnyeat (1977); Pender (1992); Sheffield (2001), each with further
bibliography.

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 254 The Christian Invention of Time
ναίων πάτριον οἶκον, ἕως χρονίῃ παρὰ νύσσῃ
ἱππεύων ἀκίχητος ἑλίσσεται ἔμπεδος αἰών.
In the immortal hall
The slave of sin never does remain dwelling
Eternal; the life-bringing son, blameless, does remain
Dwelling in the house of the father, as long as unattainable, fixed Eternity
Twists around the long-lasting post, driving his horses.
The language of time expands here dizzyingly. The house is first an
‘immortal’ hall (specified then as ‘of the father’, the everlasting); the slave
who lives in it is not an ‘eternal’ (aiōnios) dweller, he ‘never’ (oupote)
remains. Aiōnios recalls John’s eis ton aiōna, but also anticipates the full
personification Aiōn becomes as the passage continues. It may also recall
the biblical law of the slave who, if he wishes to stay with his master, has his
ear pierced and remains a slave in his master’s house eis ton aiōna, ‘for ever’,
that is, for his life-time.86 The son is now glossed as pheresbios, ‘life-
bringing’, a word used repeatedly in traditional epic verse for the fecundity
of the earth and its goddesses, now transferred into the Christian promise
of eternal life through Jesus. The final long clause, however, depicts Aiōn,
which I have translated here as ‘Eternity’, as a divinity, driving his chariot,
like the sun, around a course.
Aiōn is an especially complex word, to which we will return in the next
chapter. Although in Homer, as we have seen, it indicates a life-time, from
Plato onwards, it is also used in contrast to chronos, to indicate
a continuum of everlasting extension rather than marked and measured
time.87 In later Greek, it comes to mean ‘eternity’, and the transition from
‘life-time’ to ‘eternity’, and its use in both philosophical texts and in other
genres, gives it a semantic history that is intricate and far from linear in its
development.88 In the plural, what is more, it comes to signify ‘ages’ and
the phrase aiōn aiōnōn, like saecula saeculorum, is used for the unfurling of
unending time.89 Aiōn seems to hover between an abstract idea and
a personification (Euripides already called Aiōn ‘the child of Time’),90
but from at least the Hellenistic period onwards, Aiōn also appears as

86
Ex. 21.6; Deut, 15.17 – it is atypical in the Septuagint for aiōn to refer to a life-time: see Keizer (1999).
87
See e.g. Plutarch, De E 392F discussed with other examples by Levi (1944) 279–80. See Degani (1961)
for its polyvalence from the earliest examples on.
88
Keizer (1999) is fullest; see also Zuntz (1992) for the imperial period, and Degani (1961) for the
earliest era. Foucher (1996) discusses the material representations with bibliography. Ladner (1959)
443–8 is brief and to the point. Cullmann (1946) influentially argued that aiōn in the New
Testament never means supra-temporal eternity.
89 90
Aug. Ennar. In Ps. IX 6 discusses the sense of this phrase. Heracl. 900.

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 Beginning, Again 255
a divinity, a figure who mediates between the highest god and humans.91
Aiōn is addressed in inscriptions and in magic papyri – and represented on
coins and in art, including the extraordinary third-century mosaic from
Antioch-on-the-Orontes, which represents, as four named figures at
a symposium, ‘Past’, ‘Present’, Future’ and ‘Eternity’ (Aiōn), under the
general allegorical heading Chronoi, ‘Times’.92 According to Epiphanius,
in Alexandria there was a cult festival where Aiōn was celebrated as the child
of Korē, ‘the Virgin’.93 Aiōn becomes a figure that provides a way of
thinking about how humans inhabit time, in relation to divinity, both
through cultic activity and in philosophical thinking. This reflective mode
is vividly captured by Epictetus: ‘I am not Aiōn’, he writes with beautiful
simplicity, ‘but a man, part of everything, as an hour is of the day’.94
Epictetus asserts his necessary and ineluctable mortality by denying he is
(the god) ‘Eternity’, that is, by deprecating the disabling fear of death as no
more than the arrogance that would make a human think himself a god; he
is rather ‘a human’ (anthrōpos), a humility given extra depth by his own
history as a slave (anthrōpe is a slave’s summons). He is part of everything –
a Stoic sense of the integrated universe – expressed pointedly in the
language of time, ‘as an hour is of the day’: the ephemerality of a human
is as embedded in time as the hour is in a day. He is not Aiōn precisely
because he is only of a day. ‘I must be present like an hour and pass like
an hour’, he concludes: to be in time is to pass like time.
The Septuagint uses aiōn and aiōnios very frequently for the Hebrew
terms le ’olam and ad ‘olam (traditionally translated ‘for ever’, ‘evermore’,
‘everlasting’, and occasionally ‘age-old’, or, in the case of a human, ‘for the
whole of a life’). The Septuagint coins the phrase eis ton aiōna kai eis ton
aiōna tou aiōnos, for the Hebrew le ‘olam va’ed ‘for ever and ever’, Greek
which would, I expect, make little sense to the Greek-speakers of the
classical city.95 Taking off from the Septuagint, Aiōn becomes a term
with continuing, rich associations in Christian discourse (‘Complication
is introduced . . . in Christian literature’, comments Nock, ruefully).96 In
Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians (2.2), for example, as Paul recalls his
audience’s sins in the time before Jesus brought them from death to life,
he describes their past as walking kata ton aiōna tou kosmou toutou, which is

91
According to Foucher (1996) 30 Aion is ‘virtually unknown in Rome and the West’ as a divinity, and
even when personified as a god in the East is not truly ‘an object of cult’. He does not discuss the
magic papyri.
92
Levi (1944) is especially good; see also Nock (1935); Zuntz (1992) 12–25; and Foucher (1996) 12.
93 94
Panarion 51.22. Epict. 2.5.13. The text is printed in full in Zuntz (1992) 12–13.
95
E.g. Psalm 145.1. 96 Nock (1935) 89.

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 256 The Christian Invention of Time
normally translated as ‘according to the course of this world’. But aiōn here
too implies an ‘age’, even an ‘eternity’, which is the time of living under the
power of Satan rather than in the faith of Jesus. It implies a time of
dispensation that must always still be rejected, a false sense of time and
eternity, like the slave of sin who cannot remain in the house, for ever. Aiōn
becomes a term of Christian reflection, as eternity and the sense of personal
time become powerful vectors of religious thinking for a Christian.
Nonetheless it is still something of a surprise to see the figure of Aiōn
appear personified as a god in Nonnus’ narrative of Jesus. The imagery of
the race track – not something prevalent in Cyril’s commentary – is
repeated throughout the Paraphrase for the passing of time, and it is
a very familiar nexus of ideas from classical poetry, especially, of course,
for the movement of the sun and the moon, the markers of time. It is an
image especially associated with poetic narrative: the racing journey of
verse towards a winning conclusion; and Triphiodorus, a poet Nonnus
read, plays brilliant games with its resources, as he starts his miniature
account of the fall of Troy with the word terma, both ‘end’ and ‘turning
post’, as he drives his narrative faster and faster towards its pre-announced
conclusion.97 Yet it is the three adjectives here in Nonnus’ description that
stand out. The turning-post of the track is termed chronios. Chronios often
means ‘after a time’ – in tragedy it marks the missing of the kairos, the
disaster of the too late98 – or ‘long-lasting’. It implies here that the turning-
post, the archetypal site of contingency and danger in a race, is part of the
very lastingness of eternity (Hadjittofi translates it simply with ‘eternal’).
This course lasts. Aiōn itself is described as akikhētos and empedos.
Akikhētos, ‘unattainable’, from the opening lines has been used, as we
know, to describe not just the inability of humans to capture Jesus (or
other figures in his story), but also and significantly to indicate Jesus’
incomprehensible transcendence of time and space. Here, for the only
time in the epic, akikhetos is applied to another type of figure. But Eternity
is an integral element of human incomprehension of Jesus, and the eternity
of a faithful Christian’s life is the promise which Jesus is here explaining to
his uncomprehending audience of believers. Akikhētos here links Logos and
eternity, as it narrates the promise of everlasting life.
Empedos, ‘fixed’, is a paradigmatic Nonnian paradox: Eternity, for all the
twisting rush of its horses round the course of time, is ‘fixed’, ‘established’ –
‘fixed’ like Odysseus’ bed is fixed to the tree, fixed in the ground, fixed in

97
See Goldhill (2020) 75–7; and especially Maciver (2020).
98
See Soph. Phil. 1446; OC 441; Eur. Or. 475.

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 Beginning, Again 257
place at the centre of the house. Empedos, and compounds with empedos,
occur fully thirty times in the Paraphrase: it is a sound that knells through
the narrative. It is used most regularly for the words of John the Baptist,
Jesus himself, and the witnessing of Jesus: the fixed truth, that makes the
promise of Jesus transcend the fluid uncertainties of language. Unlike the
winged words of Homer, these are the fixed words of the Lord. It is
associated with the rule of heaven. But it is also used for the flowing
‘water’ of truth (4.68) and the shimmering of the ‘light’ of truth (8.6).
Immediately before this representation of Aiōn, Jesus declares that every-
thing he speaks ‘to the senseless world’ is empeda, ‘fixed’, ‘established’
(8.65), and that his deeds please his father ‘for the fixed circle of time’,
chronon empedokuklon (8.74). Words, time, water, light . . . are all con-
nected in this theological declaration of established certainty.
Empedokuklon, ‘of fixed circle’, does not occur elsewhere in surviving
Greek, and seems to suggest that time is imagined as a certain and estab-
lished structure that surrounds us, like the circle of Ocean in Homer’s
geography – or like the circles of Neo-Platonic cosmology:99 circles are
usually imagined as ever-flowing, but here the circle of time is fixed.
Nonnus indeed in the Paraphrase uses four empedo- compound adjectives,
three of which he seems to have coined: empedomuthos, ‘fixed in utterance’
(eight times),100 empedometis, ‘fixed in plotting’, empedomochthos, ‘fixed in
labour’, and empedokuklos: he revels in the kainotomia of his vocabulary,
even and especially when it proclaims the fixity of speech. It is fascinating
that the one author to use the phrase empedos aiōn before Nonnus (who
uses the same phrase as 3.79 too) is Empedocles, whose name might be
heard in the new word empedokuklon. Empedocles describes a world of
clashing forces and instability made up of the combining and separating
elements.101 Things come to be (gignontai), Empedocles declares, there is
no ‘stable life’. Rather, the elements ‘never cease their continuous inter-
change, to the extent that they always are in a cycle, changeless’. The life
(aiōn) of the elements is echoed in the ‘always are’ (aien easin) – an
etymological pun – that is ceaseless, cyclical change.102 If Empedocles is
evoked by the coinage empedokuklon and the direct echo empedos aiōn, it is
to emphasize Christianity’s rejection of his paradigmatic materialism with

99
Hernández de la Fuente (2014) 231–2. Circular time is common in imperial epic, as discussed by
Greensmith (2020) for Quintus.
100
As Agosti (2003) 454 ad loc. notes, Gregory of Nazianzus (Carm. II.2.7.179) has the phrase theos
empedomuthos. This is the only prior extant use of the four compound terms.
101
B26. 9–12 DK. On Empedocles in Christian polemic, see Mansfeld (1992) 209–31.
102
For this etymology see Aristotle, De cael. 279a; Degani (1961) 29–35.

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 258 The Christian Invention of Time
its arbitrary collisions and combinations of elements, his cycles without the
Providence of the Christian god.103 If rewriting scripture is based on the
dual desires, durus uterque deus, of recognizing the need for fixity in
scripture and recognizing the fluid, fissile potential of its language,
Nonnus performs this tension in his very language of fixity. Time, for
Nonnus, is empedos, a fixed grounding for his theological certainty about
human placement in time – expressed in his novel compound adjectives,
the swirling combination and separation of new linguistic elements.
The personification of Aiōn as a charioteer continues throughout the
Paraphrase. So, too, does Nonnus’ insistent qualification of the idea of time
that such personification allows. John writes (6.35), ‘He will never be
thirsty’. Nonnus writes (6.146) ‘he will never be thirsty’ – but then glosses
‘never’ with ‘as long as Aion, curved, crawling, broad-bearded passes the
boundless (atermona) turning post’. ‘Broad-bearded’ might suggest an
anthropomorphic representation of a god;104 but ‘curved’, like the expres-
sion empedokuklos, suggests a concept of an embracing topography of
time.105 Yet most striking is the adjective atermona. A ‘turning-post’ is
the very definition of a boundary, the end of the track. For Aion the
charioteer, however, this boundary is boundless – a paradox that not
only captures the strangeness of Eternity as a chariot racer, but links his
course to the theology invoked from the opening lines of the poem.106
Similarly, in the narrative of the miracle of the blind man, the word ‘never’
is also glossed by the image of the charioteer Aion, who never brought such
a fellow ‘into the coeval world’, hēliki kosmōi (9.8). ‘Coeval’, once again,
opens a vista of cosmological time, insisting that Jesus’ miracle requires
such a frame. The personification of Aion is a particularly telling example
of how inadequate it is to describe Nonnus’ classicizing expressivity either
as ‘decorative’ or as a sign that classicizing is no more than the unmarked
discourse of the educated writer of antiquity. Nonnus appropriates and

103
For a surprising use of Empedocles in contrast to a Christian model see AP 8.28 where Gregory of
Nazianzus compares his saintly mother’s death to that of Empedocles.
104
Franchi (2013) 146–8 ad 147. Spanoudakis (2016) 610.
105
On the Neo-Platonic curve of time in Nonnus see Hernández de la Fuente (2014) 246–8, and on
this passage Franchi (2013) 436 ad 146.
106
This point is not contradicted by Dion. 19.280 where the same phrase, with the participle ameibōn
and the adverb stephanēdon, is used to capture the movement of a dancer spinning continuously in
a circle around the same spot. At Dion. 38.250, the sun travels a ‘boundless circle round the Zodiac
turning-post’. Spanoudakis (2016) 610 calls this language ‘a formalistic embellishment’, but sees
Aion nonetheless as ‘a construct of achronous God bound with creation’. The second expression is
far better than the first.

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 Beginning, Again 259
redrafts the very tropes of eternity, within his Christianizing conceptual-
ization of God’s time.
The reward of eternal life for the disciples who believe in Jesus’ message,
is central to the narrative of John’s Gospel, and to Nonnus’ image of time
in the Paraphrase. As early as Book 5, Jesus lays out the decisive moral
choice. For those who do not believe, there will be a swift judgement. But
the person who believes the marturon empedomuthon, ‘the witness fixed in
utterance’ (5.89), there will be no judgement. Instead there is this promise
(5.92–9):
ἀλλ᾽ ἐπὶ κείνην
ζωὴν ἀμβροσίην, τὴν οὐ χρόνος οἶδεν ὀλέσσαι,
ἵξεται ἐκ θανάτοιο μετάτροπος· ἀπροιδὴς γὰρ
μαῖα παλιγγενέων μερόπων νεκυοσσόος ὥρη
ἵξεται ὀψιτέλεστος, ἀναυδέες ὁππότε νεκροὶ
αὖτις ἀναζήσουσιν ἀνοστήτων άπὸ κόλπων,
πάντες ἀλεξιμόροιο μιῆς ἀίοντες ἰωῆς
παιδὸς τηλυγέτοιο φερεζώοιο τοκῆος
But to that
ambrosial life, which time does not know how to destroy,
he will come, transformed from death. For unforeseen,
a corpse-saving hour, a midwife of mortals born long ago,
will come, late-fulfilled, when the speechless corpses
will come back to life again from the embrace of no return,
all listening to the single fate-averting voice
of the beloved child of the parent who brings life.
The adjective ambrosios is closely associated with the divine world of
Homeric epic. ‘Ambrosial’ is very rarely used in Greek without such
connotations,107 but, specifies Nonnus, Time – Chronos – does not know
how to destroy this ‘divine life’.108 It is a commonplace of earlier Greek
writing that Time is pandamator, ‘conqueror of all’. So Nonnus himself
writes later in the poem, where Jesus declares that he is willing to give his
life for his flock (10.61–4): ‘No law from my father will take my life from
me, not creeping time (chronos) that conquers all (pandamator), nor
unconquerable (adamastos) necessity, fixed in its plotting (empedometis),
but, self-commanded, I lay down gladly a life that wills the same’. Time is
ironically called pandamator, and necessity, with equal lack of purchase, is

107
In Nonnus it is especially associated with Jesus or John the Baptist, and, as Agosti (2003) 457–8 ad
93 notes, is a good example of Christian appropriation of Homeric diction.
108
Agosti (2003) 456–7 ad 93 usefully lists variations of the phrasing for ‘immortal life’.

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 260 The Christian Invention of Time
called ‘unconquerable’, since at this moment Jesus is proclaiming his
triumphant conquering of the necessity of death, time’s end.109 Necessity
is called ‘fixed in metis’, the sort of plotting that is traditionally anything
but ‘fixed’, but will turn out to reveal another fixity altogether, namely, the
fixity that the language of empedos has constructed around Jesus and his
promise (mētis is not a word that occurs in the New Testament or in
Patristic Greek; it speaks of another time).110 Jesus repeats the same phrase
‘that time does not know how to destroy’ also in Book 10, also applied to
the life to come (10.35), but he adds a surprising phrase that shows a very
Nonnian reading of John’s sense of time. John writes (10.10): ‘I have come
so that they may have life and have it in abundance (kai perisson)’; Nonnus
writes (10.36) ‘or have it in superior abundance (ēe perisson huperteron)’.
Adding a comparative (‘superior’, ‘higher’, ‘longer’) to an expression of
excess (‘abundance’, ‘more than required’) and changing John’s ‘and’ to
‘or’, creates a theological hyperbole.111 What alternative can be more than
eternal life? Nonnus’ linguistic exuberance – his excessive language of
excess – in striving to capture the enormity of eternity, has Jesus enter
something of a conceptual morasse. In Book 5, too, Jesus proclaims his
triumph over time and its link to death, which is also a triumph over the
standard language of the Hellenic tradition. Thus, the believer will come
from death metatropos. Metatropos is a turn that is a change (hence my
translation of ‘transformation’). I could almost have written ‘conversion’.
Jesus demands a metatropon ēthos in his believers, ‘a change of life and
character’ (3.83;112 6.208), a change predicated on this flight from death
(17.52; 13.3).113 It is the change of moral – religious – affiliation that is being
demanded, a change which will end in this journey away from death, the
reversal of time’s arrow.
John’s language is far simpler (it will be no surprise by now to learn). ‘He
has passed from death to life’ (the basis of the paraphrase just discussed) is
followed by ‘the hour is coming and now is, when the dead will hear the
voice of the Son of God, and those who will listen will live’ (5.25). I have
translated Nestle-Aland’s standard text of John, which is here different
from the text given in Scheindler’s edition of Nonnus: Scheindler prints
109
At Dion. 34.109, a delusional lover misled by a deceptive dream calls a maiden’s cheeks a ‘meadow
which time does not know how to wither (marainein)’, in contrast to the regular erotic discourse of
the fading of flowers and beauty.
110
For mētis as archetypally fluid and flexible, see Detienne and Vernant (1974).
111
Simelidis (2016) 295 notes a motivated change of ‘and’ to ‘or’ at 2.21.
112
Franchi (2016) 256 misleadingly translates it here as ‘variable’, and connects it to Dionysiac imagery.
113
In Dion. 12.139, the verb metatrepein is used for the reversal of the thread of fate to allow the rebirth
of Ampelous as a vine, on which see Shorrock (2016) 592.

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 Beginning, Again 261
future rather than perfect, ‘will pass’, and leaves out ‘and now is’. This may
indeed have been the text Nonnus read. At 4.111, however, the previous
occasion that the (full) phrase occurs, Nonnus adds ἄγχι, ‘and has nearly
come’, as he does at 5.108 (where John does not have ‘and it is now here’
anyway). Some centuries after Paul, it is harder just to say the ‘and it is now
here’. The relation between ‘now’ and ‘waiting’ and what is near and what
will come has become thoroughly theologized. Nonnus’ redrafting of
John’s language of time reflects this shift. We can note that Nonnus repeats
angchi compound adjectives 55 times in the Paraphrase. What is ‘nigh’
obsessively echoes in his language. How close is fulfilment?
The connection between the believer’s immortal life and the resurrection
of the dead is asserted in Nonnus by the repetition of the verb hixetai (94/
96): the faithful human ‘will come’ to ambrosial life as the hour of resurrec-
tion ‘will come’. This ‘corpse-saving’ hour is described first as aproïdēs
‘unforeseen’. This is a riveting moment. In the previous chapter,
I discussed how the fascination of narrative and narrative theory with ‘the
sudden’, ‘the unexpected’ becomes a leap of faith, a religious moment of
transformation – or, as with Gregory of Nazianzus’ poetics, a resistance to
such suddenness in the name of slow reading and gradual change. In the
Gospel, there is a foundational tension between Jesus’ knowledge of who he
is and what will happen to him, and the disciples’ uncertainty – thematized
by Peter’s denial or Thomas’ doubt – as well as the slow understanding of the
crowds or their refusal to recognize Jesus at all. ‘The unforeseen’ becomes
a narrative node for such a tension. From the beginning (1.28), we are told
that the Logos came aproïdēs, unforeseen, to an unbelieving world. Later
(7.167), we are told that unthinking men undertook to oppress Jesus, because
they were aproïdeis, ‘unable to foresee’ (the adjective can have both the active
and passive sense). When Jesus escaped from the temple akikhētos,
‘untouched’, no-one knew what he was doing: he was aproïdēs, beyond the
foresight of his human enemies (8.193). The Jews who are willing to believe,
but are too frightened of the priests to speak out, are said to have a faith that
is hiding aproïdēs ‘unforeseen’ – unforeseen by the priests, misunderstood by
themselves, with consequences they cannot fathom (12.173). In contrast,
Joseph of Arimathea became a disciple aproïdēs (19.194), without letting
anyone perceive his conversion – escaping the attention of the crowds
around him. Two final surprises sum up this language of failed anticipation,
concealed intention and misplaced consequences. After the crucifixion, the
disciples are eating together, and doubting Thomas is singled out by name.114

114
On the play with the double name of Twin Thomas see Whitby (2007) 203–5.

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 262 The Christian Invention of Time
At that moment, Jesus appears aproïdes, and overcomes Thomas’ doubts
(20.118).115 Jesus’ arrival is no surprise to Nonnus’ readers who know the
story; John does not mention ‘surprise’ in his account. Nonnus, by adding
the specific narratological indication, is not only designedly reminding us
that this is a surprise, but also highlighting the role of surprise in Jesus’
impact on a person (what Augustine would theorize as grace, whose moment
is overwhelmingly surprising even when anticipated). Nonnus’ addition
draws attention to the theological implications of narrative’s thauma. By
contrast to the episode with Thomas, Jesus before his death warns that
Satan – ‘the arrogant ruler of the ever-flowing universe’ – is coming aproïdēs,
unforeseen by the disciples and misrecognized by the unthinking world
(14.120–1). Jesus thus foretells the future failure of human anticipation and
understanding. It is absolutely archetypal of Nonnus’ narrative language that
this prophecy is called an ‘inspired voice before its hour (proōrion)’, and the
coming time of fulfilment of the oracle is described with ‘if twisting, unstable
time, as it crawls along, fulfils this’ (14.115–16). As the threat of the ‘unfore-
seen’ Satan is proclaimed, we are reminded volubly of the unfixed, disorderly
unfurling of time he rules in and through. At significant junctures of the
narrative, the repeated use of the word aproïdeē links narrative surprise with
a theology that contrasts human ignorance and divine knowledge.
The Gospels each have miracles at their heart: the unexpected, the
sudden. Miracles are designed to transform the inner lives of their observers:
amazement, shock, awe are expected reactions. If Herodotus promises
thōmata for his history, and Aristotle insists that thauma is the beginning
of the philosophical pursuit of knowledge, the Gospels place thaumata –
miracles – and the response to them – thauma – at the centre of its narrative
of revelation and belief. Nonnus makes the dynamic of the unforeseen
central to his narrative dynamics: who can anticipate what? Who fails to
see what should be seen? Yet, as Kierkegaard knew all too well, the abyss of
narrative surprise also opens the leap of faith. The ‘unforeseen hour’ antici-
pated by Jesus is part of a persuasive story to recognize and accept the
promise of an unchanging time of ‘ambrosial life’. The turn from death –
metatropos – goes hand in hand with the ‘unforeseen’. Nonnus’ paraphrastic
poetry displays a metatropic poetics that transforms John’s promise of a life to
come into a fully theological Christian discourse of time and narrative.
The ‘corpse-saving hour’ that is to come is also termed the ‘midwife
(maia) of mortals born long ago’116 and ‘late-fulfilled’ (opsiteleston).

115
Whitby (2007) 205.
116
On palaigeneōn see Agosti (2003) ad loc.; on its use in Dion. 2.650 see Goldhill (2020) 121–2.

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 Beginning, Again 263
‘Midwife’ suggests, of course, the imagery of rebirth central to Christianity,
but it specifically recalls here Nicodemus’ confusion in Book 3. Jesus tells
Nicodemus that a human who wants to see the ‘eternal (aiōnion) kingdom’
must be ‘born a second time’ (3.17–18). He replies: ‘How can an old man,
with white hair, have another, late-fulfilled (opsiteleston)117 travail of birth?
Surely he cannot, without a father, enter through the swollen lap (kolpos) of
his ancient mother into her pregnant belly to see the groaning rite of
a labour that is a return again (palinnostos)?’.118 The rebirth of conversion is
now expanded to the resurrection of the dead; shared promises, a link
encouraged by the shared language – opsiteleston, kolpos, nostos,
palin – between these two passages. But maia also recalls Plato’s famous
use of the term for how philosophy in the form of Socrates can bring new
ideas to life.119 Jesus’ teaching appropriates and transforms the privileged
language of the philosophers of the past. This metatropic poetics, rewriting
both Nonnus’ own earlier expressions of rebirth, and Plato’s language of
the birthing of ideas, is fully in service of his Christian theological agenda.
The final phrase of Jesus’ promise reveals Nonnus’ close reading of the
syntax of John. John writes that the corpses will hear ‘the voice of the son of
god’ – three genitives: tēs phōnēs tou huiou tou theou (5.25). Nonnus specifies
that what is heard is a single voice (miēs iōēs). This is not the ‘single voice’ of
Christianity that Ps-Apollinaris celebrated, but anticipates the two geni-
tives that follow: ‘of the beloved120 child of the parent who brings life’. The
potential for ambivalence that a genitive dependent on a genitive can bring
in Greek – which genitive is dependent on which? – is mobilized here
pointedly. There is one voice of Father and Son, Son and Father: hence the
emphatic addition of miēs, ‘single’. The adjective pherezōoio, ‘life-
bringing’, could go with either noun, child or parent – and up to this
point it has been the son who has promised zōē, ‘life’ (93). By the end of the
sentence it is clear enough that it qualifies the Father, but marks the shared
ordinance of Father and Son, their consubstantial nature, as the Nicene
creed asserts. Nonnus’ explosive polyphony seeks yet to promote the one
voice of truth, fixed.
The relation between waiting and the moment, and the metatropic
poetics of paraphrase, reach a remarkable climax when Jesus predicts his
resurrection to the confused disciples in Book 16. The prophecy itself is
surrounded by expressions of changing language. Jesus promises he will
117
A Homeric unicum (Il. 2.325) of an oracle whose fame ‘will never die’.
118
For links between this passage, the Dionysiaca, and Quintus of Smyrna, see Shorrock (2016) 582.
119
See Burnyeat (1977); Pender (1992); Sheffield (2001).
120
On the sense of this Homeric expression see Agosti (2003) 465 ad loc.

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 264 The Christian Invention of Time
utter ‘heterotropa (turned otherwise) paths of song’ (16.95), which the
disciples struggle to paraphrase as not the ‘twisted mysteries of utterances
paratropeōn (turned aside)’ which need to be read with ‘another voice’
(heterēs phōnēs) (16.111–12). The disciples express their confused reaction ‘by
concealing their utterance, pregnant with voice, travelling close to the
tongue, a contest with silence’ (16.54–6) – this a wonderfully evocative
version of John’s ‘they said to one another’. Where John pictures the
disciples turning to one another in doubt, Nonnus depicts their thoughts
and unsaid words in contorted tension. But Jesus’ prophecy itself trans-
forms John’s hauntingly simple expression, ‘A little while, you will see me
no more; again, in a little while, you will see me’ (16.16) into an incantatory
performance. And it does so in a quite extraordinary way. Over eleven lines
(50–61), Nonnus repeats and repeats the same terms in multiple forms.
‘There is’, he says ‘still a small time’ (βαιὸς ἔτι χρόνος, 50), ‘you will no
longer (οὐκέτι) see me’ (51); ‘there is left still a small spiralling time’ (εἰσέτι
βαιὸς ἕλιξ χρόνος, 52); ‘know that there is still a small | a small time still left’
(ἔτι βαιός | βαιὸς ἔτι χρόνος, 57–8); ‘you will no longer (οὐκέτι, 59) see me’;
‘there is left still a small spiralling time’ (εἰσέτι βαιὸς ἕλιξ χρόνος 60).
‘Again (empalin) you will see me’ (53); ‘again (empalin) you will see me’
(61). In this shifting, paraphrastic repetitiveness the adverbs eti, eiseti,
ouketi, ‘still’, ‘no longer’, are repeated six times, baios, ‘small’, five times;
time itself, chronos, is repeated four times, twice with helix, ‘spiralling’, and
always with ‘small’. The chiasmus of enjambment is arresting – eti baios |
baios eti, ‘still small, | small still’ (which comes first, the smallness or the
still, brevity or waiting? How long, O Lord, how long . . . ?). Homer’s verse
is celebrated for its repetitions and formulae. But here this Homeric lexis
has become something else, transformed, like the simple, clarifying repeti-
tion in John, into a profusion of spiralling language, as time is repeated
time and again to try to capture the prophecy of the future, which, for the
faithful, is changing time, their sense of time, for ever. The incantatory
repetition is an anticipatory cry to bring forth the short measure of
transformative time. How long, how long . . .
After such a dizzying swirl of words, Jesus asks the disciples (16.65–7),
‘why do you seek each other in neighbouring voices, if I said that after
a small while (baion) I will pass from your sight, and again still in a small
while (palin eiseti baion) you will see me revealed?’. Again, Jesus’ recapitu-
lation repeats the language of return and repetition, paraphrasing his own
words of resurrection, performatively; again ‘small’ is repeated, twice. (Is
there any other passage of ancient poetry where the same adjective is
repeated seven times in sixteen lines? The hour has become emphatically

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 Beginning, Again 265
its scale, the contrast between the enormity of the event and the brevity of
its time.) Did they not get it (though their earnest bafflement at such
impossibly fracturing language is understandable)? Jesus’ question
prompts a further prophecy (16.68): ‘I say to you an oath that is fixed
(empedomuthon), amen, amen’. The words may swirl but the oath – God’s
word – is fixed, empedon. At this moment of declaration, as Jesus
announces that the disciples must become the apostles, the fixity of the
promise is again contrasted not just with the explosive polyphony of
language but also with the sheer material resounding of paraphrastic
repetition, its intricate, bewildering clatter of sound.
The form of Nonnus’ poetry violently redrafts John’s idea of the small
moment and waiting for change. Jesus’ time is coming, the hour that will
transform time: the language of time, the smallness of the moment, is made
to sound out again and again – taking more and more time – as the
narrative rests in the small moment, still, awaiting, still, the moment of
transformation to come, aware of its enormity. As we read and re-read
Nonnus, as his language swells and changes the language of John, we
participate in a continuing reflective process of conversio, a turning to
God, a turning of John, that allows no completion – the enactment of
the achronos, the timelessness, with which the poem starts. This is an
astounding demonstration of how the performative power of Nonnus’
paraphrastic poetics dramatizes the transformation of Christian time.
*
Paraphrase is the metatropic genre par excellence. Nonnus takes up John’s
Gospel, which, significantly, is the Gospel from the beginning most
engaged with Hellenic intellectual tradition and most focused on time
and eschatology, and rewrites it, overlaying its koinē Greek prose with the
different affordances of hexameter verse. In so doing, he rewrites the
culture of Christianity as an elite, educated, theological narrative. Both
the form of his poetic work, and his intellectually challenging discourse,
with its rebarbative vocabulary and syntax, demand a theologically edu-
cated and culturally sophisticated reader. The exuberant poetic extremism
of Nonnus is in service of an agenda, to make the Gospel more Christian, to
reveal its conformity with a post-Nicene settlement. This poetics of para-
phrase is to be located thus not only within an aesthetic contrast with cento
and translation, but also within a contemporary politics of language that
has placed so much theological emphasis on the fixity of tradition and
dangerous innovation at the level of the word. Within this process of
rewriting, the language of time and its narrative expression are articulated

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 266 The Christian Invention of Time
into a newly theological expression. Although, in line with John’s focus,
only a few passages in the Paraphrase talk about time itself, each of these
passages demonstrates an explosive semantic expansion of John’s tem-
poral discourse. Timelessness, the end of death, the violence of rupture,
the normativity of synchronicity, waiting, the smallness/enormity of the
moment, the biology and narrative of a life-story, even making the figure
of Eternity visible – our building blocks of the understanding of time –
are integral to this transformation of the narrative of John in Nonnus’
metatropic poetics. From its first word onwards, Nonnus’ Paraphrase
provides a wildly experimental but brilliantly revealing example of how
the literature of late antiquity invents Christian temporality.

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 chapter 12

The Eternal Return

Nonnus’ Dionysiaca

Let us return to eternity, which in truth we have not ever fully left since the
opening chapter.
Book 7 of Nonnus’ other epic, the Dionysiaca, portrays Eternity as an
instrumental character in the narrative, which, as we will see, is only one of
many ways that time becomes an integral part of Nonnus’ writing. Book 7
marks another beginning too, and, if Eternity becomes a character for the
Dionysiaca, going back to the beginning and starting again is a thematic
obsession for this swirling, twisting, polymorphic and perverse storytelling.
At this point in the narrative of the Dionysiaca, Zeus has just relented from
destroying the whole cosmos with an apocalyptic flood. Typically for
Nonnus, and again we will return to this theme, because Nonnus’ imbri-
cated and entangled narrative constantly requires such gestures of return,
the storm from God is expressed first in astrological terms, as the Sun God
drives his chariot into the quarter of the Lion, and the Moon rides down
Cancer, the Crab (6.233–6). But – and do I need to repeat that this again
will become part of our discussion later? – the flood becomes an opportun-
ity for a wonderfully baroque whirlpool of myth. Earlier, drier narratives of
a world-threatening flood from both the classical tradition and Jewish or
Christian narratives of Noah, are overwhelmed by Nonnus with a full
influx of end-of-the-world horror, twisted into bizarre Witz, so that a whale
can meet a lioness in her mountain den, while bloated bodies pass; and,
what is more, the flood also becomes an opportunity for figures of the
mythic repertoire to float past each other – dramatically embodying the
familiar epic use of the ocean’s roar or the flow of water for the tradition of
song. So, Pan, looking for Echo – who else in the sea of song? – asks the sea
nymph Galateia if she is looking for her Cyclops’ song (aoidē, 6.303, the
classic marker of hexameter poetry) – the song, that is, of her lover,
Polyphemus, most famously composed by Theocritus, but echoed by
others since. The Nile meets the river Alpheius, who laments he cannot
find the spring Arethusa, his lover, always concealing herself – but no doubt
267

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 268 The Christian Invention of Time
in a flood river gods do lose their boundaries if not their identities.
Alpheius also encourages Pyramus to hunt for Thisbe lest Zeus find her
first, and he takes some small comfort for his own loss in the fact that
Aphrodite has lost Adonis: further familiar love-stories from the erotic
novels or the poetry of Ovid. At that point, Deucalion too ‘crossed the
crowning waters, a sailor unattainable (akikhētos) on a skyborne voyage’
(6.367–8). Deucalion in traditional Greek myths is the Noah-like figure
who survives the inundation with his wife to found the human race again
by throwing stones over their shoulders into the earth, stones which
become people, a new beginning for humans. His story has been briefly
told in Book 3 already (3.209–14). Here, it is as if Deucalion has floated in
from another myth, and, far from ending on the stony ground, he is not
only still floating, but raised into the sky, ‘unattainable’ – that marker of
transcendence, Nonnus’ much repeated Homeric hapax, that we saw so
strikingly used in the Paraphrase. Deucalion is travelling out of reach,
founding nothing . . . From this wild, self-conscious and funny
mythic mélange, it will immediately be clear why those who are committed
to the paradigms of classical aesthetics find it hard to appreciate Nonnus –
Matthew Arnold on Dover Beach heard Sophocles not Nonnus in the roar
of the ocean – and why those who love Nonnus do so.
At this point, however, Nonnus concludes, the ‘cosmos would have
become no cosmos’, kosmos akosmos; and, had not Zeus relented, ‘Aion
(Eternity) who nourishes all, would have dissolved the unsown concord-
ance of humanity’, Καί νύ κεν ἀνδρῶν | ἄσπορον ἁρμονίην ἀνελύσατο
πάντροφος Αἰών (6.371–2). In the Paraphrase, the figure of Aion, it will be
recalled, appeared as a personification, a surprising charioteer of time in
a Christian poem, although his representation in the art of late antiquity
suggests at least an imagistic continuity with his broad role as a divine force
from Hellenistic Greek and Roman culture onwards.1 It might seem here
too as though ‘Aion’ is less of an agent than an expression of the magnitude
of the threat to the order of things. The phrasing, however, is not the
familiar topos of the race track, but powerfully evocative. Aion ‘nourishes
all’, a beneficent and supportive framer of existence, who in this counter-
factual case, would have had to dissolve the harmonia that binds men,
making the cosmos without seed, without the future of procreation. Aion is
not just ‘eternity’ but embodies ‘the vital principle that governs the
cosmos’.2 Harmonia is also the name of the bride of Cadmus, whose

1
Levi (1944). For textual continuities, Nock (1935); Zuntz (1992); Foucher (1996); Keizer (1999).
2
Vian (1993) 48.

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 The Eternal Return 269
song had lulled the monstrous Typhon into destruction and thus saved
Zeus as king of the gods and ruler of the cosmos, and who, as the father of
Semele, is destined to be the grandfather of the not yet born Dionysus.
Had this flood continued, the genealogy that gives the world Dionysus
would not have been fulfilled, and the epic narrative would have been
stalled; it would not have reached its dénouement, its (ana)lusis. Harmonia
not only evokes the ancient anthropology that makes social ties the essence
of culture, threatened by this flood, but also imbricates the closure of the
flood narrative into the genealogy of the epic’s hero.
It is significant, then, that the language of Aion’s appearance here at the
threatened end of the order of things is recalled at the beginning of Book 7,
an episode which narrates how Aion supplicates Zeus to allow the inven-
tion of wine to make the world a happier place.3 His observation of the
flood is an anticipation of his involvement in the birth of Dionysus, and
the world-changing innovation of wine. His passing appearance in Book 6
prepares the reader for his intervention in the story of the cosmos in
Book 7.
The book opens with a summary of how the world has progressed since
the flood (7.1–7):
ἤδη δ᾽ ἀενάοιο βίου παλιναυξέι καρπῷ
ἄρσενα θηλυτέρῃ γόνιμον σπόρον αὔλακι μίξας
ἄσπορον ἤροσε κόσμον Ἔρως, φιλότητος άροτρεύς.
καὶ Φύσις ἐρρίζωτο, τιθηνήτειρα γενέθλης,
καὶ χθονὶ πῦρ κεράσασα καὶ ἠέρι σύμπλοκον ὕδωρ
ἀνδρομέην μόρφωσε γονὴν τετράζυγι δεσμῷ.
Already now Eros, with regrowing fruit of ever-flowing life,
Had mixed male generative seed in the female furrow,
And ploughed the unsown cosmos, Eros, the ploughman of love.
Nature, the nurse of generation, was rooted;
And she mixed fire with earth, and water woven with air,
And in the fourfold bond formed the human race.
Now the ‘unsown cosmos’ is productive, nature is ‘rooted’ rather than
floating and disrupted, and humans are linked in love, rather than swim-
ming after lost lovers. The scene after the flood reverses the threat of the
flood. The language of sowing, ploughing and furrows is absolutely trad-
itional, going back to the ritual of the wedding ceremony in fifth-century

3
Foucher (1996) 10 notes that Aion appears just below Theos, the supreme being, in Corpus
Hermeticum 11.2, which he says is ‘doubtless the reason why he plays an essential role’ here with
Zeus. ‘Doubtless’ is a little strong.

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 270 The Christian Invention of Time
Athens, and earlier too, as we saw, in Homer’s ‘generations of men’ and the
language of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite.4 But what makes this
introduction so remarkable is its rich layering of philosophical language,
language specifically to do with the creation of the world. If Empedocles
was a haunting presence in the Paraphrase, here again his theory of matter
runs through Nonnus’ Greek.5 In Empedocles, Eros is a founding principle
of how the elements combine to make things (as in the form of Phanes, he
is for Orphic texts too).6 Empedocles calls the elements rhizōmata, ‘roots’,
and here nature is ‘rooted’ (errizōto), and the human race is made out of the
‘fourfold’ mixing of the elements of fire, earth, water and air. No
Deucalion here. This is not the first time that Phusis, Nature, has been
called on to regenerate the earth in Nonnus. In Book 2, after the battle
between Zeus and Typhon has uprooted mountains and destroyed the
fields, Nature heals the world (2.650–4):
καὶ ταμίη κόσμοιο, παλιγγενέος Φύσις ὕλης
ῥηγνυμένης κενεῶνα κεχηνότα πῆξεν ἀρούρης,
νησαίους δὲ τένοντας ἀποτμηγμέντας ἐναύλων
ἁρμονίης ἀλύτοιο πάλιν σφρηγίσσατο δέσμῳ.
The steward of the universe, Nature, made of regenerative matter,
Fixed the gaping flank of the broken field-lands,
And sealed with the bond of indissoluble harmony
The island cliffs broken from their beds.
Nature is an organizing principle of the cosmos, its steward, and is
composed ‘of regenerative matter’.7 This phrase cues the philosophical
argument, central to the polemics surrounding Genesis’ account of cre-
ation, about whether matter is eternal or whether creation ex nihilo is
possible.8 It was an argument that set Platonists against Christians; it
seeded Augustine’s reflections on God’s time, and, in contrast, was one
of the sticking points that Synesius expressed when he agreed to become
a bishop: as a philosopher, he could not countenance creatio ex nihilo.9
Regenerative matter, however, seems to look towards Christianity’s prom-
ise of eternal life, the resurrection of the body. Nature here, in anticipation
of the flood’s disruption of Book 6 and Eros’ regenerative work at the
4
See above, pp. 25–7 and 31–4.
5
Faulkner (2017) 108 with n. 28 does not consider this passage in his unduly cautious comment
‘Nonnus may well have known Empedocles’.
6
For all things Orphic see Bernabé and Casadésus eds. (2008); and, more specifically, García-Gasco
Villarubia (2008); Otlewska-Jung (2014); Bernabé and García-Gasco (2016).
7
On the materiality of this expression see Goldhill (2020) 119–21. 8 See above p. 28 n. 26.
9
See Ep. 105 with Bregman (1982).

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 The Eternal Return 271
beginning of Book 7, guarantees an ‘indissoluable harmonia’ – the flood’s
threat was precisely ‘dissolving harmonia’ – which is ‘sealed with a bond
(desmos)’ – as Nature ‘formed the human race with a bond’ (desmos).
Nonnus knows his Plato, too. In Timaeus, a text central to the history of
thinking about time and creation, as we saw, and especially to Christian
Neo-Platonism, Plato describes how the universe was created by the
Demiurge, perfect and ageless, out of the four elements, combined in
harmony, by bonds (32a–c).10
Yet the opening line of Book 7 echoes with another philosophical
possibility too. Palinauxei, which I translated as ‘regrowing’ (‘renascent’,
‘increasing again’), is a word that Nonnus seems to have coined, and he
uses it nine times in the Paraphrase. There it refers to Jesus’ honour; the
miracle of the loaves (‘the feast increasing again’); the circle of time;
Eternity (Aion) itself; but, most strikingly, as Gigli Piccardi notes, at the
beginning of Book 15, Jesus announces, ‘I am the vine of life in the
regrowing Universe’ (palinauxei kosmōi) (Par. 15.1), and a few lines later
calls himself ‘the regrowing plant (palinauxei thamnōi, 8), and encourages
the disciples to stay together in faith ‘to swell the fruit’ (auxein karpon, 14).11
That is, palinauxēs is associated especially with the power of Jesus and
especially his power over time, the promise of the life to come – a world
view, imbued with a particular sense of time. Aenaos, which I translated
‘ever-flowing’, is another common word in the Paraphrase and the
Dionysiaca, an ambiguous term which ‘combines the ideas of “perpetual
flux” and “eternity”’,12 and which, from its first use in the prologue applied
to God himself (1.6), is associated especially with the ‘ever-lasting’ life of the
Christian promise, and the constant flow of the cosmos – interconnected
theological ideas.13 The introductory phrase of Book 7 of the Dionysiaca,
‘The re-growing fruit of ever-flowing life’, is a paraphrase of the language of
the Paraphrase (or the Paraphrase a paraphrase of the Dionysiaca), at the
moment when we are about to discuss how Eternity asks for the birth of
Dionysus, and as we read of the beginnings of the human race. The
introduction to Eternity’s supplication is replete with both Empedoclean,
Platonic, philosophical expressivity, and echoes of Christian eschatology,
here at this significant juncture of beginning. This beginning combines its

10 11
See pp. 165–9 above. Gigli Piccardi (2003) ad loc. 12 Vian (1993) 48, my translation.
13
1.6; 4.69; 3.119 (of the Jordan; baptismal water); 4.121; 6.57; 6.217; 8.10 (of Jesus’ words); 11.15; 12.199;
14.121; 16.35. F. D. Maurice was sacked from his role as professor from King’s College, London, by
Evangelical authorities for observing that the ambiguity of the term aenaos could mean that
everlasting punishment in Hell might be tempered by Jesus’ mercy: see Morris (2005).

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 272 The Christian Invention of Time
echoes of different, philosophical accounts of the origins of the world,
matter, and time.
Nonnus, as we have noted, does not explicitly refer to Christianity or the
Christian god in the Dionysiaca. But he is writing from within a Christian
community and for a community familiar with Christian language and
argument. Especially when Christ is described in the language of the vine,
as in Book 15 of the Paraphrase, an extended image beyond even its marked
use in the Gospel (itself an echo of Jeremiah’s prophecies), or when the
Dionysiaca appears to adopt such Christian language in its description of
Dionysus and his exploits, these cross-echoes between the Paraphrase and
the Dionysiaca have repeatedly vexed modern critics, because they pose in
the most sharp form the general question of the purity of either Nonnus’
Christianity or his classicism.14 The difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that
it is not known which epic was written first, or whether indeed they were
composed at the same time. Yet the hybridity that these opening lines of
Book 7 embody, seems to capture something integral to Nonnus’ poetic
discourse. It is not just that he represents a culture where the tradition of
Greek learning continues to play a formative role in the performance of
elite self-awareness. It is rather that Nonnus revels in interweaving different
narratives of the beginning of the human race, allowing echoes of these
different paradigms to pose a question about their distinctiveness and
mixing – as when Deucalion floats by Pyramus, a meeting which makes
no chronological sense, but allows a trace of another mythic world to
impinge on the scene he has created. Critics, that is, are right to be vexed,
because there is a provocation in such a style of writing. This provocation
has repeatedly resulted in critics laughing with or at Nonnus; declaring the
tension between Christian and pagan languages trivial or insisting on
religious rivalry between Dionysus and Jesus; wondering how theologically
or even aesthetically sophisticated Nonnus should be taken to be: perform-
ing, that is, their reaction to the provocation. In short, much as we have
come to realize that the voices of Virgil’s Aeneid require a reader’s political
negotiation of the imperial epic’s narrative of the coming to be of Rome,
a negotiation often performed in assertive political readings of the poem, so
the Dionysiaca’s story of the coming to be of Dionysus, with the invention
of wine and the mythic repertoire associated with the god’s transformative
power, sets its readers to negotiate the hybridity of tradition, their place in
cultural normativity.

14
For modern views with discussion of earlier stances see Shorrock (2011), (2014), (2016); Spanoudakis
(2016); Simelidis (2016); Sieber (2016) all with further bibliography.

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 The Eternal Return 273
It is thus significantly at this layered moment of a new beginning for
humans that we are to meet Aion, Eternity. Aion, as he observed the flood
has been observing the grim life of men, which ‘begins in toil and does not
cease from care’ (7.8) – an echo of God’s promise to Adam at the fall? – and
which needs wine to discover joy, celebration, relaxation, release from pain.
He will supplicate Zeus to allow the birth of Dionysus and the consequent
invention of wine (an invention of what is thus already known). In the
Iliad, the narrative takes a decisive turn when Thetis, the mother of
Achilles, supplicates Zeus, a celebrated scene which in the imaginary of
art history inspired Pheidias’ monumental statue of Zeus at Olympia.15
The supplication here too marks a determinative moment in the narra-
tive – the rebirth of Dionysus – and is equally portentous in its descriptive
language: it makes Aion an instrumental force in the direction of the
narrative. The description of Aion, consequently, may be brief but is
telling. He is, first, suntrophos (10), ‘nourished/nourishing alongside’ and
poikilomorphos (23), ‘variegated in form’, ‘shape-shifting’. Suntrophos
implies that Aion is coeval with Zeus, or perhaps Nature16 – there is no
time for the gods without the time of Eternity. Poikilomorphos opens
a vista, however, onto Nonnus’ poetics. It is a term applied to Aion in
the Paraphrase too (9.154): the Gospel phrase ‘for ever’ (ek tou aiōnos) is
paraphrased with ἐξότε ποικιλόμορφος ἀέξετο πάντροφος Αἰών, ‘from
when Eternity, variegated in form, all-nourishing, increases’, a line which
reworks precisely the vocabulary we have been tracing ([palin]auxein,
trophos, poikilomorphos, Aion) – or, as we must say, alternatively, which is
reworked in the Dionysiaca: the view of Eternity is shared between the
discourse of the Paraphrase and the discourse of the Dionysiaca, a time-
frame for both classicizing and Christianizing vectors of Nonnus’ language.
Poikilomorphos, however, also summons the presiding muse of the poetics
of the Dionysiaca, Proteus. We could indeed with Gigli Piccardi translate it
‘proteiforme’, ‘of protean-form’. Proteus is the god invoked at the begin-
ning of the Dionysiaca, with a call for poikilon eidos, poikilon humnon (1.15),
‘variegated form, variegated song’. Dionysus is the god associated with
making other, the god of transformation (theatre, alcohol, boundaries of
identity), and, as many critics have begun to develop in recent years, the
Dionysiac poetics announced in this prologue of the Dionysiaca signals
both the narrative form of the epic, where, as we have already begun to see,
mythic narratives blend and transform into versions of each other, and the

15
Platt (2011) 293–333.
16
The ambiguity is discussed in Gigli Piccardi (2003) ad loc., which she rightly does not resolve.

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 274 The Christian Invention of Time
language of the poem, which, with its long, twisty phrases and strangely
accumulating compound adjectives, transforms the reader’s perspective in
the journey through a single sentence. Aion is an agent of change, the
embodiment of shifting form – the perfect frame for the transformation
that is Dionysus’ story and style of storytelling – against which the
proclamation of the empedon, the fixity of Jesus’ message, echoes. And
here at the beginning of Book 7, Aion, introduced as poikilomorphos, asks
for a transformation in the world.
Aion is also introduced with ‘holding the key of generation (genethlēs)’
(23) and ‘stretching out his boundless (atermona) hand, the old man,
shepherd of ever-flowing life’ (28). Eros may be the ‘nurse of generation’
(genethlēs) (7.4), but Eternity links the flow of time to the life of humans
that is the passing on of the generations – a fundamental idea we saw in
Plato’s Laws: eternity for humans is the continuation of the generations,
through time.17 Such an introduction significantly announces Aion’s
speech. For he outlines how he has observed that the flood and warfare
have made men’s lives painfully short, and asks therefore for some other
god to control ‘the course (dromon) of my years’ (7.39). The charioteer
imagery of the Paraphrase is taking on a new contour. Aion wants to
change how lives run. Aion marks his pity for humans who are buffeted
by the twin miseries of old age, when man ‘walks with a foot too many’ (43)
(a phrase to delight Freud in his reading of Oedipus), or early death ‘which
dissolves the life-bearing hawsers of indissoluble union’ (47) (echoing again
his observation of the threat of the flood to dissolve harmony, and destroy
the possibility of generation). Aion explains human time to God. Human
lives are not merely short and insignificant, as Apollo in Homer insisted,
but broken by failed fulfilment and marked by pain. And he proposes
a ‘cure’ (pharmakon, 56) that ‘saves life’. Wine can dissipate the cares of the
universe. Zeus with much thought agrees. ‘The primordial (archegonos)
cosmos will be in pain’, he declares ‘until I bear one child’. Again, within
a Christian environment it is hard not to hear at least an echo of ‘God gave
his only begotten son’ (John 3.16, Paraphrase 3.82), so that the faithful
might have ‘everlasting (aiōnion) life’. Eternity asks Zeus to change the
primordial universe – the philosophical language of the opening of the
book has its purchase now – by bringing men the transformation that
Dionysus promises.
This representation of Aion in Books 6 and 7 grounds the later depic-
tions of the god. The second half of the Dionysiaca – Book 25 opens with

17
See above, pp. 45–7.

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 The Eternal Return 275
a second prologue – builds up the scale of the Indian war to come by
announcing that ‘Aion never witnessed such a war’ (25.23). As Aion
witnessed the flood and the miseries of primordial humanity, now he is
called on to mark the magnitude of Dionysus’ triumph. So too, he was
there observing at the foundation of Beirut, the earliest city in the world
(41.84).18 Elsewhere, Aion appears only in the speech of characters rather
than the narrator. In Book 12, the Season (hōra) of the Vintage asks the Sun
which god will have the privilege of overseeing the growth of the vine
(12.23) – reprising Aion’s role in asking Zeus for Dionysus to come for
precisely this privilege. In Book 24, Leukos sings a song for the resting
warriors of Dionysus which includes the light-hearted tale of Aphrodite
learning to weave and hence giving up her usual role in fertility. Aion,
called ‘charioteer of life’, grieves that the harmonia of wedded life is
disrupted and useless (24.265–7). The language of the race track – the
cliché revitalized – is now linked to the cycle of marriage and childbirth – as
the threat to harmonia recalls Aion’s role preserving human intercourse in
the poem earlier. Hermes tells Dionysus how Aion had observed
Phaethon’s fiery self-destruction – another witnessing of a major cosmic
event (38.90–5); and finally, Heracles tells Dionysus how Aion observed the
birth of autochthonous people (40.430–1).
The representation of the figure of Aion is used thus to witness, and,
in Book 7, to intervene in the great course of cosmic events, and to mark
the course of human life as a pattern of generation, understood as the
eternal cycle of procreation over time (the two senses of generation),
which, through the language of harmonia and union, also links
Eternity’s directorial role over life to the genealogy and life-story of
the epic’s hero, Dionysus. The repeated representation of Aion as
a charioteer of time in the Paraphrase is enriched by the recognition of
how the cliché of time’s cycle is thus integral to understanding human
time. The shared language between the Paraphrase and the Dionysiaca
creates a shared framework – with an intense link between Aion and the
Christian promise of eternal life in the Paraphrase, and an equally
intense insistence on the pattern of generation and constant change in
the Dionysiaca. Yet what is most striking is the shift in epic discourse.
For Achilles in the Iliad, the promise is of ‘unfading fame’, as Odysseus,
too, in the Odyssey can assert his kleos against the roll-call of the dead
heroes. Immortality is predicated on the undying power of song to
record and memorialize a hero’s life. Now in both the Paraphrase and

18
On Aion as observer see Vian (1993) 47.

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 276 The Christian Invention of Time
the Dionysiaca, the framework is Eternity, Eternity as a concept,
a concept marked by a long tradition of philosophical reflection and,
above all, theology. Both the poikilos humnos the ‘shifting song’, of the
Dionysiaca, and the empedos muthos, ‘the fixed word’ of Jesus in the
Paraphrase, are set within Eternity’s scope. Poetry is being rethought
through God’s time.
*
The two most insistent problems that haunt eternity as a concept are the
interrelated anxieties about origins or beginnings, on the one hand,
a concern we have already discussed with Augustine’s repeated reflections
on creation and God’s time; and genealogy, on the other, human continu-
ity in and against eternity – anxieties exacerbated by the theological debates
between the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon about the temporal and
hierarchical relations between Father and Son in the language of the
Trinity. The eternal problems: how do things start and where do we
come from? Nonnus writes with extraordinary panache about both geneal-
ogy and beginnings. The narrative of the Dionysiaca repeatedly returns to
multiplied stories of origin, plays with the chronology of stories of descent,
and through prophecy and retrospect makes the time of its narrative
a mythic ‘always already’.
In Book 3, for example, Cadmus, Dionysus’ grandfather, is asked his lineage,
and pours forth ‘like a fountain a line of ever-flowing stories’ (aenaōn muthōn)
(3.246). Cadmus’ answer is indeed one of Nonnus’ mythic narratives that keep
flowing into each other throughout the epic. He begins by rehearsing the
famous answer of Glaucus in the Iliad to the same question about lineage. One
point of origin for muthoi is always Homer. ‘I liken the generation of swift-fated
men to leaves’, Cadmus declares. Homer’s Glaucus said that ‘the generation of
leaves and men are alike’; Cadmus now, with typical upping of self-
consciousness, marks his formation of a simile: ‘I liken’ . . .’. ‘One generation’,
he continues, ‘rides life’s course and is conquered’ – the charioteer of time,
again – ‘another flourishes, to yield to another’, which leads to his conclusion
(3.255–6):
ἐπεὶ παλινάγρετος ἕρπων
εἰς νεὸν ἐκ πολιοῖο ῥέει μορφούμενος Αἰών
Since, turning back as it goes,
Changing form from old to young, flows Eternity
Palinagretos is another term that appears only once in Homer – Zeus’
nod in answer to Thetis’ supplication, which cannot be ‘turned back’ – but,

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 The Eternal Return 277
like akikhētos, it is repeatedly reused by Nonnus (8 times in the Paraphrase
and 22 times in the Dionysiaca). The etymology seems to have been
understood from egeirō ‘to awaken’, and it is most pointedly used not
just for repeated actions but in the context of resurrection – including the
story of Lazarus in the Paraphrase and Tylus and Zagreus in the Dionysiaca,
used in each case with archē, to capture the ‘paradoxical miracle’ of
beginning life again.19 I translate it ‘turning back’ here, but it is used by
Cyril too for the return to life, or, metaphorically, of light to the world, or
even of Christ’s soul returning to him.20 This repetition is not
a trivialization, as Spanoudakis suggests,21 as if its use were no more than
a verbal tic. In fact, the example he disparages (11.47), emphasized by the
verb egeirō and the adjective anēgretos in the preceding lines, announces
Jesus’ intention to raise Lazarus and is pointedly repeated at the climax of
the resurrection (11.164) – thus overlapping verbal repetition, ring com-
position and resurrection as models of return. Both the simple word palin
and compound adjectives with palin as a prefix, come again and again in
Nonnus – there are 14 different such compound adjectives in the
Paraphrase, used fully 69 times, and the simple palin itself occurs another
41 times. Palin sounds like a knell through the Paraphrase: it is the sound of
paraphrastic poetics. The Paraphrase, whose raison d’être is rewriting the
Gospel, making it speak again, is also about Jesus’ repeated assertion of his
message, and his return to heaven, and the recognition that Jesus’ incarna-
tion is the redirection of world history, a look back to the first man and the
possibility of undoing the primal scene of human error. The repetition of
the word palin, which marks repetition, return, reversal, resurrection, is
both the materiality and the thematics of the Paraphrase.
In the Dionysiaca, the first adjective applied to Dionysus is ‘twice-born’;
and, as in all epics since Homer, the hero’s first epithet is a definitional
moment. As we will see, Dionysus is the reborn god (in more than one
way); he is to rise back to his father in heaven; his actions – planting vines,
changing landscapes, defeating his enemies with plant-weapons, raping
women – are repeated again and again in the epic, not in aesthetic homage
to Homeric ‘type scenes’, but because this is, first of all, how the epiphany
of the god is constructed and recognized. As the opening speech of
Euripides’ Bacchae shows, Dionysus travels from town to town establishing

19
‘Paradoxical miracle’ is taken from Greensmith (forthcoming) discussed below, pp. 310–12.
20
Resurrection language: Paraphrase 5.82; 6.162; Christ’s soul Paraphrase 10.61. Cyril, In xii proph.
I.275.20. For the etymology, see the schema etymologicum at Ps-Apoll. Met. Psalm. 22.4 palinagreton
ētor egeirei, and, most saliently, Nonnus Paraphrase 11. 41; 45; 47.
21
Spanoudakis (2014a) 194 ad 47c.

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 278 The Christian Invention of Time
his rituals across the world, again and again. But, more importantly, it is
because Dionysus as a divine figure is especially associated with change,
with turning things upside down and back again, ecstasy and return from
otherness, even with bringing back to life, that the language of reversal,
turning back again, becomes a thematic resource of the Dionysiaca too.
Indeed, as we will see in the final section of this chapter, mythic figures are
repeatedly constituted as tupoi, ‘types’, of each other, ‘another Agave’,
‘another Diomedes’, even ‘another Zeus’, ‘another Dionysus’. As in the
Paraphrase, so in the Dionysiaca, the language of palin is integral to the
conceptualization of narrative time.
No surprise, then, that here it is precisely Aion, Eternity, that Cadmus
describes as ‘turning back’. As time flows, it changes its own form ‘from
grey age to the new/young’. Aion is an old man, but here it is imagined that
even Eternity, it seems, refreshes itself and becomes something neos. (Does
this echo a Christian promise of the ‘new age’?) It is an image that returns
towards the end of the poem, in a scene we shall come to shortly, where
Aion is portrayed as shedding skin like a snake and becoming youthful
again (empalin), washed as he is in the purifying delights of Roman law
(sic) (41.179–82). Here, Cadmus frames his genealogy, usually the most
linear form of time, within a life-course (biou dromon) that is ridden down
or flourishes, but finally twists back on itself.
How this portrayal of time twisting back on itself might form
a genealogical narrative and make a determination of origin difficult is
vividly demonstrated by an earlier passage in Cadmus’ journey of Book 3.
As Cadmus comes to Electra’s palace and looks amazed at the statues in her
garden, Emathion, Electra’s son, is riding from the market place.
Emathion, we are told, has a brother Dardanus, who was fathered by
Zeus and nursed by Dikē (‘Justice’), ‘when the Seasons (hōrai) ran to the
house of Queen Electra, bringing the sceptre of Zeus and the robes of Time
(chronos) and the staff of Olympus, as prophets of the indissoluble power of
the Romans (Ausoniēōn)’ (3.196–9). As we go back to the birth of
Dardanus, we go forward to the Roman empire, which, like the harmonia
brought by Aiōn, is an ‘indissoluble’ (alutos) rule – everlasting. Unlike the
Greek novels of antiquity or an epic such as Quintus Smyrnaeus’
Posthomerica, Nonnus mentions Rome explicitly. Augustus too will have
his prophecy (41.388). The Hōrai, Seasons, are also characters in the epic
who will return, and who here are the nurses of Dardanus, and they bring
‘the robes of Time’. The robe of time is not such an obvious symbol of
power as the sceptre and staff of authority. It places the narrative of
genealogy and power within the scope of a broadly conceptualized

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 The Eternal Return 279
temporal frame. Indeed, Dardanus, continues Nonnus, came to the ‘flower
of regrowing (palinauxēs, again) youth’ (3.201) when the third flood threat-
ened the foundations of the cosmos. The first flood was in the time of
Ogygos (205). This rather shadowy primordial figure gives his name to the
earliest period of human life in Greek and Latin mythography; the second
flood destroyed all humans except for Deucalion and Pyrrha, the story also
evoked in Book 6, when Deucalion again floats through a new flood (209–
14). The third flood lifted Dardanus away from his family (and he plays no
further part in the Dionysiaca). To introduce Emathion, Electra’s son, we
are given a birth-story and genealogy of his brother, which takes us back to
two different flood stories at the origins of history – the genealogy of the
human race – and forward to the everlasting power of Rome (itself
a charged and precarious history in the fifth century after the sack of
Rome). As Cadmus prepares to meet Harmonia, the temporal scope of
the narrative is stretched, back and forward, into eternity.
The final story of Dionysus in Asia, before he returns to Europe and the
familiar mythography of Pentheus and Perseus, constructs the most com-
plex narrative of aetiology, genealogy and the search for origins. Books 41–3
tell of the birth of the beautiful Beroe, how Dionysus and Poseidon both
desired her, and how they fought, until Poseidon won and married her.
Beroe is the patron divinity who gave her name to the city of Beirut
(Berutos), and Book 41 opens with an extended description and eulogy of
the city.22 This eroticized ecphrasis leads, however, into a remarkable
passage about the earliest inhabitants of the place, opening with a single
sentence that stretches over fifteen lines of verse (41.51–65), which describe
these earliest inhabitants’ autochthonous birth. These people are ‘of the
same age as dawn’ (51); Nature brought them forth ‘by some system’ (tini
thesmōi) which did not involve marriage, a father, childbirth, mother (52–
3), but – as in the beginning of Book 7 – by the combination of atoms in
a ‘fourfold bond’ (tetrazugi desmōi, 54, as in 7.6) which allowed the
‘unsown (asporos) mud’ to form a living generation to which Nature gave
a ‘perfected form’ (eidos telesphoron, 58). This perfected shape is contrasted
to the Athenian story of autochthony, when Hephaestus, failing to catch
Athena, ejaculated onto the ground, and sired Erechtheus (as he is named
here), a half-man, half-snake. In Beroe, the autochthonous race is ‘the
image of the gods’ (indalma theōn, 65), the ‘first appearance’ (protophanēs,
66) of humans, the golden race. Again in the Dionysiaca, we are taken back
to the beginning of time. The autochthonous race of Beroe may seem

22
Chuvin (1991) 196–221.

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 280 The Christian Invention of Time
unfamiliar to Greek mythic tradition, but the story is immediately linked
into the Hesiodic theogony. For Beroe, asserts Nonnus (66–76), was a city
founded by Cronos at the time when he was siring and eating his children
(the Hesiodic theogony). ‘Zeus’, Nonnus reminds us, ‘was then a young
fellow, a baby still, I guess (pou)’. Before even the battle with the Titans
which established Zeus’ authority, ‘the city of Beirut was there’ (83). And
the framework is once again made plain (83–4):
ἥν ἅμα γαίῃ
πρωτοφανὴς ἐνόησεν ὁμήλικα σύμφυτος Αἰών.
Eternity [Aiōn] first-appearing
born together with the earth observed the city his coeval
Eternity is the first to appear (prōtophanēs, as with the golden age [66])
but is born together with the earth – a cosmogony where matter and time
coexist from the start – but Beroe is already there at this primordial
moment, although it was built by Cronos. This baffling, entangled tem-
porality of beginning is immediately compared to other mythic claims for
priority. Tarsus did not exist at this point (65), nor Thebes, nor Sardis
‘coeval with the Sun’ (88). Nor was there the ‘race of men’ (genos andrōn –
the term familiar in mythic accounts of the origins of humans): a city
without humans, then . . . Nor did Arcadia proselēnos exist. Proselēnos,
which is etymologized as ‘before the moon’, is a standard term to express
the extreme antiquity of Arcadia in the Greek mythic imagination.23
Nonnus here plays out this etymology: Beroe, he claims, is older than
Phaethon, from whom Selene, the moon, gets her light. Beroe, unlike
Arcadia, is literally ‘before the moon’. Before the heavenly bodies shone,
then, Beroe was the first to dispel the cone of darkness, and ‘disperse the
dark covering of Chaos’. Chaos, in Hesiod, is the primordial chasm: the
beginning – the before – of everything: another echo of another distant,
archaic didactic epic.24 Here, the dark of Chaos is illuminated by the city of
Beirut. Beirut, in this fantastical search for origins, is before every other
first, a city before humans, before the sun, before chaos . . .
The narrative of Beroe takes place ‘under the sign of origins’, as Chuvin
writes.25 It is also haunted by another set of stories, namely, the bizarre
cosmogony written by Philo of Byblos in the second century, which we
know primarily through the lens of Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica, who is
citing it from Porphyry’s Against the Christians, a contemporary anti-Christian

23
See the scholion to Ap. Rhod. 4.264; Dueck (2020).
24 25
Faulkner (2017); see also Bajoni (2003). Chuvin (1991) 212.

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 The Eternal Return 281
polemic: a story or origins, that is, mediated through the appropriative
strategy of a Christian search for prescient intimations in the past of what
the world truly is – and a polemic about Christian truth concerning
creation.26 Philo claims to be translating into Greek the Phoenician cosmog-
ony of Sanchuniathon of Beirut, which was itself a version of the account
passed down by Taautos, a primordial figure assimilated to the Egyptian
Thoth – a fivefold metaphrastic recession of voices (Eusebius, Porphyry,
Philo, Sanchuniathon, Taautos), a story in search of an author. Eusebius is
dismissive because Philo offers both physical, material explanations of cre-
ation, and a Euhemeristic account of divinities that supposes gods were once
extraordinary men – a long-established Greek theory that was particularly
dismaying to Christians struggling with the Christology of a theos anēr.
‘Downright atheism!’, snorts Eusebius. Sanchuniathon’s cosmogony begins
with thickening air, a form of boundless chaos, which leads to a mixture
(sunkrasis) called Desire (Pothos), which led to a primordial mud (Mōt in
Phoenician or ilus in Greek), from which all was seeded, including the celestial
bodies. From wind and night are born the first humans, who are called Aion
and Protogonos. Their children were Genos and Genea (‘Race’ and
‘Generation’). The Greeks in their ignorance misunderstood this story, says
Philo, ‘because of the ambiguity of translation’. ‘Eternity’, Aion, is
a mistranslated Phoenician word for . . . the origin of humans. In Nonnus’
story of Beirut too, ‘mud’, (ilus, 56) is the primal goo;27 nature rather than
a divinity is the cause of the generation, which depends on a mixing; Aion is
the ‘first-appeared’. Cronos too appears later, as in Philo, who pictures an
awful, violent version of the so-called Golden Age. Nonnus’ Beirut has been
shaped by a Greek translation of a Phoenician cosmology, a provocative text
provocatively reappropriated.28 This exotically ludicrous account, comments
Eusebius with dry dismissiveness, ‘was approved as true by Porphyry’ – the
Neo-Platonic philosopher from Tyre, the Phoenician city nearest to Beirut,
and Dionysus’ grandfather’s hometown. Philo, as he enters a polemic of
quotation and counter-quotation in Eusebius, lurks behind Nonnus’ account
of Beirut, a local tale of universal history, a hidden quotation, another origin
for the multiplying origin stories.
This exuberant, drunken excess of origin stories, which are so hard to
reconcile into anything resembling linear time, is far from over, however.
For Aphrodite, it turns out, did not go first to Cyprus when she was born in

26
Eus. Praep. Evang. 9–10: see P. Johnson (2006), (2014).
27
Cf. Ap. Rhod. 4.676 for an Empedocles-influenced account of similar primal goo.
28
Chuvin (1991) 221–2.

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 282 The Christian Invention of Time
the foam of the sea out of the castrated genitals of Ouranos. She did not go
to Paphos, Byblos, Colias or even Cythera (all famous sites of her worship)
(87–109). Rather – as you may by now have guessed – her first landing was
at Beirut. This extraordinary transformation of what was such an estab-
lished literary and artistic and cultic tradition is duly marked in passing by
the comment that the other story is ‘a lie told by Cypriots’, a blithe and
traditional marker of mythographic infighting.29 The goddess calmly
swims through the ‘god-bearing water’ (theētokon hudōr, 112) towards the
shore. Granted the casus belli for the Council of Chalcedon was the
applicability of the term theotokos to Mary, it is hard not to be provoked
by this adjective here, as if we are being asked to set Christian and pagan
theological vocabulary against each other.30 The heady description of her
arrival from the sea, full of roses and soft breezes, also includes, how-
ever, the birth of Eros. His spontaneous generation, as soon as the goddess
was seen on the shore, is a different story of his birth from elsewhere in the
Dionysiaca, where he is the child of Hephaestus and Aphrodite (5.138–44).
Eros, like Dionysus, has multiple forms, multiple births, multiple stories in
the Dionysiaca. He is described here as a cosmic force, as at the beginning of
Book 7 (41.129–30):
γονῆς πρωτόσπορον άρχήν,
ἁρμονίης κόσμοιο φερέσβιον ἡνιοχῆα
First sown origin of generation
Life-bringing charioteer of the harmony of the cosmos.
Eros, as in Empedocles (and in Orphic cosmogonies, where he is named
Phanes)31 is the primal force of generation, here invested with the iconog-
raphy of Aion, a charioteer on the course of life, committed to the harmony
of the world. Another authoritative origin story is woven into Beroe’s
narrative. Eros immediately and exuberantly breast-feeds on the bosom
of the goddess of sexual gratification.
This wild sensual tale leads the narrator to burst into an amazing,
ecstatic hymnic address to Beirut (143–54): ‘Root of life, Beroe, nurse of
cities, boast of rulers, first-appearing, same-sown as Eternity (Aiōnos homo-
sporos), cotemporal (sunchronos) with the cosmos, seat of Hermes, plain of
Justice, town of laws’, and so on for eleven lines of chanted vocatives,
ending – extraordinarily – with the triumphant announcement of the birth

29
Faulkner (2017) sets this within a didactic tradition back to Aratus especially.
30
Shorrock (2011) 61–2 is much more convincing than Sieber (2017) on the pointedness of the term.
31
See n. 6 above.

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 The Eternal Return 283
of Beroe to her parents Ocean and Tethys. The city has (finally) become
the nymph after whom the city is named, and who Dionysus and Poseidon
will fight over in the next two books of the epic. The genealogy which starts
with time before time, the very origin of things, and claimed for itself the
birth of Aphrodite and Eros, has somehow come right up to the point of
the narrative present. As the poet becomes increasingly heated, till he
explodes into a hymn of eulogy, the stories become increasingly hard to
tie into a coherent chronological schema, as tales of origin multiply and
compete, and familiar stories are transformed into new paradigms. In the
prologue to the Dionysiaca, the poet called for the accoutrements of
Dionysus to sing his Dionysiac song, and here the poetry indeed seems
increasingly Dionysiac as stories swirl and blend into each other and
transform, until the poet himself is overwhelmed and breaks into an
ecstatic outpouring towards the city – which metamorphoses into the
announcement of the nymph’s birth. This is Nonnus’ Dionysiac poetics
dramatically on display.
And yet, with a startling and very funny coup de théatre, at this very
moment of ecstatic outpouring, Nonnus stops his narrative dead in its tracks
and states ‘But there is a younger story (phatis)’ (155) – and the narrative
which had reached such a pitch simply takes another track.32 Now, Beroe is
the daughter of Aphrodite and Adonis (157), a quite different genealogy, and
as her birth approaches, Hermes arrives with a Latin letter, a ‘herald of things
to come’ (160).33 Latin poets regularly recognize earlier Greek models, and
Ovid is happy to add a Greek explanatory account of a ritual to supplement
his Roman understanding. But Greek writers only very rarely acknowledge
Latin authorities explicitly, and do not readily admit even to knowing Latin
well.34 It is marked, then, that Hermes, a Greek god, arrives with a Latin
message. It would seem that after the first, Dionysiac splurge of origin stories
in the deepest past, a real abyss of time, now we are to enter the historical
time of the Roman world. Indeed, Beroe’s birth is also aided by Themis, the
goddess of order and justice, who has Solon’s laws in hand, and Hermes, the
‘male midwife’, is there because he is dikaspolon – a Judge. Aion – again
present and observing – ‘coeval with Ocean’, Beroe’s father, swaddles the
baby with ‘the robes of Justice’, pepla Dikēs (179). The baby Beroe is nursed
by Astraia, who pours statutes into her mouth with the milk, as the baby
burbles laws in response (215–17). All Beroe’s drinks are brought from
32
Faulkner (2017); it has often been discussed if this second story is an invention of Nonnus: Accorinti
(2004) ad loc.
33
See Lightfoot (2014) 41 who calls this ‘a favourite usage’ and lists parallels.
34
See Goldhill (forthcoming a) with bibliography and further discussion.

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 284 The Christian Invention of Time
inspirational springs to foster her eloquence. Beirut is a famous centre of
Roman law, and this new birth story, its new genealogy, is building towards
a celebration of this Roman foundation – a very different historical model.
As we have more than one Dionysus, more than one Eros, now we have
more than one Beroe.
The girl’s birth is greeted with a cosmic joy that turns the prophecies of
Isaiah into a Dionysiac scene, where the lion gently kisses the bull on the
neck, the wolf with playful cries kisses the sheep, the hound dances
a sprightly jig with the boar, a calf licks a lioness . . . Aphrodite too is
thrilled with the child, and decides to build a town to celebrate her
daughter and the Law she embodies. So she tours in her imagination cities
with a claim to fame and age: Mycenae, Thebes (named for the primeval
(archegonos, 270) city of the same name), and decides to compete with
Athens, Athene’s city, celebrated for its legal history.35 So she visits the
house of Harmonia to ask for advice. This Harmonia appears to be
a goddess, rather than Cadmus’ wife – a second Harmonia to add to our
list of repeated doubled figures (‘I seem to see two cities, two suns’, is the
paradigmatic sign of Dionysiac possession). Harmonia, with her care for
order – the justice that is harmony – is asked which city should house the
Law her daughter brings. Harmonia reveals that she has seven tablets, each
named after a planet, which contain ‘prophecies of the cosmos’.36 The
world’s history is inscribed on these tablets, and if Aphrodite consults the
tablet of Cronos she will learn what she needs to know. She will find out if
Arcadia or any other place can make such a claim to be the oldest city, and
thus have the right to house the process of Law.
The oracle is not only clear but also close to the claims of the first
genealogy of Beroe (41.364–7):
πρωτοφανὴς Βερόη πέλε σύγχρονος ἥλικι κόσμῳ,
νύμφης ὀψιγόνοιο φερώνυμος, ἣν μετανάσται
υἱέες Αὐσονίων, ὑπατήια φέγγεα Ῥώμης,
Βηρυτὸν καλέσουσιν, ἐπεὶ Λιβάνῳ πέλε γείτων.
Beroe was first-appearing, cotemporal with the cosmos her coeval,
She has the name of the nymph born later, which the colonizing
Sons of the Ausonians, consular lights of Rome,
Will call Berytos, since it is a neighbour to Lebanon.

35
The D Scholia to Il. 18.491 states that Athens was the first city to be created: the claim of Beirut to be
first may echo also against that tradition.
36
Vian (1993); Accorinti (2004) 162–4.

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 The Eternal Return 285
With the same vocabulary as before, Beroe is ‘first-appearing’, ‘coeval
with the cosmos’, but – with more clarity – named after a descendant (not
a problem in Nonnus’ ‘preposterous poetics’), and renamed by Romans.37
Beroe, then, will house Beroe. Yet as Aphrodite consults the tablets and
finds lists of other ‘first founders’, she also sees an oracle of Beirut’s future,
written in many verses of Greek poetry (unlike Hermes’ Latin letter) (389–
97). When Augustus comes to power, he will found the school of Roman
law at Beirut which will become a bulwark of social justice in the world.
The Greek poem predicts the triumph of Roman law and order. The city of
Beirut was in fact destroyed in 140 bce and only slowly recovered to
become a city of the Roman empire and centre of Roman law thanks to
Augustus’ intervention. The two oracles juxtapose the eternity of Beirut
and its modern history of change and redevelopment. Aphrodite returns to
set her son Eros to incite Poseidon and Dionysus to fight over her
daughter . . . and the narrative continues with Beroe reshaped as the object
of divine lust rather than the harbinger of Law.
The narrative of Beroe in Book 41 – on which more could certainly be
said – is an arresting example of Nonnus’ poetics, and of what happens to
time in his narrative. As befits the celebration of a law school, different
accounts are set against each other for the judgement of the reader. As befits
Dionysus’ inspiration, the first account swirls with increasingly exuberant
assertions about the beginning of time, mixing different authorities and
different claims about the primordial, transforming familiar stories into
wild alternative imaginings – and it ends with bursting into an invocation
as the poet appears overwhelmed by the sheer marvel of Beirut, which by
the end of the invocation has become transformed into a nymph born to
the Ocean. But equally befitting a Dionysiac poetics, the return from such
ecstasy is dramatized with a second story, with another, wholly different
genealogy – and the juxtaposition, with its alternative birth stories, is itself
paradigmatic of the ebullient excess of the mythic repertoire in the
Dionysiaca. In this second story, Greek and Latin prophecies combine to
create a historical account of what is to happen, and unlike the misty past
of the first story, the tale of Beirut is firmly located in the political history of
Rome and Augustus. In contrast to linear aetiology, the city is named after
a nymph who will be born generations later, and, as the city’s name will be
changed by Romans, its role will be redefined by a future intervention by
Augustus, anticipated at the nymph’s birth by Hermes with a Latin letter,

37
In what remains for us an incomprehensible etymology: see Accorinti (1995/6). On the contrast
between this passage and Quintus Smyrnaeus in terms of cultural politics see Hadjittofi (2011).

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 286 The Christian Invention of Time
as if Rome and its laws were there at the origin of time. In the narrative of
the Dionysiaca, the search for origins and the descent of genealogy are
transformed into a kaleidoscopic mélange of competing and conflicting
stories of how things start, and a designedly entangling challenge to the
linearity of time’s narrative.
*
This story of Beroe has been anticipated in the Dionysiaca especially by
two, further scenes that embody Nonnus’ fascination with time, prophecy
and the twisting unfurling of continually entangled narrative.38 The first is
in the previous book. Dionysus visits Tyre, his grandfather’s birthplace,
and as with Beroe, we have an ecphrasis of the city, focalized now through
the god’s wondering gaze.39 The maritime city is described in one of
Nonnus’ rare similes as like a girl swimming – the picture is, of course,
carefully eroticized40 – stretching her arms, whitening her body in the
foam, with her feet on the earth, while Poseidon embraces her neck with
a splashing arm – anticipating Aphrodite’s swim towards shore in the
following book. Dionysus views the town, expresses his amazement, and
then offers a prayer in the temple of Heracles Astrochiton. Within the
arena of Greek religion, the assimilation of the Phoenician god Melikart
with Heracles and then the Sun is a familiar slide.41 So Dionysus addresses
the god as ‘Astrochiton Heracles, lord of fire, prince of the cosmos, Sun’
(40.369–70). The Sun is invoked as driving his chariot in twisting circles
(helikēdon): ‘twisting the son of Time, the year, with its twelve months, you
drive circle after circle. From your chariot flows Eternity (Aiōn), taking its
shape in old age and youth’. Aion in Homer, as we saw, can mean a ‘life-
time’, and Accorinti translates Aion here reasonably as Vita, ‘Life’; or
perhaps, with Vian, ‘the vital principle’ that governs not just the universe
but an individual’s life-course.42 This invocation of the Sun’s power in the
cosmos continues with his birthing of the light of the moon, the sequence
of the seasons, the contrast of night and day, and the weather. In Dionysus’
prayer, the Sun is taken as a central force to understand the flow of all levels
of calendrical time – year, seasons, night and day – and the weather, and
the experience of a life-time from youth to old age. There is a recognition
of the full panoply of Time’s robes, conceptualized through the heaven’s

38
Vian (1993), who calls these scenes ‘cosmic preludes’, has been especially influential.
39
Chuvin (1991) 224–54.
40
Chuvin (1991) 226–7 notes the influence of Achilles Tatius throughout the description.
41
See Fauth (1995) 165–84. Fauth starts his chapter with a 13-line sentence: writing about Nonnus
affects style. See also Chuvin (1991) 233–9.
42
Accorinti (2004) ad loc. Vian (1993) 48.

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 The Eternal Return 287
order: this is the grounding of the narrative of the god’s ascent to Olympus.
The grandeur of the address is part and parcel of the grandeur of the vision
of time and the heavenly bodies as the necessary frame of the Dionysiaca.
Beyond even the Aeneid’s recognition of Roman imperium sine fine as an
expression of divine providence and necessary order,43 Nonnus makes
cosmic order and cosmic time figures in Dionysus’ narrative. The
Dionysiaca parades how time has become a subject of epic in late antiquity.
This hymn to the Sun is especially evocative in the religious context of
late antiquity.44 The Dionysiaca has already ‘invented’ the hymn, when the
character Hymnos is murdered for his forlorn passion, and lamented with
a pastoral hymnos by nature and its divinities (15.395–422). But the worship
of the Sun was central in the tensions and battles between Christianity and
paganism, not least through the emperor Julian, who wrote a long piece,
which he called a (prose) humnos, ‘On the Sovereign Sun’, which mixes
Neo-Platonism, ethnography and religious history to set the Sun as
a central and dominant force in all religion.45 Orphic Hymn 8 is to the
Sun and demonstrates the place of Helios in liturgy and Bacchic mystery
cult.46 Most saliently, however, Nonnus’ contemporary Proclus wrote
a ‘Hymn to the Sun’, which begins with an address to the ‘king of fire’,
as Dionysus begins here, ‘lord of fire’. This image goes back to Plato’s
Timaeus, and is found too in the Chaldaean Oracles.47 There are many
shared terms and expressions between the language of Proclus and the
discourse we have been tracing in the Dionysiaca.48 In Proclus, the Sun is
even hymned as ‘the father of Dionysus’, which associates the Sun and
Zeus, and Dionysus is consequently also associated with Attis and Adonis
as figures who come back from death, and thus stand as symbols for the
journey of the soul. The Sun itself, in a phrase likely to catch the eye of
a Christian reader, is the creation of the ‘ineffable (aporrhētos) deity’. Three
examples, then, not just of non-Christian but of stridently anti-Christian
hymns to the Sun, to which we could add the huge religious debate in Book
1 of Macrobius’ Saturnalia which relates every god of the Greek and

43
Hardie (1986).
44
See Agosti (2015) on the importance of hymns in late antiquity. He surprisingly does not discuss this
passage, however.
45
See, on Julian, Smith (1995) 114–78; in general, see Fauth (1995), who includes the evidence from
magic papyri for the role of the Sun in spells and mystery cults.
46
Graf (2009).
47
See Van den Berg (2001) 152–5 for full discussion. Proclus’ commentary on Plato’s Timaeus 3.141f
Diehl; 3.9.8–27 Baltzly provides the theory and quotes the oracles. See also the extended discussion
of the sun in Book 4.
48
Saffrey (1984) discusses the richness of Proclus’ language in the hymn, and especially its Platonism.

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 288 The Christian Invention of Time
Roman pantheon to worship of the sun, in a bravura mixture of scholarship
and literary mythography (Sat. 17–23), a parade of learning in Latin and
Greek which includes an Orphic hymn that links Phanes to Dionysus to
the Sun (18).49 For Nonnus, the Christian poet, to write a hymn to the sun
may, then, be a charged moment, even in an epic about Dionysus. Here
with Dionysus’ prayer, as god prays to god, both the shift between
Melikart, Heracles and Helios, and the intense, culturally resonant lan-
guage of the hymn to the Sun, constructs a moment where the boundaries
between Neo-Platonism, Orphism, and the Christianity of Nonnus are
especially fluid. Nonnus’ hymn may be ‘eccentric and hyperbolic’ –
Dionysiac? – in its combination of ‘religious, mystical, magical, astronom-
ical, or, more precisely, astrological, and philosophical-cosmological’
elements;50 but what is distinctive, however, is that although Proclus
calls the Sun, in a list of vocatives, the ‘father of Time (chronos)’ (8.13), in
contrast with such anti-Christian hymns it is only in Dionysus’ prayer that
the Sun’s power is articulated through so many levels of human and cosmic
temporality.51 The hymn to the Sun becomes another occasion to envision
the role of time in the god’s story.
Heracles answers Dionysus’ hymnic invocation and appears in epiphany
to him, and, in answer to the god’s request, offers two long stories, the first
about the foundation of the city, the second about the foundation of its
fountains, two more origin narratives. The first begins with yet another
story of autochthonous generation of an original population, an anticipa-
tion of the first genealogical myth of Beroe, in language that has by now
become familiar to this discussion. ‘Eternity (Aion), same-sown, saw them
alone as coevals of the ever-flowing cosmos’ (40.430–1). Again, to talk of
the origin of humans is to talk of eternity and the everlasting cosmos; it is
a necessary frame. Second, he explains that the fountains were once water
nymphs who wished to avoid sex, but Eros – with a mythical excursus on
the many rivers and fountains who have fallen in love, including Okeanos
and Tethys, the parents of Beroe, Galateia and Polyphemus, and Arethusa
and Alpheius, pairs we saw in the flood of Book 6 – forces the water
nymphs to join with ‘sons of the soil’. These relationships are, concludes
Heracles, ‘the divine blood of your generation’ (40.573). That is, Heracles’
first story takes Dionysus’ genealogy back through Tyre, his grandfather’s
city, to an autochthonous race at the beginning of time, back to the earth
itself; his second story takes Dionysus’ blood back to divine water nymphs

49 50
Chuvin (1991) 231–2. Fauth (1995) 165, my translation.
51
Proclus’ commentary on Timaeus, especially Book 4, reveals a far deeper background, of course.

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 The Eternal Return 289
(anticipating his own sexual exploits in the Dionysiaca) and another set of
primal ancestors (archegonoi, 40.538). Dionysus comes now from earth and
water, another beginning, after his birth in fire. ‘Twice-born’ Dionysus
multiplies the narratives of his genealogy, how this history in-forms him
through time.
The second scene that anticipates the narrative of Beroe in an especially
striking manner comes in Book 12 – and involves the first visit to the
prophetic tablets of Harmonia, the tablets at the house of the Sun.52 At the
end of Book 11 and the beginning of Book 12, the Horai, the ‘Seasons’, are
figures of the plot, as was Aion in Book 7. They are the daughters of the
Year and the Sun, maidens who dance and sing, and they visit their father’s
palace to ask about the coming of the vine, which will grow, be harvested
and make wine under their ordering of time. When they arrive, the Sun has
just dismounted from his chariot with its sweaty horses, and they are
greeted by the twelve Hours, also named Horai, who are called the
‘daughters of Time’ (Chronos) (12.15). Nonnus revels in the confusions of
myth’s nomenclature, and in the doubling it allows. Hōra means both
‘season’ and ‘hour’ in Greek, so Nonnus has one set of Hōrai meet the
other Hōrai, juxtaposing rather than disambiguating the two senses. With
the Sun, the Seasons, and the Hours who are the daughters of Chronos,
gathered to talk about Aion’s gift of the honour of the vintage, Nonnus
dramatizes time as an extended family – a divina comedia of time.
In answer to his daughter’s request – she is, as a Season should, ‘circling’
round him (31) – the Sun directs her to the tablets of Harmonia, which, the
narrator indicates, contain ‘all oracles in one place’, inscribed by ‘the
prophetic hand of Phanes the first born (prōtogonos)’ (12.33–4). Phanes,
assimilated to Eros, is the primal figure of Orphic cosmogony – yet another
explicit claim to the origin of things. The first tablet is described as
atermonos hēlika kosmou, ‘the same age as the boundless universe’ (12.43).
As with ‘beginning again’ there is something of an oxymoron in the claim
to be the same age as a universe without limit – without a beginning or end.
So, at 9.140, Hermes, in order to save the infant Dionysus from Hera’s
wrath, takes on ‘the boundless (atermona) shape of first-born (prōtogonos)
Phanes’ – an even sharper paradox, since it is hard indeed to imagine
a distinctive shape (morphē) with no boundaries. The first tablet contains
the story of Ophion, who ruled Olympus before Cronos, another story of
a time before – and the tablets of Book 41 were written by Ophion (not
Phanes – though Phanes and Ophion are sometimes ‘associated’ as primal

52
The fullest commentary on this passage is still Stegemann (1930) 128–72.

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 290 The Christian Invention of Time
figures). As ever with Nonnus, the beginning – the point of origin –
dissolves into paradox, uncertainty, multiplicity. Yet the existence of
these oracles at the beginning of time, which reveal all of coming history,
is the perfect image for the ‘always already’ of Nonnus’ mythic narration.
The Season views the tablets of Harmonia to find an answer to her
question, and, as she reads, discovers a potted history written by ‘the primal
(archegonos) mind, variegated in tales (poikilomuthos)’ (68). To call Phanes
‘the primal mind’ is to emphasize the philosophical, Orphic roots of the
figure,53 but poikilia is a key sign of Nonnian poetics, here placed at the
very beginning of the world, a founding principle: the oracles are indeed
polutropa (66), a word which both encodes the Odyssean slipperiness of
Nonnian poetics and performs it in its allusivity. These oracles may be
fixed from the beginning of time but, like Odysseus, they also pose a trap
for interpreters.54 On the second tablet, indeed, the Season sees ‘how the
pine-tree gave birth to the human race’ (56) – yet another, variegated origin
story for humanity, which nonetheless turns into a further telling of
Deucalion and the flood (59–64). In contrast to the story of Genesis,
which may tell the story of creation twice, but which locates the beginning
of the human race firmly in Eden and firmly brought about by the willed
creative force of God, the Dionysiaca produces multiple sites, multiple
methods, multiple histories for the origin of humans, a multiplicity com-
bined with conflicting, entangled genealogies and hazy, uncertain pro-
cesses of coming to be. The contrast between what we can call Dionysiac
history and biblical history is stark and telling. Unconcerned, the Season
reads on, until she reaches some astrological signs, under which she
discovers the promise of the vine, as the special province of Dionysus.
She can then depart happy with the future to come.
This first visit to the tablets of Harmonia at the palace of the Sun
anticipates the second viewing of the prophetic tablets in the Beroe episode
at the palace of Harmonia. In both cases, prophecy plays a determinative
role in the narrative (as so often in epic). In both cases, however, the tablets
also record written prophecies from and about the primal moments of
humanity, prophecies that lay down all the future for always. Both passages
recognize, manipulate and happily play with the paradoxes of temporality
and narrative established by the search for a beginning, a ‘first-born’
moment. Yet there is a further doubling that opens a particularly difficult
area of Nonnus’ representation of time. For in both passages the zodiac is
woven into the very structure of the prophetic tablets. Indeed, Harmonia’s

53 54
Gigli Piccardi (2009). Fincher (2017) 123–4 – a little heavy handed.

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 The Eternal Return 291
seven tablets are said to stand each for one of the seven planets (41.341), just
as the tablets of Book 12 are named after the signs of the zodiac. What does
astrology mean to Nonnus?
I write astrology but I could say astronomy, because the modern distinc-
tion between observation of the astral bodies and the use of astral bodies for
prediction of the future are constantly blurred in antiquity – to the degree
that one standard term for the person who engages in such work is
mathēmatikos, which signifies the science of mathematical calculation at
the shared base of what modernity would insist are separate subjects.55
From at least Hesiod’s Works and Days onwards in Greek culture, the
movement of the stars, as well as the moon and sun, are fundamental not
just for telling the hours of the day, but also for marking the seasons and thus
the pattern of the agricultural year. The stars predict the weather, and this
sort of general (‘catholic’) astrology leads to – and is sometimes in antiquity
contrasted with – personal horoscopes. The slide from using the stars to
predict the seasonal weather into using the stars to predict the changes of
a human life stands at the heart of late antique polemic around astrology.
The history of the field is long and complex, certainly.56 Already in the
fifth century bce through the public performances of drama, imaging the
cosmos through astrology is an integral element of the interconnection of
prediction, inescapable fate, order and disorder that runs through the
overdetermined narratives of tragedy – just as playing with the calendar,
based on lunar observation, in order to avoid the due date of a debt can
become a joke in Aristophanes. The chorus of stars and chorus on stage
mirror each other’s circular dances.57 The detailed mathematics of personal
astrology, however, as well as the science of astronomy, seem to have
developed with particular intensity as practices in the Hellenistic world,
and continued through to late antiquity.58 There are ‘thousands of pages
(mostly Late Antique manuals, didactic poems, and papyrus
horoscopes) . . . written in Greek’,59 two major technical works in Latin,

55
See Kennedy (2011).
56
See, for examples: Hegedus (2007) (Christian); Reed (2004); von Stuckrad (2000); Leich (2006)
(Jewish tradition); Rudolf (2014) (Aramaic); Jacobus (2020) (brief summary of Dead Sea Scrolls);
Cramer (1954); Barton (1994a), (1994b); Gee (2000); Volk (2009) (Greek and Roman); Heilen and
Osnabrück (2016); Oestermann, Rutkin and von Stuckrad eds. (2005) (horoscopes). For the
standard older discussions, see Bouché-Leclercq (1899); Cumont (1912); Festugière (1950); Gundel
and Gundel (1966). For Nonnus, see Stegemann (1930).
57
Gagné (2019); Csapo (2008) (well criticized for its Orphic turn by Gagné); Hannah (2002); and the
extraordinary Miller (1986).
58
Volk (2009) 67–75; Lightfoot (2020).
59
Heilen and Greenbaum (2016) 123. For the works of Ps-Manetho, see now Lightfoot (2020).

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 292 The Christian Invention of Time
Manilius and Firmicus Maternus (both heavily indebted to Greek mater-
ial), and innumerable poetic references and discussions in Greek and Latin
writing – to the degree that Quintilian (Inst. Or. 1.4.4) insists that you
cannot understand poetry without some knowledge of astrology, since it is
so common for poets to use astrology to differentiate time.
Quintilian (Inst. Or. 10.1.55) also finds the popularity of Aratus baffling – to
the orator he is dull and his story has no action – but Aratus’ Greek
hexameter poem Phainomena was indeed hugely influential on the Latin
poets of the Republic in particular, and his work is especially telling for
Nonnus too. Aratus, ‘master word-smith and amateur astronomer’,60
offered a highly sophisticated poetic account of the moving map of the
stars, which encapsulates a broadly Stoic image of the universe as an ordered
cosmos.61 Echoing Hesiod, Aratus lays down as a principle that god ‘fixed
signs (sēmata)’ in heaven; and ‘comprehensively reveals the signs’ (772).
These signs are so that ‘the being of everything is fixed (empeda)’ (13) – the
establishment of order demands regularity and certainty (and it will be
remembered how important the term empeda is in Nonnus’ Paraphrase, in
contrast with the exuberant world of Dionysiac change). This sense of order
is temporal. In a remarkable programmatic phrase, the multiform travelling
stars are said to be in motion πάντ᾽ ἤματα συνεχὲς αἰεί, ‘all the days,
continuously, always’ (20). Three ways to express the span of time, and
the inevitable connection between astrology and temporality: that is,
duration – each moment of each day – sequence, and a sense of eternity,
stretching forwards and backwards. Aratus parades the constancy and
certainty of his vision – words for ‘all’ and ‘ever’ are repeated through his
text from the opening line, where Zeus is declared to be always cele-
brated, or, to be precise, with a double negative, to be ‘never unspoken’,
oudepote . . . arrhēton (1–2), ‘never “ineffable”’. The ineffability of the
Logos that is so important to Nonnus’ Christianity is also a contradiction
of this certainty of Aratus’ theologically grounded science. So, in the final
two lines of the poem, with a ring composition that mirrors the circling of
the stars, Aratus promises that if you observe ‘all these things together’ –
his comprehensive science of the comprehensive universe – you would
never (oudepote) be uninformed (1153–4). Arrhētos is also a pun on the
author’s name Aratos. Aratus’ text revels in puns, etymologies and acros-
tics, including an acrostic of the word leptē, which means ‘sophisticated’
in the poetics of the era, and also may recall the term lepton, a technical
term for a ‘minute’ in astrology – a triply self-reflexive game with sēmata.

60 61
Gee (2001) 534. See Gee (2000); Hunter (1995); Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004) 224–45.

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 The Eternal Return 293
The ‘signs’ revealed by god are expressed in the signs of Aratus’ language
which also dance to hidden and revealed tunes.
No surprise, then, that Ovid, most self-consciously sophisticated of
poets, and especially in his Fasti, repeatedly turns to Aratus. The Fasti is
announced from its beginning as a poem of time (tempora is its first word),
a poem which sings ‘the signs (signa) that rise and fall under the earth’ (2) –
astrology as the measure of time.62 Yet Ovid, unlike Aratus, happily
imagines a drunk observer of the stars blurrily missing the signs (6.785–
90), and his observer of the heavens is ‘subjective and problematic’63 –
blithe in error and accuracy – a stance that epitomizes the ‘indeterminacy
and uncertainty of knowledge’64 in Ovidian explanations of the world. The
god Janus, after whom January is named, paradigmatically confesses ‘me
Chaos antiqui (nam sum res prisca) vocabunt’, ‘The ancients, for I am an old
thing, called me Chaos’. The beginning of Hesiodic time turns out now to
be a talkative, misnamed Roman god (who faces two ways). There is always
a profound instability in Ovid’s shifting stories, and not just in the
Metamorphoses. If such instability, set against the imperial claims of imper-
ium sine fine, has a political snideness, it is all the more marked when the
subject is time. Caesar’s calendar embodied the emperor’s ‘control over
time’.65 The state, as we have seen, organized and regulated the time of its
subjects. The coincidence of the celestial and the terrestrial calendar now
meant that reading the stars had less necessity, on land at least (navigating
at sea still required astrology’s accuracy). With the new accuracy of Caesar’s
reordered calendar, the date now matched the season, predictably. In 11 ce,
astrologers were exiled from Rome and personal astrology, especially
casting the horoscope of the emperor, banned.66 Yet Augustus allowed
his zodiacal sign to become a symbol of his fated power, and the Hellenistic
practice of catasterism, epitomized by Berenice’s Lock, celebrated by
Callimachus and then in translation by Catullus, took imperial power
into the map of the heavens.67 If personal horoscopes were instruments
of power, dynamic in their manipulation,68 so too the imaging of the
cosmos was a framing of imperial authority, in and against which Ovid’s
Fasti is shaped. Astrology becomes a factor in the politicization of time.

62
Gee (2000). 63 Kimpton (2014) 36.
64
Schiesaro (2002) 74. Herbert-Brown (2002) suggestively argues that the absence of predictive
horoscopic astrology in the Fasti is a politically loaded strategy.
65
Kimpton (2014) 45; or Volk (2009) 131. See, more fully, Feeney (2007).
66
Ripat (2011) (with full bibliography) who nuances the seminal Cramer (1954).
67
Gee (2000) 154–87; Volk (2009) 127–73.
68
Barton (1994a), (1994b); Heilen (2005); Volk (2009) 127–73.

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 294 The Christian Invention of Time
Or for the designed refusal of the politicization of time. Marcus
Argentarius is probably a contemporary of Ovid’s, and one of his best-
known epigrams manipulates the analogy between the macrocosm of the
universe and the microcosm of a human life with an elegant melancholy,
which recognizes the tension between the observation of the heavens and
the predictive authority of astrology with an amused disavowal of respon-
sibility or duty (AP 9.270). ‘I am on the razzle’, it begins (kōmazō), ‘and
I am staring at the golden chorus of the evening stars’. Like Ovid’s drunken
astronomer, Marcus Argentarius has stars dancing before his eyes. ‘Nor do
I step heavily on the gossip of others’69 – amid the partying, he disturbs
nobody, his eyes elsewhere. ‘I have crowned the dark hair of my head with
shaking flowers, and with my musician’s hands I have struck the strings.’
The poet is dressed for the party and performing. He concludes:
καὶ τάδε δρῶν εὔκοσμον ἔχω βίον· οὐδὲ γὰρ αὐτὸς
κόσμος ἄνευθε λύρης ἔπλετο καὶ στεφάνου.
When I act like this, my life is a model of good order. For not even
The cosmos itself moves without the lyre and crown.
As if rehearsing the moral injunctions of sympotic poetry that require an
orderly display of drinking and singing – a demand observed, as here,
mainly in its transgression – Marcus declares his life is ‘well-ordered’:
eukosmos is a well-worn political and social admonition. But the term sets
up the final joke. The cosmos – in its other sense of the universe – has its
Lyre and Crown, that is, the constellations so-named in the night sky, the
stars he was watching at the poem’s opening: the heavens provide
a determinative analogy for the poet’s life on earth. The belief that the
heavens are a model of god’s order, and that the stars determine a man’s
life, become here an amused defence of his partying. The refusal to be
serious about the seriousness of good order is also a political stance, of
course, and this lovely little poem exemplifies how there is more than one
way to use astrology to illumine a life-time. As the poem sets the poet
against the stars and his companions, so it sets the epigrammatic moment
against the eternity of the universe.
Marcus Argentarius’ melancholic wit becomes full-throated parody for
the second-century satirist Lucian, whose On Astrology, written with his
typical flair and wit, performs a mock eulogy in Ionic Greek – as if it were
a defence of the science by a trendy sophist of old, now hopelessly out of

69
The text is difficult here: see Gagné (2019) for the most recent discussion.

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 The Eternal Return 295
date. He writes an imaginary history of divination by the stars from its
invention by Ethiopians, and turns a series of familiar myths into an
increasingly baroque, rationalizing anthropology of astrology. So,
Orpheus and his music are no more than a pointer towards the Lyre
constellation, the animals who listened to the singer, the animal signs of
the zodiac; even Aeneas’ birth from Venus, Rome’s foundation myth, is
explained as the good-looking Aeneas being born ‘under Venus’, a birth
sign misremembered and mythologized. For Lucian, both astrology’s
status as a science and its very claims to historical authority are already
an open target for his intellectual satire. The Ionic Greek – old-style
science – is the mocking voice of Lucian’s snide takedown of astrology’s
pretentions to antiquity.
The tradition of astrological writing, distinctive from the use of astrol-
ogy in mundane circumstances of doubt and anxiety, is established as
a literary tradition.70 Hipparchus explains that Aratus had turned a prose
treatise of Eudoxus into verse, and Eudoxus was a pupil of Plato’s, which
takes us back to the Timaeus and its account of the birth of time with the
sun, the moon and stars. Aratus in turn is translated into Latin by Cicero,
and by Germanicus, the emperor in waiting, and, a third time, by Ovid,
the poet exiled by the emperor (and three others, too).71 But both the
practice of consulting horoscopes and this literary delight in the sky’s
sēmata or signa proved dismaying to Christian normative writers, intent
on projecting a new vision of time and the cosmos, as it was contested by
earlier philosophers too.72 This angry and rhetorically potent Christian
engagement with astrology provides a fundamental framework for
Nonnus’ poetry.73
Astrology in the sense of the observation of the heavens can certainly
play a role in a Christian perspective on the universe, because of the
argument from design, which runs on into the nineteenth century (and
beyond). The orderly movement of the stars, sun and moon is a sign of
God’s creation, God’s direction. So Clement of Rome, from as early as the
first century, writes ‘The sun and moon, with the companies of the stars,
roll on in harmony according to His command, within their prescribed

70
For the awkward literary status of a text such as Ps-Manetho, neither Anubion nor Aratus, see
Lightfoot (2020), who tries to evaluate the practical use of its ‘solemn pedestrianism’ (183) and
‘sclerotic catalogues’ (195).
71
Varro of Atax (first century); Avienius (fourth century); anonymous (eighth century) see Volk
(2009) 28.
72
See Long (1982); his Christian sources are no more than Augustine, Civ. Dei 5, however.
73
On Christian astrology Hegedus (2007) is seminal.

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 296 The Christian Invention of Time
limits, and without any deviation.’74 In this statement, Clement is close to
the standard principle of Stoic philosophy, the elite educational lingua
franca of the Roman empire, that also saw proof of the divine logos in the
order of the celestial bodies. This sense of celestial order can include the
role of the heavenly bodies in predicting the seasons and the flow of time.
Ps-Clement’s Recognitions gives an account of creation which states that the
stars were placed in the sky so that ‘they might be for an indication of
things past, present, and future. For they were made for signs of seasons
and of days, which, although they are seen indeed by all, are understood
only by the learned and intelligent’, ab eruditis et intelligentibus, as Rufinus’
translation has it (1.28.2). Astrology is here also a science, and even Gregory
of Nazianzus praises his brother Caesarius for his skill in this area of elite
knowledge.75 The roots of this religious recognition of the science of
astrology are found in Genesis, where Abraham is instructed by God to
‘observe the stars and count them, if you are able’ (15.5). Artapanus, the
Hellenistic Jewish historian, with the typical projection of Jewish cultural
precedence that we have seen in the Letter of Aristeas, concludes that
Abraham learned astrology and taught it to the Egyptian kings, who are
usually assumed to be the first authorities in the field.76 Josephus with
a more complex apologetics tells the same story, but now within more
conflicted Greek and Roman attitudes towards astrology and its
foreignness.77 Eusebius lists other sources that Abraham taught the
Pharaoh, but takes Enoch to be the inventor of astrology.78 Origen, with
his more philosophical theology, firmly distinguishes between the stars as
signs and stars as causes – separating, that is, what modernity would call
astronomy from astrology – but he, too, in a remarkable and beautiful
poetic expression, describes ‘the stars dancing in the heavens for the
salvation of everything’, ἐν οὐράνῳ σωτηρίως τῷ παντὶ χορευόντων
ἀστέρων.79 Wonder at the order of things leads even Origen to see in
the stars a dancing sign of salvation.
Yet reaction against astrology as a science of prediction produces
a complex polemic among Christian writers. Augustine is a particularly
fascinating case. In the Confessions (4.3.4–6), he confesses that he used to
frequent astrologers, and begs God’s mercy for such behaviour. It was, he

74
Clement of Rome, Epistle 1.20. 75 Or. 9.9 – also with the argument from design.
76
Eus. Praep. Evang. 9.17.2–9.
77
See Josephus, AJ 1.155–6 with the excellent discussion in Reed (2004).
78
Eus. Praep. Evang. 9.17.8 on which see Charlesworth (1977). See also Clem. Alex. Misc. 124.
79
Origen, On Prayer 7. On Origen, see Hegedus (2007) 329–38; Hall (2020), Hall (forthcoming),
especially 92–9.

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 The Eternal Return 297
explains, because the astrologers did not use sacrifices, as did Roman
practitioners of divination, nor did they pray to any spirits. The lure was
the science: he calls the experts mathematici, and the objectivity of numbers
was crucial to the astrologer’s self-representation.80 He was taught by his
friends to dismiss such personal horoscopes. Astrology, like sex, must be
rejected on his route to orthodoxy.81 It is a rejection that he comes back to
again and again, not just in the Confessions,82 but throughout his career,
with increasing aggression, at greatest length in the first seven chapters of
Book 5 of the City of God. He sarcastically rebuts astrologers who use Jesus’
expression from the Gospel of John nondum venit hora mea, ‘My hour has
not come’, as if it justified a horoscope for Christ. Rather, to be ‘a slave of
sin’, a phrase from the Gospel of John that we discussed with the
Paraphrase, is explained by Augustine as ‘a slave of Venus or Mars’ – that
is, going to an astronomer is an act of self-slavery; or, as he puts it most
forcefully elsewhere, consulting an astrologer is like paying for one’s own
spiritual death.83 Augustine repeats the same arguments against astrology
again and again. How can it be that twins have such different lives when
they are born at the same time (an argument he repeats no fewer than seven
times)?84 If the astrologer retorts that the small difference between birth
times for twins determines the difference, Augustine counters with the
impossibility of making any such accurate measurements. Above all,
however, the determinism of astrology – that a man’s life is fixed from
the moment of his birth – is hated as a denial of free will, the possibility of
moral choice, the transformative efficacy of prayer, the very dignity of
a Christian life. ‘The stars’, like fate, become an excuse to hide a person’s
moral culpability.85 The sheer repetition of Augustine’s complaints and the
forcefulness with which he makes them indicate the threat of astrology
both to Christianity as a practice and to Augustine himself – he needs to
enforce the distinction between astrology’s predictions and his own inter-
ests in unwilled grace or in his practice of opening a book to find an omen
in a verse, as he separates his new self from his old. It is worth questioning
why in the myriad modern discussions of Augustine on temporality so little
attention has been paid to this repeated – obsessive – rejection of a model
of understanding time and the unfurling of a life. It is hard, it seems, for

80
Kennedy (2011). 81 Ferrari (1977).
82 83
Conf. 7.6.3. Augustine is discussed in Hegedus (2007) 43–84. Enarr. in Ps. 140.9.
84
Civ. Dei 5.1–7; 83 Diverse Questions 45.2; Diverse Questions to Simplicianus 1.2.3; On Christian
Teaching 2.22.33–4; Literal Commentary on Genesis 2.17.36; Confessions 6.10; Against Two Letters of
the Pelagians 2.14–16 – data taken from Hegedus (2007) 74 n. 80.
85
Enarr. in Ps. 140.9.

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 298 The Christian Invention of Time
contemporary critics to take astrology as seriously as Augustine does, even
when discussing Augustine on time.
Cyril of Alexandria and Gregory of Nazianzus, both much read by
Nonnus,86 reiterate the argument against astrology that it denies free will
and thus moral action, but Gregory also points up another difficulty. Did
not the Magi predict the birth of Jesus by astrology? Did these wise men of
the East not follow a star, precisely? ‘A star will arise out of Jacob’ (Num.
24.17) provided a ready prophetic source, but this did not remove the
problem.87 Ignatius in his Letter to the Ephesians asks ‘How was [Christ]
revealed to the aeons?’ – aiōsin: ‘eternity’ again is at stake – ‘A star shone in
heaven, brighter than all the stars, and its light was ineffable (aneklalēton),
and its novelty (kainotēs) caused astonishment. All the other stars together
with the sun and moon became a chorus for the star, and it outshone them
with its light’ (19.2). The star that heralds Jesus is a sign of the majesty of
Christ, but also typologically evokes Joseph, in whose dream the stars and
sun and moon bow down to him. Yet the result of this star’s appearance is
that ‘From this moment all magic (mageia) was destroyed and every bond
of evil disappeared’ (19.3). The Magi come to end the power of magic, and
the end of evil is explained by Ignatius as the promise of the new life,
a beginning (arkhē) prepared by God. Tertullian puts the same case more
bluntly: the magic of astrology was ‘allowed until the Gospel’, usque ad
evangelicum concessa, but then becomes a sign of evil.88 Theodotus declares
that this new star destroyed tēn palaian astrothesian, ‘the old order of
constellations’.89 It was, Gregory announces in a poem we will come
back to in the next chapter, ‘not the sort of star dealt with by astrologers’ –
Christian astrology has to supersede the science of pagans.90 The star is not
just a sign, but a redesign of the heavens.
Hippolytus’ Refutation of All Heresies has almost a whole book dedicated
to astrological heresies, which include (4.46–50) a group of heretics known
as the allegorizers of Aratus – Christians who use Aratus’ poem as a guide
but assimilate it to Christianity though an allegorical technique. So, these
heretics take the Lyre and the Crown, the constellations that Marcus
Argentarius brought to bear on his life, to stand for the divine law and
the crown achieved by those who follow the divine law. (So if you look at
the stars you can see the (constellation of the) kneeling man, Engonasin,
who is associated with Adam, kneeling before the Divine Law (Lyra), that

86
Simelidis (2016) with bibliography.
87 88
Von Stuckrad (2000) 555–86; Heilen (2015); Hannah (2015). On Idolatry 9.4.
89
Casey (1934) 86.650. 90 Poem. Arcan. 5.

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 The Eternal Return 299
is, confessing his sins, and reaching with his hand towards the Crown
(Corona): the allegory is not sophisticated, at least in the text of its
refutation.) As Tertullian humiliates a Christian convert who wishes to
keep up his profession of astrologer,91 and as Augustine talks of how he
himself had been seduced by the mathematics of astrological prediction,
and as artistic representations, including famous examples in synagogues,92
figure the zodiac prominently, so Hippolytus’ huge exposition of astro-
logical heresies indicates the anxiety that the continuing purchase of
astrology on the community produces among Christian ideologues.
One figure who seems amusedly comfortable in his Christian superiority
to astrology is the little discussed Zeno of Verona, a bishop from the 360s,
who despite his Greek name writes in Latin, at around the same time as
Gregory of Nazianzus.93 Some ninety-two of his sermons (‘Tractates’)
survive, mostly about Easter, often bitterly dismissive of Jews, but one
speech is addressed to a group of recent converts to Christianity.94 Zeno
takes the idea of rebirth literally. Unlike the very recent past, these converts
are now ‘pure infants free from all guilt’. With a pleasing wit, he imagines
that they must be fascinated to know, then, since they are so many, and
from such a diverse background, what their ‘natal constellation’ (genitura)
is or ‘under what sign’ (quo signo) they are born. And so, as if they were just
kids (parvulis), he offers to reveal their ‘sacred horoscope’, that is to say,
their ‘birth-chart’ (genesis – like genitura and signum, a technical term in
astrology). Zeno thus starts with a bravura string of smart rewrites of
astrological expectations: ‘It was not Aries but the Lamb, who received
you’ – that is, their natal sign is not the Ram of astrology, but the Lamb of
Christian symbolism. Each zodiacal sign becomes the opportunity for
a supersessionist expansion of the theme of rebirth. Tertullian in De
spectaculis had made this sort of reading a familiar part of Christian
interpretation, with his characteristically overheated rhetoric: ‘You want
blood?’, he demands of those who like gladiatorial games, ‘Take the blood
of Christ!’.95 Zeno, in a more gentle but no less triumphalist manner,
demands we read the zodiac now through Christian eyes, to celebrate
a Christian view of a new type of birth, a new time.

91
On Idolatry 9.1.
92
See Hachlili (2002) for bibliography and discussion; also Levine (2012). Targum Pseudo-Jonathan
surprisingly explicitly allows mosaics in synagogues provided no obeisance is made: Charlesworth
(1977).
93
See Hegedus (2007) 353–70; and McEachnie (2018) for basic introduction and bibliography to this
obscure figure.
94 95
1.38 (Löfstedt). De spect. 29.

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 300 The Christian Invention of Time
The strength and scope of Christian polemic is highlighted by the
contrast with Jewish responses.96 We have already seen how Jewish
writers – from Philo and Artapanus to Josephus and beyond, including
the Talmud – took Abraham as the inventor of astrology, from which,
according to Jubilees, he deduced the principle of monotheism.97 Philo is
clear that worshipping the celestial bodies is a gentile error, but he too takes
astrology as a normal part of cultural tradition,98 and there is striking
evidence in the Qumran documents and in Jubilees of active Jewish
involvement with astrology.99 The locus classicus for rabbinical discussion
is tractate bShabbat 156a–b, which is the closest parallel to the Christian
theological debates.100 This passage is a carefully edited sugya which
recognizes horoscopes and the influence of the planets on individual
lives, but which also insists that a person can avert a bad fate by moral
action, thanks to divine intervention. It concludes that there is no mazel
(luck/fate) for Israel. The argument, that is, not only recognizes the power
of astrological horoscopes, especially over the lives of gentiles, but also
allows the necessary place of the free will of moral choice. Within the
overall principle of Talmudic editing ‘to systematize and synthesize earlier
halakhic traditions to eliminate contradictions and provide more general
and abstract formulations’, this passage seems to bring together what might
seem contrasting vectors in a conclusion that is ‘a type of compromise’,101
and an apologetic: the power of a commitment to halachic living, accord-
ing to rabbinic regulation, could avert the evil decree of fate.
In contrast to Roman ambivalence, then, which criminalized personal
horoscopes, while avidly reading astronomical literature, and in contrast to
this cautious Jewish assimilation, Christian ideological objections to astrol-
ogy stand out all the more clearly. For Christian theologians, the norma-
tivity embedded in the invention of Christian time required the excision of
astrology. Yet, for all this concerted effort of theological theory, here is one
area where even Christian communities failed to follow. Into the
Renaissance, astrology in the hands of figures such as Ficino,
Melanchthon and Kepler – against the rage of Luther and Calvin –
remained part of serious attempts to gain knowledge of the future: where

96
Fullest discussions in von Stuckrad (2000); Leich (2006).
97 98
See Reed (2004); Rubenstein (2007). Taylor and Hay (2012), with further bibliography.
99
Dimant (2014) 489–97, with further bibliography; Leich (2006). Von Stuckrad (2015) discusses
Jewish political uses of astrology.
100
See Rubenstein (2007), which is sounder than Gardner (2008); von Stuckrad (2000) 460–80.
101
Rubenstein (2007) 139.

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 The Eternal Return 301
the Christian insistence on the reinvention of time failed in practice to
change the fascination with the stars.
*
Nonnus, therefore, writes from within a deep history of a continuing
practice of astrology, a continuing representation of the zodiac even in
religious surroundings, an extended literary history of the use of astrology
especially in epic, and a very active ongoing debate about ‘fate’, ‘the stars’
and prediction within the Christian community, including in Cyril, and
the Cappadocian fathers, whom he seems to have read most avidly. It is
a frame of cultural expectation that nonetheless makes it extremely hard to
evaluate the impact of Nonnus’ repeated use of astrology within the
Dionysiaca.
Nonnus is the only ancient literary writer, for example, to describe at
length a scene of casting an individual horoscope, a genesis.102 At the
beginning of Book 6, Demeter becomes terrified for her daughter
Persephone. The girl’s beauty, she recognizes, has inflamed the desire of
the divinities, and the goddess is frightened about which god might
consequently try to assault her; she is especially concerned about the
lame Hephaestus (6.14). So, Demeter goes to consult Astraios, ‘the god
of prophecy’, daimonos omphēontos (16). Astraios is the father of the winds
in Hesiod (Theog. 375–80), but in Aratus, the father of the stars (as his
name suggests), and hence the god for astrology. Astraios is found with
a table covered in dark dust in which he had described a circle with a square
inside it with a pointed metal tool, and next to it an equilateral triangle (19–
23). He is engaged in the mathematics or symbolics of astrology. After
dinner and a dance, Astraios turns to the matter in hand. He gets the
genethlia metra, ‘the numbers of her birth’, the time (chronos) and hour
(hōra) of her birth (archegonos), and does a calculation with his fingers (59–
60). The vocabulary for this initial calculation includes several terms that
we have seen to be highlighted in the Paraphrase and Dionysiaca: his fingers
‘move back and forth’ (metatropa); the number ‘recurs again’ (palinnos-
toio); the number is a moving ‘circle’ (kuklon) (61–3). The returning circles
that we have seen associated in both poems with Aiōn, ‘Eternity’, here are
linked with the mathematics that grounds the girl’s fate. The suggestion
might be that the inevitable flow of time and the inevitable flow of fate are
connected by this mathematics of circles.

102
Since Stegemann (1930) 88–100, scholars have concentrated on how detailed or sophisticated the
science is – it is clear that it is not especially technical – but have not discussed adequately the
striking novelty of the subject itself.

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 302 The Christian Invention of Time
Astraios, armed with these numbers, has a servant bring him an astro-
logical globe, (eukuklon sphairan), a device that fascinated ancient science
since its invention, ascribed to Pythagoras, and its development by
Archimedes. He turns the circle of the Zodiac (kuklon again (68)) on its
pivot, and consults the ‘moving and fixed stars’ (69). The ‘counterfeit sky
turns’ (kukloumenos) and ‘bends its course around the boundless turning
post’ (atermoni nussēi, 71). Again, the language closely echoes the descrip-
tion of Aion, the charioteer, in the Paraphrase. Astraios observes an eclipse
on his model, and especially focuses on Ares – and Aphrodite, as the
question is one of sexual transgression – and finds them linked (75–85).
But he also notices the rising of Spica, the Ear of Corn. Thus, with his
‘prophetic voice’103 he predicts both that a deceitful half-monster will
ravage Demeter’s daughter, and that Demeter will be celebrated for the
bounty of crops.
The scene is remarkable not just because of the grandly exotic scene of
performed astrology, but also because the process involves divinities and
a personal horoscope. On the one hand, in the tradition of ancient epic,
with its multiform representation of gods receiving and giving prophecies,
and recognizing and acceding to fate, there is no other example of a god
behaving like an anxious mother turning to such a science for comfort or
knowledge. In the same way, only in the Dionysiaca in ancient literature
does a god have dreams – deceitful, encouraging, confusing prophecies of
the action to follow – like a human.104 This is not how the gods of epic
usually – generically – conduct themselves. On the other hand, while the
epic tradition is happy to imagine the cosmos as an ordered whole as part of
its politics and teleology, there is no other scene where any individual turns
not to divine prophecy but to the far dodgier practice of astrology to gain
access to the future. What makes the scene so hard to evaluate, therefore, is
the particular combination of exotic grandeur and conceptual bathos.
Magic can have its own grandeur and terror, certainly, with Medea, say,
or Circe. The attempts of humans to control the world through magic can
also play with the bathos of failed and self-deceptive hopes, as with
Theocritus’ portrayal of Simaetha, the girl deserted by her seducer
(Idyll 2). Nonnus takes the scene of the anxious and fearful Demeter
from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, where she hunts for her stolen
daughter in desperate silence and grief, and builds from it a moment
103
See Lightfoot (2017).
104
Dionysus at 18.169ff.; and Ares at 29.238ff. Plutarch (?) De facie in orbe lunae 942a–b in a remarkable
image depicts Cronos, bound for ever by Zeus in sleep, dreaming of Zeus’ plans, but this rarity is
not parallel to Dionysus’ human-like dreams.

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 The Eternal Return 303
where the awesomeness of the divina comedia – the very aetiology of the
seasonal world – is freighted with the less than grand associations of
personal horoscopes.
This moment tests the comfortableness of modern critical assumptions
of the ease of assimilation between the classical tradition and Christian
normativity. Nonnus portrays a scene which draws on ancient epic but
which is also unparalleled in its subject and treatment. He is also depicting
a subject that Christian authorities have repeatedly railed against, but
which in some form continued in society, both in practice and in material
culture’s representations. Is Nonnus’ portrayal a way of marking the poet’s
or reader’s distance from the old gods, gods who need such human
measures? Is the display of the practice of casting a horoscope to be taken
as the exoticism of the other, a moment of fascinated voyeurism for the
sophisticated reader? Is the scene a version of the delight Hellenistic
authors could also take in imagining the gods engaged in more trivial
human activity, as Eros is often portrayed playing with his friends and
cheating – also, needless to say, an image of desire’s delusions? Or is it no
less or no more concerning than the other tales of divine activity in the
poem, where, for example, in scenes that are especially unpalatable for
a modern reader, the celebrated hero of the poem, Dionysus, is happy to
rape young females, who are stridently committed to their virginity? What,
in short, does – should – astrology mean to Nonnus?
This provocation, this challenge seems likely to be experienced by
ancient readers too. If the Paraphrase, by its very form, entails
a triangulated reading between the Gospel, commentary and the new
poem in a way which constitutes a transformative cultural intervention,
the Dionysiaca, a poem dedicated to the transformative god par excellence,
repeatedly constructs scenes that pick up and transform the stories and
imagery of antiquity, its own cultural intervention: how is this past to
signify now? This metatropic discourse tests its reader’s engagement. Jane
Lightfoot, rightly suspicious of syncretism, accommodation, or resistance
as adequate models for Nonnus’ writing, asks whether ‘despite rhetorical
elaboration, Nonnus has in the case of prophecy at least, remained essen-
tially true to the postulates of each cultural whole’,105 that is, true to
paganism in the Dionysiaca and to Christianity in the Paraphrase. Yet,
not only is this scene of casting a horoscope designedly challenging both to
the epic tradition and to Christian expectations, but also for fifth-century
Christianity and for the tradition of pagan culture viewed from the fifth

105
Lightfoot (2016) 643. See also Lightfoot (2014).

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 304 The Christian Invention of Time
century, the integrity of a ‘cultural whole’ is fragmented into contested
arenas of normativity and behaviour.106 It is because a scene of casting
a personal horoscope for a god does not fit easily into the cultural tradition
of epic or of Christianity that it poses a question to its readers – a multi-
layered question which includes reflections about how a life-time is deter-
mined and about the function of prediction – about, that is, the experience
of temporality.
The figures of the Zodiac have been present in the Dionysiaca as active
characters, like Aion, since the opening book. Epics begin with a scene of
chaos that needs resolution: the breakdown of civility between Achilles and
Agamemnon; the household of Odysseus in turmoil; the storm as a bar to
Aeneas’ mission of foundation. In the Dionysiaca, where a new god requires
the reordering of the cosmos, the initial scene of chaos is a battle of the
cosmos, where Typhon attacks the very structure of things. In this opening
conflict, the signs of the Zodiac including the sun and the moon, are fully
involved as combatants. If the celestial bodies in their regular movements
are the very signs of order, disorder is expressed at the grandest level when
the heavenly signs are violently disrupted.107 At the start of the fight, the
number seven is especially emphasized in Nonnus’ astrological numer-
ology. ‘Itself answering the seven-zoned sky, the seven-mouthed echo from
the mouths of the Pleiads of equal number raised the war-cry, and the
planets smashed out a noise of equal measure’ (1.240–3). The parallel
between the seven zones of the heavens, the seven Pleiades and the seven
planets is reinforced by the language of echoing and answering, and the
repeated insistence precisely on the equality of number (isērithmōn, isome-
tron). This parallelism is also seen at the beginning of the second half of the
Dionysiaca on the Shield of Dionysus, introduced as ‘the starry (asteroessa)
shield of the sky’ (25.352).108 The first and framing scene described on the
shield is the ‘seven zones’ (25.396) of the heavens; the second is the ‘seven
gates’ (416) of Thebes, which are played into existence by the ‘seven-
stringed’ lyre (428). The shield itself is come to end the ‘seven years’
(397) of the war against the Indians. By this numerological repetition of
the number seven, the narrative time of the war is linked to the mythic time
and space of Thebes, home of so many Dionysiac stories, which is made
parallel to the cosmological time of the zodiac in this programmatic

106
For ‘integrity’ as the relevant but misguided normative term, see Lightfoot (2017) 155.
107
Komorowska (2004) – though her final suggestion that this represents the regrettable violent
triumph of Christianity over paganism is too tendentious.
108
A much-discussed ecphrasis: see Spanoudakis (2014b) with bibliography; Hernández de la Fuente
(2011); Miguélez Cavero (2008) 297–300.

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 The Eternal Return 305
ecphrasis. The analogy between the heavens and life on earth, as ordered
and mathematically regulated patterns, and the embodiment of this ana-
logy in the narrative of the epic, is foregrounded in the programmatic
image of Dionysus’ shield. Astrology is invoked to underline how time’s
order and narrative’s order are mutually implicative, equally fated.
It is not by chance, therefore, that the Seasons go to the House of the
Sun at the ‘fated time’ (chronos memormenos 11.520) to consult the pro-
phetic tablets of Harmonia. Prophecy is located in the domain of the
central figure of the celestial world, the Sun, central on the shield of
Dionysus. The tablets are marked by zodiacal signs – the third tablet
which predicts Dionysus’ patronage of the grape-harvest is under the
name of Leo and Virgo (12.39). Similarly, in Book 41, as we have already
mentioned, we are told that there are seven tablets, one each named for the
seven planets (41.341). Each tablet is engraved in red, by Ophion or Phanes,
who is a primal god in Orphic myth, and each contains all the prophecies
of what will happen. In Book 12 the oracles that are emphasized concern
not only Dionysus, but also a range of mythic stories including Philomela,
Niobe, Pyramus and Thisbe, who appear elsewhere in the narrative of the
Dionysiaca; in Book 41, as we have seen, the prophecies go up to Solon and
to Augustus, a political and historical narrative of law-giving. At crucial
junctures of the narrative, the prophecies that stimulate or announce the
action to come are presented within a set of other prophecies, other stories.
Each prophecy marks the interlinked and fated network of foretold
actions.
So in Book 7, after Aion has supplicated Zeus to allow the birth of
Dionysus, Eros goes on to shoot his arrow of desire into the king of the
gods in order that he will pursue Semele to procreate Dionysus in fulfil-
ment of his promise. Eros is described immediately as sophos autodidaktos
aiōna nomeuōn, ‘Clever, self-taught manager of aion’. Gigli Piccardi and
Vian both translate the final phrase as ‘shepherd of life’.109 It is hard,
however, immediately after a scene dominated by the personified figure
of Aion, to take aion in this unspecific and general sense. Especially when
the first two words of the line not only invoke a long history of the
representation of love as a smart rhetorician who makes lovers eloquent,
but also encourage sophisticated reading. Eros, ‘Desire’, rather, is here the
motivational force in how the long unfurling of eternity is shaped. Desire
‘organizes eternity’ (where the slide between the personified figure, who has
asked for Dionysus’ birth, and the abstract, temporal category recalibrated

109
Gigli Piccardi (2003) ad loc.; Vian (1993).

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 306 The Christian Invention of Time
by the birth of Dionysus, is significant). Hence Eros goes immediately to
the gates of ‘First-born Chaos’. Eros – often taken as a primeval force in his
own right – goes back to the beginnings of (Hesiodic) time, where he has
twelve arrows in a quiver, each inscribed with a foretold name of one of
Zeus’ mortal lovers. They run from Io all the way to Olympias, the mother
of Alexander the Great – from the mythic world of the oracles of Book 12 to
the historical world of the oracles of Book 41. From Io to Alexander, time’s
narrative is ordered by Eros’ arrows.
The arrows of desire, it would seem, drive time forward in a sequence of
twelve to match the months of the year. Yet for all these indications of order
and regulation that the figures of astrology provide to the discourse of the
Dionysiaca, there is still the destabilizing effect of the multiple points of
origin and the multiplying and transformative stories of myth. Eros here may
be the ‘organizing driver of eternity’ but his status as primeval, originary
force is shared with many other claims to be the first born, including Chaos,
Aion, Ophion, Phanes, Beroe . . . This unresolved tension between the
always already of foretold mythic inevitability, and the multiplying, con-
trasting and even chaotic stories of origin, or the contingent, mutating,
stories of myth, runs throughout Nonnus’ narrative.
So what does astrology mean to Nonnus? The extended use of astro-
logical discourse in the Dionysiaca first of all suggests, then, that time is
ordered. The regular movement of the stars, the sun, the moon constructs
a model for a determined cosmos. The language of kukloi, ‘circles’, associ-
ated with Aion and other figures of time, therefore links the representation
of time as a figure into the model of the cosmos as a regulated pattern of
movement, which is itself a principle of Stoic philosophy, but also
expressed through echoes of Orphic cosmogony in particular. Dionysus
may be the god of transformation, and the narrative may relate Dionysus’
ascent to heaven and the changes he brings to human life, but the temporal
framework is one of threatened but maintained cosmic order. Second,
however, the use of astrological discourse to predict the future, tied as it is
into other forms of prophecy by the narrator’s voice or by internal figures
of the narrative, helps inform the narrative itself as determined, the always
already of myth. As we will see in the final section of this chapter, the
notion that stories are not merely determined but repeat each other is
integral to the typological redrafting of the narrative. Yet, thirdly, despite
this overdeterminism of astrology, Nonnus sets such predictive certainty in
tension with multiple versions of stories, stories that are transformed into
new and surprising accounts, and multiplying points of origins, multiply-
ing claims to be the ‘first-born’. The swirl of narratives, blending into each

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 The Eternal Return 307
other, without regard for chronological order, repeatedly threaten the
directed purposiveness of the narrative, extending and twisting the story
round again on itself. If the Odyssey is the archetypal narrative of nostos, the
Dionysiaca tells its story under the sign of palinnostos, ‘turning back on
itself’.
Nonnus’ astrology, then, is integral to his temporal discourse and to how
he explores the inevitability and contingency of his storytelling. But his
astrology remains hard to relate simply to the dominant normative dis-
courses of fifth-century intellectual life. Astrology is dismissed by authori-
tative religious intellectuals as a travesty of moral judgement and a false
science, if it is used for the personal predictions of horoscopes – and here it
is a pagan god who uses astrology; but the science of observing the heavens
is respected, not least when it testifies to God’s order in creation. And it is
clear that the use of astrology never stops in the Christian community.
Whether or how the pattern of the stars should be part of a Christian
understanding of time’s order remains a fight between intellectual author-
ities and their communities for centuries to come – much as predestin-
ation, original sin and moral responsibility remain an integral part of
Christian polemics. Is the experience of a life-time as it must be or as it
can be? Nonnus’ astrology does not fit easily either into the generic
expectations of epic – how can an immortal god need a horoscope? – or
into the normative expectations of Christian narrative – no-one should use
a horoscope! Perhaps Nonnus’ bold representation of astrology is best seen
as something of a provocation, then – a potential flashpoint in the border
wars between paganism and Christianity. What astrology means to
Nonnus, that is, is not to be answered with a simple declaration, but
recognized as an ongoing question, a question not just about how
Christian or how pagan Nonnus’ poem is taken to be, but also about
how determined and how fluid are the narratives of past and future time.
*
The presence of the future in the past is strikingly on display when Zeus, as
king of the gods, summons his supporters to aid Dionysus in his battle
against Deriades and the Indians. Zeus’ rhetoric echoes with the epitaphioi
of classical Athens, the funeral speeches over the war dead that repeatedly
laid out the importance of past military exploits for the soldiers of today (as
we saw with Demosthenes’ version).110 Mnōeo, he repeats (27.254, 263, 285),
‘remember’, ‘remember’, ‘remember’ – an injunction that also draws

110
See above, pp. 142–3.

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 308 The Christian Invention of Time
attention to the literary tradition he is invoking. But the gods are being
asked to remember what has not yet happened. Athene is asked to repay
a favour to Icarius, the first in Athens’ territory to receive wine, who in the
chronology of the mythic narrative of the epic is not met until some twenty
books later (47.34ff.). What is more, Athene is also asked to recognize the
history of centuries after the time of the poem. She is asked by her father to
preserve Pan, ‘the future helper in Attic battle; preserve the preserver of
shaken Marathon, the killer of Medes’ (27.299–300). The epitaphios para-
digmatically used Marathon as a spur to encourage Athenian virtue, so here
Zeus uses Marathon and Pan’s role in it as a spur for Athene to fight and as
an example of glory – but for the future. This typology allows, indeed
insists on, the reversibility of chronology and a spreading of exemplarity,
which melds story into story as exemplars or contrasts of each other.
So Aiacos, the grandfather of Achilles, has his aristeia, where he fights, the
narrator announces, ouk atheei, ‘not without god’ (22.384). This is
a significant introduction. For Aiacos is described immediately as fighting
in a river, ‘as he is the father of Peleus’, a watery battle which ‘foretells the
half-finished (hēmiteleston) fight to come for Achilles by the flow of the river
Kamandros; the clash of the grandfather prophesied the clash of the grand-
son’ (22.386–9). Odysseus at the end of the Odyssey, as the fight with the
suitors’ relatives erupts, stands shoulder to shoulder with Telemachus and
Laertes, and Laertes notes with joy that the three generations of single sons
are competing in valour, an image of the achieved patriarchal triumph of the
household. In the Iliad, Priam appeals to Achilles to recall his father, as
Odysseus in the Odyssey is asked by Achilles to tell him about Neoptolemus,
his son. As Odysseus provides the iconic image of the household saved,
Achilles’ young death represents a negative picture of normative generational
succession. Here, however, we have three generations of the family of
Achilles, but only in the text’s representational strategy: the here and now
of the narrative is replete with the literature of the past that is yet to take place
in the time of the epic and thus three generations stand, as it were, shoulder
to shoulder in the river of poetry. A hero’s battle is made to foretell
(prothespizein) and prophesy (manteuesthai) the generations to come.
Where Pindar is happy to imagine that the triumph of a victor in the
games embodies the breeding and inheritance of the generations of past
Aeacids, Nonnus reverses the flow of time, and has the grandfather embody
the ‘prophecy’ of generations yet unborn.
Achilles’ fight in the Iliad will be with the god of the river (as his father
Peleus ‘fights’ with Thetis, a watery god, in his tempestuous marriage:
hence the loading of ouk atheei), and the fight is termed here hēmiteleston,

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 The Eternal Return 309
‘half-finished’, ‘half-fulfilled’, a typically Nonnian word, freighted with
implication. On the one hand, it invokes the battle in the Iliad where
Achilles cannot defeat the river and has to pray to the gods for help: it is
a battle that does not end in death or defeat. Hence, ‘half-finished’. On the
other hand, the river here does not complain of being choked with bodies,
nor does the river fight with Aiacus: the fight of Achilles only half fulfils this
prequel. When the river does rebel, it is against Dionysus not Aiacus, and
threatens a cosmic disruption which requires Zeus’ intervention to quell it
(23.162–24.67) – where the river begs for mercy from the flame-throwing
Dionysus. The ‘burning star’ Achilles was swamped by the river; Dionysus’
flames, and his rhetoric, threaten to scorch the river into submission. The
complaint that does arise here is rather from a Naiad who begs Aiacus not
to spread so much blood in the waters. She appeals to him as the son of
Aigina: ‘For your Aigina I hear was the daughter of a river’ (22.396).
‘I hear’, akouō, as often, marks the inheritance of the mythic tradition, as
the scene deepens its grounding in the stories of the past, and lengthens
Aiacus’ genealogy backwards as well as forwards (his grandfather, the river
Asopus, has been represented on Aiacus’ shield and will appear again in the
narrative). This Naiad will not fight but flees to another pure (akēraton)
water, the sea, where Thetis will receive her (23.399–400). The reference to
Thetis is pregnant. Thetis will become the daughter-in-law of Aiacus, the
mother of Achilles; she has already received Dionysus in her waters. As the
book ends, the Nymph’s language evokes the interconnected stories of
past, present and future. Each fight is seen as layered with fights past and
fights to come, images and foretellings of each other.
It is a fascinating background to this half-fulfilled shadow of Achilles’
future that it may perhaps also recall both theoretical writing on typology
and an earlier cento, which embodies the possibilities of how past verse can
be reformed into a Christian present. On the one hand, Cyprian, writing
about the practice of typology, declares – directly enough – that any
mention of water in scripture can represent a baptism (Ep. 63.8.1–9.1),
and such baptismal imagery is prevalent in early Christian texts and art.111
By the later fourth century ‘these typological tropes were commonplace’.112
On the other hand – and more pertinently – Eudocia, the empress who was
exiled to Jerusalem, and herself baptized in the Jordan, when she turns in
her cento to represent the baptism of Jesus, does so precisely by reutilizing
lines from Achilles’ struggle with the Scamander. Her depiction (447–61)
includes three different lines from Iliad 21 – where Achilles steps into the

111 112
Jensen (2012), especially 149–60. Jensen (2011) 35.

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 310 The Christian Invention of Time
river (21.8), the river hides the Trojan bodies (21.239) and Hephaestus stops
burning the river (21.382) – as well as two other lines about the Scamander
from the epic (14.433; 16.679). The lines are (now) full of ‘symbolic
descriptions that would resonate for a Christian audience’, especially of
a soteriological tenor.113 As Achilles in the Scamander can be rewritten as
a baptismal tupos, so here Achilles’ grandfather becomes a figure to image
the buried future present in the past.
The language of tupos occurs frequently in the Dionysiaca. Cadmus
founds the city of Egyptian Thebes as ‘an intricate earthly type, equal to
Olympus’, poikilon chronion tupon (5.87), evocative language for a Christian
who knows Augustine’s City of God. Blood on an altar is the ‘type’ of wine
(11.93) – again evocative – as wine is also the ‘the earthly type (chronion tupon)
of heavenly ambrosia’ (12.159). When a Lydian warrior is richly apparelled he
is ‘a type of Glaucus’, the Homeric warrior famously adorned in gold
armour, where the literary echo is also a foretelling of a time to come
(22.147) – a scene famous for the swapping of genealogies as much as the
exchange of armour. Characters are models of each other, and even geneal-
ogy can become palinnostos, ‘twisted back on itself’. When Cadmus explains
his genealogy, he starts from Zeus’ pursuit of Io. Io gives birth to Epaphus;
Epaphus gave birth to Libya, and Libya gave birth to Belus, ‘Libyan Zeus’,
that is, Zeus Ammon whose prophetic shrine is in the Libyan desert by
Asbystes (3.291–3). Zeus is the grandfather of . . . Zeus.
This typological morphing of identities is nowhere more pertinent than
with Dionysus and his precursor Zagreus. Zagreus is the baby of Zeus and
Persephone, whose horoscope was cast in Book 6. His life is short, as he is
ripped apart by Titans, motivated by the jealous Hera. But Zagreus also
becomes Dionysus. The description of this process is quite extraordinary
(6.172–6):
Ταρταρίῃ Τιτῆνες ἐδηλήσαντο μαχαίρῃ
ἀντιτύπῳ νόθον εἶδος ὀπιπεύοντα κατόπτρῳ.
ἔνθα διχαζομένων μελέων Τιτῆνι σιδήρῳ
τέρμα βίου Διόνυσος ἔχων παλινάγρετον ἀρχὴν
ἀλλοφυὴς μορφοῦτο πολυσπερὲς εἶδος ἀμείβων, . . .
The Titans destroyed him with a hellish dagger
As he contemplated his counterfeit form in a reflective mirror.
There and then as his limbs were split with the Titans’ iron,
The end of his life Dionysus had as a returning beginning,

113
Lefteratou (forthcoming) ; she also notes that Tertullian’s De baptismo includes a string of ‘types’
from scriptural sources.

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 The Eternal Return 311
He changed shape into another nature, and transformed into many
forms . . .
It is unclear what the myth evoked by the scene of looking in a mirror is,
but it is salient that this introduction projects the idea that the form (eidos)
of the baby is nothos, ‘counterfeit’, ‘made up’, and that the mirror is
a revelation of the antitupos, ‘the counter-type’. For as Zagreus is ‘split’,
Nonnus stunningly transforms the subject of the sentence from the
expected ‘Zagreus’ to ‘Dionysus’: it performs the transformation in
a word. In Zagreus’ end is Dionysus’ beginning. It is a beginning which
is palinagretos, which, as Emma Greensmith has sharply analysed, is
a paradox of genealogical rebirth, which stands against the frequently
repeated story of Dionysus’ birth from the thigh of Zeus. Zagreus/
Dionysus, to avoid the Titans, changes shape (morphouto) and form
(eidos). Dionysus is not yet born but comes into being as the subject of
change. In the following lines he becomes his father Zeus, as a tricky young
man (177), then his grandfather Cronos (178), weighed down with age – as
if, as with Aeacus, three generations are present in one body. He becomes
a lion, a bull, a serpent too – but to no avail, as the Titans finally
‘slaughtered the bull-shaped Dionysus’ (205). Zagreus has become
Dionysus and is killed as such. Zeus is furious that the ‘earlier
(proteros)114 Dionysus had been slaughtered’ (206), and it is his rage at
the murder that leads to the flood with which we began this chapter.
Greensmith has demonstrated with great acumen how this story
grounds a set of images of resurrection which play the Dionysus story off
against the Gospel narratives, most obviously with the long tale of Tylus on
the shield of Dionysus, and with Ampelus, Dionysus’ beloved, who comes
back as the vine (ampelos) – which, as we have suggested, links his miracle
of rebirth further to the language of Jesus as vine in the Paraphrase.115 The
same language – the terma biou leading to palinagreton archēn – also
notably appears in the resurrection of Lazarus in the Paraphrase (11.164) –
again suggesting that these figures of reincarnation are versions of each
other, morphing through the different narratives, which are themselves
versions of other poetic and religious accounts: ‘Nonnus creates a “hybrid
of hybrids.” Dubious Orphism and illicit Christianity, Homeric lexica and
Callimachean allusion: Zagreus contains within him multiple different
parts.’116 The ‘counterfeit form’ of Zagreus has thus also been taken as an
114
It is not clear why Gigli Piccardi, like most scholars, translates proteros as ‘first’.
115
Greensmith (forthcoming), building on Spanoudakis (2013) and Kroll (2016). See also Bernabé
(2008).
116
Greensmith (forthcoming).

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 312 The Christian Invention of Time
image of Nonnian poetics.117 Yet for my purposes here, what is most
pertinent is the transformative nature of the poem’s central divine hero,
who not only changes shape and changes the world around him, but whose
very nature has its ‘before’ in Zagreus and, by the end, has also a future in
the figure of Iacchus. Iacchus is the child that results from Dionysus’ rape
of drunken Aura and her horrific torture by Artemis. The boy is called
Bacchus after his father, and Iacchus is honoured as a god in Attica with
Zagreus and Dionysus. ‘They established sacrifices for late born Lyaios and
first-born (archegonos) Dionysus and sang out a new hymn to Iacchus third’
(48.964–5) – that is, to Lyaios, who is Dionysus, to Zagreus who is called
Dionysus, and third to Iacchus, who is also Bacchus. ‘The citizens beat out
their choral dance late-fulfilled in honour of Zagreus with Bromius and
Iacchus’ (48.967–8). The three gods, with shifting names, are intercon-
nected in cult – versions of each other.
A poetics of typology is one frame for understanding Nonnus’ use of
analogy, proleptic and retrospective figuration – how stories blend into
each other, offer different versions of each other, anticipate the future and
fulfil the past. We have already discussed typology as a contested mode of
interpretation among Christian theologians and translators.118 We can now
see how typology as a mode of thinking can shape a mythological narrative,
providing a structure of comprehension and expressiveness for its storytell-
ing. The lack of stable, linear narration, as stories and genealogies turn back
on themselves, and the apparent confusion or overlap of figures in the
poem – stylistic features that have often dismayed classical critics – are
features of this poetics of typology. For Nonnus at least, this is one way that
a specifically Christian mode of thinking has informed the epic’s narrative
temporality.
Both the Paraphrase and the Dionysiaca, for all their evident differences
of tone, subject matter, and perspective on the relation of man and god,
share some fascinating trajectories. Both are focused on transformation,
the transformation of the cosmos, the transformation of individuals, and
the transformation of poetic language and poetic form – what I have
termed metatropic poetics. Both make interventions in the culture of
Christianity: the Paraphrase by redrafting the koinē of the Gospels into
the sophisticated, poetic theology of a post-Chalcedon Christian thinking;
the Dionysiaca by redrafting the myths of pagan tradition into a new,
provocative vision of what the pagan past can say to the educated reader.
Both thus are committed to changing their readers in their cultural

117 118
Greensmith (forthcoming), criticizing Shorrock (2001) 116–21. See above, pp. 107–12.

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 The Eternal Return 313
embedding. Both poems inhabit the narrative space of a not yet fulfilled
religious vision – stories of becoming recognized as (a) God – expressed
from within the ‘always already’ of an achieved system. The fascination
with the language of fulfilment – half-fulfilment, non-fulfilment – in both
poems mirrors the reader’s narrative journey towards this foretold end. In
both epics, the language of temporality – and its embodiment in narrative –
undergoes its own transformation, not least by the newly conceptualized
obsession with eternity, God’s time. The vision of time in John’s Gospel is
paraphrased into a more expansive and nuanced theological apparatus, just
as in the Dionysiaca the teleology and foundational order of epic tradition is
framed both by an astrology, a cosmic patterning, a typological poetics, and
by a multiplication of competing stories of origin, a twisting, swirling overlap
of myths, and an explosive semantics of temporal language, pushing poetic
expression to a limit. Eternity through the figuration of Aion, origin stories,
and the technology of time as expressed through astrology – crucial elements
of time’s redrafting by Christianity – are flamboyantly imaged through
Nonnus’ metatropic, Dionysiac poetics. It is unnecessary (if tidy) to distin-
guish the two poems as representing two poetic stances – ‘the poet of the
Muses’ and the ‘poet of Christ’:119 in both poems, Nonnus provides the most
vivid testimony of what the Christian invention of time can do to the
narrative of epic.

119
Shorrock (2011), who is more open to the overlap between such stances than some who have
adopted his critical vocabulary.

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 chapter 13

Regulation Time
Gregory’s Christmas Day

Gregory of Nazianzus also had stars in his eyes. Some seventy years before
Nonnus depicted Demeter having a horoscope cast for Persephone, in both
sermons and theological poetry Gregory was setting the agenda for a Christian
understanding of astrology. It was a project that deeply influenced the dis-
course of Nonnus’ epics, not just on the stars but also on temporality. For, in
Gregory’s hands, astrology opened a broad vista onto the theological conflicts
of the post-Nicaean era, and the active heritage of Greek learning in Christian
culture. The collection of hexameter poems known as the Aporrhēta in Greek
(and Poemata Arcana in Latin) – the ‘ineffable’, or ‘secret’ matters – takes on
astrology as a subject for debate along with such weighty topics as the Cosmos
or the Soul, which gives an immediate indication of astrology’s importance in
Gregory’s thinking; but it is first in one of his Theological Orations, the
sermons which were one primary cause of Gregory being known in
Byzantium simply as ‘The Theologian’,1 that we will trace the significance of
looking at the heavens for Gregory’s understanding of how a Christian inhabits
time. How should the regularity of the movement of the celestial bodies be
related to the regulation of a Christian life? This extended discussion of the
circles of time will lead, however, to another of Gregory’s sermons, delivered
on a Christmas day, about how to celebrate Christmas, the moment when,
thanks to the star that led the Magi to the manger, astrology was, declares
Gregory, defeated. To understand Christmas, to experience Christmas,
Gregory explains to his congregation, is to see yourself in the framework of
a Christian comprehension of temporality. It is towards this fascinating
recognition that celebration requires a theology of time that this chapter
travels.
Gregory of Nazianzus, like Gregory of Nyssa and Basil, is insistent,
confident indeed, in the inability of human language to express what God

1
A title probably stemming from Theodoret at the Council of Chalcedon and one shared with the
author of John’s Gospel: see Langworthy (2019).

314

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 Regulation Time 315
is. His Second Theological Oration (Or. 28) is one of the greatest state-
ments of the limitations as well as the soaring hopes of this apophatic
theology. Its opening image is an extended allegory, based on the revelation
in Exodus, of the theologian climbing Mount Sinai, leaving behind the
material world of the Israelites at the foot of the mountain, to enter the
cloud and converse with God. But even as the theologian confidently
enters the cloud, he is faced by the necessity of seeing only God’s back
from behind a cleft in the rock: he can only see gnōrismata ‘tokens’, which
are ‘like shadows of the sun on water’, ‘images for our corrupt sight’, eikones
tais sathrais opsesin (3.15–16). It is an image he shares with Gregory of Nyssa,
who also makes Moses the type of the striving and incomplete knowledge
of the theologian.2 Yet Gregory of Nazianzus extends this idea into
a detailed epistemology of fleshly and conceptual failure of knowledge
which itself becomes part of a statement of faith.
Gregory ‘runs to grasp’, katalēpsomenos (3.2), the ungraspable essence of
divinity. As we saw with Nonnus’ Paraphrase, and Cyril’s commentary on
John, the ungraspability and ineffability of the divine becomes a watchword
of the nature of God – (kata)lambanein in its many forms is repeated
throughout Gregory’s sermon as the impossible hope of human
understanding.3 This unfulfilled striving takes two trajectories. On one
level, the failure is a question of language and thought.4 It may be hard to
conceptualize (noēsai) God, but it is impossible to express (phrasai) God
(4.1) – though Gregory will quickly qualify this with actually ‘it is more
impossible to conceptualize him’ in the first place, as any concept can be at
least darkly expressed in language. The tension dramatized here is played out
in multiple ways through Gregory’s sermon. God is uncircumscribable –
infinite – yet is not ‘comprehension’, katalēpsis, precisely a form of circum-
scription? (10.21–2). Any adjective indeed will miss the point. Yes, God can
be called incorporeal, but ‘this term “incorporeal” neither sets forth nor
contains his essence, any more than “unbegotten” (agennēton)5, or “without
origin” (anarchon), or “unchanging” (analoiōton) or “incorruptible”
(aphtharton) or anything else said on the subject of God or about God’
(9.4–7). Such negatives give no access to the positive essence of divinity. It is,
as Gregory sharply puts it, like answering the question ‘what is five plus five?’

2
See Greg. Nyss. Vita Mos. 2.152–66, and on it, Frank (2000b) 86–96 with general background of
Vassilopoulou and Clark (2009).
3
See Beeley (2008) 80–91; Ayres (2004) 282–301: ‘Pro-Nicenes universally assert that God’s nature or
essence is incomprehensible’ (282).
4
Meinel (2009) 75–8.
5
The definition of God given by Eunomian Arians: see Norris (1991) 53–68.

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 316 The Christian Invention of Time
with the answer ‘not six, not seven’. Yet each positive term in turn captures
only a part of God, hence the definitional process is itself infinite, and
continually partial. Again and again, Gregory reverts to the failures of
human conceptualization and the insufficiencies of human language to
grasp God. As Basil in his Contra Eunomium also shows, this insistence on
ineffability is a polemical rejection of Eunomius’ Neo-Arianism, which
confidently asserted the knowability of the divine.6 Ta aporrhēta, what
cannot be said, is integral to Christian comprehension. As Augustine fam-
ously declares (Serm. 117): ‘If you comprehended something, it is not God’.
At another level, this failure is because of humanity’s very bodily exist-
ence. Even for the lofty lovers of God ‘this darkness’ and ‘this fleshly
thickness (pachu sarkion) blocks comprehension of the truth’ (5.13). ‘This
fleshly thickness’ (pachu sarkion) is like the cloud that came between the
Israelites and God, a sign of what Jeremiah calls ‘the bonds of earth’ (Lam.
3.34).7 Gregory seems to have been instrumental in the development of the
language of pachu, ‘thickness’, ‘fatness’, which barely occurs in the Bible, to
express how the physicality of human existence is itself a bar to reaching
towards the spiritual.8 As humans are marked by this thickness, God, the
incorporeal, is exō tēs pachutētos, ‘outside thickness/fleshliness’.9 As the
more extreme ascetics mortified the flesh to transcend their fallen state,
so Gregory constantly reminds his listeners that the condition of humanity
requires a constant redemptive effort to recognize and attempt to transcend
their necessary materiality.
One consequence of humanity’s fleshliness is that human sight, flawed
as it is, fixes on the physical. As the Psalms say (Ps. 8.4), ‘I will consider the
heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars’ (5.13). At best,
this vision leads to a recognition of God’s authorship. Gregory lyrically
declares the argument from design:
that God exists, our sight is the teacher along with the law of nature. Our
sight, because it falls on visible objects, that are beautifully stable and
moving on their way, and, so I may say, immovably moving and revolving;
the law of nature, because it reasons back to the author (archegonon) from
what is seen and their order. (6.1–7)

6
Beeley (2008) 91–101; Norris (1991) 53–68.
7
The phrase in Lamentations, asireh eretz, means ‘prisoners of the land’ in a military context, but is
turned by Gregory into an image of ‘earth-bound’ humanity, which, as we will see, is typical of his
discourse. The Septuagint has desmious gēs, which may help Gregory’s understanding.
8
As discussed in Goldhill and Greensmith (2020), this specific language looks back to Origen. See also
Beeley (2008) 81–4; and on the Spiritual 154–85; and on Origen, passim.
9
Or. 40.45. Hence, in the incarnation what is taken on is precisely pachutēs: Or. 29.19.

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 Regulation Time 317
The wonder of contemplating the heavens with their regularity of motion,
for Gregory, is a foundational moment. But it is dangerous to stay in the
moment of awe. This is the cause, declares Gregory, that some people think
that the sun, the moon and the stars ‘rule everything according to the
quality and quantity of their movement’ (14.1–2). To hymn the sun or to
allow astrology’s determinative power is an epistemological failure based
on a misguided, corrupted human materiality.
Gregory circles back to his attack on astrology in the sermon’s conclud-
ing paragraphs. He has led the audience through the multiform evidences
of the natural world, from peacocks to mountains, and now reaches the
heavens. He demands now that Faith, Pistis, rather than Reason, Logos, is
to be their guide, because in going beyond mere Reason, they can tran-
scend their completely earth-bound nature (28.41–4).10 Aiming to grasp
the heavens, that is, is both a search for the spiritual, and a corollary
resistance to the earthly, which includes both the terrestrial world left
behind in turning to ‘consider the heavens’, and the materiality of the
human condition, the basis of their ignorance, ‘the bonds of earth’. With
such a programmatic introduction, Gregory’s argument is an intensely
charged, rhetorically flamboyant dismissal of astrological science. ‘Who
gave the sky its circular movement, who ordered the stars?’, he begins.
‘Before these questions, you lofty thinker (ho meteōros), who is ignorant of
what is at your feet, and cannot measure yourself, can you tell me what the
sky and stars are?’. This aggressive opening flourish combines the moral
and intellectual failures of the scientist with the inability to answer the
most basic questions about the subject of his science.11 With a wonderful
dismissiveness Gregory grants the scientist his understanding of orbits, and
periods, and waxings and wanings, settings and rising, and degrees and
minutes – the full panoply of the astrologer’s technical vocabulary – only to
conclude ‘This is no comprehension (katalēpsis) of reality, but an observa-
tion of some movement’. Gregory takes the very essence of astrological
science, its mathematical observation, and disparages its mere empiricism
(‘some movement’ is an especially nice sniffiness): understanding reality is
a different procedure, which the Christian theologian is arrogating to his
own knowledge, theology.

10
On faith see Or. 6.7; 14.33; 22.11 and especially the discussion in 32.23–7. Norris (1991) 126–9 makes
the appeal to faith central. Florensky (1997) 41 describes Nicaea as where ‘rationality was given
a death blow’ – an account criticized by Ayres (2004). On Gregory’s dependence on Aristotle, see
Norris (1991) 17–39 (and e.g. on Clement see Clark (1977)).
11
On the figure of the astrologer, see Hübner (2020).

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 318 The Christian Invention of Time
The astrologers, continues Gregory, have firmed up their measurements
by collecting together many such observations. This generalizing they
‘consider an explanation (logos), and name a science (epistēmē)’ (29.11–12).
But, he rounds on them, ‘If you want our admiration, tell us what is the
cause of this order, this movement?’. This demanding question opens into
a sort of hymn to the sun, a beacon-fire to the whole world, a leader of the
chorus of heavenly bodies – a hymn of praise which pivots, surprisingly,
around a quotation from Plato – called ‘one of the pagans (allotriōn)’ – that
‘the sun has the same position among perceptible objects as God does
among intelligible things’.12 But, repeats Gregory as his speech becomes
more incantatory, ‘What gave the sun its movement from the beginning?
What is it which keeps him always moving, and circling round, and fixed in
order (logōi) and unmoving, in reality tireless, and life-bearing and life-
giving, and all the things which the poets hymn with reason (kata logon)’
(30.5–8). As he gets more poetical, he self-consciously notes his adoption of
poetic form. The obvious and required answer to Gregory’s questions is
repeatedly left for the audience to fill in – we are to be complicit with his
disparagement – until with a final scornful turn he asks whether all this
measuring and naming is in order that ‘I should trust you, [the astrologer,]
when through this measurement you weave/plot our lives and arm creation
against the creator?’13 As Augustine reverts again and again to the act of
creation to understand human temporality and our bafflement, so Gregory
turns the very event of creation against astronomy’s claim to regulate time
and life.
Thus he begins the final paragraph of the speech, self-consciously
marking the transition to his conclusion, with ‘What do you say? Will
we stop our speech here, with materiality and the visible?’ (31.1–2). Rather –
no surprise – he concludes with a typological reading (antitupon, 31.3) of
the Tabernacle, and his desire to go beyond the veil, and perceive the world
which is made up of visible and invisible, material and spiritual, all
a product of God’s will, God’s creative force, which is the only true object
of worship, for man and angels alike. As he began with the image of Moses
climbing Mount Sinai as a model for the theologian’s striving, so he ends
with Moses’ tabernacle as an image of the veiled immaterial truth which is
the object of the theologian’s striving.

12
A paraphrase of Plato, Rep. 6.508c – where the subject is the Good rather than God.
13
The phrase plekonti ta hēmetera, which I translated as ‘weave our lives’ (Gallay (1978) translates ‘tu
règles notre sort’: ‘you rule our fate’) is best understood through the ‘composition of things’ as is
evidenced in Poem. Arc. 4.21; 4.36; 4.40.

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 Regulation Time 319
This Second Theological Oration of Gregory is titled ‘On Theology’,
and unlike the First Theological Oration, which is an attack on Eunomius,
and the third and fourth which also criticize Arian and other misunder-
standings of the Son, this speech is aimed not so much at infighting
between Christian thinkers, as at promoting a theological view of the
world, a Christian Sophia. In particular, its discussion of the essential
theological question of the essence of God determines that human failures
of comprehension stem from the materiality of language and the material-
ity of humanity’s fleshly, earth-bound, physicality, an argument which
does tie this sermon together with the other, anti-Neo-Arian diatribes.
Flesh is an epistemological issue. Astrology, as a science that is competitive
with theology, is therefore also stridently denigrated because its claim to
measurement is no more than a sort of material empiricism, and, as such,
not only ignores the primary question of creation and causality, but also,
unlike theology, cannot lead humans to transcend the earth-bound limita-
tions of their knowledge.
We saw in the last chapter that astrology, regularly contested as a science
as well as regularly adopted as a form of prediction as well as description,
was particularly worrisome to Christian thinkers. For Augustine, whose
strenuous denials of astrology also constantly remind us of his former
commitment to it, astrology was to be rejected both on moral grounds
because it denied free will, and on scientific grounds because it could not
defend its claims to predictive rigour. Gregory of Nyssa in his On Fate
makes these same cases in his dialogical polemic against a pagan mathema-
ticus. He describes with a certain rhetorical flair the collaborative work of
building a ship – from the wood cutters to the nail-hammers – and the
formation of a crew of sailors, and then points out that if the ship goes
down, it would seem that a whole team of people – and objects – with quite
different birth dates and thus horoscopic predictions nonetheless meet the
same fate. When – at what precise point? – did the influence of heaven
become instrumental in such a multiform collaborative project? As we will
see, Gregory of Nazianzus is fully aware of such arguments, which he too
can marshal when required.14 Yet in this oration he is making a different
sort of claim (one not recognized by Hegedus’ seminal study).15 Gregory
wants us to think about the order and regularity of the heavens differently.

14
It is striking that Bowen and Rochberg eds. (2020), despite an advertised date range of 250 bce to
750 ce, including a chapter on Christian astrology (Denzey Lewis (2020)), and 750 pages of
exposition, do not discuss Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, Nonnus and several
others discussed here.
15
Hegedus (2007). Gregory of Nazianzus gets short shrift in what is now justly the standard study.

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 320 The Christian Invention of Time
It is necessary to see in the sun, the moon and the stars the hand of God,
and he repeats his happy paradoxical determination that theirs is a fixed
movement, a stable set of changes. Yet such a recognition of the relation
between the celestial bodies and the flow of time is salient only if it allows
the Christian to move beyond the material, beyond such empirical, phys-
ical sightings, and recognize the limits of human, earth-bound scientific
knowledge, the necessity to strive for the spiritual, and, above all, to grasp,
as best as possible, the will and majesty of God in and through creation –
which is a matter of faith not measurement. ‘The textual blank left by
paradox is filled by faith’.16 Where Augustine suggests that accurate meas-
urement is an impossibility for astrology, as if with accurate measurement
things might be otherwise, Gregory is clear that the desire for accurate
measurement is itself a misplaced acquiescence in the fleshly thickness of
human knowing, its failure to grasp what reality truly is. ‘How will you
ever grasp (hupolēpsēi) the divine, if you put all your trust (pisteueis) in the
method of logical analysis?’ (7.1–3). Gregory’s carefully reasoned – and
occasionally poetically evocative – plea for faith rather than reason to be the
guiding principle of a Christian life thereby constructs astrology as the
iconic counter-science to theology.
*
Gregory returns to astrology in his poems known as the Aporrhēta, ‘Ineffable
Matters’ (a title used at least since the Byzantine manuscript which includes
the poems and a commentary or paraphrase of them by one Nicetas David
Paphlagon).17 These eight poems seem to have been composed as a set.18
They are in hexameters and announce themselves as if they are hymns: ‘First
we will sing (aeisomen) the Son’, (2.1); ‘Sing (aeide) praise of the Spirit’ (3.1);
‘let us hymn (humneiōmen) creation’ (4.1), a ‘framing of the poems as
“hymnic prayer”’, therefore, which contributes to the ‘validity’ and perfor-
mativity of the poems’ ‘didactic content’.19 As with the Theological
Orations, the poetry’s polemical engagement with Eunomian Neo-
Arianism leads to a broad range of critical argument – from epistemology

16
Meinel (2009) 89.
17
Christos Simelidis has pointed out to me (per litteras) that the Life of St Gregory of Akragas from the
8th/9th century is the first reference to the title – in an extraordinary tale where a visiting monk is
asked to read and interpret ‘The Theologian’s aporrhēta poems’ as a test of his intellectual excellence.
18
See Norris (1991). Gregory was the first to publish an edited collection of his own letters in Greek,
and there is an argument to be made that Book 8 of the Palatine Anthology is also an integrated
volume: Goldhill and Greensmith (2020). He curated his output and his self-representation more
purposively than many others.
19
Meinel (2009) 86, who rightly criticizes Keydel’s description of them as failed didactic epic. Faulkner
(2010) cautiously nuances the claim of Daley (2006) 29 that the hymns imitate Homeric hymns.

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 Regulation Time 321
to theology to astrology – but the form of hexameter also marks Gregory’s
continuing contribution to the transformation of Christian elite culture. It is
not so much that different audiences are projected for the orations and the
poetry: in both cases, there is a staging of performance, sermon or hymnic,
and an embrace of a complicit congregation along with a corollary dismissal
of wrong-thinking opposition. But this poetry engages with the tradition of
Greek cultural heritage differently – especially hexameter poetry with its
Homeric and religious associations – and allows a different expressivity,
which, as we will see, seems also to have been formative for Nonnus.
The fifth poem is titled Peri Pronoias, ‘On Providence’. Its first word is
ὧδε, ‘Thus’, which both looks back to the previous poem on the Cosmos
and forward to the summary description of the creation of the world
which opens this poem: an internal marker of the collection as
a collection, its continuity. The Cosmos, declares Gregory, was set on
its foundations by ‘the infinite great mind’, and ‘with an initial impetus
(rhipē), as a top is urged into whirling by a whip, it was set in motion by
the great unmoving design (logoisin)’. As with the Theological Oration,
the paradox of ‘moving according to an unmoving sequence’ grounds the
description of the celestial bodies. There can be, he argues, nothing
‘automatic’ – in the strong sense of ‘self-moving’ – about such an
order, any more than a house, a ship, a chariot – the familiar examples
of the argument from design – could be built without hands (Nonnus’
fascination with the self-moving in the Dionysiaca has this precedent).
Nor could the cosmos have existed for so long if it were anarchos (12).
Anarchos here means, it seems, without a director, or without an origin-
ating principle (archē), as it is immediately glossed by the image of
a chorus without a leader (anhēgemoneutos (13)). But as our reading of
the collection continues, it will become clear that the term can also mean
‘without an origin’ (archē). There is an argument, of course, whether the
opening words of the Gospel of John mean in the beginning in a temporal
sense, or in the beginning as an originating principle. It will turn out to be
crucial to Gregory’s understanding that there is no temporal beginning
but there absolutely is an originary moment of creation: the language of
archē and its negation marks this tension.20
This description of the celestial order leads directly into the opening
assault on the astrologer who thinks the stars are the ‘guides (hēgemonēas) of
our birth and, at the same time, all our life’ (15–16). His opening attack is

20
On the importance of archē in Gregory’s concept of God the Father see Beeley (2008) 204–17; on the
influence of Origen on this see Daley (2012) 8–10.

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 322 The Christian Invention of Time
allusive. ‘What other heaven do you turn for the very stars? Again, to whom
do you ascribe the other heaven, piling leaders on leaders?’ (17–18). This
appears to pose the question: as individual stars affect individual lives, what
is the principle that controls this disparate system? If there is no single
force – God – behind the system, how do you stop multiplying agents of
influence? This opening quickly translates into the standard argument that
many people with the same moment of birth have different fates (19–23),
and groups of different people have a common fate. Either the stars are in
conflict or some superior power must be mixing these different fates
together. Thus, he concludes, with blunt certainty (33): ‘For either God
is the director or the stars are the directors (hēgemonēes)’. The allusive
opening is thus in fact foundational. Gregory takes what is often expressed
as a common-sense observation – how can horoscopes be predictive if
different people born at the same time have different fates, or people born
at different times suffer the same fate? – and turns it into an argument
about the foundation of the order of the cosmos. Which is also a statement
of Christian knowledge, a confession: ‘But I know this. God governs all
these things’ (33). And in lines that strikingly look forward to Nonnus
(36–7):
τοῖς μὲν ἔδωκεν
ἁρμονίην τε δρόμον τε διαρκέα ἔμπεδον αἰεί,
τοῖς δὲ βίον στρεπτόν τε καὶ εἴδεα πολλὰ φέροντα·
To the celestial bodies he granted
Harmony, and a fixed course lasting for ever;
To the lower world, a life of change with its multiplicity of forms.
As in Nonnus, ‘Harmony’, a quality of the natural word, is distinguished
by a pattern that is established and certain, empedon, while human exist-
ence is marked by change, and the poikilia of shifting forms. Where
Nonnus allows the poetics of metatropic, polytropic transformation to
stand in tension with the establishment of order through the empedos Word
of Jesus in the Paraphrase or the pantheon of Olympus in the Dionysiaca –
a tension also enacted in the different scopes of the two epics, Dionysiac
change versus Christian transformation – Gregory contrasts God’s order
with human changeability, and sets human uncertainty as the necessary
mediation between the fixity of God and the unfurling of a human life over
time.
Some things God has revealed to us; the rest he preserves in the crypt
(keuthmōsi) of his wisdom. He wants to prove empty the boast of mortals.

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 Regulation Time 323
Some he has established in the here and now; others he will meet in the later
days: the farmer cuts down everything in season (hōria). (39–42)
Human epistemological doubt is a function of the difference between
God’s time and human time. Humans can only have a partial and incom-
plete knowing, because God’s sophia takes shape over the infinity of God’s
time, and humans can only wait for ‘the later days’. There is a certain
violence in this alienation from understanding: God the farmer ‘cuts
down’, keirei, but does so according to the seasons, his knowledge of
seasons. The stars may tell humans when to harvest; but this mortal
knowledge of temporality is only a shadow of the sun on water in compari-
son to the seasons of God’s comprehension.
At this point – an argument of broadest generality and scope – Gregory
brilliantly brings it all back to an intensely personal expression, his own life
and his own authority, with two lines of simple power, a rhetorical switch
of startling impact (43–4):
ὡς καὶ Χριστὸς ἄριστος ἐμοῦ βιότοιο δικαστής.
οὗτος ἐμὸς λόγος ἐστὶν ἀνάστερος, αὐτοκέλευθος.
So too Christ is the best judge of my life.
This is my story: no stars, self-driven.
Picking up on the simplicity of the confession ‘But I know this’ (34),
Gregory makes his own life his example. His logos – account, story,
rationale, his Christ-directed life: the ambiguity is pregnant21 – has ‘no
stars’. The adjective anasteros is very rare but appears twice in Aratus’
Phainomena (228, 349)22 in the expected sense of ‘starless’, a sky without
visible stars. Gregory, in his very denial of astrology, picks up and redrafts
the vocabulary of the iconic literary astrologer. Autokeleuthos, ‘self-driven’,
‘going one’s own way’, is also a very rare word. (It is also the marked oddity
of the vocabulary here that makes his personal turn so striking, so self-
driven.) Autokeleuthos indicates the free will of the human agent, the
commitment to moral choice that astrology appears to deny in its fatalism.
Keleuthos is a common term since Homer for the ‘path’ of song as well as
the path of life, and here, applied to logos, overlaps the journey of life and its
telling, both self-driven. This term, autokeleuthos, motivates the paragraph
that follows, which sarcastically rehearses the argument against determin-
ism (49–52). ‘If the circle (kuklos) runs everything . . . then the circle runs

21
See Schwab (2009) ad loc.
22
Also in Ps-Manetho 4.528, as is noted by both Schwab (2009) ad loc. and Moreschini and Sykes
(1997) ad loc. (who both oddly note only Aratus 349, and not 228).

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 324 The Christian Invention of Time
my will itself, and there will be no drive in me that leads me towards the
better, in decision or understanding’. The astrologer’s ‘circles’ bind
humans into an imposed inability not just to escape their fate but also to
change for the better.23 With Nonnus, we saw repeatedly how the circles of
heavenly transits expressed time as a circling pattern: here we see
a theological caution around such vocabulary. The order of the celestial
bodies must not be allowed to tie a human life into an amoral determinism.
Indeed, autokeleuthos is echoed by Nonnus when Lazarus stumbles out of
the grave, on his own path, again (Par. 11.161). This is the only occasion in
the Paraphrase that autokeleuthos occurs – Lazarus’ rebirth as a model,
a type, for the rebirth of every Christian into the moral choices of their
lives. But the term also takes on significance from the regular repetition of
a near homonym autokeleustos, ‘self-ordered’, which Nonnus uses nine
times in the Paraphrase in a strikingly systematic manner that emphasizes
precisely the dynamics of choice and agency in Christ’s story. Jesus explains
that what he says is not ‘self-ordered’ but comes from God; Jesus goes to his
death, however, autokeleustos, unforced and self-willed. The believer in
Jesus will act autokeleustos, ‘of his own free will’.24 The same term appears
in Cyril, also to specify the necessary agency of human choice.25 Gregory
too in the third of the Aporrhēta, ‘On the Spirit’, celebrates the Spirit as
‘divine might, coming from the Father, a self-determined being (autoke-
leuston (7))’.26 There is a strong case that Nonnus’ discourse is informed by
a reading of Gregory, a theological backstory to his fascination with ‘self-
movement’.27
Gregory’s poem on providence ends with an astral singularity. ‘Let’s
have silence about the great glory of Christ, that messenger star’ (53). This
star, he claims, and as we saw in the last chapter, is not the sort of star that
astrologers deal with, but ‘strange, and not appeared before’ (57). It had
been foretold in the Hebrew Bible (a commonplace of Christian polemics,
as we also discussed), but this star marked a unique moment in time.
Whereas all the other stars follow the road that Christ ordered for them –
call them ‘fixed, wandering, retrograde, as they term it’ – his lack of interest

23
On the importance of this sense of growth in Gregory, see Beeley (2008) 111.
24
3.108; 5.54; 7.107; 10.64; 12.94; 16.40; 16.102; 18.26; 19.80 – ironically in the mouth of the priests,
denigrating Jesus as king. Note too that artiphaēs 61 appears for the first time in extant Greek in
Gregory, and for the second time in Nonnus Par. 9.88 (wrong reference in Moreschini and Sykes
(1997) ad loc.) of the miracle of the blind man, who ‘just now sees (and is seen)’.
25
Cyril, De ador. 48 – virtue must be chosen; Glaphyr. in Pent. 16 – knowledge must be chosen; cf.
Expos. in Psal. 25; Contra Jul. 43 – in combination with rhopē and hormē as in Gregory.
26
Translation from Moreschini and Sykes (1997) ad loc.
27
Simelidis (2016), with further bibliography, is the sharpest version currently available of this claim.

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 Regulation Time 325
in the technical terminology of the science is performative, of course – ‘this
was the time when (tēmos hote) the cleverness of the science (technē) of the
astrologers came crashing down’ (83–4). Theodotus saw this star as the
redesign of heaven; Gregory sees it as the destruction of the science of
astrologers, who are now, like the Magi, to worship the Lord. Astrology
cedes not so much to theology as to adoration, not to reason but to faith.
The poem ends with an envoi to star gazing that is typical of Gregory’s
rhetorical style. He waves off the long history of theory: it is of no concern
if stars are made of some sort of fire – one time-honoured hypothesis – or
‘some “fifth body” as they call it’ – that is, specifically Aristotelian
physics.28 Such theories of the matter of stars do not matter to him. For
‘we are taking our road upwards’ – the ‘our’ is an emphatic gesture of
complicity with his audience, together to rise above mere astrology; the
road ‘upwards’ a neat transcendence of the claim of astrology to under-
stand high matters. ‘For we are hastening towards Rational Nature, which
is both heavenly and tied to earth’. The next poem in the collection is ‘On
Rational Natures’, so that this closing advertises what is immediately to
come. But Gregory cannot resist the paradox: the rational (logikē), with its
connection to the Logos, is privileged, but, as we have seen in the
Theological Orations, inadequate without faith, and inevitably marred
by human materiality. Hence it is both ‘heavenly’ – the Logos in man –
but ‘tied to the earth’, desmion aiēs. The poem’s final two words look
towards the discussion of the Theological Orations and humanity’s ‘fleshly
thickness’, and opens a paradox of humanity’s double and flawed knowing
to be negotiated in the continuing exploration of the collection.
Indeed, this closing expression, desmion aiēs, is given a revelatory expos-
ition particularly in the seventh poem in the collection ‘On the Soul’ –
which looks back to Gregory’s language of mixis that we encountered
earlier. A human, argues Gregory, is made up of a heavenly soul and an
earthly body: ‘wherefore I love one part of my life because of earth (dia
gaian) but in my heart I have a desire for another way because of my divine
part (theian dia moirēn)’ (7.76–7). This standard expression is described,
however, as the desis, ‘the binding’ of the original human being. The one
who mixed (ho mixas) the elements ‘bound (dēsato) an image in earth’ (80–
1). This physical binding – which Gregory goes on to expound at length – is
also a moral compulsion. God sends man on his road, and ‘neither does he
send him forth free, nor did he entirely bind him (dēsato)’ (10). Choice

28
Discussion in Moreschini and Sykes (1997) and Schwab (2009) ad loc. Proclus will pick this up in his
commentary on Plato’s Timaeus 3 152a–154e33 Diehl; 3.43–50 Baltzly.

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 326 The Christian Invention of Time
remains endemic to humans. ‘Tied to the earth’, the final words of ‘On
Providence’, are now explained as a multiple form of binding: humans are
limited by their earthly condition; their very materiality is a binding,
a binding of earth as well as to earth; and their lives are a tension between
the freedom to choose and their moral binding to God’s way. Gregory uses
the poetic form to strain at the expressivity of language in his incremental
attempt to capture the complexity – the ineffability – of how humans fit
into God’s creation.
It may at first sight seem surprising that in a collection of poems headed
by a poem on First Principles and dealing in turn with the grandest of
theological themes – the Son; the Spirit; the Universe; Rational Nature; the
Soul; the Testaments and the Coming of Christ – there should be a poem
on astrology. The great theologian Paul Tillich, however, paints this
remarkable portrait of the era, which is offered in the standard edition of
the poems by Donald Sykes as a framework specifically to understand the
instrumentality of Gregory’s poetry on the stars:
In the late ancient world fate conquered providence and established a reign
of terror among the masses; but Christianity emphasized the victory of
Christ over the forces of fate and fear just when they seemed to have
overwhelmed him at the cross. Here faith in providence was definitively
established.29
Even from within Tillich’s own intellectual formation as a committed
Lutheran, this is a disturbingly, even crazily exaggerated picture – and it is
a sign of theology’s continuing hold on philology that this image of Tillich’s
should have been proffered without demurral by Donald Sykes as a guide to
the significance of Gregory’s poem. Even if it is taken that astrology to an
extent replaces or supplements divination and oracles, all of which can be
seen as attempts to produce a sense of control over the frightening vicissi-
tudes of life, ‘a reign of terror’ scarcely reflects any accurate historical
understanding of the functioning of astrology, which was also as much for
the elite as for the masses. Nor did Christianity in any way succeed in
‘conquering astrology’ in the name of providence – astrology continued
throughout late antiquity and was still going strong in Christian courts and
intellectual circles throughout the early modern era too. It is certainly not
adequate to see Gregory as a figure for this triumphalist fantasy – though
fascinating to observe the continuing overwrought vehemence of a Christian

29
Tillich (1951–63) I 294 (Tillich, of course, made Kairos [see chapter 2], central to his thought);
Moreschini and Sykes (1997) 175.

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 Regulation Time 327
resistance to astrology, even an astrology of the fourth century. Tillich’s faith,
followed by Donald Sykes, seems to have suppressed the historical evidence.
Yet Gregory’s attack on astrologers is instrumental in developing
Christian theology, and must be seen as indicative of a broad set of
questions that go to the heart of Christian thinking about temporality,
and human understanding of a life-time: how should the regularity of
the time of the stars and the unfurling of a human life be understood
together? It is telling, for example, that Gregory describes Jesus at the
point of his birth with that opening word of Nonnus’ Paraphrase,
achronos, ‘timeless’, ‘no time’ (5.55). This is not so much putting
Jesus beyond astrology – what is a birth horoscope for the timeless? – as
a way of linking the discussion of the star of the Magi to the
Christology of the earlier poems in the collection – and the
Theological Orations on the Son, with their theoretical exposition of
the theology of time we discussed in chapter 1.
In particular, the use of achronos looks back to the second of the
Aporrhēta, ‘On the Son’, which is directly polemical in its antagonism to
those suicidal theologians whose ‘tongues are at war with divinity’ (3–4). As
so often in the arguments with Neo-Arians around the crisis of Nicaea, the
opening salvo concerns time and the Trinity. The Son is immediately
called achronos, ‘timeless’ (7) and ‘equal in nature to his progenitor’ (8),
terms also familiar from the prologue to the Paraphrase, as well as antici-
pating its use in ‘On Providence’. Gregory vividly distinguishes human
birth, which involves ‘flux and shamefully horrible cutting’, the inevitable
product of passion, because humans are ‘bound’ (detos, 15), which, as we
have seen, is the watchword for the limitations of human materiality.
God’s birth by contrast is unconnected to passion because it involves the
‘completely uncompounded, the unbodied’ (apēktos, asōmatos, 16). Apēktos
is an extremely rare adjective indeed and seems to be chosen to contrast
with detos. But this contrast is only to make more comprehensible the
temporal difference. ‘As assuredly time (chronos) exists before me, time
(chronos) is not before the Logos, whose progenitor is timeless (achronos)’
(18–19). Gregory, as in ‘On Providence’ inserts himself at a crucial juncture
as the example of the human: his time-bound existence contrasts with
God’s eternity. God the father, intensifies Gregory, is anarchos, which, in
contrast to its use in ‘On Providence’, here indicates ‘without beginning’.
The syntax of this sentence, however, is significantly incomplete. It begins:
‘When the Father is without beginning, with no lack or supplement to his
divinity, then also the Son of the Father too, the son who has as a father
a timeless beginning/principle’ (18–20), but then the sentence drifts away

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 328 The Christian Invention of Time
into a series of subordinate clauses with no main verb for the Son. Gregory
in the Third Theological Oration (29.3) is explicit that the language of
‘when’ and ‘then’ cannot possibly capture the timelessness of God, but we
are forced to use such terms. Here, the syntax collapses around the ‘when’
and the ‘then’ as it travels towards an injunction not to split the Son and
the Father from each other. The Son’s Father is called an achronos arkhē,
which I translated ‘a timeless beginning/principle’, in an attempt to keep
the ambiguity (which, again, it is hard to imagine Nonnus reading without
interest). Between anarchos and achronos arkhē, the question of an overlap
between a ‘timeless beginning’ – another paradox for the faithful – or
‘timeless principle’, a principle of timelessness, seems to be left unresolved.
This irresolvability is articulated in the fourth of the Aporrhēta, ‘On the
Cosmos’, where Gregory argues against the Manichaeans that the soul and
the body are not to be seen as a primal compound of good and evil, but
a compound – a mixis – to which evil is added only later. ‘For me’, he
declares, with the personal turn again, ‘God is one, without beginning,
(anarchos), without conflict, one good light, the strength of simple and
composite (plektōn) minds, the exalted in heaven and on earth’ (4.39–41).
The lack of a beginning is also a lack of conflict, a single goodness rather
than a Manichaean opposition. This principle of the singleness of God
places evil as man’s invention: ‘Self-destructive in corruption, I planted
evil’ (4.53) – Gregory as a human is fully implicated in original sin. The
Cosmos itself was brought into being by God, and therefore is not eternal.
God ruled over the ‘empty aeons (aiōsi) before the universe was set in place
and was adorned with forms’ (4.62–3) – kosmēthēnai, ‘adorned’, is an
etymological play on the other sense of cosmos, ‘adornment’ rather than
‘universe’. God’s mind was stirred to look at the forms (tupoi) of the
universe about to come into being, but already present to God (66–8).
‘All things are before God, what will be, what has come into being, and
what is now present’ – the timelessness of God – but ‘for me time is divided
like this, some before some after’. Again, Gregory presents himself, his
time, as the counter-model to God’s time. Human time is divided. But for
God everything is eis hen, ‘into one’.30 The principle of the single nature of
God – in contrast to the dualism of Manichaeism – and the timelessness of
God are thus mutually implicative. For Gregory, although God is one, and
his time one, humanity experiences itself as a mixis and time necessarily as
divided.

30
See Ayres (2004) 244–51 for this concept in the development of pro-Nicene theology.

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 Regulation Time 329
Hence, to return to ‘On the Son’, the timelessness of the Father and the
timelessness of the Son therefore require that we do not break apart
(ἀπορρήξωμεν – a very aggressive term) the Father and the Son. As
Gregory concludes, with his characteristically bold simplicity, conjoined
with surprising vocabulary (26–7):
ὃ γὰρ πάρος ἐστὶ Θεοῖο,
ἢ χρόνος ἠὲ θέλησις, ἐμοὶ τμῆξις θεότητος.
For what exists before God,
Whether time or will, to me is a severance of divinity.
Gregory has explored how there can be no time before God, the Son, but
here he adds ‘will’, thelēsis, a charged term he has not adumbrated in the
poem – though it is extensively discussed in the Theological Orations on
the Son, and a bone of contention in Christian polemic. If God ‘willed’ the
birth of Jesus, it implies that Jesus is a result of God’s objectification and
thus subordinate. If God did not will Jesus’ birth, how, then, did it come
about? The co-temporaneous, equal nature of Father and Son is the answer
to this question in Nicaean theology, but there is a certain silencing of such
discussions about will in this poem until this bare reference. The final
phrase is most striking, however. Tmēxis, which I translated ‘severance’,
occurs only here in extant Greek literature. Its meaning is clear enough, but
its strange form is arresting. As a human birth results in a ‘shamefully
horrible cutting’, and as human time is ‘divided’, so divinity itself becomes
like a human in the violence of the ‘severance’ that such theory forces
between Father and Son. To cut apart the Father and the Son is to treat
divinity as human.31 Thus, after a long consideration of the qualities of the
Son, Gregory concludes, ‘You at any rate, do not dishonour divinity with
these mortal attributes. Divinity made glorious the earthly form which, in
gracious love for you, the immortal Son formed himself’ (82–3). Gregory is
determined that the divine attributes of Jesus transcend his human qual-
ities (as has often been noticed in discussions of Gregory’s Christology),32
but here the culminating adjective which I translated as ‘immortal’ is

31
So Prudentius accuses Marcion of daring secare numen insecabile, ‘to cut an uncuttable divinity’
(Ham. Praef. 61), and the anonymous Carmen adversus Marcionitas 2.14–15 (see Pollmann (1991))
accuses these heretics of numen sine fine tremendum | dividere in partes, ‘dividing into parts the
awesome divinity without end’.
32
On Gregory’s Christology the most helpful discussion is Beeley (2008) 115–52, with full bibliog-
raphy, who writes (116) that Gregory ‘is one of the chief architects of the language and concepts used
in the Christological controversies that occupied the Church’ over the next centuries. See also
Winslow (1979); and with special emphasis on the problems of Gregory’s Christology Norris (1991)
39–53.

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 330 The Christian Invention of Time
aphthitos, the word associated most strongly with Achilles’ all too human
search for glory. In a similar way, Apollinaris’ metaphrasis of the Psalms
addresses God as aphthite – ‘undecaying one’; the angel Gabriel in the
Vision of Dorotheos, who Muse-like, along with Christ, inspires the poet’s
song, is called aphthitos.33 Aphthitos is not a term that appears in the
Septuagint or Patristic writing in general, though aphtharsia and aphthartos
are key terms in the discourse of corruptibility and incorruptibility as
Christian categories of the material body and of spirit. The poeticism is
not just a synonym, however. As Gregory – we saw – appropriated
Homer’s boast of glory against Homer, here he turns the same vocabulary,
which encapsulates a hero’s struggle against mortality, to mark Jesus’
transcendence of his mortal attributes. Writing not just against his
Christian opponents but also against the heritage of pagan concepts of
mortal and divine temporality, Gregory uses the strut of epic tradition to
enforce his theological understanding of God’s time.
*
Gregory’s engagement with astrology, then, is deeply embedded in a series
of theological debates about time and Christology, morality and the
inadequacy of human knowledge, agency and transformation. This nexus
of theological thinking takes a further turn, however, when Gregory, in his
brief appointment as archbishop of Constantinople, faces his congregation
in the church of the Holy Apostles on Christmas day 380,34 and in
a celebratory mood. Oration 38 is the first of his Epiphany Homilies, and
unlike the works we have been discussing so far, it presents itself fully
within a liturgical setting. It revels in the performativity of the occasion,
and the prose is full of hymnic praise, celebratory incantations, and ecstatic
pleasure in the celebration and in itself. It is the most Dionysiac of his
orations. As the sermon runs its course, however, the polemical underpin-
nings of its theology shine forth, and its basis within a theology of time
becomes clear.
The speech begins with a full-throated explosion of celebration: ‘Christ
is born, glorify him! Christ from heaven, meet him! Christ on earth, exalt
him!’.35 Even in such outbursts, Gregory constructs a texture of

33
P. Bodmer 29.169, discussed very briefly by Agosti (2011) 289–91.
34
It has been debated if the day is 25 December or 4 January and the year 379 or 380: see Moreschini
and Gallay (1990) 13–22. For my purposes, what matters is that the day is the day called Christ’s
epiphany or birthday, as Gregory (3.1) explicitly declares, and I am happy to go with the traditional
dating of 25 December 380. There is no evidence before the fourth century for celebrating
Christmas: Beckwith (1996) 71.
35
See Spira (2007) 197–200 for the rhetoric of this opening; also Spira (2007) 215–18.

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 Regulation Time 331
argumentation: ‘Christ in the flesh! Exult in trembling and joy! In trem-
bling because of sin, in joy because of hope’. The quotation from the
Psalms (2.11) (where the sense of the Hebrew is uncertain) – ‘rejoice with
trembling!’ – is extended and glossed with the standard matrix of Christian
emotional expectation: fear at sin and joy in hope. So too the liturgical and
theological come together in his incantatory repetitions: ‘Again (palin)
darkness is undone, again (palin) light established, again (palin) Egypt is
punished with darkness, again (palin) Israel is illumined by the pillar’. Each
of the phrases marked by palin cites or alludes to a text from the Hebrew
Bible: palin marks therefore the repetition that liturgy performs – it is again
Christmas Day – but also the quotation (palin) which is a rewriting of the
Old Testament as the New (palin) – as he cites from Paul ‘The ancient has
passed; see, everything has become new’. Yet this conversion (antistrophē,
4.8) too is a form of return: ‘let us go forward to Christ, or return to him –
this is the more proper expression’ (4.3–4). There should not be talk of
‘fashioning’ (plasis, Ps. 118.73) but of ‘refashioning’ (anaplasis) (4.16–17).
Thus, later in the speech, he concludes ringingly (16.18–19): ‘In all this,
there is one principle: my fulfilment (teleiōsis) and refashioning (anaplasis)
and return (epanodos) to the first Adam’. With Nonnus’ Paraphrase we
emphasized the connection between the poetics of palin in paraphrase and
the theology of palin in the Gospel. Gregory’s opening repetitions of palin
open a full theological and liturgical understanding that connects the
performed repetition of the festival, which each year again repeats its
celebration, and the re-quotation of scripture, with the newness of the
New Testament promise to return to the lost Paradise. Time turning back
on itself . . .
These ecstatic opening passages also recall the Theological Orations and
Aporrhēta poems, marking the continuity of religious thought across the
genres. So, the Logos pachunetai (2.17) ‘Thickens into flesh’; ‘the invisible
becomes visible’, and, inevitably, ‘the timeless begins’, ho achronos archetai:
paradox here seems to be part of the rhetoric of excited joy as much as it is
a cue to faith over logic. Gregory also explains that the day can be called the
Theophany because it was when God appeared (phanēnai) or the Genethlia
because it is the day of God’s birth (gennasthai), but this brief pause of
glossing turns quickly into a long list of ways that their celebration is not to
be like a pagan feast. This oscillation between more sober, scholarly
comment and overwhelming displays of rousing enthusiasm repeatedly
and performatively enacts the sense of joy bursting through in celebration.
So, his introduction concludes with a chanted list of refused pleasures (5–
21): ‘we won’t garland the halls; we won’t set up choruses; we won’t adorn

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 332 The Christian Invention of Time
the streets . . . ’, and so on for more than twenty lines. That’s for the
Greeks. The Christians will luxuriate rather in the divine law and Christian
tales (6.7). This introduction – and it is clearly marked in the text as such
by the transition into the argument of the sermon (6.16–21) – is program-
matic in these glances towards theology which veer into joy and then return
to theology. As we will see, this performance in itself will prove key to the
agenda of the sermon. It is finally the performance of Christianity that will
count.
The argument of the sermon – the promised diēgēsis – starts with the
classical statement of God’s time:
Θεὸς ἦν μὲν ἀεὶ καὶ ἔστι καὶ ἔσται· μᾶλλον δὲ «ἔστιν» ἀεί. Τὸ γὰρ «ἦν» καὶ
«ἔσται», τοῦ καθ᾽ ἡμᾶς χρόνου τμήματα καὶ τῆς ῥευστῆς φύσεως.
God was always and is and will be. Rather, ‘he is’ always. For ‘was’ and
‘will be’ are the severances of our time and of nature in flux.
Gregory repeatedly recognizes the insufficiency of such temporal language
for God’s time (as we have seen), but his terminology here specifically picks
up on the poetry of the Aporrhēta. Human time is marked by the violence of
its severances – tmēmata is from the same root as tmēxis – and by a nature in
flux. Rheustos, ‘in flux’ is a philosophical term from the Greek tradition, an
Empedoclean or Heraclitan sense of the instability of material form, here
contrasted with the permanence and stability of God’s existence – and an
echo of the ‘flux’ (rhusis, Apor. 2.16) that is a physical sign of human birth
into mortal time. In this infinity, God ‘transcends our every conception of
time and nature’ (7.7–8). Humans can only grasp at God’s essence ‘all too
dimly and indifferently’, and the only thing that humans can conceive is his
boundlessness, and only that because God has a simple nature (7.23–7).
What is meant by a simple nature?36 That which is not composed (sunthetos).
As in the Aporrhēta, the threat of the composite is that it can be broken or
severed. So the simple nature of God depends on the infinity of timelessness:
he is anarchon (7.5), ‘without beginning’, and ‘deathless and beyond destruc-
tion’, athanatos, anōlethros – hence aiōnos, ‘eternal’. ‘Eternity’, defines
Gregory, is neither time (chronos) nor a part of time – it cannot be measured.
Human time is measured by the celestial bodies like the sun, but eternity for
divinity – and this is a very difficult idea, alluding to Gregory’s technical,
theoretical discussion of temporality – is ‘stretched out alongside their
existence, like a sort of “timely” movement and interval’. Gregory is

36
See Ayres (2004) 278–301 for a discussion of simplicity and singleness in the thinking of the
Cappadocians.

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 Regulation Time 333
struggling to express what he has repeatedly said is a struggle for humans to
comprehend, namely, the idea of eternity, and at this point of awkwardness,
he just announces ‘That’s enough philosophy about God for now’. As we
will see, this aposiōpēsis, this break into silence about philosophy, is
a significant part of the performativity of the sermon. But what he has
offered is the foundation of a story, God’s time as the ground on which the
narrative to come is to be structured.
For what follows is no less than the history of the universe up to the birth
of Jesus, narrated in an overwrought mixture of summary and expansive
emotional glosses.37 So chapter 9 delivers an account of the creation of the
angels. Chapter 10 moves on to the material and visible world, always no
more than a microcosm of the invisible world of the spirit. At this point, he
worries his audience is becoming impatient to get back to the festivities, but,
he explains, that is exactly his route. So chapter 11 gives us the creation of
man. Up to this point in the history of the universe there had been no mixis
of opposites (11.5), but now God creates humanity as a mixture of the
material and the spirit, which prompts another excited list, this time of
mediated polarizations, ‘earthly (epigeion), yet heavenly; of the moment
(proskairon) yet immortal’ (11.17–18). Chapter 12 sets man in the Paradise
of Eden, equipped with free will, which leads to the original sin. After the
Fall, Adam and Eve put on animal skins, described with full theological
purchase as ‘perhaps the thicker (pachuteran) flesh, mortal, antitype (anti-
tupos)’: the skins they wear are perhaps a type, a negative, reversed image of
their previous life in Paradise – now their flesh is even more pachus, ‘thick’,
bound to the earth, a block to knowledge; their bodies are now tied to
mortality in the full sense, forced to labour and give birth in blood and pain;
a constant contrast to the different life of the body in Paradise, towards
which Gregory constantly longs to return. Chapter 13 begins with the
educational punishments that follow the Fall, for different causes over
different times, none of which succeed in changing the course of humanity:
‘reason, law, prophecy, benefits, threats, blows, floods, fires, wars, victories,
defeats, signs from heaven, signs from the air, from earth, from sea, unex-
pected revolutions of men, of cities, of nations’.38 This rolling, rhetorical list
is a priamel to God’s final cure for man’s ills, the birth of Jesus, the Logos –
which prompts another roll-call of performed brilliance – and Nicaean
theology (13.14–19):

37
Fulford (2012) is an attempt to set this in the context of exegetical preaching.
38
There are similar summary lists of disasters in Orosius (aeterna perdito, nunc quoque) without the
sense of education: see Walter (2020) 210–20.

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 334 The Christian Invention of Time
the one before the centuries (proaiōnios), the invisible, the ungraspable
(aperilēptos), the incorporeal, the beginning/principle (archē) from the
beginning/principle, the light from the light, the fountain of life and
immortality, the impress (ekmageion) of the archetypal beauty, the unmov-
ing seal, the unshifting image, the definition and the reason (logos) of the
Father.
The temporality of Nicaean theology, which was Gregory’s mission to
promote in Constantinople, is emphatic: the Logos is ‘before the centur-
ies’, timeless; it is a beginning out of a beginning, the spring of life which is
also the immortality of Christian promise. Equally emphatic is Nicaean
Christology: ‘light from light’ quotes from the creed,39 and the repeated
images of sameness, deny the subordination of the Son to the Father – the
‘impress of the archetype’, ‘the unshifting image (eikon)’,40 the ‘unmoving
seal’ – and culminate in the claim that the Logos is the ‘definition and
reason’ of the Father. The circularity of defining the Logos as the logos
demonstrates – enacts – the ‘ungraspability’ of the divine that is central to
Gregory’s epistemology. This extraordinary rhetoric where the chanted list
of former admonitions is answered by the equally incantatory list of the
attributes of Christ provides not just a theological framework for the birth
of Jesus, but also its liturgical celebration.
Gregory continues with a narration of the mission of Jesus – and an
angry rebuttal of any of the congregation who do not recognize divinity in
the figure of Jesus: a continuation, that is, of his telling of the history of
everything, framed by the threats of theological controversy (14–15). ‘You
will see’, he announces with the plea for the immediacy of vision in
experiencing this story (16.1), ‘Jesus in the Jordan . . .’ – and thus into
a summary list of the miracles and sufferings, leading to the crucifixion,
Resurrection and the Ascension, concluding in the lines we have already
quoted, that ‘In all of this there is one principle . . . my return to Adam’.
The point of the story is the ‘fulfilment’ or ‘perfection’ (teleiōsis) of each
member of the congregation, each ‘I’. The story of Jesus must be a personal
story of each Christian.
This conclusion is, however, also a crucial bridge to the close of the
sermon. ‘Dance!’, enjoins Gregory, ‘like David before the Tabernacle’
(17.3–4). The birth of Jesus means that ‘You have been released from the

39
And illumination/light is a constant theme in Gregory: see Beeley (2008) 104–11.
40
A common expression, found also in Athanasius Contra Gentes 41.1 (who is imitating Alexander of
Alexandria, the opponent of Arius) – and who also contrasts the composite nature of man with the
singleness of God: Ayres (2004) 41–50. Aparallēktos eikon is another phrase around which pro-
Nicene theology formed.

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 Regulation Time 335
bonds of your birth’: eluthēs is a second-person singular, as Gregory
addresses each congregant as an individual; the ‘bonds’ of birth recall the
binding of earth, to earth, of the journey of life that marks out human
existence. But to celebrate, each congregant is to find their place in the
story. ‘Be the ox in the manger’, asserts Gregory, who ‘knows his master’
and is ‘fit for sacrifice’; ‘Run! Bring gifts with the Magi’. ‘Adore with the
shepherds’. Yet it is not just as a figure in the story of Jesus that each
congregant should celebrate but also in an enactment of the life of Jesus
himself. ‘Travel blamelessly through all the ages and potentialities of
Christ’ (18.7–8). Here we see the power and paradox of autokeleuthos: the
journey of the Christian must be a willed choice to follow the path of Jesus.
So, concludes Gregory in yet another flowing list,
Teach in the Temple and drive out the sacrilegious traders . . . Submit to be
stoned . . . If you are scourged, ask what they have left out . . . Taste gall because
of the taste;41 drink vinegar; hunt out spittings; accept blows, beatings; be
crowned with thorns . . . be crucified . . . that you may rise with him . . .
To celebrate Christ is to enact the imitatio Christi, which is ‘to see God, as
much as it is within reach (ephikton) for God to be seen’ and ‘to make God
clear, as much as it is within reach (ephikton) for prisoners of flesh (desmiois
sarkos)’ (18.223–6). As ever, Gregory insists that even in this transcendent
moment of fulfilment, the human being is still bound by the flesh of
materiality.
The sermon that began with ‘Christ is born, glorify him’ ends with
a powerful statement that each Christian has to imitate Jesus, to relive the
life of Christ, to suffer with him: to experience Jesus’ story. There is a thread of
Nicaean theology running through the whole sermon, for sure, often force-
fully indicated, but whenever the threshold of philosophical thought is
approached, Gregory backs away – explicitly or performatively – into
a more joyous expressivity. The demand to experience the story leads not to
theological exegesis (though Gregory keeps letting the theology peep from
behind the veil), but rather to performance – the rolling lists of attributes, the
incantatory repetitions, the excited revelling in paradox, the expressions of
celebration. The event of the birth of Jesus – Christmas Day – is therefore set
in the narrative of time – the history of the universe from creation to its
promise of eternity, told in sequence from the idea of God’s timeless time
through creation, Adam, the Fall, the history of human failings until the birth
of Jesus, Jesus’ story leading to the crucifixion and the promise of eternity. To

41
This is typological: Gregory uses ‘the taste’ to refer to Adam’s bite of the apple in Eden.

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 336 The Christian Invention of Time
celebrate Christmas requires an understanding of time and the universe to
comprehend the significance of the birth. To experience Christmas is to
experience one’s life within Christian time. That is the performance of
Christianity demanded by the performance of the sermon.
*
Gregory of Nazianzus, like Gregory of Nyssa and Basil of Caesarea, discusses
time from a technical philosophical perspective, as we indicated in chapter 1:
this is how Gregory’s take on temporality has been usually discussed by
scholars, fitting him into the long tradition of Greek thinking about time.
Indeed, Gregory writes himself into that tradition by his explicit citations of
Aristotle and Plato and his engagement with Neo-Platonic thinking about
such issues. It is clear that as for Augustine, so for this group of Cappadocian
thinkers, linked by family, religion, space and controversy, time was a major
theoretical issue of religion. What this chapter has set out to show, however,
is how such theoretical argumentation, inflected as it constantly is by post-
Nicaean theology, also informs less directly theoretical discussion and
becomes part of the narrative and the performance of Christianity. It helps
explain the fascination with and disparagement of astrology, an argument
that opens out into a consideration of morality, agency and the role of
providence in contradistinction to fate in Christian thinking. What is the
regulation of time? For Gregory, the very interest of science in the accurate
measurement of time reveals a flawed thinking about materiality, the human
limitations of knowledge, what is within reach for prisoners of the flesh. But,
as we finally saw, the understanding of temporality – both God’s time and
the history of humanity from creation forwards – is also a necessary founda-
tion for the very acts of celebration, the festivities of the church. The
performance of celebration in the experience of liturgy is a repetition that
should entail an understanding of Christian life in time, where each life is
also a repetition of the type of Jesus, an imitatio Christi. In the layers of
typological thinking, each citation of scripture is a re-quotation that is also
the supersessionist fulfilment of the newness of the New Testament; each
liturgical celebration is a repetition that orders time into a Christian calen-
dar, a repeat of earlier celebrations, a fulfilment of the order of worship; each
life is lived as a fulfilment of the type, a repetition of original sin overcome for
the faithful by the promise of grace: the fulfilment that is a return, time
turning back on itself, palintropic. Gregory sets out to redefine for Christians
how a life-time is to be experienced as time. To celebrate Christmas Day
with Gregory is to conceptualize one’s life as a paradigm of how to live in
Christian time.

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 chapter 14

Day to Day

For Gregory of Nazianzus, then, Christmas Day is to be experienced as

a celebration of the history of the universe and as a living recognition of the
transformative epiphany of Jesus Christ, an epiphany that changes how time is
lived and perceived by the Christian faithful. Gregory wants to redefine how
time is counted, recounted, experienced. Ambrose of Milan at around the
same time, over in the West, is rather more modest in his vision. At least at first
sight. His hymns are designedly simple and easily memorable in form, though,
like William Blake’s lyrics, they are far from simple in their linguistic depth and
significance – and they proved extraordinarily influential in the invention of
Christian time as well as of the Christian hymnic tradition. These hymns are to
be sung by a congregation, and there are reports not just of people singing
lustily and of the hymns spreading across Italy, but also of annoyance by
Ambrose’s opponents at their success in inculcating particular doctrinal views
in the singers.1 Hymns, that is, are to work not by a preacher telling his
audience what to think but by a congregation’s absorption of ideas through
repeated performance, by the pleasure of singing.2 The hymns of Ambrose
construct a different relation with worshippers from Gregory’s preaching. As
we saw with Augustine’s description of reading a Psalm, the repetition of
performance becomes a form of embodiment through physical and mental
memory. Each of Ambrose’s fourteen hymns3 has thirty-two lines – eight
stanzas. There is no other lyric collection in antiquity where every poem has
the same length, the same form.4 This repetition provides a physical rhythm

1
The best introductions remain Fontaine et al. (1992) 11–102; Dunkle (2016); on the history of
liturgical reception see Marie-Hélène Julien in the same volume (109–14). Fontaine et al. (1992) is
written by a team of ten scholars: the notes below give simply Fontaine et al. (1992) rather than
specifying each author. Augustine, Conf. 9.6.14 records his tears at listening to Ambrose’s hymns in
Milan. See Zerfass (2008) 29–36.
2
On the acceptable pleasure of psalmody see den Boeft (2008).
3
Taking as authentic the poems included in the standard edition of Fontaine et al. (1992).
4
Prudentius’ Dittochaeon has 49 quatrains, each designed to be the title to a picture in church: again,
in this later Christian collection form and ideological purchase are intimately connected.

337

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 338 The Christian Invention of Time
and horizon of expectation – a bodily and mental pattern – that every
performance enforces. You know, when you sing Ambrose, how long it
lasts, when the end is coming. Regularity of time is a formal quality of
Ambrose’s writing – embodied in its performance by each member of his
community.
The first of Ambrose’s hymns is the most famous; it is not only still part
of liturgy but is also often put to music in other settings. It begins:
Aeterne rerum conditor,
noctem diemque qui regis,
et temporum das tempora
ut alleves fastidium
Eternal maker of the world,
You who rule night and day,
And give the times of times,
To alleviate weariness
The metre of these hymns is an eight-syllable iambic form (technically,
iambic dimeter acatalectic), and the flexibility and expressivity of
Ambrose’s use has been much imitated and discussed.5 It is very easy to
set to music and sing, and thus to repeat and absorb. The syntax and
vocabulary are aggressively simple in comparison with Gregory’s theologic-
ally inflected paradoxes, technical terminology and long periodic prose (or
verse). God is addressed first as the eternal ‘founder’ of the universe.
Conditor is a very familiar term from Roman political literature. Rome is
dated from its foundation. The Aeneid announces that its subject is how
great an effort it was Romanam condere gentem, ‘to found the Roman
nation’. Augustus is celebrated by Livy – in a remarkable passage of source
criticism, unparalleled in Roman historiography – as the templorum
omnium conditor ac restitutor, ‘the founder and restorer of all temples’.6
Unlike the roll-call of Roman founders of cities and cults, God is eternal
and the founder of rerum – matter, or the universe (the general term which
is the subject of Lucretius and other natural scientists in their search to
understand the world). Orosius sums up this shift of sense when he writes
that his Christian universal history starts ab orbe condito, ‘from the foun-
dation of the world’: the punning rewriting of the standard historiograph-
ical dating, ab urbe condita is eloquent (as is its rewriting of Roman puns on
urbs and orbis).7 Conditor is rare in the Latin Bible, however; it occurs only

5
See Dunkle (2016) 86–90 with extensive bibliography; Fontaine et al. (1992) 77–92.
6 7
Livy 4.20.7: see Sailor (2006). Orosius, Hist. 1.1.14: see Walter (2020) 211.

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 Day to Day 339
once in reference to God in Hebrews 11.10, where Abraham, dweller in
tents, is said to look forward to the city whose architect and maker
(conditor) is God. Conditor in this case translates the Greek dēmiourgos, the
Platonic term for the maker of the universe, and the contrast between even
Abraham’s hopeful work and God’s establishment is stark. In Jerome’s smart
translation, conditor makes Paul’s contrast speak to Latin political horizons.
The phrase rerum conditor itself is found in Tertullian and Lactantius,8
however, and conditor is common enough in Augustine and in the City of
God, perhaps in echo of that passage of Paul. It is also repeated in Prudentius,
who read Ambrose closely.9 The word has a particular charge in Christian
Latin in that it inherently contrasts God’s creation with human order. So,
here, God rules ‘night and day’ – a first gloss on aeterne. For Manilius, fata
regunt orbem, certa stant omnia lege | longaque per certos signantur tempora casus,
‘Fate rules the world, and everything is set by its fixed law | and the extent of
time is marked by fixed events/descents’– that is, as time is defined by the
descent (casus) and rise of the celestial bodies, so human life is determined
from birth to death by the stars.10 Unlike Manilius, here it is God who
‘rules day and night’ – a phrase which implies both always and the alternations
of time – and, in an expression that is hard to translate neatly, God ‘gives the
times of times’. The polyptoton, as critics have noted, indicates that God both
creates the hours and the seasons (tempora) and delineates eternity (temporum)
by such divisions of ordinary time.11 If saecula saeculorum becomes the
liturgical equivalent of the Hebrew le’olum va’ed, as an expression of eternity,
tempora temporum is the mundane equivalent for the regular unfurling of daily
time – the will to see ‘in the eternal the whole temporality of each day’.12 The
polyptoton itself, as Bert Pranger has argued, requires an audience to disam-
biguate the different senses of tempus – a weak version of the paradoxes of faith
paraded by Gregory – and to engage with the construction of meaning, thus
performing what Dunkle calls the mystagogic actualization of the hymn’s
dramatization of time.13 As we will see, time is actualized at a threefold level:

8
Tert. Adv. Marc. 1.10.1 and universitatis conditor, De spect. 2.4. Lact. Inst. 5.1.1; 6.9.14 see Fontaine
et al. (1992) ad loc. Ambrose himself in De virg. 3.6.34 uses rerum conditor in a prayer.
9
E.g. Cath. 4.9 (rerum conditor); Ham. 2; Ham. 346.
10
Man. 4.14–6; on the Stoic background here see Volk (2009) 62–6, 220–1; Habinek (2011) and Green
(2011) with further bibliography.
11
Pranger (2007); den Boeft (2003). Proclus in his commentary on Plato’s Timaeus twice quotes
a Chaldaean Oracle fr 185, chronou chronos, referring to the sun, explaining that it means ‘it makes
manifest that time which is most primary and the cycle of the seasons is brought about in accordance
with it’ (4.256a Diehl; 55.32–56.1 Baltzly); see also 4.249f Diehl; 36.22 Baltzly.
12
Fontaine et al. (1992) 40. ‘Time and eternity are in the grip of each other’ (den Boeft (2003) 57).
13
Pranger (2007) in response to den Boeft (2003); Dunkle (2016), especially chapter 3 – this is the most
sophisticated overall account of Ambrose’s Hymns.

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 340 The Christian Invention of Time
the representation of Christian time through the daily rituals of Christianity
and their significance, the dramatization of the moment of the song, and the
‘time’ of metrical singing, the materiality of the verse. All three levels are
expressed in the gift of temporum tempora.
The final clause expresses the purpose of God’s division and regulation
of time: ‘to alleviate fastidium’. Fastidium is a surprising word. In my
translation above, I have given what has become a standard Christian
understanding. In one of the most popular nineteenth-century translations
as a modern hymn, William Copeland writes ‘weary mortals to relieve’;
Gerard O’Daly similarly suggests ‘to alleviate weariness’.14 (John Henry
Newman, who wrote the other common hymnic version used in liturgy,
simply leaves this phrase out altogether.) It has even been translated as
‘tedium’ or ‘boredom’: Dunkle offers ‘monotony’.15 But fastidium is
a much stronger and more emotive word. It means ‘disgust’ that can be
prompted by a physical revulsion, or ‘disdain’ prompted by self-assertion
or haughtiness.16 In Jerome’s Latin, it is used in Ezekiel (16.31) for the
whore who raises her price out of fastidium, ‘a harlot . . . who scornest hire’,
as the King James Bible puts it (‘monotony’ is not the issue). Fastidium is
a surprise because it raises a question: how does the division of time, the
separation of night and day, stop feelings of disgust or haughtiness? The
translation ‘weariness’ – which turns the surprise into a cliché – ignores
how these opening lines provide a programmatic agenda not just to the
poem’s discussion of time, but also to its moral normativity. The division
of night and day will turn out to be a model for the repentance of sin,
a rejection of worldly values in favour of Christian piety and purity. The
disgust or haughtiness of humanity is to be alleviated in Christian worship.
Fastidium epitomizes the sinners’ emotions that will be alleviated by the
morning’s fulfilment of vows to God (32). Self-disgust is acknowledged and
exorcised by singing with heart and soul.
The following three stanzas establish the significance of the division
of day from night in a gradual transformation from the sequence of
temporality to the morality of repentance, which retrospectively turns

14
O’Daly (2012) 56. William Copeland (1804–85), an Oxford movement cleric who edited Newman’s
sermons, produced the aptly titled Hymns for the Week and Hymns for the Seasons in 1848; John
Henry Newman (1801–90) published the hymn several times from 1850 to 1880.
15
Dunkle (2016) 221.
16
Kaster (2001) is a very full and persuasive treatment of the word. Septimius Severus describes himself
in his cell experiencing a paradigmatic praesentium fastidium, ‘disgust with present’, in a list of
a monk’s emotions Ep. 2.1. Franz (1994) 193 rightly translates Ekel, but backs away from it as he
proceeds!

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 Day to Day 341
each expression of night and day into versions of evil and good, ignorance
and illumination (4–8):
Praeco diei iam sonat,
noctis profundae pervigil,
nocturna lux viantibus,
a nocte noctem segregans.
The herald of the day now sounds,
the watchman of deep night,
nocturnal light to travellers,
separating night from night.
The ‘herald’ of the day, an expression for what will be specified as the cock
crowing, also opens the possibility of what O’Daly unnecessarily insists must
be understood as a ‘symbol’, but not an allegory or type: Fontaine is more
productive with his carefully open-ended adjective, ‘allegorisable’.17 The form
of expression is suggestive rather than determinative. The iam gives a hic et
nunc of performance: the cockcrow is the time of the poem, whenever it is
sung, whenever it sounds out. This ‘herald’ is also a watchman of the deep
night – a line that recalls both Virgil’s underworld, ‘the deep night’ of death,18
and the language we discussed from the Gospels of waiting, watching and the
injunction not to sleep as ‘You do not know the hour’ when epiphany will
come. This figure does not sleep at night but watches (pervigil). As such – and
here the ‘symbol’ slips into a wider sense of allegorical reading – the watchman
can be called a ‘nocturnal light for travellers’. This verse recalls John 8.12, ‘I am
the light of the world and who follows me will not walk in darkness’: the light
is ‘the light of life’. The night that is separated from night, therefore – the
polyptoton echoing the polyptoton of the first stanza – is to be understood in
a broadly metaphoric (allegorical, typological) and moral sense; indeed by
splitting the signifier, segregating one sense of nox from another, it demands
we dawn on a reading that is open to reading otherwise. The regulation of day
and night is also the separation of sin and goodness, religious truth and the
darkness of ignorance: hence the time of ‘night’ is also and always the ‘night’
of spiritual darkness. So the third stanza juxtaposes the rising of the sun and
the dispelling of the demons of evil (9–12):
Hoc excitatus Lucifer
solvit polum caligine,

17
O’Daly (2012) 24; better, Dunkle (2016) 78–83. On allegory, type and symbol see above, pp. 107–12.
18
In Dido’s anticipation (Aen. 4.26) and in Aeneas’ regret for her suicide (Aen. 6.462) the same line
ending, noctemque profundam links the events in a pattern of death without salvation.

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 342 The Christian Invention of Time
hoc omnis errorum chorus
vias nocendi deserit.
By him aroused, the Morning Star
Releases the sky from darkness,
By him, the whole chorus of strayings
Deserts the ways of destructiveness.
If the first two lines of this stanza can be understood as no more than
a poetic expression for sunrise (even with the possible moral sense of solvit),
the second two lines (linked as they are by the repetition of hoc ‘by him’)
offer a boldly moral paraphrase.19 The dawn chorus – a different congre-
gation of singers from the performers of this hymn – is made up of errorum,
‘strayings’, ‘losing the way’, which may refer to the mistakes of demons or
to heretics – they are, of course, models of each other – who are forced by
the light to desert ‘the way of destructiveness’, which is both an image of
brigands and thieves forced away from the highways by the exposure
of day, and an image of the sinners of the world repenting. Nocendi,
which I translated as ‘destructiveness’, may remind us that the ancient
etymology of night (nox) found its root in nocere, ‘to harm’.20 The
cockcrow announces the dispersal of the harm of night’s darkness.
The fourth stanza finally ties the image of the cock crowing precisely to
the Gospels 13–16):
Hoc nauta vires colligit
pontique mitescunt freta;
hoc ipse petra ecclesiae
canente culpam diluit.
By him, the sailor gathers strength,
And the straits of the sea calm;
By him, the very Rock of the Church,
At the singing washes away his sin.
The calming of the sea and the regathering of the sailor’s strength
inevitably looks towards the miracles of Jesus, as if the ‘symbol’ of the
cockcrow could be instrumental, or stand for the power of Jesus. But the
final image evokes the one cockcrow of the Gospels. Jesus foretold that
Peter, Petros, the Rock, would deny him three times before the cock

19
Ambrose’s poem follows his more directly homiletic material closely, especially here Hex. 5.88–9: see
den Boeft (2003).
20
Varro, Ling. 6.6, based on Catullus. On Isidore of Seville who also records the etymology (5.31), see
Henderson (2007).

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 Day to Day 343
crowed. Peter, threatened by the mob, denies, three times, that he is
a disciple of Jesus. A cock crows. At the sound, Peter recognized what he
had done, and in tears repented and never denied Jesus again.21 Peter’s tears
are made the equivalent of baptism or a ritual of purification as they ‘wash
away’ his sin. So later in the poem (28) we are encouraged to ‘free’ (solvitur,
as the morning star ‘frees’, solvit, darkness) our sin, culpam, by ‘weeping’,
fletu – making Peter’s repentance the paradigm for each human.
The first four stanzas, then, trace the transformation of the ‘now’ of the
early cock’s crow into a repeated performance of the transformation from
darkness to light, as a religious conversion of repentance and the rejection
of the darkness of sin. The second four stanzas play out the implications of
this transformational encouragement for the congregation of singers, and
the pivot from the first four stanzas to the last four is the poem’s central
line, surgamus ergo strenue, ‘let us rise therefore in strength’ (as the poem
turns from the second-person address to the embrace of the third-person
collective). As so often in the language of the Bible, and especially in
Christianity with the miracle of raising Lazarus or healing the paralysed
man, the injunction ‘rise up’ is both literalized in images of standing and
walking and climbing mountains, and always imbued with the moral
fervour of religious transformation and exaltation.22 So here the cockerel
not only excites those who lie down (excitat, as Lucifer was excitatus), and
upbraids the sleepy, but also he ‘refutes the deniers’, negantes arguit (20).
The enemies of the Lord are those who cannot hear the sound of the wake-
up call (scholars have pointlessly argued who the deniers must be, anti-
Nicenes or others). So, as the cockerel sings (canente, 21), an echo of his
singing to mark Peter’s repentance (canente 16), as now the congregation
sings, ‘hope returns, health is restored to the sick, the robber’s knife is
sheathed, and faith returns to the fallen (lapsis)’ (21–4). The palintropic
poetics of salvation are heard in the repetition of re-: redit; refunditur;
revertitur. As with Gregory, to rise up is to go back.
So, bringing the second-person and the third-person plural together,
Jesus is asked to ‘regard those of us who are stumbling (labantes), correct us
with your gaze; if you do look, our falls (lapsus) fall away, and our sin is
freed by weeping’ (25–8). The ‘fallen’ lapsis (23) were once the ‘tottering’,
labantes (24). But, with Jesus’ help, our ‘falls’ (lapsus) fall away (cadunt).
What stops the tottering (labo) becoming the falling (labens) is the correct-
ive gaze of Jesus, which makes such slips ‘fall away’, a nice paradox of the

21
Mat. 26.73–5; Luke 22.59–62; John 18 13–27. Discussed in Ambrose’s prose at Luc. 10.74; Hex. 5.
22
Franz (1994) 235–40.

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 344 The Christian Invention of Time
fall. Dunkle, however, like several of the manuscripts, prints labentes
‘slipping’, ‘falling’, for labantes ‘tottering’ (though he translates it ‘who
stumble’).23As Fontaine notes, labentes, which would pick up lapsis and
lapsus in a single image, is metrically false, and, he adds, labantes is also
richer theologically in that it allows for ‘wavering’, and does not just focus
on those who have sinned. The Latin seems to anticipate the textual
problem in its slippery language. Jesus ‘corrects’ by looking at labantes –
by not allowing it to become labentes, and by ‘solving’ (solvitur) the error in
the washing of tears.24 Jesus is asked to look and correct the text of our
lives, to keep labo, ‘wavering’, from (in a self-reflexive play) becoming
labentes, ‘falling’ – or lapsis ‘the fallen’ or lapsus ‘our falls’. Textual criticism
of the soul . . . The lapsus calami that leads Dunkle to print labentes is also
a theological lapsus, an oversight.
The final stanza brings the imagery full circle with a return to the
language of the opening stanza (29–32):
Tu lux refulge sensibus
mentisque somnum discute,
te nostra vox primum sonet
et vota solvamus tibi.
You, light, shine again on our senses,
And cast off the sleep of our minds.
May our voice sound you first
And may we fulfil our vows to you.
As the light comes every day, so Jesus – called ‘light’, as so often in the
post-Nicene period – is asked to shine again on their senses. The re- of
refulge should not be ignored.25 It links the repeated daily appearance of the
sun, to the daily work of faith, performed in this hymn, and heralded in the
sixth stanza’s language of salvation. Nor should sensibus be translated
‘soul’.26 The contrast is between the physical observation of the sun, its
impact on the senses, and the sleep of the mind, which does not allow
a person to recognize the temporum tempora, the significance of God’s
eternal time in the daily routines of restoration. Now ‘our voice’ – the voice

23
And ‘tottering’ in the body of the book, Dunkle (2016) 94. The reading labentes is defended at length
by Franz (1994) 259–63, including the difficult claim that the incorrect metrics is a lectio difficilior.
Hex. 5.88 has Iesu titubantes respicit, ‘Jesus looks caringly at the waverers’.
24
For the moral vocabulary of textual criticism, see Tarrant (2016) 30–48.
25
As by O’Daly (2012) 56 and Dunkle (2016). Fontaine et al. (1992), as so often, is spot on in its note ad loc.
26
O’Daly (2012) 57; sensibus is central to Dunkle’s account of the hymns as a set: ‘to form the
congregation’s senses in ecclesial perception’ (Dunkle (2016) 115). By contrast see the deep distrust of
the senses in Prudentius, Ham. 298–307 with Malamud (2011) 119–21.

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 Day to Day 345
that is singing the hymn, the hic et nunc of worship – is to sound out God
first and as originator – founder – of all things. The cockcrow, which
sounded (sonat) at the opening of the poem, has become the hopeful choir
‘sounding out’ (sonet) this hymn: they have become the heralds. Thus they
can hope to fulfil their vows to God. Solvamur, ‘let us fulfil’, ‘free our-
selves’, picks up the morning star’s ‘freeing’ (solvit, 10) of darkness from the
sky, the ‘freeing’ of sin by our tears (solvitur, 28): the vow is repaying what
has been promised, the language fulfilling the imagery of the poem, its
promise. The performance of the poem itself becomes the fulfilled vow of
recognizing God’s time in daily time, captured in the time of the poem.
The ring composition of the poem enacts its palintropic poetics: we begin
again. And do so every time the hymn is sung, adding tempora to tempora,
time and time again.
This first hymn of Ambrose already indicates through its repetitions
across stanzas, its polyptota and other word plays, and the careful slipperi-
ness of its ‘allegorisable’ expressivity, just how dense the poetic texture of
the apparent simplicity of Ambrose’s poetry is. It asks us to see the
immensity of God’s time in the simplicity of cockcrow announcing the
sun about to rise: ‘to see the morning with new eyes’.27 The hymn is about
the necessary, daily reperformance of our recognition of God’s time, and as
a hymn it enacts this reperformance as it is sung again, daily, any day. Even
if it is only read once, its imaginary is regular repetition, day by day, syllable
by syllable. The chorus of the ‘we’ of the poem is a self-fulfilling prophecy
of community, whose boundaries exclude the deniers, the fallen, the
errant. The return of the poem at its end to its beginning is its own
demonstration of temporality, a demonstration that sets itself against
what Daniel Mendelsohn called the elusive melancholia of ring compos-
ition which recognizes that things can cohere, temporarily. For Ambrose
and his choir, it is rather that things cohere temporally, temporum tempora,
everlastingly. (Late Romantic melancholia was always an abreaction
against religion.) For Ambrose, what is at stake in his hymns is
a ‘sanctification of time’ which is ‘a Christianization of the everyday’,
every day.28
*
Before we can turn later in this chapter to further hymns of Ambrose and
then to their influence on Prudentius, in order to explore this Christian
sanctification of the calendar as a regulation of time, we need some further

27 28
Dunkle (2016) 98. Phrases taken from Dunkle (2016) 114; O’Daly (2012) 18.

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 346 The Christian Invention of Time
brief background to appreciate the power of Ambrose’s liturgical interven-
tion, as ‘the true inventor of Christian lyric poetry’.29 The history of hymns
and the history of the Christianization of time turn out to march hand in
hand (if not always in time).
In the long and intricate history of the gradual development of
Christianity as the central institutional force of the empire, there are
three particular vectors that are integral to the impact of Ambrose’s
hymns. The first concerns the liturgical use of composed hymns as opposed
to psalms. There is a long suspicion of the inherently pagan and inherently
seductive nature of singing. Clement of Alexandria contrasted skolia
(drinking songs) and erotic poetry with decent Christian hymns – but
the early church ‘consciously avoided original hymnody at least partly
because of a caution about the music’s potential to entice and deceive the
crowds’.30 Ambrose follows this easy opposition too when he attacks
mortiferi cantus acroamatum scaenicorum, quae mentem emolliant ad amores,
‘the death-bringing songs of theatrical performances which soften the
mind for sexual affairs’. The Greek words acroamatum scaenicorum imitate
Roman distaste for Greek effeminizing art, despite the fact that Ambrose
was instrumental in bringing Eastern Greek theology to a broad Western
audience. He sets such lethal singing against the pious pleasures of the
Psalms: a gift of David ‘like a heavenly conversation’.31 In the same way,
Athanasius in his celebrated Letter to Marcellinus sees in the Psalms
a therapy for the emotions. This polarization of pious pleasure and pagan
corruption masks a more complex internal division in Christian thinking,
however. For the extreme asceticism of the growing monastic movement
insisted on the Psalms as the royal road to prayer. ‘The defining character-
istic of monasticism at this time was psalmody’.32 As John Chrysostom
writes, ‘In the monastery there is a holy choir of angelic hosts, and David is
there first, middle and last’.33 Epiphanius of Salamis expresses the extreme
bluntly: ‘the true monk must have prayer and psalmody in his heart
without ceasing’.34 We will return shortly to the demand that prayer
should be ‘unceasing’, but the continuous recitation of psalms became
a sign of a certain Egyptian monastic ideal, projected as a paradigm for
a person’s relationship to God. Vigils over the whole night in which psalms
were recited are lovingly described as liturgical high points.35 When the
fourth-century pilgrim Egeria describes her trip to Jerusalem, she focuses
29 30
den Boeft (2008) 427. Clem. Paed. 2.4; Dunkle (2016) 21.
31 32
Ambr. Hex, 3.1.5; Expl. Psalm. 12. McKinnon (1991) 50.
33
John Chrysostom, De poenitentia. 34 Apophthegmata Patrum Epiphanius 3.
35
Basil, Ep. 207 is a good case. See McKinnon (1991), (1994); Taft (1986).

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 Day to Day 347
her long description on the singing of psalms that dominated the liturgy in
the Anastasis. This history has led James McKinnon to identify a ‘later
fourth-century psalmodic movement’,36 an ideological investment in the
repeated performances of the Psalms as an expression of Christian faith. To
institutionalize one’s own hymns in the church is thus a polemical, eccle-
sial act.
This leads directly to the second vector, the politicization of liturgy.
Athanasius attacked Arius – liturgy becomes a weapon in pro- and anti-
Nicene rows – by accusing him of writing ‘drinking songs’.37 He describes
Arius’ Thalia in the clichéd critical language of professional rhetoric:
effeminate, dissolute, corrupting. Gregory of Nyssa called Eunomius’
poetry ‘Sotadean’.38 This accusation has led to some inconsequential
attempts to judge the scansion of Arian verse.39 Gregory’s point rather is
to associate his opponents with pagan tradition by any insult that will stick:
a heretic’s poetry must be bad poetry, corruptingly pagan. Socrates’ Church
History (6.8) gives a vivid account of Arians entering the city of Antioch
and singing antiphonal songs all night with ‘insulting verses’ that had been
adapted to an anti-Nicene agenda. John Chrysostom organized counter-
choruses of singers, ‘a good plan’, comments Socrates, ‘but it resulted in
riots and danger’. The singers ended up fighting, and people were killed.40
Competing performances of hymn singing become the mode of political
conflict between competing religious groups. Ambrose as bishop of Milan
became embroiled in such conflicts.41 Although he ‘handled the “Arian”
legacy with tact’,42 the clash of his power as bishop with the emperor and
the court was crucial to the spectacular ‘politics of heresy’ in this era.
Nonetheless, Ambrose’s hymns, notwithstanding a certain grumbling
from his enemies, did not aggressively proclaim their evident and inform-
ing pro-Nicene ideology – especially in contrast with the Cappadocian
writing we have been discussing – and did not result in the sort of tumult
that Socrates describes in Antioch. It was possible for the hymns not to
enflame what was ‘the diffuse set of allegiances’ in Milan.43 The success of
the hymns is testimony also to their political savvy.
The third vector is the most complex and the most salient, and concerns the
times of prayer in Christian liturgy. There is a string of passages in the New
Testament which suggest that continual prayer is an ideal. It is the message of
the parable of the widow and the judge according to Luke (18.1); Paul puts
36 37
McKinnon (1994). Apol. contra Arian. 1.5; De synod. 1.15.2–3. 38 Contra Eun. 1.1.17.
39 40
Stead (1978) is a classic example (and includes further bibliography). See Stanfill (2019).
41
See in particular McLynn (1994) and the forceful Williams (2017), both with extensive bibliography.
42
Brown (2012) 123. 43 Williams (2017) 8.

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 348 The Christian Invention of Time
the demand most strongly: ‘Pray at all times in the Spirit’ en panti kairōi
en Pneumati (Eph. 6.18), and – directly – ‘Pray continually (adialeiptōs)’
(1 Thess. 5.17), an extension of the commands to be ever watchful. As we
have seen, Epiphanius recognized continual prayer therefore as an ideal
of monastic living. So, St Martin, a founding figure of Western monas-
ticism, in the hagiographical prose of Sulpicius Severus, which we will
discuss in the next chapter, fulfils the obligation literally: ‘Never did
a single hour or moment pass in which he was not engaged in prayer or
focused on reading; even while reading or if it happened he was engaged
in something else, he never relaxed his mind from prayer’.44 Origen
explores what this might mean, however. ‘He prays without ceasing who
combines his prayer with necessary work, and suitable activities with his
prayer’: indeed, he continues, ‘the only way we can take Paul’s saying ‘Pray
continually’ to be possible is if we can say the whole life of a saint is one
mighty integrated prayer’.45 So Origen both requires that prayer is integrated
into a holy life, and understands ‘continually’ to mean at points throughout
the day. His first example is Daniel who, ‘when great danger threatened him,
prayed three times a day’. By the fourth century, it was usual in the
monasteries to say psalms and pray at morning, night and at the third,
sixth and ninth hours (terce, sext and none), as Egeria carefully records. John
Cassian, who toured Egypt and helped transfer monastic ideals to the West,
considered this to be a ‘tempering of the perfection of the Egyptians’.46 Fixed
times of prayer was both a regulation and a compromise.
Indeed, fixed times seems to have been a requirement of Christian order
from early days.47 Clement of Rome’s Letter to the Corinthians specifies ‘set
times (kairoi) and hours (hōrai)’ for services, though it is far from clear
what this would have meant in the first century. Tertullian in the second
century specifies third, sixth and ninth hours for prayer,48 and Hippolytus
of Rome in the third century in his Apostolic Tradition lays out (41) a full day
of prayer and ritual, starting with prayer and a teaching at dawn, allowing
prayer at home at the third hour (and in your heart if you are out and
about), and moving through to nighttime rituals: if your wife is not
baptized, you should at midnight wash and retreat to another room to
pray. Each of these fixed hours is also invested with a fixed symbolism. So
Hippolytus explains the sixth hour in this way (41.7):
Pray also at the sixth hour. Because when Christ was attached to the wood of
the cross, the daylight ceased and became darkness. Thus you should pray

44
Sulp. Sev. VM 26.3. 45 Origen, On Prayer 12.2. 46
Inst. 3.2.
47 48
For this history see Bradshaw (1981); Taft (1986). On Prayer 25.

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 Day to Day 349
a powerful prayer at this hour, imitating the cry of him who prayed and all
creation was made dark for the unbelieving Jews
The daily prayer at its specified hour is to recall the specified hour of the
crucifixion, and its temporal miracle, including the cry of Jesus on the
cross, a key moment in Christology’s understanding of the humanity of
Jesus, and a contrast with the Jews – a typical polarizing self-definition.
Clement of Alexandria takes a slightly different perspective. The prayer at
night is necessary to fulfil the biblical injunction to be vigilant and wait. ‘A
sleeping man is of no more use than a dead one. Therefore at night we
ought to rise often and bless God.’49 And, quoting Paul, Clement con-
cludes that Christians are ‘sons of light and sons of the day. We are not of
the night or of darkness’, darkness that is ignorance. It is against such
a tradition that Ambrose’s first hymn resounds, both as a hymn for the
moment before dawn and as an explication of the significance of light and
darkness in the performance of Christian worship. Regular and specified
times of prayer by the fourth century had become fully institutionalized in
the Christian churches, and observed with especial fervour in monastic
establishments.
It is intriguing that Robert Taft SJ, in what is still the standard
overview of the history of the liturgy of the hours, begins with the blithe
assertion that ‘these are the natural prayer hours in any tradition’.50 From
within his own commitment to his own tradition, and with little anthro-
pology or history of systems of time, Taft normalizes his own practice as
what is natural, or should be natural, ‘in any tradition’. Yet in the Greek
and Roman societies in which Christianity was shaped, there was simply
no equivalent of such regulation. There were no daily prayers, either
personal or civic, and certainly no suggestion that there should be a fixed
time for sacrifice or libation.51 Christianity’s sanctification of the every-
day and its hours as a moralized memorial of the New Testament narra-
tive is markedly alien to the long history of Greek and Roman civic and
personal practice. What is more – and this is equally traditional, alas, and
equally ideological – Taft selectively misrepresents Jewish cultic practice,
out of which Christianity also developed, and systematically silences its
theoretical discussions of temporality.

49 50
Paed. 2.9. Taft (1986) 11.
51
This generalization is not undermined by the claim of Marinus – a fifth-century ce Palestinian
student of Proclus – that Proclus prayed to the sun morning, noon and night (Vit. Procl. 22), nor by
Plato’s claim that Greeks and barbarians worship the sun at morning and evening Laws 10, 887e. For
the Roman sense of the diurnal pattern, see Ker (2019); Martial (discussed above pp. 80–1) has none
of the ritual rigour at stake here.

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 350 The Christian Invention of Time
The history of Jewish practice in terms of its temporal commitments is
especially complex because of the rupture in time forced by the destruction
of the Temple of Jerusalem in 70. Judaism is unique in the ancient world in
that its cultic practice was focused on a single site, a single Temple, in
Jerusalem. This is where sacrifices and cultic celebrations took place, both
as daily events and as the pilgrim festivals. Jews across the Mediterranean
paid an annual tax to the Temple; but their local practice, even in
Alexandria, is very hard even to evidence.52 After the destruction of the
Temple, cultic practice had to change and placed greater emphasis on its
local centres (synagogues) and family-based events (the home). Events that
could only take place in the Temple had to be re-conceptualized and
relocated or ended. This long process – the development of rabbinic
Judaism – also involves retrospective rewriting of history to make the
contingencies of the contemporary more invested with the authority of
tradition.53 What is more, the development of rabbinic Judaism also
increasingly privileged the study-hall as a place of religious activity, to
the extent that study of texts could be said – by committed teachers and
students of these texts – to be more important than prayer.54 Study has no
time regulation, although it can appropriate the same self-serving idealism
that dismisses all other activity as a distraction from what should be
a continual process of learning. In short, there is a changing social, political
and religious map of practice, both over time and between different
communities – which develops not only within the contours of its internal
dynamics but also in interaction with the surrounding communities and
their practices. Across this changing map, there is also a changing and
intense discussion about temporality.
Now, it is indeed the case that the Pentateuch specifies that there should
be a morning and evening sacrifice every day at the Temple, with add-
itional sacrifices for sabbaths, new moons and festivals, as well as recogniz-
ing the contingent sacrifices of sin offerings, or personal vows, and the like.
So, too, it is reported that a particular Psalm was specified for each day of
the week to be sung in the Temple by the Levites, and that specified sets of
Psalms were sung on festivals, the Hallel at Passover for example, the fifteen
Psalms of Ascent, which may have been sung on the fifteen steps of the
Temple during the pilgrim festivals.55 The calendar, as we have already
indicated, was a major source of theoretical and political debate across
52
For the variety and difficulty of the evidence for prayer in the Second Temple era, see Flusser (1984).
53
See e.g. Schwartz (2001), (2009). 54 Reif (1993) 95–103.
55
For the range of evidence of types of prayer material, see Bradshaw (1981) 1–23; Flusser (1984); Reif
(1993).

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 Day to Day 351
Jewish history in antiquity, to which texts from Hellenistic Judaism, such
as Jubilees, or, from later, the Seder Olam, indicate the range of detailed
engagement of scholars and religious thinkers with the scope of time.56
Taft takes such material – which he passes over in barely a handful of
pages57 – as a sign that Judaism is no more than a poorly articulated and
thus barely influential model of liturgical time for the Christian divine
office. Yet it is fundamental that the temporal requirements for sacrifice or
prayer in the Pentateuch never indicate a specific hour beyond ‘morning’,
‘evening’, or ‘when you rise’, ‘when you lie down’. Indeed, by the time that
the Talmud is edited and written down in late antiquity, this openness is
the prompt for an extended discussion of how time is to be experienced.
This discussion makes the boundaries and limitations of duration,
rather than the fixing of the hour, its necessary subject. We discussed in
chapter 3 how the timing of the evening prayer of the shema is discussed in
the Talmud by constructing analogies with other ritual and social pro-
cesses, and how its initial questions open out into an extended debate about
the marking out of temporal zones and their boundaries and repetitions.
We can now add a further example from that Talmudic discussion which
will serve to mark the difference between the Christian and Jewish regula-
tion of time. The first mishnah of the tractate bBerakhot offers a ma’aseh
case, that is, a narrative example of what actually happened which is thus
determinative: ‘It happened (ma’aseh) that Rabbi Gamliel’s sons came back
from a taverna. They said “we have not yet said shema”. He said to them, “if
the light of dawn has not risen, you are obligated”’.58 The story is told as
evidence of Gamliel’s assertion that the evening shema can be said until
dawn, against Rabbi Eliezer’s claim that it can be said only until the end of
the first watch. Gamliel practised his theory. The text will go on to worry
further what the rising of the light of dawn actually is, as the detail of what
‘evening’ as a time-frame could be taken to mean is explored.
There are two striking ways in which this text is different from the
Christian regulation of time we have been examining. First, it embeds such
discussion not in a monastery or a church but in the scene of a father
waiting for his children to come home late from the pub, a father who
happens to be a major rabbi. When the children see him, they admit they
have not yet said shema and he indicates they still have time. It is a sharp
and amused dramatic scene that demonstrates how even in a rabbinical

56
See above pp. 173–7 and on Seder Olam, Milikowsky (2014) and on Jubilees VanderKamm (2018).
57
Taft (1986) 5–11; a much more judicious and fuller discussion in Bradshaw (1981) 1–23.
58
bBerakhot 2a.

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 352 The Christian Invention of Time
household there has to be a certain flexibility about time within the family
dynamics of an urban social life. The tale is told without express moraliz-
ing, and, unlike the domestic framing of many martyr lives, there are no
consequences of the children’s behaviour or their father’s admonition.
Second, the issue of time is precisely not about defining a fixed time for
prayer and sticking to it, but working out what the duration of ‘evening’,
‘when you lie down’, is, and thinking about the extension of such a time-
frame in the lived experience of domestic life. It is a matter of boundaries
rather than precision of the fixed hour. So, paradigmatically, the halachic
conclusion of the Talmud is that the morning shema should ideally be said
before the end of the third hour, and even then it grants a longer allowance
for the Amidah, the central prayer of the morning service – and, as ‘ideally’
indicates, there are provisions made for the grey area of the ‘what if it is said
later’. The insistence of Christian theological writers in their search for
a liturgy of hours that prayers should be said at dawn, third, sixth, ninth
hours and at the evening and in the night, far from embodying what is
‘natural to any tradition’, is distinctively different both from Greek and
Roman cultural norms, and from the practice and theory of Jewish
temporality.
Ambrose’s hymn for the dawning hour is therefore also a telling moment
in the history of liturgical worship as an expression of time. Now, for the
Christian, time is to be organized and regulated to the hour in the liturgy of
the hours. The hour requires prayer embodied in a communal song, which
is not a Psalm, but which plays a public part in the contentiousness of
theologically informed religious and political power. The song is not just
praise of God, but a reminder of the narratives of the Gospels, tinged by
theological import, and designed by its repetitive performance to construct
a community of worshippers – and above all to mark out time as Christian
rather than Greek, Roman or Jewish: a performance of Christian
temporality.
*
The fourteen hymns of Ambrose combine three interlinked orderings of
time. The first four hymns are for times of the day, the hours of prayer:
the second hymn is for the rising of the sun, the third for the third hour,
and the fourth for night time. The fifth, seventh and ninth hymns are for
Christmas, Epiphany and Easter, that is, major festivals of the church
which celebrate the events of Jesus’ narrative. The remaining hymns each
celebrate a saint’s day, starting with the evangelist John (Hymn 6) and
including Agnes (8), the passions of the apostles (12), Laurence (13), and the

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 Day to Day 353
new saints of Milan, Victor, Nabor and Felix (10), and Protasius and
Gervasius (11), and ending with All Saints (14). Overlapped, therefore,
are the history of the Church from the birth of Jesus through the Gospels,
the Apostles, the martyrs up to the most recent additions of the canon of
Saints in Milan itself; the calendar of ritual over the year, Christmas,
Epiphany, Easter; and the daily expression of worship, from before dawn
to night. The three orderings are mutually implicative and normative. Not
only are the calendars of daily worship, major festivals and saints’ days
expressions of the continuity of Christian time, where each moment and
level of chronology implies each other – daily time and eternity, temporum
tempora, interlinked – but also the exemplars of the saints which imitate
the model of Jesus become a paradigm for the worshipper’s faith. The
collected hymns articulate a Christian ideology of time.
This ideology is expressed both in the continuing use of vocabulary and
expression from the first hymn that creates an incremental semantic
network between the different hymns, and in the explicit language of
temporality. In the opening stanza of Hymn 2, Jesus is celebrated with
the language of the Nicene creed as de luce lucem (2), ‘light from light’, and
lux lucis (3), ‘light of light’, which is glossed as dies dierum illuminans (4),
which can mean both ‘shining as day of days’, or the ‘day illuminating of
days’. The first hymn made the cockcrow ‘the herald of the day’, which had
its allegorical sense; here Jesus is the day – as opposed to the usual image of
the sun or the light. Thus Jesus is celebrated both as a transcendent light
(‘day of days’) and as the day which gives light to the pattern of the days,
the unfurling of time. The ambiguity is telling, and turns a standard
Hebrew linguistic pattern (‘king of kings’, ‘lord of lords’) into a more
semantically challenging Latin expressivity. Similarly, the Sun/Jesus is
asked to descend – inlabere (5) – as Apollo in the Aeneid is asked to ‘descend
into our spirits’ (Aen. 3.89), but the term takes on a heightened sense after
the play between slipping and falling in the sixth and seventh stanzas of the
first hymn: the descent of the sun is also to help humans against the casus
asperos, the ‘harsh falls’, ‘the tough events’, of life (15). In the same way, as
the first hymn encouraged us to rise up strenue, ‘with strength’, here God is
asked to fill ‘our acts with strength’ (strenuos, 13). So, the final two stanzas
play out the connection of each and every day with the idea of Jesus as the
‘day of days’ with the same turn to a moralized time that we saw in the first
hymn. Laetus dies transeat!, ‘Let the day pass in joy!’, seems a standard
morning prayer for the coming day to go well, but the joyfulness is a moral
life: ‘May modesty be like dawn! May faith be like noon! May our minds
not know twilight!’ The day is not just metaphorized – pure like the first

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 354 The Christian Invention of Time
rays; faithful with the ardour of the sun at noon; resisting the doubtfulness
of half-light – but constructed as a tripartite eschatological sequence that is
fully pro-Nicene in its theology (29–32):59
Aurora cursus provehit;
aurora totus prodeat
in Patre totus Filius,
et totus in Verbo Pater.
Dawn advances its course.
May the complete dawn come forth,
The complete Son in the Father,
And the complete Father in the Word.
The dawn, like the ‘day in joy’, is a marker of the time of the poem: it
advances its cursus, a term which recalls the use of dromos and kuklos that we
have seen in the Greek discussions of the stars and astrology – the regular
circle of time passing. But aurora is also a symbol of the resurrection and
a metonymy of Christ60 – hence ‘complete’, ‘perfected’, ‘whole’. Aurora,
a feminine noun, has a masculine adjective totus, as for Peter ipse, ‘himself’
(masculine) qualified the Rock, Petra (feminine) (1.15): some copyists tried
to correct the grammar, but the assimilation here to the Son and the
Father, as with the association of Peter with his etymologized and symbolic
name, twists grammar to an ideological – allegorizable – agenda. So this
grammatically imperfect but ‘perfect dawn’ finds a fully Nicene Trinitarian
expression: Father, Son and Word are as one. The return of each dawn is
thus to be viewed as the visible sign of the resurrection of Jesus and of the
Nicene theology that explains it. Again, the ring composition that insists
on its own circular language (cursus), takes us back to the opening line of
the poem, splendor paternae gloriae, ‘Splendour of the Father’s glory’,
which can now be fully appreciated not just as indicating the light of the
sun as the visible emanation of God’s glory, but also more specifically as the
overlap between Jesus as ‘the glory of God’ – the passion of Jesus is called
doxa theou – and Jesus as the sun. Ambrose wishes to make each moment of
the day embedded in a religious understanding, a Christian vision of
temporality.
The third hymn announces iam surgit hora tertia, ‘Now the third hour
rises’ (1) – the hic et nunc of liturgical worship. But this hour matters
because ‘This hour (haec hora) is the one that gave the end to the ancient
wicked crime’ (9–10), that is, it is the time of day of the crucifixion that

59 60
As noted by Fontaine et al. (1992) ad loc. See Fontaine et al. (1992) ad loc.

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 Day to Day 355
transformed the original sin into the Christian promise to transcend death.
Haec hora, the very mark of ‘now’, is valued – each and every day – as the
mark of the transcendence of time. Hence, the final hymn concludes by
‘asking now (nunc)’ that Jesus joins his praying servants – those singing the
hymn – in the fellowship of martyrs ‘for the centuries of eternity’, in
sempiterna saecula. This last poem began by praising the aeterna Christi
munera, ‘the eternal gifts of Christ’. The final ring composition is the circle
of eternal time, which is begged for now in the moment of hymning. The
singers are striving to fulfil the imitation of the saints they celebrate, to turn
their now into a fulfilment of the promise of eternity.
The meaning of a saint’s day is also explored in a fascinating passage
from Ambrose’s prose treatise on virginity. Once again he overlaps light
with faith, and night or mist with uncertainty or the heresy of dissent. But
he also takes the role of a day and its relation to celebration in a different
direction – a remarkable gloss on what dies dierum illuminans (2.4) or diei
iam sonat (1.5) might signify:
Bona lux quae perfidiae discussit caliginem, fidei diem fecit. Dies factus est
Petrus, dies Paulus, ideoque hodie natali eorum spiritus sanctus increpuit
dicens: Dies diei eructat verbum, hoc est ex intimo thesauro cordis fidem
praedicant Christi.
This is the good light, which shattered the mist of faithlessness and made
the day for faith. Peter has been made a day, Paul has been made a day, and
thus on today their feast-day the Holy Spirit cried out saying: ‘Day speaks
forth the word to day’, that is, they preach the faith of Christ from the
deepest storehouse of their heart.61

The thought that light makes the day, and changes perfidia to fides, ‘faith-
lessness’ to ‘faith’, leads to the instrumental power of the examples of Peter and
Paul, whose martyrdom – and faith – is central to Hymn 12. Peter ‘became
a day, Paul a day’: the saints are transformed into their days, the day that the
light of faith makes. The day, its time, is the embodiment of the saint (the day
made saint). On each saint’s day, the Holy Spirit declares that this day – the
hodie of the liturgical time of celebration – sends forth verbum – the word of
faith – to the other days, day, as it were, speaking to day, announcing
(praedicant) faith. The sentence Dies diei eructat verbum is a quotation from
Psalm 18 (19).3, a Psalm which we will shortly see is paraphrased in Ambrose’s
Hymn 5, and thus the Holy Spirit in quoting the Psalm performs the fulfilment
of scripture. The days are linked in a conversation where the matter is the word

61
De Virgin. 19.125.

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 356 The Christian Invention of Time
of God, verbum.62 In Ambrose’s vision, the festal calendar becomes a catena of
embodied sound proclaiming the Verbum of God – the chain of God’s word in
time, day to day.
These hymnic strategies that repeat words in changed senses to build up an
incremental network of theologized meaning, that use ring composition to
reinforce a formal palintropic poetics of redemption, and that transform
narrative in and out of the here and now of performance and the permanent
moral struggle of faith or the cosmological temporality of Christian history,
recur throughout the hymns, and although I have analysed my examples here
in the order of the hymns’ modern edition, the strategies work across the whole
collection in whatever order the hymns are sung, and sung again, and again.
Yet there is one further aspect of Ambrose’s writing that links these hymns into
my earlier discussion of Nonnus. For what I have called the hymns’ palintropic
poetics is linked, as in Nonnus, to the practice of paraphrase.
The most patent appropriation of scripture is in Hymn 6, a celebration
of the evangelist John, where the fisherman is described as hooking the
word of God. This leads to a quotation of the first lines of the Gospel of
John, fitted, word for word, into a stanza. It requires a certain laissez faire
treatment of metrics, but has the effect of tying the hymns into the
authoritative tradition of the Gospels, so that singing the hymn here is
also reciting the Gospel, indeed the Gospel’s foundational expression of
time, in principio erat – with the result that reading the Gospel will echo
with Ambrose’s music and recontextualization of the verses. Hymn 5,
however, is a remarkable demonstration of Ambrose’s paraphrastic writing
at work.63 The first five lines reads (5.1–5):
Intende, qui regis Israel
super Cherubim qui sedes,
appare Ephraem coram, excita
potentiam tuam et veni.
Veni redemptor gentium.
Give ear, you who rule Israel,
Who are enthroned upon the Cherubim,
Appear before Ephraim,
Rouse your power and come.
Come, redeemer of the nations.

62
Singing Psalms, for Ambrose, is a ‘a model of heavenly conversation for us’, caelestis nobis instar
conversationis: Expl. Psal. 12.
63
What follows builds on the excellent analyses of Fontaine et al. (1992) ad loc. and Dunkle (2016)
122–4.

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 Day to Day 357
These lines closely follow Psalm 79 (80) in the Latin translation:
Qui regis Israel, intende qui deducis velut ovem Ioseph, qui sedes super
Cherubim, appare coram Ephraim et Benjamin et Manasse, excita poten-
tiam tuam et veni, ut saluos facias nos.
You who rule Israel, give ear, you who leads Joseph like a flock, who are
enthroned upon the Cherubim, appear before Ephraim, Benjamin and
Manasseh, rouse your power and come, so that you may make us safe.

Ambrose removes the image of the shepherd marshalling Joseph like a flock,
although it motivates the mention of Ephraim and Manasseh, Joseph’s sons
and the founders of the tribe of Joseph, as well as Benjamin, his favourite
brother and another founder of a tribe of Israel. As Fontaine notes, this
redrafting is not just for brevity or to fit the metrics. The Psalm is a plea to
save us – this and the next verse, ‘show us your favour that we may be delivered’,
are emphatically repeated three times in the Psalm – and ‘us’ is the tribes of
Israel set against the enemy who are the nations. Ambrose has turned the
Psalm’s national plea into a universal assertion of the redemptive power of God.
The paraphrase, here in a hymn on the nativity of Jesus, is also expressing the
supersessionist insistence that Christianity is a promise to all mankind.
Ambrose ‘embeds a universalizing theology’ in his hymn, which ‘expresses
this rupture’ with Judaism that, for him, the birth of Jesus encapsulates.64
This adaptive paraphrasing of the Psalms continues in the hymn. Here
are verses 17–24:
Procedat65 e thalamo suo,
pudoris aula regia,
geminae gigas substantiae
alacris ut currat viam.
Egressus eius a Patre,
regressus eius ad Patrem;
excursus usque ad inferos,
recursus ad sedem Dei.
Let him come forth from his chamber,
the royal palace of modesty,
a giant of twin substance,
swift to run the race.

64
Dunkle (2016) 123; Fontaine et al. (1992) 279 ad 5.5.
65
Dunkle (2016) reads procedit; some manuscripts, in parallel to the Psalm, procedens. I follow
Fontaine et al. (1992) here.

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 358 The Christian Invention of Time
He went out from his Father,
He came back to his Father.
He journeyed to the dead,
He journeyed back to the throne of God.
These lines paraphrase Psalm 18 (19), though the gestures of appropri-
ation here are far more aggressive.
Et ipse tamquam sponsus procedens de thalamo suo, exsultavit tamquam
gigas, ad currendam viam; a summo caelo egressio eius. Et occursus eius
usque ad summum eius.
And he comes forth like a bridegroom from his chamber, and rejoices in
running the race, like a giant; his coming forth is from the height of the sky.
His circuit is to the height of it.

The subject of the Psalm (ipse) is the sun, which appears like a groom from
his marriage chamber; and like a ‘giant’ (a strong and motivated translation, as
we will see, of the Hebrew gibor, ‘hero’, ‘mighty’) who runs a race. The sun’s
journey is a circuit across the heavens. This depiction stems from the Psalm’s
opening, ‘The heavens declare the glory of the God.’ But Ambrose has made
the subject of his verses Jesus (an easy transition after the association of Jesus
and the sun that we have already seen in the hymns). Jesus comes forth like
a bridegroom, but his chamber now, with the expected ascetic sexuality, must
be qualified immediately as a palace of chastity (pudor). Jesus is a ‘giant’, but in
an extraordinary exegetical gloss, a giant ‘of twin substance’.66 The salient
reference here is to Genesis 6.4, where the mysterious Nephilim appear. This is
the time on earth when there are divine beings who sleep with humans: it is the
moment which leads God to express his wrath that results in the flood. The
Nephilim are described in Hebrew as giborim, which is translated as ‘giants’,
gigantes, in the Septuagint,67 rather than its usual rendering as ‘mighty one’,
‘champion’, ‘hero’, which may explain why gibor in Psalm 18 has been
translated in Latin and Greek as gigas, ‘giant’, with the correspondingly strange
image of a giant ‘running a race’. The Nephilim are divinities who couple with
mortals and produce offspring. Jesus is both divine and human.68 Hence with

66
A striking phrase quoted by Augustine Contra sermonem Arianorum 8.6. Augustine also notes the
singing of this hymn in his Serm. 372.3: see Daley (1993) 492 n. 40.
67
Rashi notes that Nephilim in Hebrew means ‘giants’. He also notes its sense ‘fallen’, which led to
Nephilim being seen as angels. Rabbinic interpretation of this passage stretches from cross-class
marriage to angels sleeping with humans.
68
Ambrose explains this sense also as De incar. domin. sacr. 5.35: consors divinitatis et corporis.
Augustine explains the word gigas in the same way, Enarr. in Ps. XVIII and elsewhere see Daley
(1993) 492 fn. 41.

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 Day to Day 359
an arresting combination of intertextual play between Genesis and the Psalm,
on the one hand, and Christological theology on the other, Jesus here is a ‘giant
of twin substance’, a phrase designed to proclaim the essential human and
essential divine combined in Jesus, a principle of Nicene theology.69 In the
Psalm, the sun goes across the vault of heaven in its circuit. But in Ambrose’s
hymn, Jesus goes from the Father and back to the Father, and circuits down to
the underworld and back up to the throne of God. The repetitions of e- and re-
along with the repetition of -cursus, ‘circuit’, enact the palintropic poetics we
have been tracing: the occursus of the Psalm is tellingly transformed into
excursus and recursus. The return of Jesus is integral to the narrative of Jesus,
and must be emphasized in this way. The paraphrase of the Psalm rewrites the
sun’s journey as Jesus’ resurrection and the triumph over time.
This intermingling of narrative and theology is hard to read without
complicity or rejection. Brian Dunkle SJ, who, as I have said, has produced
the most sophisticated literary reading of Ambrose’s hymns, is certainly on
the side of complicity. ‘The Christological reading of the Psalms . . . does
not compromise their integrity as texts about the Lord of the Old
Testament’, he writes, ‘Ambrose retains a plain interpretation of the texts
even as he offers a Christological or allegorical interpretation for his
particular catechetical ends’.70 When an image of the sun from several
hundred years before the birth of Jesus is read as the figure of Jesus, how
can ‘the integrity’ of a text be said to remain uncompromised? How can the
‘plain interpretation’ of a text about the sun be reconciled with
a Christological – a supersessionist – interpretation? As if Dunkle using
the term ‘Old Testament’ itself is not already fully complicit with this
supersessionist ideology. Who is outside the choir when the hymn is sung?
According to the self-serving rhetoric of the hymns themselves, only the
deniers, the ignorant, those who live in darkness . . . Such is the power and
success of the hymns: to create the world of worship where singing from
this hymn sheet is naturalized as the horizon of expectation for the
community. For Dunkle, subscribing as he does to Ambrose’s agenda,
the compelling supersessionism of Ambrose is silently passed over in the
easy assumption of the Christian vocabulary of ‘Old Testament’ and the
comfortable assertion of its integrity, its plainness. As with Paul Tillich or
Robert Taft, faith determines reading, and the violent logic of Christian
supersessionism continues to distort scholarship.
*

69 70
Daley (1993) 481–2. Dunkle (2016) 125.

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 360 The Christian Invention of Time
Prudentius read Ambrose intently. Prudentius, who combined his poetry
with a career in imperial service, was roughly contemporary with Ambrose,
though he lived longer than the bishop; he was engaged in the political and
theological encounters that also dominated Ambrose’s career. Ambrose
wrote two letters against Symmachus, the leading non-Christian senator
who had proposed re-establishing the altar of Peace in the Senate – a sacrifice
at this altar opened the senatorial sessions, and it had therefore great
symbolic valence – and Prudentius also wrote two lengthy hexameter
poems Against Symmachus (with prefaces in asclepiads and glyconics, good
Horatian metres): Prudentius’ case depends on setting Roman imperial
history into a new Christian eschatological narrative. The Peristephanon is
a series of poems which dramatize martyr’s bloody deaths, and the poet’s
response to their suffering.71 One of the longest of these poems (2) relates the
passion of St Laurence, as does Ambrose’s Hymn 13;72 the twelfth treats the
martyrdom of Peter and Paul as does Ambrose Hymn 12. The growing cult
of martyrs links the two poets’ liturgical and spiritual interests.73 Prudentius’
Psychomachia dramatizes the internal struggles of the soul in the form of
a classical and violent battle of the gods;74 and in barely less bloodthirsty and
certainly no less lurid a form, his Hamartigenia, ‘Origin of Sin’, depicts the
sins of humans stemming from Satan’s rebellion.75 Ambrose’s insistence on
‘internal vision’, the education of the senses towards a spiritual comprehen-
sion of the physical world, and the need to avoid the ‘falls’ of sin, offer
a similar theological framework. But it is in Prudentius’ Cathemerinon that
his specific engagement with Ambrose is paraded.
The Cathemerinon is a collection of twelve hymns.76 Several have the
same subjects as Ambrose’s hymns; four are in the same metre; Ambrose’s
language is echoed both boldly and subtly. Cathemerinon is a Greek word
meaning ‘daily’ poems, or poems ‘for the day by day’, and each poem, and
the collection as a whole, is engaged with setting a sense of daily time into
a theological framework. Although sections of these works have made their
way into modern liturgical hymns,77 they are long poems, in multiple
metres, and do not seem to have been designed, as Ambrose’s hymns are,

71
See Palmer (1989); Roberts (1993). 72 See Conybeare (2002); Walter (2020) 194–208.
73
Roberts (1993); Palmer (1989). On martyrs see Shaw (1996); Brown (2014); Grig (2004).
74
Nugent (1985); Mastrangelo (2008); and now Pelttari (2019).
75
Malamud (2011) is the best introduction to this text, along with Dykes (2011).
76
O’Daly (2012) is a necessary starting point.
77
O’Daly (2012) 383 notes examples. The most important, if distant descendant is perhaps Keble’s The
Christian Year, which was the highest-selling poetry book in the nineteenth century, with nearly
400,000 copies sold in Britain alone, and which has a similar ‘day by day’ lyric format. See Blair ed.
(2004).

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 Day to Day 361
for repeated liturgical use. Where Ambrose’s hymns are for a congregation
led by a bishop, Prudentius’ Cathemerinon is probably written for a more
restricted readership.78 ‘Christian identity meant re-probing and re-
surveying the boundary between public and private’, writes Bowes, and
she notes that after Nicaea there developed ‘an increasingly shrill debate
about how the private was to be valued in the face of a new kind of
public’.79 Prudentius’ poetry also marks a porous boundary between acts
of worship and acts of reading, exegesis and literary performance. At
multiple levels, Prudentius’ collection is an extended reflection on
Ambrose’s project. Its language is far more violent, even brutal in its martyr
narratives; his politics are more strident; his focus on the suffering of this
world is insistent and more aggressive than any of Ambrose’s depictions of
sin and punishment; his parade of classical learning is more explicit. (All of
which no doubt helps explain why in the modern institutions of classics
Prudentius is part of the canon, while Ambrose rarely features.) In the case
of both Nonnus and Gregory we saw a struggle over what the register of
Christian language should be, and over what audiences were projected by
such Christian writing. Between Ambrose, whose hymns become part of
the everyday worship they depict, and Prudentius, whose long, classically
formed poetry engages in literary exposition of exempla from the Bible, we
can see a similar strain between more popular and more learned expressiv-
ities, particularly signalled by Prudentius’ express engagement with
Ambrose’s project.80 Prudentius shares Ambrose’s concern to construct
Christian daily time, but shifts not just the focus of comprehension but
also the mode of intellectual engagement. Prudentius is more present as
a figure in his poems, and far more interested in the suffering self, the
internal anguish of self-recognition. These are poems for reading, for
personal absorption, absorption in the celebrating, suffering self. As
Mastrangelo has argued at length, Prudentius’ Christian hero is an indi-
vidual struggling in his soul and for his soul, for whom the martyr is the
prime figure of imitation and admiration.81

78
Hershkowitz (2017) following Bowes (2008) calls him a ‘villa-poet’.
79
Bowes (2008) 216. Ambrose (Bowes (2008) 203) was opposed to occulta consilia in domibus, and in
this rhetoric ‘private worship was the mark of a heretic’ (198).
80
On Prudentius’ classicism, a greatly discussed topic, for examples see Mastrangelo (2008) 14–40
(Virgil); Malamud (2011) 120–3 (Lucretius); Lühnken (2002) (Horace and Virgil); Malamud (1989);
van Assendelft (1976); and also on Horace see e.g. Pucci (1991) with bibliography back to Breidt in
1887. Pucci’s conclusion that Prudentius was a great poet who happened to be a Christian, however,
severely distorts Prudentius’ agenda and poetics, but is typical of one strand of criticism within
Classics.
81
Mastrangelo (2008).

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 362 The Christian Invention of Time
This shift is evident from the Preface, which was probably attached to
a large-scale edition of his poetry, but also can act as a significant prelude to
the hymns. It is a 45-line personal life history and confessio. ‘I have lived for
five decades, if I am not mistaken’, it begins, ‘and, on top, the seventh pole
(cardo) turns the year, while we enjoy the circling (volubilis) sun’. Fifty-
seven years old, then, but the familiar language of astronomical time will
turn out to be programmatic for the collection. Prudentius runs through
his decades with summary tales of sinful development – at school he
learned to lie; in youth, lustful brazenness; then a career in law, leading
to government and imperial preferment. This life is but a priamel, how-
ever, for his impending death. Now at the very end (fine sub ultimo, 33), his
sinful soul can cast off its stupidity and he can celebrate God at least with
his voice. Consequently, he prays to let his soul ‘link the days with hymns’,
hymnis continuet dies (37). As Ambrose desired to have ‘day speak to day’,
Prudentius too will construct a chain of days through their hymns, organ-
ize time through celebration of God and the martyrs.82 And Prudentius is
clear about his project’s polemical stance: ‘Let my soul fight against
heresies, debate the catholic faith, trample the rites of the nations, bring
destruction, Rome, on your idols’ (38–41). Ambrose rejected the ‘deniers’,
‘those in ignorance’; Prudentius, with a characteristic intensification of his
polemical language, is up for a fight (pugnat, conculcat, labem . . . inferat).
Yet his literary self-reflexivity is ever present. He ends (43–5) by hoping to
be ‘free of the chains’ of his physicality and let his voice go wherever it will
until its last sound. Liber, ‘free’, puns on the word ‘book’, liber, often in
Latin poetry encouraged to go where it must, and links the finality of
composition with the end of the poet’s life.83 The last word of the poem is
ultimo, ‘last’, recalling the fine ultimo he anticipates. Unlike Ambrose,
whose self-representation is absent from his hymns, the voice of the poet
Prudentius is placed first and last. As a preface, this poem has been read as
indicating Prudentius’ connections with the classical tradition, especially
with Horace.84 It also acts as a programmatic opening to the hymns,
demanding that the collection should be read as the evidence of a life,
a perspective on a life, and that the ‘day by day’ is to be comprehended as
the threat and promise of the experience of human time, for each and every
reader as an individual. It is life as a protreptic: an exemplum of what is to
matter in the day to day.
82
Pelttari (2019) translates continuet as ‘fill’, which misses the sense of the catena of days. Every
medievalist will know why I emphasize catena.
83
Malamud (1989) 77. On the tongue see Ballenger (2009) 91–125.
84
See e.g. Pucci (1991) 679–85.

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 Day to Day 363
One organizing structure of the Cathemerinon seems clear enough. The
twelve poems are structured in six pairs of poems, where the first three pairs
focus on specific types and times of daily activity, and the second celebrate
forms of religious practice and their temporality, moving from weekly
activity, to the broadest cosmological time, to specific festivities of the
calendar.85 So the first pair of hymns echoes Ambrose, with a hymn for
cockcrow and a hymn for the sunrise/morning. These are also in Ambrosian
metre and full of direct echoes of Ambrose’s language.86 The second pair is
on ‘before eating’ and ‘after eating’, linking worship to ‘our daily bread’ and
its significance.87 The third pair is for ‘lamp-lighting’ and ‘just before sleep’,
with the expected anxiety about the darkening of the mind. The fourth pair,
starting the second sequence, is on fasting and after fasting. After ‘daily
bread’ comes the necessity of fasting. As Peter Brown demonstrated, fasting
is a way of stopping the time of the body (removing menstruation, sexual
desire) in order to reverse time back towards the garden of Eden, the time
before the Fall.88 Prudentius’ hymns praise fasting but are also an argument
against the extremes of ascetic fasting, in the name of a regulated temperance:
here the fasting seems to be probably for one day a week. The fifth pair is
a hymn for ‘every hour’, omnis horae, and a hymn for the burial of the dead.
The hymn for every hour is a joyous song of praise that catalogues the works
of Christ from the foundation of the world, through his miracles, crucifix-
ion, descent to hell and return from it, and adds the fathers and saints who
followed Jesus. Its conclusion is that Jesus has conquered death and returned
humanity to life, and hence joyful celebration should continue. It is a hymn
for every hour because every hour instantiates the full history of time. As
Gregory Nazianzus placed Christmas in the history of time to explain its
significance as a day of celebration, so here Prudentius insists that every
human – he catalogues choirs of praise (109–11) – and nature itself (112–13),
must celebrate together ‘for ever and ever’, saeculorum saeculis. The trad-
itional closural formula takes on further significance after this narrative
precisely of the saecula saeculorum.89 The hymn is significantly in juxtapos-
ition therefore with the hymn for burial of the dead. The ‘era will quickly
come’, venient cito saecula (36), when the resurrection of the body will justify
the care taken over burial.90 As with Lazarus, this ‘triumph over black death’

85
Ludwig (1977) 318–21 is more sensible than the thesis of the whole article.
86
See e.g. Herzog (1966) 65–7; O’Daly (2012) 57–62.
87 88
Herzog (1966) 43–9 emphasizes the allegorical elements of food. Brown (1988).
89
Mastrangelo (2008) 67–74 demonstrates the importance of saeculum as a term in Prudentius’
typological discourse.
90
See Rebillard (2012).

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 364 The Christian Invention of Time
(128) is the Christian promise. After the vision of the centuries in the hymn
for every hour, the eternity of the afterlife follows. The final two hymns
proclaim the celebration of Christmas and Epiphany, linked in liturgy and
theology in the fourth century. Again, both poems have the subjects and
metre of hymns of Ambrose, and, as we saw, were the subjects of paired
sermons by Gregory Nazianzus. The Cathemerinon understands its agenda
of ‘day by day’ in four interlocking ways, then: first, the hours of the day as
scenes of prayer and self-reflection; second, the day as structured around
‘daily bread’ or the self-controlled abstinence from food: what the physical
needs of the body mean for the spiritual life of the faithful; third, the
cosmological ordering of time, which is instantiated in every hour, and
grounds the theological understanding of death, as an expression of the
redrafting of eternity; fourth, the festal calendar of celebration. These four
frames are mutually implicative, interlocking and integrate the collection as
a collection. Prudentius’ poetic project, it has been recognized, is the
formation of the internally struggling Christian individual within a new
Christian history: ‘A true Christian conversion through the reading of [his
poetry] forms a true Roman citizen’.91 The poems of the Cathemerinon insist,
however, that this conversion is a process that is shaped and continues in and
through the experience of time, day by day.
Although I discussed how the repeated performance of Ambrose’s
hymns, all the same length and metre, encouraged a certain embodiment
of faith in the choir of celebrants, Prudentius is concerned with time-
bound physicality in a quite different manner. First of all, his vision of
human life is distressingly physical in its suffering (4.81–4):
Vexamur, premimur, malis rotamur;
Oderunt, lacerant, trahunt, lacessunt;
Iuncta est suppliciis fides iniquis.
We are harassed, crushed, turned on the wheel of evil;
They hate us, torment us, drag us, attack us;
Faith is tied to unjust punishment.
Prudentius’ ‘we’ is deeply and violently oppressed by an unnamed ‘they’
who assault them, with the result that faith itself is integrally linked to
suffering that is not fair. Life for humans is a physical anguish. The body
itself, however, is also the source of the wrong it suffers. As he states in the
Hamartigenia (562): gignimus omne malum proprio de corpore nostrum, ‘We
beget all our evil from our own body’. So even cures must be taken ‘with

91
Mastrangelo (2008) 57, summarizing much contemporary criticism of Prudentius.

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 Day to Day 365
a full mouth and woven into your internal veins’ (Cath. 4.89–90). The
fleshly thickness that in Gregory Nazianzus made a bar to human under-
standing of God, becomes in Prudentius a defining physicality that is
punished, damaged, and transcended by the acceptance of pain.
So his description of martyrs is stridently more vivid and brutal than
Ambrose’s, in the Cathemerinon and in the Peristephanon. When Ambrose
tells of the martyrdom of young Agnes, he exclaims, ‘Struck! With what
dignity she bore it!’ (8.25) – and that is the only description of her physical
suffering. The next eight lines, the close of the poem, dwell on how she
maintained her modesty as she fell, making sure her body was covered, so
that she ‘fell with a decorous fall’, lapsu verecundo cadens (8.32) – a death
which also shows how the ‘fall’ (lapsus/cadunt) feared in the first hymn can
be transcended. Prudentius by contrast has Agnes demand penetration of
her ‘nipples by the whole blade’, and offers to take ‘the force of the sword
deep into her chest’ (Peri. 14.86–7), before she is decapitated. In the
Cathemerinon’s description of the massacre of the innocents Prudentius
dwells even more attentively on the physicality of violence (12.117–20):
O barbarum spectaculum!
inlisa cervix cautibus
spargit cerebrum lacteum
oculosque per vulnus vomit; . . .
O savage display!
A head dashed on the stones
Scattered the milky brains
And vomits the eyes through the wound.
The baby’s brains are called ‘milky’ both because of their colour or
consistency, but also because the child has been grabbed from its mother’s
breast. The precision of the eye being ‘vomited’ through the wound is
designed to raise disgust. This is only one of several such stanzas.
Human life is thus a trial, and the enemies of Christianity, especially
Satan, are amazed when ‘crumbling clay can bear such toil’, posse limum
tabidum tantum laboris sustinere (7.191–2). Flesh is as fragile as mud, and
only its capability of surviving violence is remarkable. A life-time therefore
is a passage of distress turned to celebration only by the promise of life after
death and the spectacle of suffering borne. It is not by chance that fasting
and the burial of the dead play so big a role in Prudentius, and none in
Ambrose’s hymns. To inhabit the body in human time is for Prudentius
a necessarily terrible ordeal. As he declared in the Preface to the collection,
‘what of use have I achieved in the space of so much time?’ (tanti spatio

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 366 The Christian Invention of Time
temporis) (5), when ‘in time (iam), whatever it is that I was, death will have
wiped it out’, cum iam quidquid id est quod fueram, mors aboleverit.
Whereas Horace could wryly recall his own past failures as the subject of
the city’s gossip – heu . . . fabula quanta fui, ‘Oh, . . . what a story I was’,
Prudentius’ past is a demonstration of existential irrelevance. For
Prudentius, it would seem, the experience of human time is a torture
alleviated only by faith, which can allow the transcendence of the suffering
of human physicality.
The celebration of the hope that such faith brings, is itself also power-
fully expressed as the transformation of time, in a way which recalls
Gregory’s sermon for Christmas Day, though for Prudentius the hope
turns into an aggressive outpouring of religious hatred. Cathemerinon 11 is
his hymn of Christmas Day. It begins with the sun:
Quid est quod artum circulum
sol iam recurrens deserit?
Christusne terries nascitur,
qui lucis auget tramitem?
Heu quam fugacem gratiam
festina volvebat dies!
quam paene subductam facem
sensim recisa extinxerat!
Why is it that the sun is now running back
And leaving behind its narrow circle?
Is Christ born on earth
Who increases the path of light?
Alas! How transient the thanks
The racing day was rolling round.
How nearly it had extinguished its withdrawn torch,
As it was cut back gradually!
The winter solstice as a celestial event – with grandiloquent rhetoric – is
imaged as the sun expanding its journey across the sky, again, after its near
disappearance – a bold overstatement – in the shortest day of the year. The
language is familiar in its vocabulary if not its excess: the circle of the sun’s
course; its running back; the rolling of time. But it is all predicated on the
birth of Christ who ‘increases the path of light’. The slippage between the
language of divine illumination and the language of the day is evident, and
recalibrates the celestial signs.
Jesus’ birth opens into a narrative of history, which takes us back to the
foundation (condidit, 21) of the heavens when Jesus was already the causal

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 Day to Day 367
force. Nonetheless – and this continues a well-known theological debate
about why Jesus was not born earlier – ‘as the ages (saeculis) were ordered,
and the status of the universe (rerum) set in place, their founder and architect
stayed in the Father’s bosom’ (25–8). Christmas Day requires a perspective
back to the very foundation of time, with even more theological pointedness
than in Gregory’s sermon. Jesus stayed with his Father (29–32):
Donec rotata annalium
transvolverentur milia,
atque ipse peccantem diu
dignatus orbem viseret.
Until thousands of years in cycles
Were rolled across,
And he thought fit to visit
A world long sinful.
The long sweep of time, which turns in cycles (rotata), is captured in the
impressive two-word line transvolverentur milia, ‘thousands were rolled
across’, large words for the expanse of the centuries.92 It is only after such
a long time (diu) marked by human sin, that Jesus makes the decision to
come to the world. The result of this decision, the birth that ‘breaks the
chain (catena) of death’ (46), inaugurates a new golden age: novellum
saeculum . . . et lux aurea, ‘a new age and a golden light’. For Prudentius,
as he seeks to map the contours of the daily, the single turning point of the
winter solstice, which is the turning point of the year, marks the trans-
formational singular event of the birth of Jesus, and must therefore be
comprehended as the turning point in the history of the centuries.
The perspective is also forwards. The poem ends (89–116) with a vitriolic
attack on the Jews for not recognizing Jesus. (It is often now claimed that
such attacks are figurations of internal divisions between Christian groups,
but in a discourse which moves so easily between figuration and direct
description it is hard to delimit the hate speech – or its consequences – with
such certainty. Indeed, it represses the long history of Christian anti-
Semitism.) In his attack, the Jews will recognize the error of their ways at
the end of time (104–7):
Cum vasta signum bucina
terris cremandis miserit
et scissus axis cardinem
mundi ruentis solverit.

92
Ambrose uses the same trick: multiplicabatur magis, ‘it was multiplied the more’ (7.25).

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 368 The Christian Invention of Time
When the huge trumpet sends forth
Its signal for the burning of the earth
And the axis breaks and dissolves
the pole of the collapsing world.
Ambrose’s Fifth Hymn, as we saw, performed in celebration of
Christmas Day, adapted Psalms to his universalist model and imaged
Jesus as the sun, and equal to his Father. Prudentius makes his Nicene
rhetoric more explicit and determinative, and moves the adaptation of
Hebrew scripture into an assault on Jews who will ‘experience the lightning
bolt of the cross’ (112–13), a turn from the illumination of the sun to the
violence of celestial punishment. Time is now both the foundation of the
Christmas story and a weapon with which to crush your enemies. Like
Tertullian, Prudentius enjoys imagining the end of days as the bitter end of
his opponents.
The final poem of Prudentius’ collection is for the celebration of
Epiphany, and it includes another arresting example of the blend of
astrology and eschatology that is the distinctive rhetoric of Christian
reflection on the story of the Magi. The opening, as we have come to
expect with the hymns of both Ambrose and Prudentius, is a theologically
laden construction of a dramatic present that overlays the moment of
celebration with the deep history and symbolism of the Christian narrative
(12.1–4):
Quicumque Christum quaeretis,
oculos in altum tollite:
illic licebit visere
Signum perennis gloriae.
All you who are seeking Christ,
Lift your eyes to the sky:
There it will be possible to see
The sign of eternal glory.
The ‘you’ embraces the celebrants, the readers recalling or anticipating
the celebration, and the Magi, who travel to find Jesus. What will be
visible – and the tense is important here – is a sign of ‘eternal’ glory. The
present search for the coming sign of the everlasting allows time to slide
between now and the widest perspective. So, the narrator prays that the
comet and all the stars that burn with the heat of the Dog Star ‘may now
fall, destroyed by the light of God’, iam dei sub luce destructum cadat (23–4).
The ‘light of God’ is both the star of Bethlehem and the empowering truth
of faith (as in Ambrose’s metaphorics of light); the maleficent stars are to

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 Day to Day 369
fall (cadat) before it – not the ‘descent’ of astrological movement but the
‘fall’ of defeat. But what is the time of iam? Does it imply that the stars have
‘already’ been destroyed? Or is it a prayer that ‘now’, since the new star has
appeared, they are to fall? Or is it the ‘now’ of the prayer itself, the liturgical
present? A constant present of triumph? The following stanza begins, En
Persici . . ., ‘Look! Persians . . .’: a dramatic present recalling the scriptural
narrative of the Magi. The past is constantly present in the here and now, as
the sign announces a future to come – and both past and future are but
shadows of the eternity of God’s time. The slippage in tenses – in time-
frames – is part of Prudentius’ theological vision of time, prompted here by
the stars, the markers of time.
‘The sign’ to be seen is the star that ‘conquers the circle of the sun in
beauty and light’ (4–5) – the star that led the Magi to Bethlehem. This star
is not beholden to the moon’s monthly course (lunam menstruam, 10), but
on its own ‘possesses the sky and controls the course of the days’, caelum
possidens cursum dierum temperat (11–12). The star is now in imperial
ownership of the sky, and, like the emperor’s management of the cursus
honorum, it controls the very subject of the poems, the cursus dierum, the
cycle of day to day. So, what the Magi see is the regale vexillum, the ‘royal
standard’ (27); the constellations that flee ask (32–5):
‘quis iste tantus’, inquiunt
‘regnator astris imperans,
quem sic tremunt caelestia
cui lux et aethra inserviunt?’
‘Who’, they ask, ‘is this great commander
Who is emperor to the stars,
Who makes the celestial bodies tremble,
To whom light and air are servants?’
Prudentius, unlike the other descriptions of the astrology of the star we
have discussed, makes it not just a sign that outshines the other stars, or
leads the Magi (as does Ambrose (7.10–12)), but an imperial and instru-
mental force controlling the stars, to whom the very matter of the heavens
is a servant. So, the constellations that ‘revolve in unchanging motions’,93
in se retortis motibus (14), refuse to follow their usual routes and hide, and
the ‘other globes of astral significance’, ceteri . . . signorum globi (29–30)
retreat.94 Gregory, it will be recalled, saw the appearance of this star as the

93
O’Daly’s translation.
94
For globi of stars see Ambrose, Hymn 7.2 micantium astrorum globi, ‘the globes of shining stars’.

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 370 The Christian Invention of Time
end of the science of astrology, Theodotus a redesign of heaven’s map.
Prudentius, the official of the state, represents the star as a military com-
mander storming the heavens and compelling the stars into abject retreat.
This astrological conceit is linked to the star’s status in time. Hoc sidus
aeternum manet, ‘This star stays eternally’, announces Prudentius (17), it
‘never sinks’. So the Magi declare (36–9):
‘inlustre quiddam cernimus
quod nesciat finem pati,
sublime, celsum, interminum,
antiquius caelo et chao.’
‘We see something glorious,
That does not know how to experience an end,
Sublime, on high, without boundary,
Older than the sky or chaos.’
The Magi, the viewers in the poem, know how to see. They do not
merely see something bright but something whose brightness is glory. They
see something that is without end, not Virgil’s Roman empire, but God’s;
its position in the sky is also a transcendence; its course is ‘without
boundary’ (interminus: a rare word that looks forward to Nonnus’ fascin-
ation with what is atermōn). Most strikingly, this star – appearing only
now – is nonetheless ‘older than the sky and chaos’. This phrase implies not
just what is above the earth and ‘the world below’ the earth, as O’Daly
translates,95 but the foundational moments of creation in the Christian and
Greek tradition: in Genesis, in the beginning God creates the heaven
(caelum); in Hesiod, the beginning of everything is Chaos. This star,
beyond time, thus, in the eyes of the Magi, is the king of the nations,
Jesus – hic ille rex est gentium (41) – who indeed was born ‘before Chaos’,
ante Chaos genitus.96 As Prudentius makes the star not just the sign of the
birth of Jesus but (a figure of) Jesus, so the star’s timeline follows Nicene
theology and exists before the creation of the sky in which it is. This king is
the king promised by scripture, the Magi conclude, the star that will arise
from the stock of Jesse.
The ability to see beyond the physical, as the Magi do, is a fulfilment of
the injunction of Paul, ‘So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what
is unseen, since what is seen is temporal (proskaira) but what is unseen is

95
O’Daly (2012) 355.
96
Ham. 44 – a powerful pro-Nicaean and anti-Marcian passage. See Malamud (2011) 156–9. Paulinus
of Nola encourages Jovius to write biblical epic starting from chaos ante diem 22.151.

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 Day to Day 371
eternal (aiōnia)’ (2 Cor. 4.18). So the most visible object of all, the shining
star, is itself a sign of the eternal, a fulfilment of prophecy, a figure of
eschatological promise: in it they see the king. Ambrose quotes these lines
of Paul twenty-one times.97 Prudentius dramatizes Paul’s injunction,
Ambrose’s inspiration, in this extended paraphrase of the brief scriptural
narrative of the Magi. Crucial to this vision of the invisible is typology. As
Catherine Conybeare comments on Prudentius’ interpretative demands in
the Hamartigenia, reading becomes ‘an interpretative act and hence an
ethical one’: ‘Not only what you read but how you read affects your fides.’98
So, the hymn continues with the long description of the massacre of the
innocents as the frame for the journey of the Magi, but after its all too vivid
account of violence, from which I quoted earlier, it determines that this
massacre is like the edict of Pharaoh to kill the male children of the
Israelites. Moses escaped that slaughter, thus ‘prefiguring Christ’, Christi
figuram praeferens (143). To make his point, Prudentius offers a lengthy
typological reading of Moses encouraging us to ‘recognize Jesus in the
example of so great a man’ (157–8), a typology already rehearsed at length in
the fifth hymn.99 Because of this typology, concludes Prudentius (181–4):
iure ergo se Iudae ducem
vidisse testantur Magi,
cum facta priscorum ducum
Christi figuram pinxerint.
Therefore it is right that the Magi testify
That they have seen the king of Judah,
When the deeds of earlier leaders
Portray the figure of Christ.
What enables the Magi to bear witness that they have seen the king of
Judah, when they look at a star or a baby in a manger, is not so much
prophecy or the guidance of a star but the history of typological understand-
ings of Jesus that underpin the Christian interpretation of the Hebrew Bible
as the Old Testament. The narrative that began with the looking to the star
as a sign, ends with the fulfilment of the sign by seeing in the baby the
scriptural history that has always already been the sign of his birth. Typology
turns the linearity of aetiology into a continuity of repeated figuration. As
Jonas Grethlein writes (of Augustine), typology redrafts ‘the sequential
narrative of the past through a view that is . . . aligned with God’s timeless

97 98
Counted by Dunkle (2016). Conybeare (2007) 229; 239.
99
Cath. 5.31–137, on which see Mastrangelo (2008) 107–12.

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 372 The Christian Invention of Time
perspective’.100 Prudentius’ hymn sets out to make ‘its audience, as it follows
the text in its linear development, part of this non-linear mode of time’,101 to
form what Catherine Conybeare nicely calls ‘the typological imaginary’.102
These longer scriptural and theological narratives, with their startling
enargeia and forceful rhetoric – that certainly distinguish Prudentius’ hymns
from Ambrose’s – evoke a model of reading, which transforms Ambrose’s
collective hymns of worship into a reader’s reflective engagement with the
temporality of Christianity. The sleeper in the first hymn is implored to give
up his ‘sickly, sleepy, lazy’ bed and be ‘chaste, upright and sober’ (1.5–7).
Prudentius’ Christian harbours ‘dark, hidden thoughts’ (2.13–16), ever ‘con-
scious of sin’ (2.10). ‘We’ merit nothing because of our sins (6.117–18).
Prudentius as narrator leads the prayer, precor, ‘I pray’ (3.6). Prudentius’
rhetoric repeatedly draws on the satires of Horace and Juvenal, as well as
Christian homiletics, in turning a critical moral gaze at the reader. The
repeated criticisms of human behaviour, along with first-person
confessions, second-person injunctions and first-person plural complicities,
construct a strident moral framework focused on sin and death, and the long
narratives – the very time of reading – create a dynamic of narrative exemplar-
ity which place his moral imperatives within a broader theological framework.
‘The reader is called to account’ . . . the poetry ‘calls into being a responsible
reader’, makes her ‘a participant in the poem’s negotiation’.103 As in the satires
of Juvenal or Horace, whoever else is pilloried in the poetry, the faithful reader
as much as the hypocrite lecteur is provoked towards intense self-scrutiny.
The connection between typology and the human experience of the
present – how a past example tempora nostra figurat, ‘prefigures our times’
(Psych. 67)104 – is captured in summary and with a full theological perspec-
tive in Prudentius’ Apotheosis, a poem on the nature of the divine, where he
writes (Apoth. 309–11):
Christus forma patris, nos Christi forma et imago.
condimur in faciem domini bonitate paterna
venturo in nostrum faciem post saecula Christo, . . .
Christ is the figure of the Father, we are the figure and image of Christ.
We are founded in the image of the Lord by the goodness of the father,
As Christ was to come into our image after centuries, . . .

100
Grethlein (2013) 346.
101
Walter (2020) 207 – she is talking here of Peristephanon 2 on Laurence.
102
Conybeare (2007) 238. This is also the central thrust of Mastrangelo (2008).
103
Dykes (2011) 18, 19, talking of the Hamartigenia.
104
See Mastrangelo (2010), an expansion of his discussion in Mastrangelo (2008).

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 Day to Day 373
These are hard lines to translate as the grammar as much as the vocabu-
lary contributes to the intricate vision of overlapped past, present and
future. Christ is the forma of the Father: I have translated forma as ‘figure’,
but after Nicaea it also includes an implication of substance, ‘form’. We –
human beings – are the ‘figure and image’ of Christ, that is, humans are to
imitate the model of Jesus, as well as recognize our human body and divine
soul. This divine form is immediately glossed from Genesis. We are made –
condimur, as we have discussed, is also a politicized term – in God’s image.
The Latin Bible in Genesis uses the word imago, but Prudentius uses facies.
The one thing that cannot be seen of God, however, is his face (facies). Our
creation ‘in the image’ of God also recognizes the unknowability of God,
the repeated principle of Prudentius’ apophatic theology. This creation is
in the present tense: creation is a continuing drama. The ablative absolute
that follows does not indicate a precise relation between the previous
sentence and its own assertion (I translate it with ‘as’ as the least marked
option). The future participle could be causal, however: ‘Because Christ is
to come . . .’. Our very humanity is predicated at creation on the coming of
Jesus. This future arrives post saecula ‘after the aeons’. On the one hand,
there is a linear narrative: there is creation, and after many years, there is the
Incarnation. On the other hand, as Jesus is in the form or image of the
Father, so we are to Jesus, but Jesus is also in the image of us. What is to
come is also the always already. This is the productive tension of typology,
which recognizes the centuries of time only to fold them back into an
eternal figuration, a ‘God’s eye view of the past, present and future’ as
determining models of each other.105
It has often been noted that ‘at the grave of the martyr the temporal
distinction of then, the time of the passion, and now is abolished’:106 the
saint, as Peter Brown argued, becomes the cultic locus which mediates
between heaven and earth, the past, the present and the future.107 The
insistence on the constant present in the tenses of the hymns, however, has
its more specific ethical impulse too. Everyone, writes Prudentius, is
embarrassed or ashamed by the thoughts of night by the morning. So,
the morning becomes the model of now (2.33–6):
Nunc, nunc severum vivitur,
nunc nemo temptat ludicrum,
inepta nunc omnes sua
vultu colorant serio.

105 106
Mastrangelo (2008) 49 where he also discusses these lines. Roberts (1993) 13.
107
Brown (2014). See also the essays in Howard-Johnston and Hayward (1999) and Grig (2004).

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 374 The Christian Invention of Time
Now, now life is lived severely;
Now nobody tries a joke,
Everybody now colours their idiocies
In a serious face.
Humans put a brave face on their own moral failures. The fourfold
repetition of nunc, ‘now’, emphasizes what Paul called the proskairon, the
temporary, the moment, the mundane – the failure to look towards the
eternal. So, continues Prudentius, haec hora cunctis utilis, ‘This hour is
useful for everyone’ (2.37). The usefulness is sarcastic. The morning hour is
useful for ‘the soldier, lawyer, sailor, workman, ploughman, shop-owner’ –
for the trivialities of daily work, the sort of life of business he recorded for
himself in his preface. Prudentius prays for something more: intende nostris
sensibus, vitamque totam dispice, ‘attend to our inner feelings; examine our
whole life’ (57–8). His hope is that ‘a whole day’, tota dies (101), can pass
without sin. Whole days may stretch in a chain to make a whole life: this is
the ethical logic of the Cathemerinon. To transform the nunc, nunc of
mundane, fragmented living into the recognition that each moment is
replete with the promise of eternity. For Prudentius, each bite of food is
a memory of the taste of the apple that Adam took, which has been undone
by Jesus as the second Adam; each act of fasting is a control of the flesh,
which is the ‘triumph of the emperor of the spirit’, triumphet imperator
spiritus (7.200). The annual festivals of the day of Christmas and Epiphany
invoke the full scope of cosmological eternity and the transformation of the
unfurling of time that is signalled by the birth of Jesus. So, too the hymn of
omnis horae, ‘every hour’ tells of omnia saecula saeculorum, as the ceremony
of the burial of the dead prompts a reflection on the mortality of the flesh
and its transcendence in the Christian promise. Thus the collection that
began with the poet anticipating his own death, concludes in its last line
with iam nemo posthac mortuus, ‘now nobody hereafter is dead’ (12.207).
The ‘now’ is the recognition of the end of the journey of the hymns: it is to
this point that his poetry has been travelling. It is also a recognition that it is
only ‘now’ after the birth of Jesus that such a claim can be made. The
liturgical, theological present and the performative present overlap.
Anything the poet might have been, claimed the preface, will have been
wiped out by death: but the poetry itself challenges this. The immortality
of poetic production, so often rehearsed at the end of Latin works – non
omnis moriar – is echoed and redrafted here, now, now within a Christian
eschatology.
*

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 Day to Day 375
Whereas Ambrose provides short hymns of identical length and metre for
the regulated and public performance of liturgy within the context of the
cathedral Christianity under the control of a bishop, hymns designed to
produce a community of worshippers, tied together in faith and in the
temporal experience of daily observance, Prudentius provides long poems
of different lengths and metres, designed, it seems, not for liturgical,
communal performance, but, like Callimachus’ Hymns, as a reflection of
such performance for a community of individual readers. His fascination is
with the sinful, suffering self, how it is modelled by the martyrs, and how it
experiences the daily time of the body and its pains along with such
internal anguish. Whereas Ambrose uses the paradoxes of Christian rhet-
oric to open a broader and deeper perspective of how Christian time frames
the regular observance of the hours of prayer and the festal calendar,
Prudentius’ remarkable poetic texture turns such paradoxes into a fierce
and memorable language of self-scrutiny and moral fervour, where the
violence of imagery and violence of pain are intertwined into a fierce and
shocking beauty. Ambrose looks towards – helps form – the church as
institution, and holds an instrumental place in the long construction of the
liturgy of the hours, and the modelling – and the enacted experience – of
the day as a regulated order of prayer that structures both cathedral
Christianity and, above all, the monastery, which, as we saw, are both
integral to the historiography of Western time.108 Prudentius marks out
a different space where the committed Christian can reflect on the
extremes of asceticism and the commitment of the martyr as part of self-
understanding, mediated through the experience of the day by day.
Violence towards heretics, towards Jews, is matched by violence towards
sin, and violence towards the sinning self, but tempered by the celebration
of the Christian promise of transcendence of both pain and death,
a promise that is articulated and experienced through the daily round of
prayer and festal celebration. Prudentius, like most Christians, is neither an
ascetic monk nor a martyr (nor a priest). His poetry is instrumental in
imaging a Christian day that recognizes the alluring force of asceticism and
martyrdom, and yet remains distanced from both. His poetry of self-
scrutiny enacts thus a profoundly sophisticated poetics of imitation,
embodiment and difference. If Ambrose is leading the choir’s singing,
Prudentius’ positionality is the Christian lying in tears in front of the
picture of a martyr, while on a mission to Rome, reflecting on his own
position on the ground, crying.

108
See above, pp. 81–4.

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 376 The Christian Invention of Time
In the representations of day-by-day Christianity in the hymns of Ambrose
and Prudentius, then, we can see the dynamic tensions within the develop-
ment of Christianity around the turn of the fifth century – different param-
eters of the organization of time, as I discussed in the first section of this book.
Ambrose and Prudentius articulate how the ‘now’ is recalibrated against
timelessness, how a life is to be narrated as an ethical struggle, how time is
to be regulated, how the past of the saints is to be memorialized, all predicated
on an understanding of God’s time and the Christian promise of life after
death. To remake the day by day. I have so far emphasized Prudentius’
engagement with Ambrose because it is this contrast which reveals most
pointedly the agenda of Prudentius’ writing and the direction of his project.
It is also necessary, however, because so much recent writing on Prudentius by
classicists has focused on how his poetry echoes and redrafts the language of
the classical tradition, especially Virgil and Horace. It has become a mantra to
repeat Bentley’s judgement that Prudentius was ‘the Virgil and Horace of the
Christians’, Maro et Flaccus Christianorum. There is no doubt that Prudentius
was well read in the Latin poetry of the Republic and early Empire: he had
a serious education. Nor is there any doubt that he uses this furniture of the
mind in a significant manner. As has been demonstrated with some rigour,
Prudentius appropriates Virgil’s defining image of Rome and its future and
uses it against itself to project a Christian imperial gaze; he takes up Horace’s
genial and ironic self-representation of failure and hesitation – and sense of
daily life – and transforms it into his more self-lacerating ideal of self-
awareness. Lucretius’ Epicurean rejection of religion is inverted. The sharp-
ness of Prudentius’ rhetoric is informed by the language of Roman satire –
Juvenal as much as Horace – as it is by Tertullian.109 ‘An allusive poetics of
transformation, of the making new of traditional models, corres-
ponds to the substantive message of personal renewal and
transformation’.110 Yet it is telling that the most recent discussion
of the Cathemerinon, from which I have just quoted, a discussion
which is the epitome of this classicist understanding of intertextual-
ity, also proceeds without any reference to Ambrose (or any other
Christian writers, bar St Paul).111 Reading classically keeps the poetry
away from any practice or politics of religion. We have seen in this
book moments when theological commitments bury philological
rigour: in this reduction of Prudentius to a late but honoured place
within the classical tradition – business as usual for classicists,

109
See above, n. 8. 110 Hardie (2019) 23.
111
Hardie (2019) 216–22. So too van Assendelft (1976) barely mentions Ambrose’s hymns.

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 Day to Day 377
ironically enough for Prudentius who is so scathing of such a lack of
self-scrutiny – classical philology aggressively performs its institu-
tional severance from theology. Prudentius suffers for it.
This contrast between Ambrose and Prudentius is instructively on display
in Ambrose’s twelfth hymn and the twelfth poem of Prudentius’
Peristephanon, which are both dedicated to the celebration of the day of
the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul in Rome. Ambrose’s hymn begins
Apostolorum passio | diem sacravit saeculi, ‘The Passion of the Apostles | has
made holy this day of our era’. Saeculum means the time of the mundane,
‘this age’ in contrast to God’s time. In his commentary on the Psalms,
Ambrose writes: dies saeculi mali sunt quia saeculum in maligno positum est,
‘The days of this era are bad, because the era is set to be disposed towards
evil’.112 What had been no more than one more day of the ordinary calendar
has become other, thanks to the passion of the martyrs: sacravit, ‘has made
holy’, marks ‘this transformation or this valorization of time’, and the
position of the verb between the two words of time, diem and saeculi,
‘emphasizes this sacralization of time: the fact that from now on time can
be a time of salvation and liturgy’.113 The hymn moves from a portrayal of the
two saints’ deaths, to a description of the city of Rome in celebration, to close
with a rousing acclamation of the city (31–2): electa, gentium caput! | sedes
magistri gentium!, ‘Chosen one, leader of the nations! | Throne of the master
of the nations!’. The hymn travels from a recognition of the day’s sacrality to
participation in the day’s celebration, as the hymn ends with its performers’
acclamation of Rome as a Christian city.
Prudentius’ twelfth Peristephanon, by contrast, opens with a conversation.
An unnamed interlocutor asks what the unusually large and joyful celebra-
tion is, and receives the answer that it is the feast of Paul and Peter (3–6):
Festus apostolici nobis redit hic dies triumphi,
Pauli atque Petri nobilis cruore.
unus utrumque dies, pleno tamen innouatus anno,
uidit superba morte laureatum.
This day we have the festival of apostles’ triumph coming back,
A day made celebrated by the blood of Paul and Peter.
The one same day – but returned anew after a full year –
Saw each win the crown of martyrdom in a splendid death.

112
Ambr. In Psal. 36.32, cited by Fontaine et al. (1992) ad loc., who also notes that Cyprian (Laps. 2)
opposes dies saeculi and terrena tempora to aeternitas. Augustine’s most extensive discussion of the
sense of saeculum is Enarr. in Ps. IX, 6.
113
Fontaine et al. (1992) ad loc.

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 378 The Christian Invention of Time
The speaker explains that the two martyrs were killed on the same day in
the calendar a year apart. The day returns – the cycle of time – the year is
‘made new’, and each return of the day is made an occasion of joy and
celebration by virtue of its memory of the martyrdom.114 So, in the
narrative that follows which describes the martyrdoms, the second death
takes place (21–3):
ut teres orbis iter flexi rota percucurrit anni
diemque eundem sol reduxit ortus,
evomit in iugulum Pauli Nero fervidum furorem, . . .
when the round wheel of the turning year had run the course of its circle
and the rising sun brought back the same day,
Nero vomited forth his hot rage against the throat of Paul . . .???
The overload of words for the turning of time – teres, orbis, flexi, rota – is
emphatic. Nor is it merely a frame for the heated anger of the emperor. The
sacredness of the day is because of this repetition, and is enacted in the
repetition of the annual festivities. The narrator goes on to describe how
the topography of Rome too has been made sacred (sacrata, 30; sacravit, 47;
sacra, 63) by the two churches that are dedicated to the two martyrs, either
side of the Tiber, and encourages his listener to join him in going to the
celebrations. ‘It is enough’, he concludes (65–6), ‘to have learned this at
Rome: go home and remember to celebrate this double-festival day’.
Prudentius dramatizes two men observing others at a festival – the standard
pose of the theōros, the visitor to a cult site familiar from Pausanias or
Plutarch or Ovid and already parodied in Theocritus 14 where two less
educated women are shown watching a festival performance at the palace
of Ptolemy. There is an intellectual distance in the exegesis of the landscape
and the reasons behind the ceremonials. The final encouragement is to
‘remember and celebrate too’ – not so much joining the performative
acclamation that closed Ambrose’s hymn, as an enjoining to absorb what
has been taught, and to repeat ‘the day’ for oneself.115 The poem becomes
both the description of a day of worship and an injunction to fulfil the day
of celebration as a day of celebration. The persuasive strategies and pro-
jected audiences of Prudentius and Ambrose are again different, for all that
both insist on turning the dies saeculi into a dies sacratus. They dramatize
different styles of experiencing the day.

114
On renovatio see Hardie (2019) 135–62.
115
The same injunction, memento, occurs at Cath. 6.125; Perist. 10.835, but without this aetiological
implication.

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 Day to Day 379
In chapter 3 we discussed the importance of the zealous regulation of
time that the Rule of Benedict and other monastic systems demanded, and
the significance of such regulation for the measuring and comprehension
of time’s order in Western history. With Ambrose and Prudentius, we can
see how a poet who is a bishop and a poet who is a state official together
help formulate an understanding of Christian time as a day-by-day experi-
ence: the articulation of the times of the day, and the relation of such
articulation to the festal calendar, to the Christian ethical memory of the
martyrs, and to the broadest cosmological time of theology, as expressions
of being Christian. Here, too, is the story of how time becomes structured,
how time is (to be) experienced. Such poetry, circulated, performed, read,
reveals the formation of the temporal imaginary.

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 chapter 15

‘We Are the Times’

Making History Christian

The first chapter of this book opened my investigation into the discourse of
temporality in late antiquity with the discussion of how a specific mistrans-
lation of the Hebrew Bible by the Septuagint was a designed intervention
in the cultural reception of the text. I start this last chapter with another
question about a surprising intervention by the translators of the
Septuagint, which will lead into an extraordinary rabbit-hole of exegesis
and commentary – to emerge, once again, in Augustine’s specific and
remarkable obsession with time. This journey starts with a figure who
will be a mainstay of this chapter, Sulpicius Severus, a Christian from
Aquitaine who was born probably around 355. Sulpicius Severus is
a celebrated author – though scarcely a familiar figure in the classical
canon – famous because he wrote the Life of St Martin, which became
a hugely influential text in the Middle Ages, and which has a claim to be the
first Latin biography of a Christian saint who was not martyred –
a hagiography, that is, rather than a martyr narrative.1 We will discuss
this text and its generic affiliations later. He also wrote dialogues about St
Martin and letters (Paulinus of Nola was an especially significant corres-
pondent), and a Chronicon.2 This Chronicon is a history of the world from
the creation to the Priscillian heresy, which contrasts strikingly with
Eusebius’ Chronicon (which we discussed in chapter 7) in its aim and
form. Fully three quarters of Sulpicius Severus’ Chronicon is a curt para-
phrase of the Hebrew Bible (although he probably read it in Latin). In the
Chronicon, it is always a surprise when Sulpicius Severus himself allows his
authorial voice to emerge in what is otherwise a studiously objective stance,
for all that his editing and redrafting is aggressive. Consequently, it is
arresting that, when he comes to the story of Noah, he offers a personal
1
The best general introduction remains Stancliffe (1983).
2
There are hundreds of manuscripts of the Vita Martini but only a single manuscript of the Chronicon.
For the Vita Martini the best commentary is Burton (2017); for the Chronicon, see Senneville-Grave
(1999). Further bibliography below.

380

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 Making History Christian 381
interpretation. When Noah correctly judges that the waters are receding,
he takes action (1.2.1):
corvum primum explorandae rei gratia, eoque non revertente – ut ego
conicio, cadaveribus detentum – emisit columbam.
He sent out first a raven to explore the situation, and when it did not come
back – detained by the corpses, as I imagine – he sent out a dove.
To a reader familiar with the Hebrew text, both the action of the raven
and the interpretation are challenging. The Hebrew text reads va’yetze
yatzov vashov, which is standardly translated ‘he went to and fro’ until the
waters receded.3 The first bird, that is, can find no place to land but travels
around and around. This leads to some delightful and bizarre midrashim.
In bSandhedrin 108b, a conversation is imagined between the raven and
Noah in which the raven rejects the task offered with a knock-down
argument. He must be hated by God and by Noah, the raven argues, to
have been selected for the mission, because, since they are unclean animals,
there are only two ravens in the ark. If he died from heat or cold, therefore,
the species of ravens would be wiped out. He adds that he suspects Noah of
wanting to get rid of him so that he can have sex with the raven’s wife!
(Noah retorts angrily that since he has observed the prohibition of sex on
the ark with his own wife he is scarcely likely to have sex with a raven.)
Hence, however, the fearful raven will only fly round and round the ark.
Midrash Rabbah Bereshit imagines a different conversation – the idea of
a conversation comes from an etymological play on the Hebrew verbs.
Noah asserts blithely that the raven can be sent because as an unclean
animal he is no good for food or for a sacrifice, only to be reminded by God
that ravens would feed Elijah in the desert (Kings 1.17.6) – a paradigmatic
demonstration of how the narrative of the Talmud is informed by God’s
omniscient (always already) time. Therefore this midrash too explains why
the raven stays close to the ark’s sanctuary, to be safe for his future role.
There is no reason given in the Hebrew Bible for why Noah sends out this
first bird, and he draws no explicit conclusion from the bird’s reaction;
these gaps prompt imaginative stories about why the raven is chosen and
what is at stake in his circling round and round. In both the Hebrew text of
Genesis and in its long commentary tradition in Hebrew and Aramaic the
raven leaves the ark and ‘goes to and fro’. It does not ‘go out and not come
back’, as Sulpicius Severus has it.

3
Gen. 8.7.

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 382 The Christian Invention of Time
The translation of the Septuagint, however, takes a strikingly different
tack, which is the likeliest source for the tradition that Sulpicius Severus
represents. The Septuagint reads ‘He sent out the raven to see if the waters
had receded. It went out and did not return until the waters had dried from
the land’. The Septuagint adds, first of all, a reason for Noah’s actions: the
bird is let out to see ‘if the waters had receded’. In the Hebrew Bible, this
reason is given for the release of the dove, and the lack of such a reason in its
logical place for the first bird has prompted critics who are so minded to
suggest that the raven story is an interpolation either by the priestly source
(or the earlier compositional level known as J) or from Mesopotamian
literature, though the reasons given for such an interpolation are specula-
tive at best.4 Origen already marked this phrase with obeli as not being in
the Hebrew text.5 It demonstrates that the Septuagint is trying to edit the
story, as it translates, to introduce a more explicit and clearly understand-
able motivation. But the Septuagint has also decided that the raven ‘did not
return’. One might generously assume that this is no more than a literalist
understanding of ‘going to and fro’, that is, the raven circled and did not
thus actually go back to the ark. But the addition of this negative opens
a long history of textual doubt.
John Calvin, at the heart of the Reformation, sums it up succinctly: ‘I
wonder whence a negation, which Moses has not in the Hebrew text, has
crept into the Greek and Latin version, since it entirely changes the sense’.6
Usually assertive in his knowledge, Calvin is baffled about the source of the
negative – a bafflement easy to share. Calvin continues: ‘Hence the fable
has originated, that the raven, having found carcasses, was kept away from
the ark and forsook its protector. Afterwards futile allegories followed . . .’.7
Calvin is right that the Vetus Latina and the Vulgate both standardly read
‘egrediebatur et non revertebatur’, though Jerome, scholarly as ever, in his
Hebrew Questions on Genesis adds et de corvo aliter dicitur: ‘emissit corvum et
egressus est, exiens et revertens, donec siccarentur aquae de terra’, ‘About the
raven there is another reading, “He sent out the raven and it went out,
going away and returning until the waters dried from the earth”’, a good
translation of the Masoretic Hebrew, despite what his authorized

4
See Moberly (2000) and Marcus (2002) for discussion and bibliography.
5
Marcus (2002) 71 discusses this.
6
Calvin (1948) ad loc. Calvin despised the Council of Trent’s insistence on the authority of the
Vulgate, its ‘barbarous’ declaration ‘that Scripture should only signify to us whatever dreaming
monks might choose’ (Calvin (1958) 76), a quotation contextualized briefly in Hendel (2016) 277 (see
271–329).
7
Calvin (1958) 76.

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 Making History Christian 383
translation transmits. Philo, who read the Septuagint and may not have
known Hebrew, is the earliest to offer one of the ‘futile allegories’, whereby
the black raven stands for sin and the white dove for virtue, a reading
happily extended by Ambrose and Prudentius (as well as by Greek
Christians).8 Josephus, by contrast, who did read Hebrew, simplifies the
story, and has the raven go and come back as a sign that the world is still too
wet, but then tells of only one dove, who returns with mud on its toes and
an olive branch in its beak.9 The mud anticipates the rabbinical under-
standing of Genesis 8.9, where, when the first dove returns, ‘Noah, putting
out his hand, took it into the ark’. ‘Putting out his hand’ is understood in
later commentaries precisely as holding the bird and inspecting it for signs
of a recovered world, especially mud on its toes. The Greek and Latin texts
and commentaries, with the exception of Josephus’ unique version, seem
consistently to read a different text from the Hebrew that they translate,
and that the Hebrew commentators use. The Peshitta, the Syriac Bible
which usually follows the Hebrew, in this case follows the Septuagint,
and – since there is always one exception – Pirkei de Rabbi Eliezer, written
as late as the turn of the eighth to ninth centuries, is the only text from
within the Jewish tradition that assumes that the raven does not come
back.10 The great polyglot bibles of the Renaissance print Hebrew and
Septuagint versions next to each other without demurral.11 The King James
Bible, however, translates the Hebrew (‘which went forth, to and fro’), and
most modern Christian commentaries discuss (translations of) the Hebrew
text without recognition of the long history of Christian understanding of
another version.
The doubt over whether the raven goes and comes back, or goes and
does not come back, is most vividly evidenced in the oldest extant manu-
script of the whole Vulgate, Codex Amiatinus, copied in the Benedictine
monastery at Wearmouth-Jarrow in the north of England around the year
700. This beautiful manuscript has only one addition, written in a non-
scribal hand. Above Genesis 8.7, which in this manuscript reads

8
Philo, Questions and Answers on Genesis II.35; Ambrose, On Mysteries 11; Prudentius, Ditto. 3. See also
John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis.
9
AJ 1.3.5. Josephus, unlike others who wish to separate the mythic Deucalion from the scriptural
Noah, with the assimilationist zeal we saw in chapter 1, concedes that the story is well known to
pagans, and singles out Berossus (AJ 1.3.6) – whose story, unlike Josephus, has three birds, like the
Hebrew Bible’s three missions of the dove.
10
Pirkei de Rabbi Eliezer 23.
11
Notwithstanding Fabricius’ comment that ‘variants are arts of the Devil’ (letter to Buxtorf,
24 August 1625). Van Boxel (2006) gives an interesting account of Bellarmine’s Christian Hebraist
engagement with the problem; see also Hendel (2016) 279–82.

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 384 The Christian Invention of Time
egrediebatur et revertebatur, the word NON has been added, and scholars
have reason to believe it is in the hand of the Venerable Bede himself. It is
as if the text and its correction materially dramatize Jerome’s own aware-
ness of the two readings. In an uncanny repetition of such ambivalence or
correction, Vulgate.org, an online interlinear text and translation of the
Vulgate, gives an incorrect Latin text qui egrediebatur et revertebatur, but
translates it ‘which went forth and did not return’ – a difference – no doubt
a providential misprint – which captures the history of the problem nicely
enough. The silence in the Hebrew Bible about why Noah sends the raven
out, or what his ‘going to and fro’ means, allows not just for the imagina-
tive constructions of midrash but also for the interventions of editing as
well as the work of exegesis.
Augustine, however, reveals how potent the Septuagint translation can
become as an exegetical tool – in a route of thinking that is far from the
midrashim. In his Enarrationes in Psalmos 102, he writes this stunning
paragraph (Ennar. in Ps. 102.16):
Sunt enim qui praeparant conversionem, et differunt, et fit in illis vox
corvina, ‘Cras, cras’. Corvus de arca missus, non est reversus. Non
quaerit Deus dilationem in voce corvina, sed confessionem in gemitu
columbino. Missa columba reversa est. Quamdiu: Cras, cras? Observa
ultimum cras: quia ignoras quod sit ultimum cras, sufficiat quod vixisti
usque ad hodiernum peccator. Audisti, saepe soles audire, audisti et
hodie: quam quotidie audis, tam quotidie non corrigeris. Tu enim
secundum duritiam cordis tui et cor impoenitens, thesaurizas tibi iram
in die irae et revelationis iusti iudicii Dei, qui reddet unicuique secundum
opera sua [Rom. 2.5–6].
There are those who make preparations for their conversion, and delay; in
them comes into being the voice of a raven, ‘tomorrow, tomorrow’ [cras/cras =
caw/caw]. The raven was sent from the ark, and did not return. God does not
seek delay in the voice of a raven, but confession in the moaning of a dove.
The dove, sent out, returned. How long: tomorrow, tomorrow. Look to the
last tomorrow. Because you do not know what the last tomorrow is, let it be
enough that you have lived as a sinner until today. You have heard, you are
used to hearing often, you have heard today too: as many times as you hear,
you will not change. For ‘according to the hardness of your heart and your
unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against you in the day of wrath
and the revelation of the just punishment of God, who will repay each man
according to his deeds’.
The raven is a model of the continuing deferral of the hesitant convert.
He ‘goes out but does not return’ – where ‘return’ is the termus technicus for
the repentance required by conversio – teshuvah in Hebrew. Conversio

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 Making History Christian 385
requires revertere. The dove, by contrast, goes out and comes back. But this
symbolic contrast is expressed in terms of voice. The dove moans in
penitence; but the raven caws, which in Latin sounds cras, cras, ‘tomorrow,
tomorrow’.12 As we discussed in chapter 9, cras, cras is precisely what
Augustine himself declared in his own hesitant journey towards his own
conversion in the Confessions. Quamdiu ‘How long?’ was his redrafting of
the biblical language of pleading into his desperate awareness of the waiting
for grace. Augustine models his own experience through the raven, hears
his own dilatory travel towards God in the cry of the bird. ‘You have
heard . . .’ he repeats, and his repetition overlaps three sorts of hearing: his
injunction against the failed hearing of the sinner; his insistence on the
revelatory pun of cras, cras (‘hear!’); and the remembrance of his own text,
the Confessions (‘you have heard . . .’). He goes on to dismiss the sinner’s
deferral of repentance with a quotation from St Paul (Rom. 2.5.6),
a reminder that the Day of Judgement will end such delays with terrible
punishment. But this text also affords Augustine another telling pun. The
problem of the hesitant repentant is precisely in his duritiam cordis and cor
impoenitens. The repetition of cor is obscured in the King James translation
(‘after thy hardness and impenitent heart’, which follows the Septuagint),
but here is surely made to sound out significantly. The corvus lurks in the
cor of the hesitant, as the vox of the raven is heard in the cras, cras of delay,
Augustine’s own voice of despair. Noah’s raven who does not return
becomes a potent image of the time-bound incapable convert, waiting
for, but resisting, a tomorrow of grace.
The Septuagint’s redrafting of the Hebrew Bible’s language becomes in
the hands of Augustine a route to express the failure of the sinner’s everyday
waiting and deferral of change. The bird which does not return (repent),
the corvus, lives in the cor of the stumbling Christian who finds his very
language sounding out the temporality of his sin of hesitancy, cras, cras, in
the vox corvina. What appears to be a strategic editorial decision of the
translators of the Septuagint, for this Christian of late antiquity, has
become another story of how humans inhabit time.
*
Sulpicius Severus with his representation of Martin provides an intense,
polemical and personally committed perspective on the contrast we saw in
the last chapter between Ambrose and Prudentius. Like Prudentius,
Sulpicius Severus had a career before committing to a thoroughgoing
12
Augustine uses the same trope repeatedly: e.g. Sermons on the Liturgical Season 224.4; Contra
Faustum 12.20.

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 386 The Christian Invention of Time
Christian way of life. He practised successfully as a lawyer and had the
literary and rhetorical training that one would expect for such a position.13
His writing reflects such an education, and for a classically trained reader
the influences of Sallust, Tacitus and the Roman historiographical and
biographical tradition are evident, pervasive and integral to Sulpicius
Severus’ language. Sulpicius Severus, like Paulinus of Nola with whom
he corresponds, became a committed Christian – it is not certain if he came
from a Christian family, though it is likely – by ‘selling all and following’
the example of Paulinus of Nola and Martin as well as Jesus. Paulinus
writes about their similar but different circumstances: ‘You were nearer the
prime of life, more richly praised, less burdened with inherited wealth, but
no poorer in intellectual resources; and you were still immersed in the
bustle of the law courts, that theatre of the world, where you enjoyed an
outstanding name for eloquence’.14 Sulpicius Severus, like Paulinus,
became an icon of the success of the church’s policy of conversion
among the Roman landed classes.
With a brief worry about the principle, Sulpicius Severus did keep the
income from one estate which allowed him to establish a community of
like-minded men at a place called Primuliacum in Aquitaine. This estab-
lishment is right at the start of Western monastic traditions, where prayer,
readings and study, rather than agricultural or other labour, formed the
structure of the everyday – a similar comfortable set-up to Augustine’s at
Cassiacum. As with Augustine, dialogue is one of the privileged genres of
publication for such educated, withdrawn communities, not only creating
a sophisticated Christian rejoinder to the philosophical tradition inaugur-
ated by Plato and Xenophon, but also providing a model of exchange and
community. The dialogues of Sulpicius Severus depict the return of
a friend, Postumianus, who has been to the East. He promises stories;
Gallus, another disciple of Martin, is allowed to make up a third, and
eventually local monks, hearing of what is going on, make up an audience.
The dialogues discuss the ascetic practices of eastern Christians, including
Jerome, in comparison with the church in Gaul and Martin’s exemplary
spiritual and practical inheritance.15 As with John Cassian, whom we
discussed earlier,16 these dialogues are an instrumental sign and symptom
of the spread of monasticism in the West. The form of these exchanges in
their elegance, commitment, shared criticism and good-feeling are part of
13
Stancliffe (1983) 15–110 records what we know about Sulpicius’ vita.
14
Paulinus, Ep. 5.5. See Conybeare (2000); Trout (1999).
15
On the role of Origen, the most discussed part of this dialogue, see van Andel (1980).
16
See pp. 82–4.

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 Making History Christian 387
the argument about how normative Christianity should be lived, as much
as such questions constitute the substance of their debates.
Martin, by contrast, was ‘uneducated’, illiteratus, according to Sulpicius
Severus, his disciple and biographer. Martin came from a pagan, military
family, and at the age of fifteen he was enrolled in the Roman army by his
father, who had risen to the rank of military tribune. Martin was part of the
Imperial Guard under Constantius and Julian. It was as a soldier – and not
yet ‘reborn in Christ’17 – that he performed the act through which he is
most often depicted in later iconography. He was dressed in uniform when
he passed a destitute beggar whom nobody else was pitying. Martin took
what he had – his own cloak – and split it in two and gave half to the
beggar. It made some of the bystanders laugh, because it made his uniform
look absurd, but that night Martin had a dream vision in which he saw
Jesus wearing the half cloak. (Later depictions, in which Martin is fully
enclosed in grand medieval body armour and riding a horse, make the
gesture seem no more than symbolic and scarcely the basis for a future
ascetic life.) Eventually, the story goes, on the eve of a battle, Martin
declared to the emperor ‘I am Christ’s soldier; I am not allowed to fight’.
The emperor’s rage is deflected by the enemy’s surrender, and Martin
succeeded in leaving the army, travelling to Gaul to visit Hilary of Poitiers,
the mainstay of Nicene orthodoxy in the country, and to commit himself
to a Christian life.
Martin returned from his travels to Tours where he was elected bishop
by popular demand. He founded a monastery nearby and, until his death,
continued both as bishop and as the head of the monastery – living in
austere asceticism with his disciples, and, according to Sulpicius, perform-
ing a stunning series of miracles. Martin, then, like Ambrose, is a bishop.
But Martin’s ill-educated asceticism – he wrote nothing – contrasts with
Ambrose’s worldly and very literate career. Martin generally dismissed the
opportunity his celebrated holiness gave him to meet the great and the
good (except for one dinner with Maximius (VM 20)), whereas Ambrose
was a figure at court. Ambrose indeed became the very figure of the worldly
authority of the church when he required the emperor Theodosius to
perform repentance in front of him, a spectacle of power that epitomized
the changing position of the church in the empire.18 When Martin did
enter politics, specifically around the Priscillianist controversy, it was
a failed attempt to persuade the emperor not to put Priscillian to death

17
Necdum . . . regeneratus in Christo, VM 2.8.
18
The contrast between Ambrose and Martin in these terms is made explicitly in Sulp. Sev. Ep. 1.25.

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 388 The Christian Invention of Time
for his heresy – the first time a Christian emperor had punished a Christian
with death for his views.19 Ambrose for his part was deeply and successfully
involved in political intrigues between the Arian court and the Nicaean
cathedral. Whereas Sulpicius Severus’ life of Martin is full of his miracles,
Paulinus of Milan’s biography of Ambrose has a series of public and private
political successes, but includes only two miracles, both explicitly typo-
logical: a woman touches his robe and is cured;20 he lies over a dead child
who recovers.21 Neither event is mentioned in Ambrose’s own writings,
notes Paulinus of Milan, and they are very much a footnote to what makes
Ambrose worthy of praise in the eyes of his hagiographer.22 Whereas
Ambrose has left us hymns, sermons, treatises – a normative, systematic
engagement with the Christian imagination – Martin, like Theophilus
who destroyed the Serapeion in Alexandria, violently assaulted monu-
ments and buildings of the religious traditions he despised, forcing the
local inhabitants to accept his destructiveness. As the role of bishop in the
church is very much under formation in this period, Martin and Ambrose
indicate two different trajectories, for all that they were both elected by
popular acclaim and shared anti-Arian stances.
Indeed, the intense political activity around Priscillian (to which we will
inevitably return when we look at Sulpicius Severus’ Chronicon, our main
source for the controversy) allows us to nuance what appeared in my last
chapter as a contrast between Ambrose’s institutional embedding and
Prudentius’ ‘villa Christianity’. The Council of Saragossa, held in 380, in
response to the Prisicillian heresy, passed as its fourth decree that
Christians were ‘not to be concealed in houses, nor to stay on estates,
nor to head for the mountains, nor to walk in bare feet, but to flock to the
churches’.23 This decree appears to target private groups in small city
houses (seen as an insidious political threat since the fifth century bce),
the ‘villa-Christians’ such as Sulpicius Severus on his estate at Primuliacum
(or Prudentius), anchorites or hermits who went into the wilderness alone,
and mendicant ascetics. They are all enjoined by the bishops, who drafted
the decree, to come into the churches, and thus to submit to the authority
of the bishops. Indeed, the council even criticized ascetic practice itself and
private reading, which might be thought to be mainstays in the self-
representation of Christian virtue. The council proposed thus an aggressive
policy of institutional centralization. Priscillian was attacked in part

19
Burrus (1995). 20 Paulinus, Vit. Ambr. 10: see John 14.12.
21
Paulinus, Vit. Ambr. 28: see 2 Kings 4. 22 Noted both at Vit. Ambr. 10 and Vit. Ambr. 28.
23
Cited and discussed by Burrus (1995) 37–8.

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 Making History Christian 389
because he seemed to work, like Prudentius, ‘outside a church context’,24
included women in his groups (hence the accusations against him of
seductiveness and moral corruption), and bypassed the formal institutions
of the church.25 Yet Martin too was caught up in such accusations, though
he had no truck with women: although he was a bishop, he also followed an
ascetic life-style, and asserted his own authority separate from the wrangles
of church doctrine. His charismatic persona – and performance – was
distrusted by these established authorities.
This controversy reveals that in the late fourth century the political
arguments about the status of the bishops and the reach of the institutional
church focused not just on the dogmatic disputes over Arianism and the
Nicene creed, but also on regulating the boundaries between public and
private authority. The individuality of the saint’s ascetic practices and
miraculous power could be seen as a threat to the established church as
well as an example; Martin’s withdrawn monasticism provided a contrast
to the worldly bishops. How a Christian life was to be lived – in what forms
of community, with what commitments to civic institutions, with what
political engagement – remained a sharply contested normative argument.
There are many stories of the requirements and rejections of institutional
expectations in the name of something purer or more committed – coun-
ter-stories, expressed repeatedly as the proclamation of what is more
properly Christian. Gregory of Nazianzus, in the East, wrote of his bitter
disappointment with the politicking in Constantinople, returned to his
backwater, and took a vow of silence for a year, during which time he wrote
poetry – different styles of public withdrawal (and yet publicity). Synesius,
when he took up the role of bishop, refused to separate from his wife,
insisting that his married life would continue, in its propriety – a view
expressed in a letter to his bishop, Theophilus, which circulated as
a document beyond its recipient, as a semi-public statement of principle
and a self-representation. Jerome, in his very public rejection of his former
public life in Rome, withdrew to the desert in the Holy Land, but took his
library and staff and remained fully active in the doctrinal exchanges of the
era – one of the sights to visit on pilgrimage, a figure whose influence
thereby stretched beyond his disseminated publications. Such negotiations
were articulated as the question of how to engage with the saeculum, the
‘age’, the ‘time’ in which they lived: as Sulpicius says of Martin, all his talk
24
Palmer (1989) 3. Victorinus (Aug. Conf. 8.2.4) was upbraided by Simplicianus: ‘I shall not believe or
count you a Christian till I see you in a Church of Christ’. But he replied with a laugh, ‘So do walls
make Christians?’.
25
The issue of gender is particularly well discussed by Burrus (1995).

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 390 The Christian Invention of Time
was how the saeculi onera, ‘the burdens of this age’, ‘time’s weight’, must be
relinquished.26
Sulpicius Severus’ Vita Martini is our main source for Martin’s career as
a bishop. Its exemplary status is broadcast by Paulinus of Milan’s biography of
Ambrose where he reports that Augustine instructed him to write the work as
‘Athanasius had penned the life of Anthony, Jerome the life of Paul, and
Sulpicius Severus, the servant of God, also composed in a highly polished
style, a Life of Martin, the venerable bishop of Tours’. The Life of Anthony, as
we saw, played a key role in Augustine’s own narrative of conversion and was
a fundamental text for the ascetic movement of Christianity; Jerome’s life of
Paul is also focused on asceticism and its sexual anxieties. The Vita Martini in
turn constructs the life of a bishop as an ascetic, miracle-working model of
faith and virtue.27 Unlike the lives of Anthony and Paul, it was completed
before its subject’s death. Unlike most hagiographies and – of course – unlike
all martyr narratives, it has no representation of the saint’s death, and thus no
culmination in the perfected end, the triumph over this life in the transfigur-
ation of death. Partly for this reason, its generic affiliation has been much
discussed by scholars, who have seen the influence of Suetonius and Sallust
much in evidence.28 The Vita Martini is best seen, however, on the one hand,
as a hinge between the multiform classical tradition of biography and what
will become the genre of Christian hagiography: a foundational text which
does not so much epitomize as seed the generic tradition to come. On the
other hand, it is also to be regarded as experimental, one of several roughly
contemporary attempts to write a Christian life – such as the autobiographical
examples of Augustine’s Confessions, Gregory of Nazianzus’ Poem on Himself,
Synesius Epistle 105, or the more general models of a Christian day, discussed
in the previous chapter. It is as the expression of how a life can be narrated that
the Vita Martini is salient for my argument.
The opening chapter of the Vita is a sophisticated programmatic state-
ment. The work is prefaced by a letter to the dedicatee, Desiderius, which
expresses Sulpicius Severus’ humble agreement to send his humble work
into the world anonymously, with all due apologies for its lack of style (a
generic modesty).29 Sulpicius had hoped to keep the work private, but
allows it to go to Desiderius with the promise it would go no further, or if it

26
VM 25.4. A distant echo of Catullus 14.22–3 saecli incommoda, pessimi poetae?
27
Harper (1965). See, by way of contrast, Williams (2008).
28
Discussion and bibliography in Burton (2017), and for the influence of these Latin writers on the
Chronicon van Andel (1976).
29
Conybeare (2000) 41–59 discusses how Christians strove to enact a ‘spiritualization of the aristo-
cratic habit of forming and maintaining connections by letter’.

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 Making History Christian 391
did, to travel anonymously: the negotiation of what is private and what is
public is carefully and openly articulated as an elegant but transcended
hesitation. This performance of modesty is immediately belied by the bold
and stylish opening of the Vita itself (1.1):
Plerique mortales, studio et gloriae saeculari inaniter dediti, exinde peren-
nem, ut putabant, memoriam nominis sui quaesierunt, si vitas clarorum
virorum stilo illustrassent.
Many human beings, vainly committed to the pursuit of worldly glory, have
sought consequently to make what they think is an everlasting memorial for
their own name, if they might render famous the lives of glorious men by
their pen.
This opening generalization about humanity – a grand frame for his
project – utilizes the language of the classical tradition against itself.
Sallust’s Catiline and his Jugurtha, biographies both, start with similar
broad references to mankind (omnes homines/genus humanum), and the
phrase multi mortales is a repeated phrase in Jugurtha.30 Sallust also
declares the glory of writing of famous deeds (Cat. 3.1–2). Tacitus’
Agricola opens with a sarcastic comment about the clarorum virorum
facta in his own times, the ‘deeds of glorious men’. The search for
perennem memoriam, ‘everlasting memorial’ echoes Horace’s famous
claim to have erected a monumentum aere perennius, a ‘monument
more everlasting than bronze’ – a self-fulfilling (in all senses) claim on
posterity. Yet such references to the long tradition of the pursuit of glory
in the expectation of immortal fame – an ideology we discussed in
chapter 1 – are undermined by Sulpicius’ normative dismissiveness.
Such dedication is vain (inaniter), its immortality is a false judgement
(ut putabant). Even the claim to be clari, ‘glorious’, may contain an
‘implicit contrast between the glory sought by distinguished (but mortal)
Roman heroes of old, and the glory of God’.31 Both the pursuit of worldly
glory and the hope to immortalize it in writing – the hero and the bard –
are set up to be dismissed.
With a display of nuance, Sulpicius Severus allows that the classical
tradition has allowed ‘some return on their expectation: not an everlasting
return, but a little nonetheless’ (1.2). This is because such writers – whose
language he is imitating – have indeed ‘spread abroad the memory of
themselves’, which is, Sulpicius Severus immediately qualifies, ‘albeit in
vain’. The examples of great men have also stimulated in readers

30 31
See for references and discussion Burton (2017) ad loc. Burton (2017) 140 ad loc.

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 392 The Christian Invention of Time
a considerable desire for emulation (aemulatio). Sulpicius Severus recog-
nizes both the strength of the classical tradition of historiography or
biography – the fame of Suetonius, Sallust, Tacitus, whose names, of
course he will not cite to add to their memoria – as he recognizes the
express purpose of such writing: to provide the exempla that motivate
virtue. Yet this recognition is no more than a foil for his rejection of it:
Sed tamen nihil ad beatam illam aeternamque vitam haec eorum cura
pertinuit, ‘Yet all this effort of theirs has no bearing at all on that life
which is blessed and eternal’ (1.2). The writings of the past are doomed to
triviality because their aim is not defined by Christian time, the life which
is ‘blessed and eternal’. In beatam illam we can hear the familiar trope of
Roman writing, beatus ille, qui . . ., ‘happy is he who . . .’, the repeated
expression of what a good life is, often indeed associated with a noble
death. In the Psalms, from the very first words, beatus vir, this same motif is
common; but now to be beatus must be understood through aeterna vita,
the Christian promise of everlasting life. Biography is defined by its sense of
time.
Indeed, for Sulpicius Severus the Christian vision of time vitiates the
heroes of the past: ‘What good did glory (gloria) do even to the heroes
themselves, when it is destined to perish with the age (saeculo) of their
biographers?’ (1.3). The eternal life that Christianity offers dwarfs the mere
human era (saeculum), which is the condition of pagan biography. Nor,
indeed, is exemplarity, the second purpose of such pagan life stories, of any
value to posterity. Sulpicius picks out for criticism Hector and Socrates –
that is, Homer and Plato, on the one hand, the two privileged authorities
against whom Christianity sets itself, the wisdom of epic and philosophy,
poetry and prose; or, on the other hand, military success or intellectual
success, two routes to glory: the one pugnantem, ‘fighting’, the other,
philosophantem ‘philosophizing’. Both Hector and Socrates are useless
exempla, argues Sulpicius, because they rested their hopes in mere stories,
myths (fabulis) – epic, dialogues – and gave ‘their souls to tombs’, misun-
derstandings explicable because ‘they reckoned the value of human life
solely in terms of actions in the present’. Even Socrates’ commitment to the
immortality of the soul and Hector’s search for immortal fame are no more
than ‘actions in the present’, because they do not look towards true
immortality, and must thus be restricted to the here and now of this
saeculum. They trusted they would live on – but only in human memory.
But, concludes Sulpicius, ‘It is human duty (officium) to seek not an
everlasting memory (perennem memoriam) but rather everlasting life
(perennem . . . vitam)’ (1.4). How is this to be done? ‘Not by writing, or

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 Making History Christian 393
fighting, or philosophizing, but by pious, holy, religious living’. Everlasting
life contrasts with mere memory that continues, and it is won – a parallel
contrast – not by the activities of a biographer or by a military hero or by
a philosopher but by a form of living – a Christian life. This ideal is not
merely a general template but also is programmatic for the life of Martin to
come. He wrote nothing; he was a soldier but rejected such a career for
a life as a soldier of Christ; he was saintly but did miracles not philosophy.
He will exemplify what it means to have a life that is lived ‘piously,
venerably, religiously’.
This opening paragraph of the Vita Martini establishes a new framework
for biography. A life is still to be exemplary. This life (as Sulpicius goes on
to assert) will lead, however, towards vera sapientia, ‘true wisdom’, as
opposed to mere philosophy, and divina virtus, ‘divine virtue’, as opposed
to bravery in battle, which is indeed militia caelestis, ‘military service for
heaven’.32 Exemplarity depends on values, and the opposition between
Christian and pagan ideals is articulated starkly. Yet such moral values are
justified and determined by the temporal framework of eternal life: how
life is to be led depends on this understanding of eternal life. Such (eternal)
life is opposed to (eternal) memory which is all that pagan celebration and
aspiration can offer. Christian time and Christian biography are mutually
implicative – and transcend pagan achievements.
Sulpicius takes a full second paragraph to spell out his reasons for writing
the biography of Martin. Martin is an exemplary Christian, fit for imita-
tion, and thus deserving not to be forgotten. The author hopes humbly for
eternal reward, though neither Martin nor the author seek fame or praise.
Yet even in this strategic modesty, there is a polemic taking shape. In
Sulpicius’ second dialogue, a discussion of asceticism, miracles, and the less
than satisfactory behaviour of bishops, Postumianus recalls that Martin
often used to say to Sulpicius Severus that once he was a bishop, ‘he did not
possess the gift of working miracles in anything like the same degree as he
could remember possessing it previously’ as a monk.33 Philip Rousseau
adds that the bishops of Apphy of Oxyrhynchus and Netras of Pharan are
quoted as saying ‘God’s gift has not deserted me because I am a bishop’. He
concludes that Sulpicius is ‘convinced that exact correspondence could be
achieved between the demands of spirituality and an ecclesiastical car-
eer’, and that Martin fulfilled that balance perfectly.34 ‘Our people here’,
declares Postumianus, ‘should not press the example beyond the limits
observed by Martin’ (2.8). In the context of the arguments about

32 33 34
VM 1.6. Dial. 2.4. Rousseau (1978) 150–1.

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 394 The Christian Invention of Time
Priscillian, and the debates over the boundaries between private and
institutional religiosity, the representation of Martin as a model ‘contains
always an implicit reproach to the majority of bishops (at least in Gaul)
who fall short of this ideal’.35 A beata vita depends on aeterna vita, but how
the beata vita is to be lived remains integrally contested between the
Christian writers of the fourth century. Martin’s exemplarity is also
polemical.
The representation of the life of Martin is fascinating, and sets the
agenda for future hagiographies of Christian saints. His early life – by
which is meant his life before his conversion – is barely adumbrated. We
are told in a sentence where he was born and bred and who his family was.
A second sentence places him in a military career. But almost immediately –
and at greater length – we are reassured that he wanted to enter a monastery
at age 10, and was always thinking of a religious life. (There is nothing of
the complex psycho-drama of Augustine’s Confessions, nor any reflection
on the relation between youthful experience and later life, as, say, in
Plutarch’s life of Alexander.) His military career is described through his
preparation for baptism – by helping the poor, culminating in his gift of
half of his cloak to the poor beggar, and his consequent vision of Jesus.36
And the final story of his pre-conversion life is his resistance to fighting and
his eventual release from the army. Only three of the twenty-seven chapters
of the biography, then, are dedicated to his life before his career in the
church, and even these are almost entirely taken up with his incipient
Christian faith. Scholars have been much vexed by the chronological
contradictions between the Vita and stories in the dialogue and letters,
and have argued without adequate conclusion about how long Martin
served in the army, and what the gap was between his baptism and
discharge.37 It might be better to recognize that Sulpicius Severus turns
his gaze away from this period of Martin’s life except inasmuch as it
provides exemplary tales of the future saint’s Christianity. The seminal
story of the beggar is introduced with quodam itaque tempore, ‘so at some
time . . .’. In a story focused on aeterna vita, the mundane business of dates
and human causality is of only trivial notice.
Indeed, the remaining 24 chapters of the Vita are hard to locate in any
significant chronological order. After his first significant miracle, he was
regarded as a beatus vir and sanctus, ‘a blessed man’, ‘holy’. This is marked
35
Burton (2017) 140 ad 1.7.
36
See Praet (2016) with further bibliography; Roberts (1994) for the afterlife.
37
A discussion started by the seminal work of Babut (1912); see e.g. Stancliffe (1983) 111–48; Barnes
(1996), (2010) 205–8; Burton (2017) 9–25.

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 Making History Christian 395
by ab hoc primum tempore, ‘from this time, first . . .’. The next chapter
opens nec multo post, ‘Not long after’. The next ‘sub idem fere tempus’, ‘At
about the same time . . .’. Other chapters begin ‘insequenti tempore’, ‘in the
course of time’; and repeatedly with ‘about the same time’, ‘at the same
time’, ‘meanwhile’. It is even vaguer than the vague chronology in the more
teleological model of the Gospels.38 Each chapter contains a singular, often
miraculous event, until the final summary chapters.39 It is striking that the
letters and dialogues add extra miracle stories with a similar lack of concern
for where they fit into a life-time. The Life has no death scene, and thus
ends with a general eulogy of Martin’s character (and a declaration of
Sulpicius Severus’ own sincerity). In the second Letter, Sulpicius Severus
confesses he had a vision of Martin rising to heaven holding the Vita in his
hands – and awoke to the message of Martin’s death. He was – declares
Sulpicius – a martyr, although he was not killed for his faith, because ‘he
suffered for the hope of eternity’.40 Martin’s Vita is a set of juxtaposed
stories, to which other stories can – and for Sulpicius, should – be added.
We are told that Martin served under Constantius and Julian, but there are
barely any other standard markers of the saeculum. The death of Maximius
is registered only as the fulfilment of a prophecy by Martin. Unlike the
historiographers, Sulpicius Severus offers no dates or dating devices. What
counts in the life is not its location in what we could call secular history, but
its repeated performance of sanctity. The life is constituted by a series of
discrete scenes of displayed holiness.
The Talmud’s representation of a Jewish life, as we discussed in chapter
9, fractured the continuity of time into a series of halachic choices, singular
scenes where the exercise of debate over the right thing to do could be
performed. This narrative style changed the possibility of causality, agency,
regulation and the experience of time. In the Vita Martini, narrative is
fractured into a series of singular stories, for all that the Life begins with
a birth, and, through later texts at least, adds the telling of a death. But the
individual scenes do not focus on moments of debate or choice. The
moment of conversion converts the narrative: before baptism, the focus
is on the barriers to conversion overcome, and the early signs of the
religious life to be chosen. After conversion, what counts is not the order
of a life – not the development of a person, career advancement, an
education into new understanding, not even growing old. In this life of
waiting, all that is deemed significant is the exercise of sanctity. Hence the

38
Luke 3.1 dates the preaching of John the Baptist to the fifteenth year of Tiberius’ reign.
39
Harper (1965). 40 See the discussion of ‘living martyrs’ above, p. 202.

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 396 The Christian Invention of Time
vita becomes a series of exemplary stories, each self-contained, each the
performance of holiness, with little explicit link between them. The
narrative form is an expression of the rubric of evaluation: to live pie,
sancte, religioseque, ‘piously, holily, and religiously’. Each story reveals
those qualities, another exemplum narrated for the faith of the reader, led
by the author and his sincerity. The programmatic force of aeterna vita
requires a life that is ‘constant prayer and reading’, interspersed with
miracles, and, as a sign of his sanctity, fights with the devil, visits from
angels, and conversations with Agnes, Thecla and Mary (something, we are
told by Sulpicius, pushing against the boundaries of faith, that even the
monks in the monastery doubted to be true). It is these singular signs of his
status as a holy man that gives the narrative its episodic structuring and its
moral force. This form of a Life is an expression of how living is to be
shaped by the promise of eternity. The Life of Martin indeed becomes the
foundation for later hagiographies, instrumental in modelling the
Christian experience of a life-time. The Vita tells its reader how to live
a life, to tell a life, to inhabit time.
*
The dialogue with Postumianus (sometimes divided by editors into two
dialogues) ends suitably enough with Martin’s views on the end of the
world. Martin states that Nero will come to power in the West and make
the worship of pagan idols compulsory; meanwhile the Antichrist will have
power in the East in Jerusalem, and he will compel men to deny Christ and
he will set himself up as Christ, and order all men to be circumcised. The
Antichrist will go on to defeat Nero, and the whole world will be under his
sway until the Second Coming when he will be defeated by Christ. ‘“There
was no doubt too that Antichrist was already born; his conception was the
work of an evil spirit. He is now a child and will take over supreme power
when he comes of age”’.41 This particular version of the end of days,
condemned by Jerome as a heresy, and, consequently, omitted from
some manuscripts of the dialogues,42 is given in Martin’s name by
Gallus, who comments ‘you can judge how soon this fearful future may
be upon us’. Although Nero had died centuries earlier, the terror of the
imminent persecution heralding the end of days is strikingly vivid. If
aeterna vita is the principle through which the Vita is conceived, here in
this dialogue, Sulpicius Severus’ supplement to the Life after Martin’s
death, the prospect of the end of time is the necessary perspective provided

41 42
Dial. 2.14. See Babut (1912) cclxix–cclxx. In general, Vaesen (1988).

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 Making History Christian 397
to the dialogue’s tale of faith and miracles. But Gallus’ story is interrupted
in full flow by a slave who announces that another priest is at the door –
which ends the dialogue. The following dialogue, led also by Gallus on
the following day, continues the discussion – but never returns to
Martin’s apocalyptic vision. That the story of the imminent end of days
is interrupted and receives no commentary, and then is passed over in
continuing silence, may be significant. In the Chronicon, Sulpicius care-
fully frames such stories with the rhetoric of doubt. When he comes to
Nero, he calls him the ‘most filthy not just of humans but also of animals’
because he was the first to persecute Christians. He continues: ‘I do not
know if he will be the last fulfilment too, if indeed, as the opinion of
many holds, he will come before the Antichrist.’43 He concludes the life
of Nero with the fact that his body was not found, and that ‘it is believed
(creditur) that although he had stabbed himself with his sword, his
wound was cured, as was written on this topic, “the blow of his death
was cured” [Rev. 13.3], because he had to be sent back at the end of time
(sub saeculi fine) to fulfil the mystery of his evil’. Nero is written into the
book of Revelation – the reference is to one of the heads of the monster
from the sea. But Sulpicius distances himself from the argument by
ascribing it to the view of many and to belief (a historiographer’s cau-
tion). The imminence of the end of days, so strong a conviction in Paul,
had by the fourth century become a more carefully hedged topic, and
Martin’s prediction is left to hang unfulfilled.
The Chronicon indeed takes a strikingly different view of time from the
Vita Martini. The prologue to this work also begins with a programmatic
statement of principle (Praef. 1.):
Res a mundi exordio sacris litteris editas breviter constringere et cum
distinctione temporum usque ad nostram memoriam carptim dicere aggres-
sus sum, multis id a me et studiose efflagitantibus, qui divina compendiosa
lectione cognoscere properant.
I have set out to give a condensed history of events from the beginning of the
world, as laid out in scripture, and to tell them separately, with distinction of
times up to the time of our own memory; many people have asked this from
me earnestly; they were keen to know about divine things from a summary
account.
It is worth lingering on this dense and precise statement. The subject of
his writing is res – ‘things’, ‘events’ – which summons in its generality both

43
Chro. 28.1.

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 398 The Christian Invention of Time
the cosmographic epic of Lucretius (De rerum natura) and the res gestae of
historiographical accounts.44 But these res are specifically what has been
written in scripture, a pointed indication of what should be memorialized
in a history. We are not, therefore, to be treated to a version of the Persian
Wars or the Peloponnesian War, nor the Social War or Hannibal, stuff of
the saeculum. Or: the thōmata promised by Herodotus will now be super-
seded by the thaumata of divine miracle. This is a history that will take its
start from the beginning of the world: not ab urbe condita, the foundation
of the city from which Livy and others mark their narrative’s purpose.45
Yet, this account is to be a condensed version (constringere, since Cicero, is
a technical term for such abridging).46 The promise of the history from the
beginning – all time – will not take too much time to tell. As I have
discussed elsewhere, scale is an essential rhetorical element of the literature
of late antiquity, where epyllion and epigram play so significant a role.47
Sulpicius Severus’ abridged scripture is another paraphrase, another rewrit-
ing of scripture, now in historiographical mode – a Christianizing of
history and a historicization of Christianity. The blending of genres and
the rhetoric of scale is a sophisticated self-placement between Christian and
pagan literary tradition. Sulpicius continues that his narrative will be
shaped carptim, which I take to mean ‘separately’, ‘in discrete parts’, that
is, not through the parallel tabulation of multiple narratives that Eusebius
pioneered, on the one hand – thus setting himself within the practices of
Christian chronicle writing – and, on the other, as he specifies, cum
distinctione temporum, ‘with distinction of times’.48 As we will see, this
involves not just periodization, but also a concern for dating and ordering of
events. Where the Vita Martini purposively resisted any such historiograph-
ical insistence on period and placement of action within a time-frame – its
actions took place very much without distinctione temporum – the Chronicon
announces its historiographical credentials from the beginning. If the
Dialogue left open the question of the end of days, the Chronicon announces
its end at the start: ad nostram memoriam. The Vita Martini dismissed
memoria as the hope of pagan striving; the Chronicon makes Sulpicius
Severus’ memoria the end of the history. The Chronicon will aim to do two

44
van Andel (1976) collects and discusses echoes of earlier historiography in the Chronicon.
45
Socrates, Hist. Eccl. 5 pr. indicates that church history, by contrast, should start with the Incarnation.
See van Nuffelen (2010) 167, and more generally van Nuffelen (2004).
46
Festus, for example, provided an abridged history of Rome (Breviarium) as Solinus reworked and
abridged Pliny and Pomponius Mela.
47
Goldhill (2020) 38–70.
48
Carptim echoes Sallust, again – Cat. 4.2 – his historiographical methodology.

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 Making History Christian 399
things sometimes kept separate in the historiographical tradition; it will
combine both the deep history a mundi exordio and a detailed contemporary
history of conflict for which the author’s authority as an eye-witness is
crucial. Again, the careful recognition of – and placement within – generic
expectations is articulated with self-aware reticence. The claim that many
people have asked him to write is a cliché of modesty, but here it is used also
to summarize his double purpose: first, to relate divina, ‘divine things’,
a purposive re-expression of the opening res now as a charged insistence on
Providence as the driving structure of history; second, to relate them in
compendiosa lectione, an ‘abridged text’, a selection that is, as he specifies in
the following sentence, two books containing the facts (gestis) culled from
many volumes. The Chronicon thus, in its opening sentence, is program-
matically announced not just as an abridged paraphrase of scripture leading
to an eye-witness account of the church, but also as a self-aware generic
intervention in how the Christian narrative of time is to be comprehended
and enacted.
Sulpicius continues with the promise that despite being
a paraphrastic summary, this abridgement has omitted ‘almost noth-
ing of the facts’ (gestis). (The ‘almost’ opens a vista of selectivity that
we will see to be performed repeatedly, as with the story of the raven
and doves on the ark.) He also explains his combination of deep
history and contemporary conflict. ‘It seemed not absurd’, he writes,
‘after I had run through sacred history up to the crucifixion of Christ
and the deeds of the Apostles, to add also the events (gesta) that
happened afterwards’. If this bare self-justification looks back to
nostram memoriam, the following sentence offers a fascinating gloss
on distinctione temporum (Praef. 2):
Ceterum illud non pigebit fateri, me, sicubi ratio exegit, ad distinguenda
tempora continuandamque seriem usum esse historicis mundialibus atque
ex his, quae ad supplementum cognitionis deerant, usurpasse . . .
But I will have no hesitation in confessing that, whenever reason demanded
it, I have made use of pagan historians for making my distinction of times
and for maintaining an unbroken sequence; I have appropriated from them
what was needed to supplement my knowledge . . .
Although he had announced that his history was extracted from scrip-
ture, he adds here that he has no embarrassment in admitting that he has
used the pagan historians he has been alluding to already. This appropri-
ation (usurpare may imply a philological militia caelestis) is necessary both
to fulfil his aim of distinctio temporum and to produce a continuous

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 400 The Christian Invention of Time
narrative: there are swathes of history for which there are no scriptural
sources, of course. But, with an appeal to ratio, ‘reason’, he also allows
pagans to supply what he needs by way of knowledge. Much later,
Sulpicius explains that the lack of reference in secular histories to the events
of scripture is itself a sign of God’s plan, to keep sacrae voces pristine of such
influences.49 Where there are any discrepancies in chronology, Sulpicius,
like Jerome, blames copyists’ errors.50 As the Chronicon in its opening
revealed a sophisticated intermingling of generic markers between
Christian and pagan historiographic trajectories, here such rhetoric is
given an epistemological grounding. The Christian cannot do without
pagan knowledge. Christian history and historiography remain fully imbri-
cated with pagan forms.
Sulpicius Severus’ introduction closes with a defence of the voice of the
paraphrast, which, as we saw with Erasmus’ paraphrases, became a heated
topic of debate in early modern Europe, and is expressed in late antiquity
by the contrast between Ps-Apollinaris’ explanatory preface to his metaph-
rasis of the Psalms, written in the voice of the author, and Nonnus’ refusal
of any self-representation in his paraphrase of the Gospel of John (though
not in the Dionysiaca). Sulpicius insists that he does not present his
abbreviation of scripture as an author (auctor). His aim is not that any
reader should omit to read scripture; and he insists that any reader familiar
with scripture will recognize what he reads. Thus his paraphrase cannot
replace scripture (Praef. 3):
Etenim universa divinarum rerum mysteria non nisi ex ipsis fontibus hauriri
queunt.
For they cannot draw up the universal mysteries of divine matters except
from the sources themselves.
Sulpicius denies his own authority: readers should go back to scripture,
where the highest level of truth lies. It is only in scripture that the mysteries
that appertain to the universe, the perspective of God’s time, can be
discovered. What, then, is the purpose of this abbreviated history?
Explicitly he claims it is to ‘teach those who are unaware and bring
conviction to the educated’ (Praef. 2). As we will see, it offers more than
this, not least when it moves from scripture to contemporary events. But
the awkwardness is marked in the defensiveness. For whom, then, is such
an abbreviation of scripture necessary? What is left out and what included?

49 50
2.14.3, a passage discussed by Williams (2011) 286–8. 1.39.1.

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 Making History Christian 401
What image of Christianity does Sulpicius Severus’ historiographical
Christianity provide?51
The preface to the Chronicon, then, asks who owns the past, to retell it.
Whose knowledge is to count? Whose style of writing? On the one hand,
in the voice of the paraphrast, Sulpicius Severus insists that he abbrevi-
ates, and does not write as an author, and almost every fact from scripture
is there; on the other hand, Sulpicius admits he has intertwined pagan
knowledge where reason and continuity demand it. There is a lack to be
filled, his narrative needs its supplements from beyond scripture. This
tension, we will see, is played out again and again in the history that
follows. It is not resolved by insisting that the true mystery of divine
matters is to be found only in the scriptures, which serves to locate
authority elsewhere. What is particularly salient, however, is the different
modelling of time in the Vita Martini and the Chronicon. Where the Vita
Martini in the voice of the faithful disciple and hagiographer offers
discrete scenes of sanctity with little interest in dates, sequence or world
history, the Chronicon in the voice of the scholarly historiographer is
committed to distinctio temporum and series – the framework, as it were,
that is lacking in the Vita. Together, these two perspectives map comple-
mentary but different trajectories of Christian narratives of time,
embodied in different narrative forms. As we will see, the contrast
produces different ideas of how the praesens, the moment of the now in
time, is to be comprehended.
That the Chronicon is much more than a mere abbreviation is evident
from the narrative’s opening sentences (1.1.1):
Mundus a Deo constitutus est abhinc annos iam paene sex milia, sicut
processu voluminis istius digeremus. Quamquam inter se parum consen-
tiant qui rationem temporum investigatam ediderunt.
The world was created by God, almost six thousand years ago, as we will set
out in the course of this book. Although those who have published
a researched calculation of the time all too little agree among themselves.
The expected opening – that God created the world – is immediately
qualified not just by the addition of a time-scale – something no scriptural
account hazards – but also by a placement of such a claim within the
structure of his own work – a self-aware marking of composition – and
within ongoing scholarly debate on chronology in general. The narrative
includes internal commentary on its own proceeding. There is no before to

51
See Williams (2011) for the problem of Sulpicius’ authority in historiographical terms.

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 402 The Christian Invention of Time
this history. From Herodotus and Thucydides onwards, the historiograph-
er’s commitment to an epistemology of evidence produces a rupture
between myth and history, a speculated era of before and a knowable
time of what can be researched and tested, a distinctio temporum that
plays no role in this account. Even Eusebius started with Abraham. For
Sulpicius, myth has no function. Distinctio temporum is not a distinction of
types of time, as it can be in classical historiography, but the counting of
years in one sequence (series) towards an end.
The six days of creation are not represented. Sulpicius Severus goes
straight to creating humans and the Garden of Eden, from which humans
pass to exile in ‘our world’, without – remarkably – the intervention of the
snake, or the actions of Eve, and in nothing more than a subordinate clause
(‘when they tasted the tree forbidden to them’). The abbreviation is drastic.
When we get to Abraham, it is telling what is included, what excluded.
Abraham was born, we are told, 1,017 years after the flood – maintaining
the chronicle’s interest in dating and counting the tempora. We are told
that his and Sarah’s names were changed by God – but, he adds, ‘the not
insignificant mystery of this fact is not for this work to expound’. The
explicit refusal to reveal the mystery is also an encouragement to seek
beyond his text for its full meaning, as the preface had suggested.
Similarly, he turns to the language of typology only once – with
Deborah who is said to be a type of the church – though a certain historical
typology is integral to the history, in that the turning point of the
Incarnation provides ‘the meaning that underlay all of the significant
events recorded in the Chronicle’.52 Sarah’s story is almost entirely
occluded: she is said to exile Hagar, but otherwise her laugh, her response
to the angels, her beauty that leads her to be taken into the Pharaoh’s
harem, are all ignored. Lot’s wife, however, unlike Eve, prompts
a moralizing comment: when she turns back to look at Sodom and
Gomorrah, it is a demonstration ‘of human sinfulness, which is pained
to restrain from what is forbidden’. When Lot is captured, and Abraham
goes to rescue him, Sulpicius specifies that he took 318 men with him. It is
marked that this detail of number is included (although the snake omitted
from the Garden of Eden). The number of bishops at the Council of
Nicaea was said to be 318 as a typological fulfilment of this story – hence the
detail also has an ideological import, and needs to be included. So when
Sulpicius indicates that he will offer no summary of Leviticus because it is
full of laws (1.19.1), it is not only to focus on the narrative history of Israel,

52
For Deborah (Judges 4) see 1.23.3. For historical typology, see Williams (2011).

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 Making History Christian 403
but also in line with Christians’ dismissiveness of what they call Jewish
‘law-bound’ religion. He also refuses to abbreviate the Gospels or the Acts
of the Apostles lest his ‘form of concision detracts from their dignity’. He
does, however, specify the day and year of Jesus’ birth, and who the consuls
were, the standard Roman method of dating – something no Gospel
contains. Sulpicius’ Chronicon, like all histories, embeds its ideology in
its narrative form.
The interest in dating and counting continues throughout, expressed, as
with Jesus’ birthday, with a certain scholarly precision. So, Joshua’s death
took place 3,884 years after the creation of the world, but – the occasional
admitted doubt is a strategy of self-authorization – he adds with due
caution, ‘about the time (tempore) of his rule I can’t be definitive. The
usual opinion, however, is that he ruled the Hebrews twenty-seven years’
(1.22.3). He tells us that thanks to his voluminous reading he found the
sequence of Babylonian kings interpolated in an anonymous book, and it
agrees with his own calculations (2.5.4). Getting the time right – the
number of years of any period of rule and the relation between different
stories – is a fundamental aim of the Chronicon – ut temporum ordo
consertus sit, ‘that the order of times should be fixed’ (2.19.1) – and so the
books of the later prophets are intercalated with the rise to power of Darius
in Persia. This is important not only as the background to the book of
Daniel but also in making the transition from scripture to the era of Greek
rule, a transition made by noting that Alexander came to power by
defeating a descendent of Darius on the Persian throne. Getting the time
right – measuring, adding the years – is crucial. The 6,000 years of this
human saeculum requires careful counting to anticipate the end of days.
The repeated insistence on the time-scale of his history is not an antiquar-
ian obsession but a necessarily Christian understanding of the unfurling of
time and the place of the present in providential world history.
Christianity’s commitment to a moment of creation and an eschatology
of the end of days makes historical time finite (here 6,000 years). The
modern, shocking rediscovery of ‘deep time’, starting with geology and
biology in the nineteenth century, is, as we saw, set precisely against this
Christian delimitation of the beginning and end of time.
So, too, the moralizing increases as the narrative continues. When
Sulpicius records that the Levites are not allowed to hold property, he
expostulates that he cannot pass over this example in silence. Today, he
complains, priests have completely forgotten such an injunction. ‘These
days (hoc tempore) so great a desire for possession has entered priests’ minds
like a cancer’ (1.22.2). He goes on to list the signs of their rapaciousness,

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 404 The Christian Invention of Time
and concludes by expressing his ‘shame and distaste for our era (temporum
nostrorum)’. The exemplum of the past holds a critical mirror to the present.
This despair at the present is the heading for the final section of the
Chronicon: sequuntur tempora aetatis nostrae gravia et periculosa, ‘There
follow the times of our era, fraught and dangerous’ (2.46.1). This anatomy
of the present follows from the Arian controversy, where Severus certainly
does not conceal the dogmatic position from which he writes, and culmin-
ates in his account of the Priscillian controversy.53 He summarizes his era as
‘a perpetual war of discord’, and attacks the confusion and corruption
brought about now (nunc) by the bishops and their ‘hatred or partiality,
fear, unreliability, envy, factiousness, lust, greed, arrogance, somnolence,
laziness’ (2.51.5). The triumph of the church is not celebrated, as it is in
Ambrose or Prudentius. Rather, for Sulpicius Severus, there have been nine
persecutions (he numbers them for us).54 The tenth, he notes, will be when
the Antichrist comes to power, as prophesized by the book of Revelation. It
is a commonplace of classical rhetoric and especially of moralizing histori-
ography that the present of Rome is slipping into degeneracy brought
about by empire’s riches, a grim contrast with the hard and honest virtues
of the early Fathers. Sulpicius’ narrative echoes such rhetoric, not least in
that fine list of modern sins in the church. But this rhetoric is not the same
as the classical models it echoes: it has a different epistemological basis.
This sinfulness is a sign of the coming of the end. His despair is not merely
a lament that casts his enemies as the epitome of all corruption and
depravity. It is also a necessary stage in world history. The history from
the beginning of the world, abhinc annos iam paene sex milia, ‘now almost
six thousand years ago’, has an end point. Both the iam and the paene in
this first act of dating are significant. In the ‘almost’ is the teleology of
eschatology that makes the iam, the present, an insistent concern. The final
four verbs of this last paragraph of the Chronicon are in the imperfect, when
Sulpicius has usually used the perfect or historic present in his narrative.
Senneville-Grave comments astutely that Sulpicius here follows a habit of
Sallust who uses the imperfect in this way ‘to indicate to his readers the end
of a world’.55 For Senneville-Grave the end is the collapse of the church
into corruption. Sulpicius’ imperfects, however, are also an invitation to
consider the further and final end, the end of days.

53
Burrus (1995) is the most interesting discussion of this.
54
For a detailed comparison of Sulpicius’ list of persecutions with other such lists, see van Andel (1976)
117–42.
55
Senneville-Grave (1999) 491 ad 51.5.

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 Making History Christian 405
To see the present as an ominous moment in Christian time is one
agenda of Sulpicius Severus’ Chronicon. To achieve this, he needs to tell
the history of the world from its creation because from its creation it is
destined for destruction. He needs to count each year because each year
matters in creating the ordo temporum. It places the time of our age,
tempora aetatis nostrae, and us, necessarily and integrally within this
time-frame. In this vision of history, the historiographer can use pagan
sources because there is no outside of Christian time. He can summarize
and paraphrase because it is the ordo temporum that is being constructed.
Specific moral exempla are highlighted in preparation for the modern
history of persecution, triumph and heresy – the now which demands
our comprehension. Its imperfect ending opens a vista on the end to
come. His present is a grim moment before the foretold end. Sulpicius
Severus’ Chronicon does not have the intellectual reach of Augustine’s
City of God, certainly, nor does it have the impact or scholarly working
of Eusebius’ and Jerome’s Chronica. But, in the same era as Augustine
and Jerome, Sulpicius Severus’ Chronicon also aims to provide
a comprehensive history of Christian time, where the complicity of
nostrae aetatis, ‘our age’, does not allow for any other perspective. His
history is a Christian vision of the whole of time.
*
Nonnus’ Paraphrase, as we discussed at some length, constructs through its
paraphrastic poetics a theologically framed discourse of beginnings, based
on the paradoxes of a Nicene, Christological understanding of temporality;
in the Dionysiaca, by contrast, with its Dionysiac poetics, Nonnus trans-
forms the mystery of origin into a polyphony of competing stories and
theoretical perspectives from Greek philosophy, cosmology, myth, litera-
ture, as beginning becomes a site not of fixed and explanatory origin but of
explosively creative difference and transformation. Gregory of Nazianzus
celebrates Christmas by taking his congregation back to the origin of time,
in order to understand the Incarnation. Augustine’s Confessions is driven by
his bafflement at creation – not just the origin of the world but original sin,
where he himself comes from, the whence of grace: timelessness is the
frame and incomprehensible paradox of God in man’s coming into being.
Augustine’s City of God, as we also outlined, is the most sophisticated and
influential treatment of how history is, from the beginning and at source,
formed by Providence, and thus destined to end. For the Christianities of
late antiquity, a discourse of origin is fundamental and integral, and it is
within this discourse that Sulpicius Severus’ Chronicon is shaped, with its

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 406 The Christian Invention of Time
history a mundi exordio, and its final tense imperfects waiting for the
foretold end. As the language and institutions of power are changing across
empire, so too the narrative of the authority of origins is being redrafted, as
Christian authors seek to place Christianity always already at the fountain-
head of cultural value. There is a shared agenda to rewrite history’s primal
scene as Christian.
Paulus Orosius was commissioned to participate in this historiograph-
ical agenda. His Historiae, the final text to be briefly analysed in this book,
was requested by Augustine, while he was writing City of God, to be
a demonstration of the grim truth of past, pagan history and of the glorious
prospects of the Christian era, a case aimed both at pagan opponents and at
Christians in need of rhetorical ammunition – or self-justificatory histor-
ical understanding, necessary after the shock of the sack of Rome by the
Visigoths in 410. Orosius was Spanish, probably from the town that is now
Braga in Portugal; he visited Augustine in Hippo, and, with Augustine’s
introduction, Jerome in Palestine, but little else is known of him apart
from the few years of this intellectual pilgrimage in the second decade of
the fifth century.56 He was asked by Jerome to speak on behalf of ortho-
doxy against Pelagian dogmatists at the Synod of Jerusalem in 415, where
he was accused of heresy by archbishop John and consequently wrote his
Liber Apologeticus in his own defence. Orosius also wrote for Augustine the
Commonitorium, an account of what Priscillianists and Origenists believed,
asking for Augustine’s theological opinion. He was involved, that is, with
the same issues as Sulpicius in Spain, and engaged with the leading writers
of Christian theory around the Mediterranean. Orosius (like Augustine in
City of God) writes his Historiae specifically after and in response to the sack
of Rome by the Visigoths under Alaric in 410 – an event which shocked and
horrified the empire and its Christian authorities.57 While Sulpicius’ Life of
Martin was hugely influential on later hagiography, Orosius’ histories
proved a model of equal importance for medieval historiography, despite
much modern disdain for his intellect and historiographical credentials.
Because Augustine commissioned the Historiae, it has become
a commonplace of modern criticism to compare the City of God with the
Historiae, usually with the result that the sophistication and scale of vision
in Augustine convict Orosius not just of superficiality and naivety, but also

56
Bare facts judiciously recorded in Fear (2010a) 1–6; Zecchini (2003). Seminal, general overview in
Momigliano (1963).
57
‘Stunned and stupefied . . . hanging there, between hope and despair. The brightest light of all the
lands was extinguished . . . the whole world had perished in a single city’ is Jerome’s dramatic
account of his reaction On Ezechiel 1 pr. (trans. O’Donnell (2004) 208).

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 Making History Christian 407
of being a henchman – Orosius calls himself Augustine’s dog – who ‘never
understood a tithe of what Augustine said to him’.58 The critical arguments
over Orosius – it is a familiar story with much of the literature of late
antiquity – have consequently turned on claim and counterclaim of
whether Orosius is ‘good’ or not as a historian.59 It is time, as
Greensmith argues for the similarly reviled and counter-defended
Quintus of Smyrna, to move on from rehearsing such tropes – and
clichés – of evaluation.60 Orosius, for my argument, provides a telling
contrast to the eschatology and abbreviated narration of Sulpicius –
a different modelling of what Christian history, Christian understanding
of a placement in time, can be. It is with Orosius that we will end.
Orosius’ sense of a beginning is quite remarkable. ‘Pretty well all published
scholars’, he writes, ‘in Greek or Latin, who for the sake of lasting memorial
(memoriam) have passed down in their words the deeds of kings and peoples,
have constructed the beginning of their account from Ninus, the son of Belus,
king of the Assyrians’ (1.1.1). This is arresting not least because it seems to be
self-evidently false of pretty well all extant ancient historians, though it is true
at least of Justin, one of Orosius’ main sources. How can Orosius come to
make such a statement? His dismissal of such a starting point is that it denies
that there is a beginning to the world, a story of creation – a ‘blind ignorance’
which thus reduces all of earlier humanity (humanum genus) to the status of
anonymous animals (pecudes), as if only with Ninus was humanity awoken
into a new state of awareness. Before, Ninus, then, was there nothing of note?
Again, spatium mythicum or Censorinus’ ‘the unclear, through ignorance’ is to
have no place in Christian history, for which there is to be no outside, no
beyond knowing. Ninus, or, significantly, any other such start – Polycrates,
say – can only be arbitrary. ‘I’ – he begins his counter-case – ‘have decided to
trace the beginning of human misery from the beginning of human sin’. Since
the theme of Orosius’ history is to be the miseries of the human race, to start
with the original sin is a necessary beginning. The arbitrariness of starting
history with Ninus is a foil to the integral logic of an origin in the original sin
of Eden.
Orosius adds quickly that he has put together just a few extracts – like
Sulpicius, he is committed to brevitas, although his seven books of the

58
O’Donnell (2004) 208 – a judgement delivered with the full authority of the President of the Society
of Classical Studies; see, most recently, Hartog (2020) 105–16.
59
See, for example, Corsini (1968), especially ch. 9; Goetz (1980) 136–46; Cobet (2009) 86–7; van
Nuffelen (2012) repeatedly discusses such issues of value with acumen (and on Augustine specific-
ally, 198–205).
60
Greensmith (2020).

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 408 The Christian Invention of Time
Historiae are far longer than the Chronicon. This editing is demonstrated all
too vividly in what immediately follows, which is as startling as his opening
claim of what nearly everyone writes (1.1.5):
Sunt autem ab Adam primo homine usque ad Ninum, magnum ut dicunt,
regem, quando natus est Abraham, anni III.CLXXXIIII, qui ab omnibus
historiographis vel omissi vel ignorati sunt.
From Adam the first man, however, until King Ninus, whom they call ‘the
great’, when Abraham was born, there were 3,184 years, which are either
passed over by historians, or unknown to them.

The story of the Garden of Eden is even more briefly alluded to here
than in Sulpicius. It is no more than a starting point in order to count the
years until Ninus, when, we are told in a subordinate clause, Abraham was
born – a recognition of synchronicity, which, we will see, is fundamental to
Orosius’ sense of history. What could be the starting point of a history of
the church – Abraham’s turn to God – is passed over as subordinate to the
ignorance or ignoring of what preceded it, the main clause. So much for the
book of Genesis. For the Christian apologist Orosius, in sharp contradis-
tinction to the continuities projected by Sulpicius’ Chronicon, Genesis, it
seems, is not pressingly relevant as historiography.
This repression of the scriptural material, which dominated the narra-
tive of the Chronicon, is continued when Orosius returns to start the
narrative of history after the celebrated chapter 2 has provided a full
geography of the world.61 (Grethlein and Schlögel would both be quick
to note the long history of interaction between the languages of time and
space.)62 When Orosius returns to Genesis, he refers to the creation – post
fabricam ornatumque mundi huius, ‘after the fabrication and decoration of
this world’ – without any specification of the biblical six days; and goes on
to describe the original sin in highly moralized vocabulary but without any
narration of what the sin is. There is no mention of Adam, Eve, the tree,
the snake, let alone Cain, Abel and so forth: this is a programmatic,
generalized statement of a pattern of man doing wrong and being punished
by God. It sets the paradigm for the history to come. The flood is the next
biblical event Orosius alludes to, but the authority for the tale is given as
veracissmi scriptores, ‘the most reliable authors’. Is this the Bible? It is telling
that Orosius goes on to give evidence for the flood from the presence of
shells on mountain tops, something even those ‘ignorant of the times past

61 62
See the excellent discussion in Merrills (2005) 64–99. Grethlein (2013); Schlögel (2016).

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 Making History Christian 409
and the author of those times’ can witness. When, a few paragraphs later,
he comes to Sodom and Gomorrah, the next biblical story included in the
history, his source is expressly given as Tacitus – not scripture – who is
quoted, and then supplemented with a more moralized explanation of the
destruction. Similarly for Joseph, the source offered is expressly Justin’s
epitome of Pompeius Trogus (who makes Moses the son of Joseph), as –
later on – the plagues are given their first summation from quotations from
both Justin and Tacitus. Unlike Sulpicius, who abbreviated and recapitu-
lated biblical writings to produce three-quarters of his history, Orosius
includes only the barest of references to the Hebrew Bible; he never gives
scripture expressly as his authority; he insists wherever possible on citing
and even quoting well-known pagan historians as authorities, whom he
expands and corrects in line with his programmatic agenda of demonstrat-
ing the moral punishment of human sin. Pagans are appropriated as
authorities to be displayed but criticized – or allowed, from their own
mouths, to list the horrors of the pre-Incarnation past. Orosius thus –
unlike Sulpicius – identifies dates consistently through non-Christian
time-scales – each date is given as ‘before’ or ‘since the foundation of the
city’, and within this Roman framework, he braids the classical tradition
and scriptural authority together, intercalating stories, identifying parallel
events between the scriptural history and other narratives. So, thirty years
after the plagues in Egypt, the fifty daughters of Danaus killed their
husbands, and Procne and Philomela took their revenge on Tereus, at
the same time as Perseus went from Greece to Asia. For Orosius, a universal
history, like his geography, covers the map of myth and history of different
cultures. Pagan authors are made to speak a charged Christian history of
the miseries of a pre-Christian era. Orosius ‘baptize[s] secular history’.63
Tempora Christiana, ‘the Christian era’, is Orosius’ description of the
times in which he lives. At the turn of the fifth century, the present – ‘an
elastic concept’ which could stretch back to Constantine64 – is increasingly
referred to as tempora Christiana.65 Although the term is used with multiple
colourings, it is rarely simply positive. Peter Brown states that by this
phrase, Christian writers ‘meant, not the stability of the Constantian order,
but a new age, overshadowed by a crisis of authority, that led to renewed
barbarian raids throughout the Roman provinces of the West’.66 Tempora
Christiana, that is, does not refer to a fixed and agreed time, but marks the
63
Fear (2010b) 185. 64 Markus (2000) 200, speaking of Augustine’s use of tempora Christiana.
65
Markus (1988) with the necessary qualifications of Madec (1975) and the rejoinder of Markus (2000);
Brown (2013).
66
Brown (2013) 86.

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 410 The Christian Invention of Time
space of a question, an anxiety: how or in what ways has the adoption of
Christianity by the empire changed the understanding of time? What does
it mean to live in a Christian empire? What self-understanding is required
by the recognition that to live now is to inhabit Christian history? Simply:
how different is the Christian now? It should not be underestimated how
extraordinary a claim it is that all of history is to be comprehended
according to the assertion of a religious allegiance. From Hesiod onwards,
the ‘ages of man’, with a lost and longed-for golden age, is a familiar trope
of mythic cosmology; historians conceptualize Athens of the fifth century
bce as a ‘classical’ city since even the fourth century bce;67 recognizing the
difference between the Republic and the imperial age is a standard ordering
of Roman historical time; the very rise of the Roman empire requires
explanation, especially to Greek historians, educated to another past.
Notwithstanding all these strategies of periodization, it is only with tem-
pora Christiana that the structuring of time is articulated through what can
be called a religion. The dynamics of belonging now depend on faith or
belief, orthodoxy and heresy. The logic of tempora Christiana makes
outsiders of pagans or Jews, all non-Christians, who evidence the untime-
liness of not accepting the new of the good news. (Modern institutions in
the West have not yet fully disabused themselves of these gestures of
exclusion.) The religious present of tempora Christiana, like the anthropo-
logical present, sets its others outside the time of the now, and without an
inheritance in the future. The language of tempora Christiana not only
orders history but also excludes its opponents from fully participating in
time, except as excluded, punishable others.
‘We are the times’, declares Augustine, at the climax of his Sermon 80:
mala tempora, laboriosa tempora, hoc dicunt homines. bene uiuamus, et
bona sunt tempora. nos sumus tempora: quales sumus, talia sunt tempora.
The times are bad, the times are burdensome, that’s what men say. Let us
live well, times are good. We are the times; what we are, the times are.
What humans do – the complicit ‘we’ of his projected Christian
congregation – makes the world good or bad. And yet, Augustine fre-
quently states, despite the fact that sin is punished, it is not simply that
good deeds lead directly to salvation: the apophatic mystery of God’s
purpose remains opaque in the unfurling of events.68 Augustine’s

67
Hanink (2014).
68
See Murphy (2011) and, more generally, Markus (1988); Ayres (2009); Harrison (2000); Wetzel
(1992).

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 Making History Christian 411
insistence on the moral evaluation of human agency – which we saw in
his strident rejection of astrology – also leads him to reject a naïve
Christian triumphalism in tempora Christiana. His ‘radical agnosticism
about God’s purposes in human history offered no comfort’.69 For
Augustine, ‘We simply can’t read God’s purposes in history’.70 For
Sulpicius, the present, a brief step before the imminent end of days, was
summarized in a list of sins and chaotic strife; his times are ‘difficult and
dangerous’. For Augustine, subject to God’s inscrutable planning, and
striving for good while marred by original sin, the now remains conditional.
Orosius too, following his master, determines the present of tempora
Christiana as conditional. There are four strategic moves to Orosius’
writing the present. They are all formed by his historiographical agenda,
that is, by his express intention to counter pagan and Christian claims that
the sack of Rome with its attendant physical and explanatory crises throws
a challenge to Christianity and its powers of salvation. The sack of Rome
made Christians, as well as those who did not see themselves as Christians,
question not just the stability of the empire but also the implications of
such instability for their theologically informed comprehension of history.
Was Christianity and its destruction of the sites and practices of traditional
worship to blame for the sack of Rome? Was the sack a punishment?
Orosius is quite clear that ‘the world and humanity (homo) is ruled by
divine Providence, as good as it is just’.71 He also confesses – a good
rhetorical ploy – that he too, like others faced by Rome’s sack, ‘found
myself in confusion. I had often thought that the disasters of our present
times seemed to seethe beyond measure’.72 The ‘however’ follows inevit-
ably: ‘However, I found that the days gone by were not only equally
fraught (graves) as today, but even more awfully miserable the further
they were removed from the remedy of the true religion.’73 Orosius’
argument requires that he sets out empirically that in the past things
were worse – hence his regular return to pagan authorities so that he can
fend off the charge of parti-pris sources – and that he shows how the true
religion has made things better. Yet he also knows full well that, despite his
celebration of religion’s salvation, the end of days is integral to Christian
history. ‘An exception, of course – quite different – are the last (novissimis)
days at the end of time (saeculi), and with the appearance of the Antichrist,
and the final judgement.’74 The torments of this final time are predicted in

69
Markus (2000) 205. 70 Murphy (2011) 601.
71 72
Hist. 1.1.9, with Goetz (1980) and Fear (2005). Hist. pr. 13.
73 74
Hist. pr. 13. Not really a conversion, as van Nuffelen (2012) 63 puts it. Hist. pr. 15.

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 412 The Christian Invention of Time
Holy Scripture, and will be unlike either the present or the past. Sulpicius
feels their imminence; Orosius, in the only other mention of the end of
days in the Historiae, recognizes only that they ‘are going to come some-
time’, quandoque ventura.75 The delayed sufferings and punishment at the
end of days might be declared different from any other human experience,
and in the unknown future, but this alone is not enough to reconcile the
two historical narratives, the one which makes Christianity the progressive
betterment of human conditions, the other which leads inexorably towards
the grim misery of the Antichrist’s rise to power. What strategies, then,
does Orosius use in order to depict the present with regard to the past and
the future, to comprehend the now in time’s passing?
The first strategy concerns synchronicity, which, as we saw with the
Parian Marble or Polybius or Diodorus Siculus, had long been part of the
arsenal of the historiographer’s articulation of order. We have already
noted how in Book 1 biblical and non-biblical events are intercalated to
create parallels between the times of the different mythic traditions. The
beginning of Book 7 of the Historiae is the fullest expression of this logic.
Orosius combines numerology and synchronicity to create a fated pattern
of history. Abraham was born forty-three years into the realm of Ninus,
Jesus was born at the end of the forty-second year of Augustus’ reign. So,
too, the kingdom of Carthage lasted 700 years, as did the kingdom of
Macedonia. With a considerable strain on the evidence, Babylon is said to
have been the dominant empire for 1,164 years, as Rome from its founda-
tion to the sack of Alaric also counts 1,164 years.76 Most significantly,
however – as has often been discussed – Orosius insists that the birth of
Jesus comes in the reign of Augustus because Augustus alone created both
the empire that was to be the proper home of Christianity, linking so many
different peoples under one authority, and the time when ‘the whole world’
experienced ‘the profoundest calm and a unified peace’.77 Numerology and
synchronicity come together to determine necessity, which brings the
history of Rome and the history of Christianity onto the same tracks:
‘The secular and the Christian are triumphantly made interdependent by
a synchronism of the birth of Christ and the accession of power of the
emperor Augustus.’78 It is fundamental to Orosius, in a manner quite
different from Sulpicius, that Rome is the condition of possibility for
Christianity. Book 1 takes us from Adam to the foundation of Rome;
75 76
Hist. 7.27.15. Hist. 2.3.2–3.
77
Hist. 7.3.10. See Lacroix (1965) 171, who argues that Orosius’ basic point is simple: God’s commit-
ment to Rome is a matter of Christ; Christ sets up his church at the heart of the empire.
78
Fear (2010b) 182.

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 Making History Christian 413
Book 7 covers Roman history from the birth of Christ to Orosius’ own day.
Books 2–6 – as dominant in his history as scripture is in Sulpicius – are
made up by the history of Rome’s growth, the seedbed of Christianity. As
Andrew Fear memorably puts it: ‘Orosius was the first author to give
Roman history a purpose’.79 Orosius’ sense of time makes a continuity
of secular and religious history, because the Roman empire and
Christianity are integrally intertwined. The attempt of the opponents of
Christianity to blame Christianity for the sack of Rome are undermined by
Orosius’ demonstration that Rome was always already on a path to
Christian triumph.
The pattern of this historical continuity is structured in particular by
a theory of the Four Empires, which Orosius takes up from the book of
Daniel, essential reading for Christian apocalyptic reflections. This is
his second strategy. Orosius determines that the four empires are
Babylon in the East, Macedonia in the North, Carthage in the South,
and Rome in the West – a universal geography of power. (Carthage is not
usually one of the kingdoms, but, as van Nuffelen notes, this ‘original
concoction that is part of a long tradition and a contemporary vogue’ thus
keeps Rome firmly in the foreground.)80 Babylon lasted as a city 1,400
years, Orosius states, and both Macedonia and Carthage were the domin-
ant imperial powers for 700 years. Rome too has its sevens: in its 700th year
a great fire destroyed fourteen districts. This self-marked repetition of
seven embodies and blazons forth God’s providence. It is not by chance
that there are seven books of the Historiae. There is no overlap between
these empires: as the last king of one dies, the first king of the next comes
into the light. This bold superstructure of history again demands that
Christianity is seen as an integral part of the divine plan for imperial
authority. Christianity is Roman because its claim to be a worldwide
religion requires a worldwide empire as its geography.
Yet one obvious conclusion from such a pattern might be that Rome
too, as Sulpicius would have it, is approaching its end, and with it the end
of the world. Is not the sack of Rome one sign of this inevitable and
foretold fading of Roman power? This is where the crucial turning point –
and third strategy – of Orosius takes shape. From early in the narrative,
Orosius is intent on declaring that Rome is different from Babylon in this
respect: it is not about to fall. He states this point as boldly and baldly as he
can (2.3.6):

79 80
Fear (2010b) 182. van Nuffelen (2012) 49.

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 414 The Christian Invention of Time
Ecce similis Babyloniae ortus et Romae, similis potentia, similis magnitudo,
similia tempora, similia bona, similia mala; tamen non similis exitus simi-
lisve defectus. Illa enim regnum amisit, haec retinet, illa interfectione regis
orbata, haec incolumi imperatore secura est.
Look! Babylon and Rome have a similar beginning, similar power, similar
size, similar length of time, similar goods, similar evils; but their end or
decline are not the same. Babylon lost its kingdom; Rome retains hers.
Babylon was orphaned by the killing of her king; Rome is secure, its
emperor unharmed.
The repeated injunctions to ‘look!’, ‘see!’ stab home the point. The
similarity demanded by the theory of the four empires produces the
crucial difference between Rome and Babylon. Rome is a Christian
city. Babylon was undone because of the baseness of the lusts of their
ruler; Rome was saved because of the ‘most chaste self-control of the
Christian religion in their ruler’. It was more than just the ruler’s
Christian goodness that saved the city, however. Unlike Babylon’s lack
of reverence for religion, in Rome ‘There were Christians, who spared;
Christians who were spared; and Christians because of whose memory
and in whose memory, this sparing took place.’ The sack of the city,
which so traumatized Jerome in Palestine, has now become in Orosius’
apologetics a scene of restraint, where the Christian Visigoths pitied the
Christians of Rome – there is no mention of any tension between the
Arian Visigoths and pro-Nicaean Romans – and this pity was enacted in
the name of a glorified history of Christians, the sancti who make
Christian history glorious. When Orosius comes to narrate the history
he pre-announces here in Book 2, he highlights the story of a nun whose
plea to a Visigoth warrior results in a procession of nuns carrying the
ritual treasures of St Peter, protected from harm by the Visigoth army.81
Far from being the blameworthy cause of Rome’s disasters, Christianity is
‘responsible for the salvation of Rome’.82
Orosius knows well the instability of empire, historiography’s admon-
ition to the powerful since Herodotus. He marks it as a cliché: ‘not my
project’, he sniffs, ‘to expatiate on the unstable nature of changeable
things’, and he seals the point with a quotation that is proven, he says,
by the fall of Babylon: quidquid enim est opera et manu factum, labi et
consumi vetustate, ‘whatever is made by the work of man’s hands, collapses
and is consumed by age’ (2.6.13–14). This sententia is a paraphrase of
a passage from the very well-known speech of Cicero, Pro Marcello. This

81 82
7.49.3–14. Merrills (2005) 42.

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 Making History Christian 415
speech is about pardon – Cicero is celebrating Caesar’s pardon of
Marcellus – delivered at a crisis point that led to the collapse of the
Republic, and it marks a moment of maximum disjunction in the shifting
relationship of Caesar and Cicero. Pro Marcello can stand as an icon of the
res mutabiles Orosius does not want to discuss. Orosius could have found
many passages from scripture to make such a familiar point – ‘Unless the
Lord builds the house, those who build it, build in vain’, ‘he who builds on
sand . . .’ and so forth – but by appropriating Cicero, he not only invokes
a non-Christian proof, once again, for his Christian argument, but also
allows classical Rome, the mutability of its power and its rulers’ relation-
ships, to stand as its own example of the moral he is quoting Cicero to
prove. Orosius quotes from authoritative tradition to undermine the
tradition, from the inside, as it were. Such quotations are ‘not just literary
flourishes, but ideological statements about what drives history: Jesus, not
Caesar; the Church, not Augustus’.83 For Orosius, literary quotations from
classical authorities form part of his drive to narrate Christian time.
‘Old age’, vetustas, we may remember from Septimius Severus’ inscrip-
tion on the Pantheon. Empires, it seems, like buildings, have a life expect-
ancy, as does a human. An intense sermon of Augustine makes this
association of the naturalness of a human’s ageing even with the age of
the world itself: ‘The world is perishing; the world is growing old, the
world is fainting, the world is labouring with the panting breath of old age
(vetustas). Do not fear. Your youth will renew itself like the eagle.’84
Augustine can imagine the gradual decline of the world towards the end
of time, which he contrasts with the Christian promise of rebirth. But
Orosius repeatedly pushes away the possibility of an imminent end.
Orosius embodies not so much ‘a confidence in the divine permanence
of the Christian empire’85 as a recognized potential to keep staving off the
end of empire by an active Christian goodness. A ‘flawed temporal state’,86
or fragile continuity is held forth as the answer. Everything human decays.
Yet Orosius’ eschatology is ‘situated in an unknown future’, and the
Church remains ‘the true centre of historical action’.87 Modern critics of
Orosius have been swift to dismiss what they see as a naïve theodicy driving
his historiography. The pattern of human corruption leading to divine
punishment is, however, fully in service of a more cautious persuasive
normativity in Orosius’ narrative. Humanity, constantly threatened by its
own sinfulness and punishment, which history repeatedly reveals, must

83
van Nuffelen (2012) 190. 84 Serm. 81.8. 85
Merrills (2005) 57.
86 87
Merrills (2005) 57. See Herzog (2002b). van Nuffelen (2012) 197.

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 416 The Christian Invention of Time
turn again and again to a Christian morality with its hope of God’s mercy,
if the fragile potential of a Christian empire is to be maintained. This is
how Orosius understands the present in relation to the past and future.
The past, for Orosius, is exemplary. It is with exempla that Orosius’
fourth strategy takes shape. Exempla – or paradeigmata in Greek – as we
previously outlined, are integral to classical rhetoric in theory and practice;
they forge a relation to the past that is marked by genealogy and disruption:
the genealogy that asserts a privileged connection between the present case
and what has gone, and a disruption that recognizes that the past has passed
and is different from the present in its very instructiveness.88 Exempla
provided the glue of ancient rhetoric, and, as such, are integral not just to
the performance of rhetoric but also to the rhetoric of self-performance. For
Christian writing, classical exemplarity therefore needed negotiation: what is
to be made of the great men and deeds of the past by the new normativity
and new parameters of achievement? For Basil – to extract one strategy from
his educational principles – the examples of the past can be appropriated for
present purposes: Odysseus, naked on the beach before Nausicaa, can be
a model of virtue. Augustine, as has been extensively discussed, used ‘the
cultural expectations and literary training he shares with classically educated
members of his audience to destabilize their perceptions of their own history,
and to substitute a Christian interpretation of events’89 – he redesigned
familiar exemplarities to a new template. In the City of God in particular, the
examples of the past – both the exemplary force of history and the historical
usage of exempla – became a route to reformulating an understanding of how
living in today’s time could be comprehended.
Orosius sees danger for the Christian in the exempla of classical trad-
ition. He is quietly dismissive of the effect of such rhetorical exercise. He
concludes his account of Athens and its war with Persia – the most classical
of classical pasts and the source of the grandeur of the historiographical
tradition – with a praeteritio and a trademark (mis)quotation of Virgil: quis
enim cladem illius temporis, quis fando funera explicet aut aequare lacrimis
possit dolores?, ‘For who could describe the disaster of that time, who might
express in speech its deaths or could equal with tears its grief?’ (2.18.4).90
Aeneas’ description of the sacking of Troy (Aen. 2.361–2) is applied to the
miseries now of Greece at war – a nicely understated rehearsal of Scipio’s
quotation of Homer’s vision of the fall of Troy for the destruction of
88
See above, pp. 100–12.
89
Conybeare (1999) 63; see also Murphy (2011); Burns (2001); Ayres (2009).
90
quis cladem illius noctis, quis funera fando | explicet aut possit lacrimis aequare labores? Aen. 2.361–2;
note especially the change of noctis to temporis and labores to dolores, as well as the word order.

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 Making History Christian 417
Carthage, the locus classicus for the epic memory of the rise and fall of cities
and empires.91 But Orosius manipulates this shift of perspective with
a further twist (2.18.4):
Verumtamen haec ipsa, quia multo interiectu saeculorum exoleverunt, facta
sunt nobis exercitia ingeniorum et oblectamenta fabularum.
In reality, these very events because they have faded through the interval of
centuries, have become for us exercises of intellect and the pleasure of
storytelling.
The triumphs and horrors of classical Greece have become no more than
what he has just demonstrated: an exercise of rhetorical skill in the pleasure
of storytelling. We know that Virgil’s Aeneas, when he tells his story of
disaster, is also beguiling Dido: there are further dangerous pleasures hinted
at. Rhetoric and literature have produced an emotional deadening towards
the past. Time itself has dulled our feelings. If only his readers would apply
their minds more intently, continues Orosius, and observe as if from a height
above the spectacle, they would be able to measure each era (tempus)
according to its own qualities, and then they would realize that neither the
past would have been so terrible without the punishing rage of God, nor the
present so full of good without the kindness and mercy of God. Providence
revealed . . . Orosius, moving between the example of classical Athens and
the exemplary epic of Virgil, demands that his readers evaluate a time for
what it is, and to see in the contrast of present and past the working of
Providence. His readers need to be cajoled into discovering again the horrors
of the past and the beneficence of the present.
The preface to Book 4 of the Historiae generalizes this case with a certain
flair. Orosius begins with Virgil again, this time with an acknowledged
quotation of a line from the first book of the Aeneid: ‘Perhaps these
sufferings too will at some time hence be a pleasure to recall’ (Aen.
1.203).92 The story of the foundation of Rome is the foundation of this
historiography. Orosius explains that the worse events are, the more
pleasurable it is to recall them later; that everyone thinks the future will
be better; and that in the moment, present sufferings always loom largest in
the imagination. These three rather trite observations open into
a discussion of how people always think their own troubles trump the
past. He takes the case of a man who gets up from his warm bed to find it is

91
See above, p. 174.
92
McCormack (1998) is good on Virgil’s role in Augustine; on such allusiveness in historiography see
also Kelly (2008).

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 418 The Christian Invention of Time
icy outside. If he says, ‘It’s cold today’, no problem: that’s normal behav-
iour. If, however, he shouts that there has never been such cold even when
Hannibal crossed the Apennines and lost his elephants, Orosius would
personally drag him from his incriminatingly warm sheets and show him
children playing in the frost to reveal the moaner’s ‘childish dissoluteness’,
puerilibus licentiis (4. pr. 10). His pain comes not from the ‘violence of the
time’ (in tempore violentiam) but from his own laziness. Orosius sardonic-
ally mocks the man’s use of the exemplum of Hannibal crossing the Alps as
no more than a corrupt and lazy gesture of self-satisfaction. He makes the
man an example for his trivial use of the past. This story is a parable for the
historiographer. And for anyone who thinks the Christian present is not
better than the past. By contrast, Orosius sets out to give us the full
terribleness of what has happened in the past, so that we will neither
underestimate the evil of the past nor use the past trivially to emphasize
the evil of the present in a false comparison. Exemplarity is integral to
Orosius’ historiography: his argument ‘questions the creation of an exem-
plary past in all three aspects, that is, its actual reality, its creation by
ancient historians, and its impact on contemporary perception’.93 For
Orosius, to understand the narrative of Christian time requires this moral-
izing redesign of his inherited tradition of the temporality of classical
exemplarity. What the past can say has been transformed.
*
Sulpicius Severus, writing before the sack of Rome, nonetheless hears
time’s chariot rushing near. His vision of Christian time demands that
scripture fills our perspective: three-quarters of history is subsumed by
what is written in the Hebrew Bible; and the New Testament provides the
model for understanding both the pattern of the Hebrew Bible and the
sorry state of current affairs which justify his anticipation of the end of
days. When Sulpicius cites ancient historians or uses their language, it is to
supplement the chronology of his biblical narrative, or to transcend the
lures of the saeculum, the burden of time’s corrupting normality. He
performatively turns his eyes from everlasting glory towards everlasting
life. Orosius, by contrast, allows the end of days to be ‘going to come
sometime’. His narrative also goes back to original sin for its starting point,
to see a repeated pattern of human wrongdoing and divine punishment,
but this is a historical narrative that embraces North, South, East and
West, the four empires that structure secular power: a history far beyond

93
van Nuffelen (2012) 70. The previous paragraph owes a good deal to this excellent discussion.

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 Making History Christian 419
the geography of scriptural narrative. All four empires are destined to rise
and fall according to Providence, but, for Orosius, the past was a far worse
place. To evidence his claim, he tells a (baptized) secular history, which is
made to convict itself, by quotation and interpretation. The exempla of the
classical past are refuted as false models, misrepresented by traditional
historiography, and insidious in their distortion of the self-understanding
of the present. Yet the indefinite future of quandoque ventura, the ‘going to
come sometime’, also allows Orosius to defer the end of Rome, and to
locate the continuity of deferral in the shared frame of God’s beneficence
and human – Christian – moral choices. Christians are not responsible for
the sack of Rome, therefore, but the very agents of its salvation. The
present for Sulpicius Severus is summed up in a fiercely incremental list
of moral corruptions; for Orosius, similarly at the very conclusion of his
narrative, the present – tempora Christiana – can be positively distin-
guished from the confusion of disbelief that is embodied in the conflicts
of human history (conflictationes saeculi), because of the increasing presence
of Christ’s Grace: Christianis temporibus propter praesentem magis Christi
gratiam ab illa incredulitatis confusione discretis (7.43.19). This is a different
distinctio temporum, a different sense of what the present is, of what is at
stake in distinguishing tempora Christiana. Orosius comprehends
Christian time differently from Sulpicius, and the narrative that embeds
this definition takes a quite different form. Orosius’ continuing potential-
ities of Christian agency in time contrast tellingly with Sulpicius’ sense of
an ending. Shifting conceptualizations of the end allow strikingly contrast-
ive narratives of time and differing understandings of how a Christian may
inhabit it. This juxtaposition of Sulpicius and Orosius offers two distinct-
ive, productive routes into the map that medieval historiography will draw.
Historiography played a major role in the first section’s discussion of how
a self-placement in time was constructed through writing the narrative of
the past, and how such historiographical structures are predicated on
a roster of concepts about temporality. Christianity changes history.
Through Sulpicius and Orosius together, we can see the shape of
Christian time as a historiographical project being formed. It will last for
centuries.

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 Coda
Writing in the Time of Sickness

It has been a strange time in which to write about time. This book was
written during a year marked and scarred across the world by the
Coronavirus, Covid-19. It would be nice to imagine that the comments
I am about to make will quickly be out of date, but at the time of writing
not only is there no immediate sign of any lessening of the pandemic, but
also the glib slogans of public discourse ‘build back better’, ‘the new
normal’, seem peculiarly hollow. It seems unlikely that this time of
pandemic will be forgotten in the near future, or its impact unfelt.
For those who have lost friends and family, and for those whose lives have
been made miserable by long-term sickness, physical or mental, by the loss of
income, by the loss of employment, or by the collapse of social exchange, this
time will be remembered through mourning, regret, despair and relief at its
passing inasmuch as such losses pass – never without a residue. One of the
strangest feelings of being in this time, however, is the transformation of
time itself. For everyone, routines, long lived, have changed. What it means
to go through a day has altered under lockdowns and the restrictions of travel
and contact. Even the pattern of the week has slipped, as the difference
between the weekend and the weekday has slid. The pattern of work and
holiday, the expectations and practices of travel – where time and speed are
so pressing – have had to mutate. Festival celebration – religious, familial,
communal – along with the release and joy of the leisure activities of sport
and theatre or music – the distinctions of time – are silenced or muted. The
sense of the future has become differently insistent. As with Augustine, ‘how
long?’ has become the cry of a desperate sense of waiting. The promise or
threat of last week’s figures, next week’s rise, has become a new shared public
and private anxiety. Yet the hours and days march on. As Augustine also
wrote (Conf. 4.8.13), non vacant tempora, ‘time does not take holidays’. To
live in a time of sickness is to become acutely and differently aware of time.
Yet it is also telling that at the same time in different parts of the world
there has been developing a violent political attempt to grasp hold of how an
420

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 Coda 421
understanding of time is shaped. In Poland, following the model of
Hungary, laws have been passed, designed to control what accounts of
history will be acceptable – legal – from now on, and only accounts that
conform to the government’s self-serving projection of patriotism will be
allowed. In India, the government of Modi has projected a fantasy of the
past based on a nationalist purity that has veered into the absurd, but with
murderous consequences. Far right groups in America, not dis-
encouraged by President Trump’s understanding of how stories about
the past can be true or false, have increasingly disseminated poisonous
models of a once celebrated and now threatened racial purity, with
a parallel dismissiveness towards the history of slavery and violent imperi-
alism. In both Russia and China – with quite different inflections – the
government uses the state media to insist on an authorized version of the
past that suits its own agenda – and, we should also note, the deep
complexity of the Russian public discourse of the past, so often simplified
in the Western media, has been brilliantly explored – for example – by the
oeuvre of Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize winner for literature, espe-
cially in Second-Hand Time. We could add examples, no less in need of
sophisticated analysis, from arenas of conflict from the Middle East to
Britain’s Brexit debates. History has always been manipulated for ideo-
logical purposes, certainly, not only by the victorious, and the totalitarian
states of the Third Reich and the Stalinist Soviet Union remain the
paradigms of such authoritarian regulation of the narrative of the past.
Nonetheless, for anyone even cautiously committed to the values of
a plural, liberal democracy, this trend towards increasingly aggressive,
arrant and aggrandizing acts of control can only feel deeply worrying, not
least with an eye to the consequences of such actions in the past.
It is, then, an insistently grim time to think about how time is repre-
sented and experienced. This history of the transformation of temporality
in late antiquity has uncovered its fair share of extreme ideologues, not to
mention their strident and unpleasantly consequential projections of how
the past must be understood. The Christian invention of time cannot be
decently separated from the violent politics with which it marches, hand in
hand. Yet the hope remains that perhaps a more nuanced and developed
understanding of what is at stake in ‘inhabiting time’, how it can be
debated and transformed over time, what factors go into its comprehension
and experience, might contribute not just to understanding our current
temporalities, but also to resisting the oversimplification and distorted
genealogies of the past that make violent politics possible.

Cambridge, Lent Term, 2021.

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 Index Locorum

Bible Isaiah
Hebrew Bible/Old Testament 40.8, 40
Genesis 51.6, 91
2.2, 19 Lamentations 3.34, 316
6.4, 358 Ezekiel 16.31, 340
8.7, 381 n. 3, 383 Daniel
12.1, 123 7.23, 91
15.5, 296 9.27, 92
22.10, 246 11.31, 92
Exodus 12.11, 92
11.4, 68 Hosea 1.1, 111
15.27, 108 Habakkuk 3.18, 111
21.6, 254 n. 86 New Testament
23.19, 225 n. 8 Matthew
34.26, 225 n. 8 5.17, 90
Leviticus 5.18, 224
24, 64 5.19, 224
25, 64 24.3, 92
Numbers 24.17, 298 24.8, 92
Deuteronomy 24.9, 94
4.2, 223 24.14, 94
12.32, 223 24.15–16, 92
14.21, 225 n. 8 24.29–31, 92
15.17, 254 n. 86 24.36, 92
25.17–19, 120 n. 29 24.42, 92
Judges 7.19, 68 25.13, 92
1 Kings 17.6, 381 25.46, 94
2 Kings 4, 388 n. 21 26.73–5, 343 n. 21
Psalms Mark
8.4, 316 13.14, 92
13, 190 13.33, 93
18(19), 358 13.35, 93
18(19).3, 355 Luke
79(80), 357 3.1, 395 n. 38
102, 172 12.40, 93
104.24, 41 12.45, 95
118.73, 331 17.20, 95
119.62, 68 18.1, 347
119.148, 68 22.59–62, 343 n. 21
145.1, 255 n. 95 24.39, 245

472

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 Index Locorum 473
John Ta’anit 23a, 85
1.1, 37, 41, 223, 239, 321 Midrash
1.5, 249 Avot Derabbi Natan 31, 86
1.8–9, 249 Eikah Rabba 1.1.6–13, 20 n. 5
4.23, 177 Kohelet Rabbah 2.4–8, 67
5.25, 177, 260, 263 Midrash Rabbah Bereshit 108b, 381
5.39, 92 Rabbah Bereshit 10.9, 23
6.35, 258 Mishnah Sanhedrin 5.3, 69
8.12, 341
8.21, 252 Aeschylus
8.35, 253 Agamemnon
8.55, 252 136, 52
10.10, 260 150, 52
10.30, 250 486–7, 53
14.12, 388 n. 20 1292, 51
16.16, 264 1299, 54
18.13–27, 343 n. 21 1322–3, 51
20.12, 245 1343, 51
20.74, 245 1353, 52
20.134–5, 245 1356–7, 52
Romans Eumenides 738, 28
2.5.6, 385 Ambrose of Milan
5.14, 108 De mysteriis 11, 383 n. 8
1 Corinthians De virginitate
7.31, 94 1.5, 355
10, 107 2.4, 355
10.11, 107 3.6.34, 339 n. 8
2 Corinthians 19.125, 355 n. 61
4.18, 371 Enarrationes in Psalmos 36.32, 377 n. 112
5.17, 228 n. 17 Explanatio Psalmorum 12, 346 n. 31, 356 n. 62
Ephesians Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam 10.74,
2.2, 255 343 n. 21
6.18, 348 Hexaemeron
Philippians 4.17, 108 3.1.5, 346 n. 31
1 Thessalonians 5.17, 348 5, 343 n. 21
Hebrews Hymn 1 (Aeterne rerum conditor)
8.5, 208 1–4, 338–40
11.10, 339 5–8, 341
Revelation 9–12, 341–2
1.3, 94 10, 345
13.3, 397 13–16, 342–3
16, 343
Intertestamental Writings 20, 343
Jubilees 2.16, 23 21, 343
Letter of Aristeas 315–16, 239 n. 46 21–4, 343
23, 343
Rabbinical Writings 24, 343
Babylonian Talmud 25–8, 343
Berakhot 28, 343, 345
1, 68 29–32, 344–5
2a, 351 n. 58 32, 340
Megillah 9a, 22, 23 Hymn 2, 352, 353
Menachot 29b, 225 n. 6 Hymn 3, 354
Sanhedrin 108b, 381 Hymn 5 (Intende, qui regis Israel), 352, 355,
Shabbat 156a–b, 300 356–9, 368

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 474 Index Locorum
Ambrose of Milan (cont.) 11.6, 39
1–5, 356 11.7, 40
17–24, 357 11.9, 41
35, 358 n. 68 11.14.17, 96
Hymn 6, 352, 356 11.28.37, 97
Hymn 7, 352, 367 n. 92, 369 11.29, 97
Hymn 8, 352 Contra duas epistulas pelagianorum 2.14–16,
Hymn 9, 352 297 n. 84
Hymn 10, 353 Contra Faustum 12.20, 385 n. 12
Hymn 11, 353 Contra sermonem Arianorum 8.6, 358 n. 66
Hymn 12 (Apostolorum passio), 352, 355, 360, De civitate Dei (City of God)
377–8 5, 295 n. 72
31–2, 377 5.1–7, 297 n. 84
Hymn 13, 352, 360 7.13, 180
Hymn 14, 353 10.29, 240 n. 48
Andocides, 1.69, 116 12, 178
Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 15, 179
4.264, 280 n. 23 18.18, 184
4.676, 281 n. 27 19.17, 179
Apophthegmata Patrum Epiphanius 3, 346 n. 34 20, 179
Aratus, Phaenomena 20.9, 177
1–2, 292 20.14, 177
13, 292 20.25, 172
228, 323 21, 179
349, 323 De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum 1.2.3,
772, 292 297 n. 84
1153–4, 292 De diversis quaestionibus octoginta 45.2,
Aristotle, Physics 297 n. 84
220a 25, 76 De doctrina christiana 2.15 (22), 22 n. 11
221b, 50 De Genesi ad litteram 2.17.36, 297 n. 84
Athanasius of Alexandria Enarrationes in Psalmos
Apologia contra Arianos 1.5, 347 n. 37 9.6, 254 n. 89
Contra gentes 41.1, 334 n. 40 18, 358 n. 68
De synodis 1.15.2–3, 347 n. 37 102.16, 384
Augustine of Hippo 140.9, 297 n. 83,85
On Christian Teaching 2.22.33–4, 297 n. 84 In Evangelium Joannis Tractatus 38.10,
Confessiones 98 n. 29
1.6.7, 181 Sermones
1.6.9, 182 80, 410
2.139, 127 n. 48 81.8, 415 n. 84
3.8.13, 420 117, 316
4.3.4–6, 296 372.3, 358 n. 66
6.10, 297 n. 84 Denis 14.3, 125 n. 43
8.2.4, 389 n. 24 Sermons on the Liturgical Season 224.4, 385 n. 12
8.12, 96
10.4, 123 Basil of Caesarea, Epistulae 207, 346 n. 35
10.6.9, 128
10.8, 128 Cassiodorus, 4.214–18, 191
10.8.14, 128 Censorinus, De die natali 21, 149 n. 43
10.9.16, 128 Chaldaean Oracle, fr. 185, 339 n. 11
10.13, 128 Cicero, De natura deorum 1.21, 169
10.16.5, 129 Clement of Alexandria
10.17, 129 Paedagogus
10.17.26, 129 2.4, 346 n. 30
11, 39–44 2.9, 349 n. 49

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77–82, 93 2.8, 327
Stromateis III.8.61.1, 207 n. 6 2.15, 327
Clement of Rome, Epistulae 1.20, 296 n. 74 2.16, 327, 332
Corpus Hermeticum 11.2, 269 n. 3 2.18–19, 327
Cyprian 2.18–20, 327
De lapsi 2, 377 n. 112 2.26–27, 329
Epistulae 2.82–3, 329
63.8.1–9.1, 309 3.1, 320
74, 228 n. 17 3.7, 324
Cyril of Alexandria 4.1, 320
Commentary on the Gospel of John 4.21, 318 n. 13
1.1.17, 244 n. 62 4.36, 318 n. 13
1.1.22, 248 n. 74 4.39–41, 328
1.18.2–16, 244 n. 60 4.40, 318 n. 13
Commentary on the Twelve Prophets I.275.20, 4.53, 328
277 n. 20 4.62–3, 328
De adoratione 48, 324 n. 25 4.66–8, 328
Glaphyra in Pentateuchum 16, 324 n. 25 5.12, 321
5.13, 321
Demosthenes 5.17–18, 322
19.184, 116 5.19–23, 322
40.53, 116 5.33, 322
60.9, 143 5.34, 323
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers 5.36–7, 322
4.16.19, 186 5.39–42, 323
5.43–4, 323
Epic of Creation, Tablet 5.16–22, 70 5.49–52, 323
Epictetus, 2.5.13, 255 n. 94 5.53, 324
Epiphanius 5.55, 327
Apophthegmata Patrum Epiphanius 3, 346 n. 34 5.55–64, 298 n. 90
De mens et pond. 535, 19 n. 2 5.57, 324
Panarion 51.22, 255 n. 93 5.83–4, 325
Eudocia, centos 447–661, 309 7.76–7, 325
Euripides, Heraclidae 900, 254 n. 89 7.80–1, 325
Eusebius of Caesarea 7.100–1, 325
Chronicon, pr.II, 232 n. 32 Carmina
Historia ecclesiastica I.1.2.21, 243 n. 59
1.1.4, 150 I.1.5, 243 n. 59
1.4.7, 151 I.1.27, 243 n. 59
1.5.2, 149 II.1.11.649, 243 n. 59
5.23.2, 153 II.1.14.41, 243 n. 59
5.25.1, 153 II.1.39, 235–8
7.32.6, 151 II.2.7.179, 257 n. 100
10.4.2–72, 208 Epistulae
Praeparatio evangelica 2.49, 239 n. 45
1.9–10, 281 n. 26 101, 230 n. 21, 238 n. 43
2.5, 232 n. 32 102, 230 n. 21
9.17.2–9, 296 n. 76 Orationes
Vita Constantini 3.33, 208 4.73, 35 n. 44
6.7, 317 n. 10
Galen, De ordine librorum propriorum, 1, 186 9.9, 296 n. 75
Gregory of Nazianzus 14.33, 317 n. 10
Aporrhēta/Poemata Arcana 22.11, 317 n. 10
2.1, 320 27.3, 35 n. 44
2.3–4, 327 28, 315–20

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Gregory of Nazianzus (cont.) Gregory of Nyssa
28.3.2, 315 In Canticum Canticorum 89.19, 245 n. 69
28.3.15–16, 315 Contra Eunomium 1.1.17, 347 n. 38
28.4, 37 Trid. spat. 290 Jaeger, 37 n. 53,54
28.4.1, 315 Vita Macrinae
28.5.13, 316 18.30, 200
28.6.1–7, 316 20.3, 200
28.7.1–3, 320 Vita Moysis 2.152–66, 315 n. 2
28.9.4–7, 315
28.10.21–2, 315 Herodotus
28.12.25, 316 1.32.9, 47 n. 6
28.14.1–2, 316 3.122, 143
28.29.11–12, 318 7.3, 173
28.30.5–8, 318 Hesiod
28.31.1–2, 318 Theogony
28.31.3, 318 21, 29
28.41–4, 317 886, 28
29.3, 37 n. 55,56 903, 29
29.3, 328 Works and Days
29.19, 316 n. 9 175, 165
30.20, 41 176–8, 165
32.23–7, 317 n. 10 179–200, 165
38.2.11, 331 201, 165
38.2.17, 331 Hippolytus of Rome
38.3.1, 330 n. 34 Apostolic Tradition 41.7, 348
38.4.3–4, 331 Refutation of All Heresies 4.46–50, 298
38.4.16–17, 331 Historia Augusta, Hadrian 20.3, 132
38.5.1–21, 331 Homer
38.6.7, 332 Iliad
38.6.16–21, 332 2.325, 263 n. 117
38.7.5, 332 6.146, 46
38.7.7–8, 332 6.358, 49
38.7.23–7, 332 7.100, 48
38.9, 333 9.186, 232
38.10, 333 14.433, 310
38.11, 333 16.679, 310
38.11.5, 333 17.75, 244
38.11.17–18, 333 21.8, 310
38.12, 333 21.239, 310
38.13, 333 21.461–7, 46
38.13.14–19, 333 Odyssey
38.14–15, 334 5.152–3, 27
38.16.1, 334 5.211–12, 25
38.17.3–4, 334 5.217, 25
38.18.7–8, 335 5.218, 25
38.18.223–6, 335 5.219, 25
40.45, 316 n. 9 5.220, 25
42.22, 36 n. 46 11.97–137, 49
43.5, 202 n. 45 11.300–4, 30
Palatine Anthology (AP) 11.303–4, 30
8.12.5, 61 11.602, 29
8.14.4, 61 23.133–40, 53
8.20.2, 61 23.524, 245 n. 67
8.28, 258 n. 103 24.192–202, 49
8.31, 62 24.514–15, 50

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 Index Locorum 477
Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 5.528–30, 171
241–6, 33 5.1276, 171
259, 33
278, 33 Macrobius, Saturnalia
1.17–23, 288
Ignatius, Letter to the Ephesians 1.18, 288
19.2, 298 Manilius, 4.14–16, 339 n. 10
19.3, 298 Marinus, Vita Procli 22, 349 n. 51
Irenaeus of Lyon, Adversus haereses 1 pr. 1, 152 Martial, 4.8.1–7, 80
Isocrates, Philippus 134, 104 Melito of Sardis, Peri Pascha
35, 110
Jerome 37, 110
Epistulae 38, 110
22.7, 201
46, 122 Nonnus
58, 122 Dionysiaca
58.7, 123 1.15, 273
108, 201 1.240–3, 304
108.6, 201 2.650–4, 270
108.10, 123 3.196–9, 278
108.15, 202 3.201, 279
108.24, 202 3.205, 279
108.32, 201 3.209–14, 268
155, 232 n. 32 3.255–6, 276
On Ezechiel 1 pr., 406 n. 57 3.291–3, 310
John Cassian, Institutes 5.87, 310
2.17, 82 5.138–44, 282
3.2, 348 n. 46 6.14, 301
John Chrysostom 6.16, 301
Adversus Iudaeos 5, 92 n. 13 6.59–60, 301
Homily 15 on 2 Corinthians 5, 123 n. 41 6.61–3, 301
Josephus 6.68, 302
Jewish Antiquities 6.69, 302
1.3.4, 383 n. 9 6.71, 302
1.3.6, 383 n. 9 6.75–85, 302
1.5, 22 6.172–6, 310
1.10, 21 6.177, 311
1.10–13, 21 6.178, 311
1.33, 22 6.205, 311
2.16.4, 232 n. 29 6.206, 311
4.18.44, 232 n. 29 6.209–14, 279
7.12.3, 232 n. 30 6.233–6, 267
12.11–118, 21 6.303, 267
Vita 9–12, 186 6.371–2, 268
7.1–7, 269
Lactantius, Divinae institutiones 7.6, 279
4.7, 248 n. 72 7.8, 273
4.8, 44, 249 n. 78 7.10, 273
5.1.1; 6.9.14, 339 n. 8 7.23, 273, 274
Livy, 39.40, 105 7.28, 274
Longinus, De sublimitate 14, 103, 104 7.39, 274
Lucian, Verae historiae 2.17, 56 7.43, 274
Lucretius, De rerum natura 7.47, 274
1.459, 170 11.93, 310
1.464–71, 170 11.164, 311

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 478 Index Locorum
Nonnus (cont.) 41.160, 283
11.520, 305 41.179–82, 278
12.33–4, 289 41.215–17, 283
12.39, 305 41.270, 284
12.43, 289 41.341, 291, 305
12.51, 289 41.364–7, 284
12.56, 290 41.388, 278
12.59–64, 290 41.389–97, 285
12.66, 290 47.29, 249 n. 75
12.68, 290 47.34ff. 308
12.139, 260 n. 113 48.964–5, 312
12.159, 310 Paraphrase of the Gospel of John
15.395–422, 287 1.1–5, 243–51
18.169ff. 302 n. 104 1.6, 271 n. 13
19.280, 258 n. 106 1.14, 248
22.147, 310 1.19, 250 n. 81
22.384, 308 1.28, 261
22.386–9, 308 1.39–41, 248
22.396, 309 1.40, 248
23.162–24.67, 309 2.21, 260 n. 111
23.399–400, 309 3.17–18, 263
24.265–7, 275 3.31, 250 n. 81
25.352, 304 3.79, 257
25.396, 304 3.83, 260
25.416, 304 3.108, 324 n. 24
25.428, 304 3.119, 271 n. 13
27.254, 307 4.68, 257
27.263, 307 4.69, 271 n. 13
27.285, 307 4.111, 261
27.299–300, 308 4.121, 271 n. 13
29.238ff. 302 n. 104 5.54, 324 n. 24
34.109, 260 n. 109 5.82, 277 n. 20
38.90–5, 275 5.89, 259
40.369–70, 286 5.92–9, 259
40.430–1, 275, 288 5.93, 263
40.538, 289 6.57, 271 n. 13
40.573, 288 6.108, 261
41.51, 279 6.146, 250 n. 81, 258
41.51–65, 279 6.147, 250 n. 81
41.52–3, 279 6.162, 277 n. 20
41.54, 279 6.208, 260
41.56, 281 6.217, 271 n. 13
41.58, 279 7.107, 324 n. 24
41.65, 279, 280 7.123, 245 n. 65
41.66, 279, 280 7.167, 261
41.66–76, 280 8.6, 257
41.83, 280 8.10, 271 n. 13
41.83–4, 280 8.39–41, 252
41.87–109, 282 8.55–9, 252
41.88, 280 8.65, 257
41.112, 282 8.74, 257
41.129–30, 282 8.90–4, 253
41.143–54, 282 8.154, 273
41.155, 283 8.191, 245 n. 65
41.157, 283 8.193, 261

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 Index Locorum 479
9.8, 258 20.118, 262
9.88, 324 n. 24 21.143, 250 n. 81
10.35, 260 21.222–3, 247
10.36, 260 21.223, 247
10.61, 277 n. 20
10.61–4, 259 Origen
10.64, 324 n. 24 Commentary on John 2.4, 111
10.134, 250 n. 81 Contra Celsum 1.10, 186
10.139, 245 n. 65 Homil. in Lev. 13.5, 123 n. 40
11.15, 271 n. 13 Peri Pascha
11.41, 277 n. 20 12, 109
11.45, 277 n. 20 13, 109
11.47, 277 n. 20, 277 On Prayer 12.2, 348 n. 45
11.161, 324 Scholion on Psalm 108,
11.164, 277 232 n. 32
12.2, 245 n. 65 Orosius
12.94, 324 n. 24 Historiae
12.173, 261 Praef.
12.199, 271 n. 13 13, 411 n. 72
13.3, 260 15, 411 n. 74
13.137, 245 n. 66 1.1.1, 407
14.18, 245 n. 66 1.1.5, 408
14.53, 245 n. 66 1.1.9, 411 n. 71
14.115–16, 262 2.3.2–3, 412 n. 76
14.120–1, 262 2.3.6, 413
14.121, 271 n. 13 2.6.13–14, 414
15.1, 271 2.18.4, 416, 417
15.8, 271 4. Pr. 10, 418
15.14, 271 7.3.10, 412 n. 77
16.35, 271 n. 13 7.27.15, 412 n. 75
16.40, 324 n. 24 7.43.19, 419
16.51, 264 7.49.3–14, 414 n. 81
16.52, 264 Ovid
16.53, 264 Fasti
16.54–6, 264 2, 293
16.57–8, 264 6.785–90, 293
16.59, 264 Metamorphoses
16.60, 264 1.2, 89
16.61, 264 1.4, 89
16.65–7, 264
16.68, 265 Palatine Anthology (AP)
16.95, 264 1.10.43–51, 207
16.102, 324 n. 24 7.138, 60
16.111–12, 264 7.249, 59
17.52, 260 7.300, 59
17.53, 250 n. 81 7.412.8, 61
18.26, 324 n. 24 8.12.5, 61
18.33, 250 n. 81 8.14.4, 61
19.81, 250 n. 81 8.20.2, 61
19,80, 324 n. 24 8.28, 258 n. 103
19.178, 246 8.31, 62
19.179, 246 9.270, 294
19.187, 246 Paulinus of Milan, Vita Ambrosii
19.194, 261 10, 388 n. 20,22
19.224, 247 28, 388 n. 21,22

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 480 Index Locorum
Paulinus of Nola, Epistulae 39e, 167
5.5, 386 n. 14 Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia 35.71, 134
22.151, 370 n. 96 Pliny the Younger
Pausanias, 10.35.3, 114 n. 4 Epistulae
Philo of Alexandria 2.11, 72
De opificio mundi 15–25, 65 n. 1 6.2.6, 72
De somniis 6.2.7–8, 72
150–6, 30 Panegyricus 52.4–5, 120 n. 28
151, 30 Plutarch
De vita contemplativa 2.6.68–9, 232 n. 31 De E 392F, 254 n. 87
De vita Mosis De facie in orbe lunae 942a–b, 302 n. 104
2.31, 20 Life of Solon 27.1, 140
2.37, 21 Polybius, History
2.38, 230 n. 23 1.1.2, 210 n. 12
2.41, 21 1.3, 138
Quaestiones et solutiones in Genesis II 35, 383 n. 8 1.4, 138
Pindar 12.11, 140
Nemean Odes 10, 31 38.6, 139
Olympian Odes 2.56, 53 n. 19 Proclus
Pirkei de Rabbi Eliezer 23, 383 n. 10 Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus
Plato 3.141f, 287 n. 47
Euthydemus 3.152a–154e 33, 325 n. 28
217b, 194 4.256a, 339 n. 11
274e, 193 ‘Hymn to the Sun’ 8.13, 288
283c–d, 193 Prudentius
Laws Apotheosis 309–11, 372
10.887e, 349 n. 51 Cathemerinon
721c3–7, 45 Praef.
721b–c, 45 5, 366
Parmenides 33, 362
155e4–157b5, 211 37, 362
156d, 211 38–41, 362
156e, 211 43–5, 362
Phaedo 1.5–7, 372
67e, 56 2
114c, 56 10, 372
Protagoras 13–16, 372
309a, 195 33–6, 373
326d, 150 37, 374
Republic 57–8, 374
6.508c, 318 n. 12 101, 374
515c, 210 3.6, 372
Symposium 4
210e, 210 9, 339 n. 9
212c, 210 81–4, 364
213c, 210 89–90, 365
Theaetetus 172d, 71 6.117–18, 372
Timaeus 7
3.141f, 287 n. 47 191–2, 365
3.152a–154e 33, 325 n. 28 200, 374
22a–b, 146 8
27c–d, 166 25, 365
32a–c, 271 32, 365
33a, 166 9
37c–d, 166 36, 363

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109–11, 363 29–33, 233
112–13, 363 33, 234
128, 364 59, 234
11, 366–8 60, 234
1–8, 366 62, 234
21, 366 67–79, 234
25–8, 367 78, 234
29–32, 367 79–80, 234
46, 367 105, 234
89–116, 367 107, 234
104–107, 367 Ps-Clement, Recognitions 1.28.2, 296
112–13, 368 Ps-Manetho 4.528, 323 n. 22
12, 368–72
1–4, 368 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria
4–5, 369 1.4.4, 292
10, 369 10.1.55, 292
11–12, 369 Quintus of Smyrna, Posthomerica
14, 369 11, 88
23–4, 368 12, 88
27, 369
29–30, 369 Rufinus, Historia ecclesiastica 6.16.4, 19 n. 2
32–5, 369
36–9, 370 Sallust, Bellum Catalinae
41, 370 3.1–2, 391
117–20, 365 4.2, 398 n. 48
143, 371 Seneca, Epistulae 12.6–7, 178
181–4, 371 Socrates, Historia ecclesiastica
207, 374 5 pr., 398 n. 45
Dittochaeon 3, 383 n. 8 6.8, 347
Hamartigenia Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus 1193–5, 101
Praef. 61, 329 n. 31 Sozomen, Historia ecclesiastica 5.18, 238 n. 42
2, 339 n. 9 Sulpicius Severus
298–307, 344 n. 26 Chronicon
346, 339 n. 9 Praef.
562, 364 1, 397
Libri contra Symmachum 2, 399, 400
1.542, 88 n. 6 3, 400
2.541, 88 n. 6 1.1.1, 401
Peristephanon 1.2.2, 381
2, 360, 372 n. 101 1.19.1, 402
529–36, 124 1.22.2, 403
9, 122 1.23.3, 403
7–8, 124 1.39.1, 400 n. 50
19–20, 124 2.5.4, 403
12, 360, 377–8 2.14.3, 400 n. 49
3–6, 377 2.19.1, 403
21–3, 378 2.46.1, 404
14.86–7, 365 2.51.5, 404
Psychomachia 67, 372 28.1, 397 n. 43
Ps-Apollinaris, Metaphrasis of the Psalms Dialogues
1–4, 231 2.4, 393 n. 33
15–18, 232 2.14, 396 n. 41
18–23, 233 Epistulae
22.4, 277 n. 20 1.25, 387 n. 18
23–8, 233 2, 395

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 482 Index Locorum
Sulpicius Severus (cont.) Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Eranistes 63.3–4,
2.1, 340 n. 16 224 n. 4
Vita Martini Thucydides
1.1, 391 1.22, 105
1.2, 391 1.138.2, 53 n. 19
1.3, 392 2.36, 115
1.4, 392 2.41, 115
1.6, 393 n. 32 3.36, 183
20, 387
26.3, 348 n. 44 Varro, De lingua Latina 6.6, 342 n. 20
Synesius of Cyrene, Epistulae 105, 270 n. 9, 390 Virgil, Aeneid
1.1, 90
Tatian, Oratio ad Graecos 26, 98 1.33, 89
Tertullian 1.203, 417
Adversus Marcionem 1.10.1, 339 n. 8 1.278–9, 88
Apologeticus 46.18, 224 n. 5 1.459, 125
De corona 13, 179 n. 79 2.361–2, 416
De idolatria 9.1, 299 n. 91 3.89, 353
De oratione 25, 348 n. 48 4, 88
De spectaculis Vision of Dorotheos, P. Bodmer 29.169, 330
2.4, 339 n. 8 Vitruvius 11.11, 81
29, 299 n. 95
Theocritus, Idyll 2, 302 Zeno of Verona 1.38, 299 n. 94

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 Subject Index

Accorinti, Domenico, 286 Ajax, 87

Aceratus the Grammarian, 60 Alaric, 412
Achates, 125 Alcibiades, 195, 210
Achilles Alexander of Alexandria, 334 n. 40
Aiacos (grandfather) as foreshadowing of, Alexievich, Svetlana, Second-Hand Time, 421
308–9 allegory, 226, 315
death/immortality and, 47–9, 55, 57, 60, 63, Allen, Danielle, 71
164, 275, 330 Alpheius (river deity), 267, 288
God’s time and, 12, 27, 29, 38 ‘alternate-dayed’, 30
Ps-Apollinaris, Metaphrasis of the Psalms Alypius, 191
and, 232 Amalek, 120
typology of, 309 Ambrose of Milan, 9, 15, 337–59
waiting and, 86, 87, 99 Aeterne rerum conditor, 338–45, 349, 352
wrath and closure in Iliad, 218 Apostolorum passio, 377–8
in Zeno’s paradox, 213 dynamic tensions within Christianity of fifth
Achilles Tatius, 286 n. 40 century and, 376
Callirhoe and Cleitophon, 212 on flood story, 383
‘Acts of Paul and Thecla’, 188, 191, 199 Intende, qui regis Israel, 352, 356–9
Adam (biblical figure), 107, 176, 189, 298, interlinked orderings of time in, 352–9
374, 408 liturgical use of composed hymns versus
Adana, Turkey, clock-tower in, 72 psalms, 346–7
Adonis, 268, 283 Martin of Tours compared, 387
Aeneas, 32, 33, 88–9, 99, 125, 295, 416 Nonnus and, 356
Aeneid. see Virgil, Aeneid Paulinus of Milan’s biography of, 388, 390
Aeschines, 134 on providential unification of empire, 179
Aeschylus Prudentius and, 337 n. 4, 339, 344 n. 26, 360–1,
Choephoroi, 202 363, 364, 365, 368, 369, 372, 375–9
Eumenides, 28 regulation of time in hymns of, 337, 345, 349,
Oresteia, 50–4 352–9
Prometheus Bound (attrib.), 54–5 songs and singing, Christian suspicion of, 346
Agamemnon, 49, 51–4, 218 Sulpicius Severus compared, 404
ages of man, 165, 410 typology, use of, 359
Agnes (martyr), 365 Amiatinus, Codex, 383
Agosti, Gianfranco, 250 n. 81 Amidah, 352
Agrippa (builder of Pantheon), 132 anagnōrisis (recognition), 51
Aiacus, 308–9 anamnēsis (recollection), 127, 128
Aion (deity/eternity) Anchises, 32
in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, 267–76, 278, 280, 282, Andocides, 116
283, 286, 288, 305 Anicia Juliana, 206–9, 215
in Nonnus’ Paraphrase, 253–6, 257, 258–9, Anthony (saint), 81, 189, 192, 390
268, 302 Antikythera mechanism, 81

483

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 484 Subject Index
Antiochus IV Epiphanes (Seleucid ruler), 92, 138 Athene, 28, 32, 50, 113, 279, 308
antiquity, study of time in, 6 Athenian archon list, as dating mechanism,
Aphrodite, 31–4, 268, 275, 281, 283, 284, 285, 286 139, 140
apocalyptic. See end of days Athens
Apollinaris, 230 n. 21, 238, 330 epigraphy of, 136
Apollo, 25, 27, 46, 48, 50, 52, 54, 244, 353 Funeral Speech for the war dead, 115, 117,
Apollonius, 134 142, 307
Appadurai, Arjun, 146 Harmodius and Aristogeiton (tyrannicides),
Apphy of Oxyrhynchus (bishop), 393 statues of, agora, 116
Apuleius, Metamorphosis, 184 history and memory in, 113–18
Aratus, Phaenomena, 292, 295, 298, 301, 323 Mytilene, vote to execute men of, 183
Aratus of Sicyon, 138 Parthenon, 113, 115, 121, 143
Archilochus, 135 Persia, war with, 113, 114, 115, 146
Archimedes, 302 stoa poikilē (Painted Stoa), agora, 114
architecture as expression of time, 216; see also wedding ceremony in, 270
specific buildings Augustine of Hippo
Arendt, Hannah, 212 St Anthony and, 81
Arethusa (spring deity), 267, 288 on Apuleius’ Metamorphosis, 184
Arians, Arianism, and Neo-Arianism, 10, 36, 238, on astrology/astronomy, 296–8, 299
244, 250, 251, 320, 334 n. 40, 347, 388 Christianization of history by, 410
Aristeas, Letter of, 20, 21, 22, 239, 296 City of God, 176–80, 297, 310, 339, 405,
Aristogeiton and Harmodius (tyrannicides), 406, 416
statues of, agora, Athens, 116 Confessions, 14, 39, 96–8, 127–31, 159, 181–3, 191,
Aristophanes, 196, 210, 291 193, 197, 227, 229, 296, 390, 394, 405
Aristotle, 14 conversion of, 183, 185, 189–92, 211
on anagnōrisis, 51 Covid-19 pandemic and, 421
on astrology/astronomy, 325 Thomas De Quincey and, 159
on duty to bear arms for the state, 56 exemplarity reimagined by, 416
Gregory of Nazianzus and, 317 n. 10, 325 on flood story, 384–5
on memory and recollection, 127 on God’s time, 24, 36, 39–44, 182, 270
on metaphor, 209 on grace, 262
Physics, 50 on his erotic desires, 197
theory of time posited by, 6, 75–6, 77, 102, on history and memory, 123, 127–31, 157
167, 216 on John 1.1, 239
on timelessness and the now, 160, 211 life-writing of, 181–3, 185, 189–92
on tragedy, 101, 180 on martyr narratives, 125
Arnold, Matthew, 268 negotiation between Christianity and Greek
Artapanus, 296, 300 cultural tradition in life-writing of, 203
Artemis, 32, 202 Orosius’ Historiae and, 406, 415
asceticism as feature of Christian biography, Pauline conversion compared, 188
197–204 on Paulinus of Milan’s biography of
Assyrian calculations of astronomical time, 70 Ambrose, 390
Astraios, 301–2 on pilgrimage, 123
astrology/astronomy/Zodiac Plato on the sudden and, 211
Gregory of Nazianzus on, 296, 298, 314, Plato’s Euthydemus and, 192–5
317–20, 321–7 on reading and interpretation, 227, 229, 337
in Nonnus, Dionysiaca, 291–307 on rupture and continuity, 215
star of the Magi predicting birth of Christ, 298, on Septuagint, 22
324, 327, 368–72 Sulpicius Severus compared, 386, 394, 405
Al-Asur (103rd Sura), 15 telling time and, 76, 79
Athanasius theories of time and, 216
on Arius’ Thalia, 347 on timelessness and the now, 11, 156, 157,
Contra Gentes, 334 n. 40 176–80
Letter to Marcellinus, 346 tolle, lege story, 190
Life of Anthony, 189, 192, 390 on understanding concept of time, 6, 43

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 Subject Index 485
on waiting, 96–8 Bohrer, Karl Heinz, 210, 212
Wittgenstein and, 216 Books of Hours, 15
Augustus Caesar, 81, 87, 118, 132, 149, 179, 217, Bowes, Kim, 361
278, 285, 293, 305, 338, 412 Brexit, 421
autobiography. see life-writing and time Brooks, Peter, 90
Avienius, 295 n. 71 Brown, Peter, 82, 363, 373
axial age, 141 Burckhardt, Joseph, 150
Burrus, Virginia, 199
Babylon, and theory of Four Empires, 413
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 215 Cadmus, 268, 276, 278–9, 284, 310
Bakker, Egbert, 47 Caligula, 20
baptism, water as typology for, 309 Callimachus, 139, 150, 293, 311, 375
‘barbarian’, concept of, 10 Calvin, John, 300, 382
Baroway, Israel, 232 n. 33 Calypso story (from Odyssey), 25, 26, 27, 48,
Barthes, Roland, 12, 90 86
Basil of Caesarea Caracalla, 133
Contra Eunomium, 316 Carthage
Eunomius attacked by, 36 n. 48 foundation of, in same year as Rome, 140
on exempla, 416 Four Empires, theory of, 413
on Greek education tradition, 34 Cassandra, 54, 55, 64
Gregory of Nazianzus compared, 315, 336 Cassian of Imola, 122–6
monastic time and, 82, 83 Cassian, John, 93, 348
poems of Gregory of Nazianzus for, 61 Institutes, 82–3
Bauer, Walter, 9 Cassiodorus, 191
Beckett, Samuel, 4, 54 Castor (brother of Helen of Troy), 30–1
Bede, 384 catechumens, 187
Beeley, Christopher, 329 n. 32 Cato, 105–6
Beer, Gillian, 74 Origines, 106
Benedict XVI (pope), Regensburg Address, Catullus, 293, 342 n. 20
240 cenobitic communities, 82
Benedictine Rule, 83 Censorinus, 148
Berenice’s Lock, 293 centos, versus translations and paraphrases,
bererah (legal retroactivity), 65 228
Bergson, Henri, 122 n. 35, 209 n. 10 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 74
Beroe/Beirut, in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, Chalcedon, Council of (451), 38–9, 206, 230, 231
279–86, 288 n. 25, 282, 312, 314 n. 1
Berossus, 147 Chaldean Oracles, 287, 339 n. 11
Beyond the Fringe, 86 Chambers, Robert, Vestiges of the Natural History
Bible; see also Gospels; Hebrew Bible/Old of Creation, 74
Testament; Paul and Pauline writings; change. see rupture and continuity
Septuagint; specific books Chaos, 280, 370
Codex Amiatinus, 383 Chaplin, Charlie, 4
Codex Sinaiticus, 225 charioteer, Aion/eternity personified as, 258, 268,
commentary, as common Christian genre, 227 274, 275, 276, 282, 302
oral law and, 224 n. 1 Charles V (Holy Roman emperor), 173, 174
Orosius’ suppression of scriptural material in Christian invention of time, 1–16, 420–1
Historiae, 408–9, 412 antiquity, study of time in, 6
Peshitta, 383 changes in writing of late antiquity due to, 9, 14
rewriting the scriptures, concept of, 223–35 (See also Christmas; history,
Sulpicius Severus, Chronicon, as retelling/ Christianization of; regulation of time,
abridgment of, 397–406, 412 sanctification of calendar as; specific
Vulgate, 111, 340, 382, 383 authors)
biography. see life-writing and time chronological, subject, and geographical limits
bishops and institutional Church, 388–90 on scope of, 15–16
Blake, William, 337 Covid-19 pandemic, time affected by, 420–1

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 486 Subject Index
Christian invention of time (cont.) Clytemnestra, 49, 50–4
institutions structuring and transforming Coetzee, J. M., Waiting for the Barbarians, 173
understanding of time, 8–9 (See also comedy, 196, 209
death and temporality; exempla and commentary, as common Christian genre,
typology; God’s time; history and 227
memory; life-writing and time; rupture Comte, Auguste, 74
and continuity; simultaneity and Constantine I, 150, 208, 409
synchronicity; telling time; timelessness Constantinople
and the now; waiting) Hagia Sophia, 209
modern concept of time and, 1–6 St Polyeuktos, dedication of, 206–9
paucity of scholarly analysis of, 7 Constantinople, Council of (381), 238
the Sabbath and the week, as unit of time, 217 Constantius II, 228 n. 17, 387, 395
sources for, 15 conversion
terms of identification and orthodoxy in, 9–11 asceticism required by, 197–204
theories of time, 215–19 of Augustine, 183, 185, 189–92, 211
Christianity, institutional position of, 150 Augustine on raven in flood story, 384–5
Christmas Christian life-writing focused on, 183–92
in Ambrose’s hymns, 352, 368 of Empress Eudocia, 242
date of celebration of, 330 n. 34 generational immortality, rejecting, 190,
Gregory of Nazianzus on, 314, 330–6, 337, 363 192
in Prudentius’ Cathemerinon 11, 366–8, 374 life choices versus, in classical writing, 184–8
star of the Magi predicting birth of Christ, 298, of Martin of Tours, 387, 395
324, 327, 368–72 Nonnus, religious and cultural identity of,
Chronicles, Books of, 225 241–2
chronometry. see telling time of Paul, 184, 188
Chuvin, Pierre, 280 Plato on the sudden and, 211
Cicero of Ponticianus, 189, 191
constringere in, 398 repentance, focus on, 183–7
Pro Marcello, 414 of Victorinus, 189
on simultaneity, 134 Conybeare, Catherine, 97, 181 n. 1, 371
timelessness and the now, in On the Nature of Cook, Peter, 86
the Gods, 169 Copeland, William, 340
cinematic enactment of time in Marclay’s Corke-Webster, James, 149, 151
The Clock, 1–5 Councils of the Church
Clark, Chris, 72 Chalcedon (451), 38–9, 206, 230, 231 n. 25, 282,
Clarke, Katherine, 141 312, 314 n. 1
classical culture. see Greco-Roman culture Constantinople (381), 238
classicism Nicaea (325), Nicene creed, and Nicene
the exemplary and, 100–7 theology, 36, 38, 224, 225, 244, 249, 250,
genealogy/idealism and, 101–2, 103, 214 251, 334, 335, 347, 354, 373
untimeliness, as politics and aesthetics of, 103, Saragossa (380), 388
214–15 Trent (1545–63), 382 n. 6
Clay, Jenny Strauss, 33 Counter-Reformation, 215
Clement of Alexandria Covid-19 pandemic, 420–1
Eusebius of Caesarea and, 150 creation
Philo’s Platonizing conception of Hebrew in Genesis, 173
Bible and, 108, 226 Plato on, 166–9, 173
on prayer and praying, 349 Septuagint’s deliberate mistranslation of
on ‘rape’ of scripture, 207 n. 6 timing of, 19–24, 226
on Septuagint, 22 Sulpicius Severus on, 401
songs and singing, suspicion of, 346 Synesius of Cyrene on, 172
Clement of Rome theories of time and, 216
on astronomy/astrology, 295 Croesus, 47, 140
Letter to the Corinthians, 348 Cronos, 28, 280, 284, 311
The Clock (Marclay), 1–5, 215 Cupid and Psyche, 184

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cursus honorum, 133, 369 Diodorus Siculus, 141, 412
Cyprian, 228 n. 17, 309 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, 186
Cyril of Alexandria Dionysus. see Nonnus, Dionysiaca
Commentary on John, 315 discontinuity, aesthetics of, 139
on God’s time, 38 n. 60, 38 Domitian, 120, 132
Nestorius and, 224, 249 dream-time, 65
Nonnus influenced by, 224, 227, 243, 244, 246 Dummett, M. A. E., 65 n. 4
n. 70, 248, 250, 277, 298, 301 Dunkle, Brian, 340, 344, 359
on typology, 110 n. 21 Dunn, John, 103
Durkheim, Emil, 122 n. 35, 162
damnatio memoriae, 119–20
Daniel, book of, 91–2, 175, 179, 403, 413 Easter/Passover dating controversy, 153–4
Darius (Persian ruler), 403 Echo, 267
Darwin, Charles, 74 Edict of Milan (313), 150
Dawn, 33 Egeria, 122, 346, 348
De Quincey, Thomas, Confessions of an Opium Egyptian versus Greek and Roman history,
Eater, 159–60 144–7, 163
death and temporality, 11, 45–63 Einstein, Albert, 5, 76, 78, 162
funeral processions, Roman, 118 Electra, 202, 278
Funeral Speech for the war dead, Athens, 115, Eliot, T. S.
117, 142, 307 Four Quartets, 79
generational succession as human means of telling time and, 79–80
immortality, 46, 50 The Wasteland, 3, 79, 215
in Homer, 45–50 Emathion and Dardanus, 278
human desire for glory (kleos) in Greco- Empedocles, 257, 270, 271, 281 n. 27, 282
Roman literature, 45–9, 55, 63 empire
kairos (the decisive time) and chronos, 50–6 Four Empires, theory of, 413–16
martyrdom, 57–8, 63 imperial temporal regimes, 173–7, 179
memorialization of death in Greek tradition, providential unification of, 179
Christian reconstruction of, 59–63 Seleucid empire, temporal regime of, 173, 175
other Christian concepts of time affecting, 13 end of days
Plato on, 45–7, 56–7, 63 Augustine on, 177, 179
promise of immortality after death in Jerusalem Temple, prophesied reappearance
Christianity, changes caused by, 58, 63 of, 208
reconstruction of glory (kleos) in Christian in Orosius’ Historiae, 413–16
literature, 58, 63 in Sulpicius Severus’ Chronicon, 397 n. 43, 404
repentance, 58 in Sulpicius Severus’ Vita Martini, 396
Seneca, suicide of, 57 uncertainty of, 147
Socrates, death of, 56–7, 186 waiting and eschatological expectations, 86,
in Stoicism, 57 91–6, 156
deep time, 5, 74, 147 Enlightenment, 77, 136
delay and fulfilment. see waiting 1 Enoch, 93, 94
Demeter, 31, 301–3 Epic of Creation, 70
Demiurge, 166 Epictetus, 255
Demosthenes, 116, 134, 142–3, 145 Epicureans, 172
Deriades and the Indians, Zeus’ battle against, Epiphanius, 19 n. 2, 255
307–9 Erasmus, Desiderius, 229, 400
Derrida, Jacques, 126 Eratosthenes, 139
Deucalion, 268, 270, 272, 279, 290, 383 n. 9 Eros/Phanes, 270, 274, 282, 285, 289, 303, 305
Deuteronomy, Book of, 225 eschatology. see end of days
diastēma, in Gregory of Nazianzus, 37 eternity
Dido, 88, 99, 125 Augustine of Hippo on, 39–44
digression, 80, 139 charioteer, Aion/eternity personified as, 258,
Dio Cassius, 186 268, 274, 275, 276, 282, 302
Dio of Prusa, 185 Gregory of Nazianzus on, 37

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 488 Subject Index
eternity (cont.) Four Empires, theory of, 413–16
in Nonnus, Dionysiaca, 267–76, 278, 280, 282, Frank, Georgina, 200
283, 286, 288, 305 Fränkel, Hermann, 87
in Nonnus, Paraphrase of the Gospel of John, Freccero, Carla, 214
253–6, 257, 258–9, 302 Frederiksen, Paula, 189, 191
in Pauline writings, 255 French Revolution, 106, 214
in Septuagint, 255 Freud, Sigmund, 78, 101, 126, 181, 209, 274
Eudocia (Aelia Eudocia; empress), 206, 242, 309 funeral processions, Roman, 118
Eudoxus, 295 Funeral Speech for the war dead, Athens, 115, 117,
Eulalia (martyr), 57, 58 142, 307
Eumaeus, 164
Eunomius and Eunomians, 36–7, 251, 316, Gaia, 28
320, 347 Galateia, 267, 288
Euripides, 29, 49, 254 Galen, 186
Bacchae, 277 Galison, Peter, 76
Eusebius of Caesarea, 14 Ganymede, 33
on astrology/astronomy, 296 Geertz, Clifford, 162
on Christian history, 150–4 genealogy/generations
Chronicon, 147, 152, 155, 380 of Anicia Juliana, 207, 209
Ecclesiastical History, 149–55 Christian conversion and rejection of, 190, 192
epistemology of evidence, commitment classicism and, 101–2, 103, 214
to, 402 damnatio memoriae, 119–20
Life of Constantine, 208 Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History and, 152
Praeparatio Evangelica, 280 heresies and, 152
on Septuagint, 22 immortality, generational succession as human
simultaneity and historical time in, 147–55 means of, 46, 50, 190
exempla and typology, 12, 100–12 in John’s Gospel, 239
Ambrose’s typology, 359 in Luke, 239
Augustine reimagining exemplarity, 416 in Nonnus, Dionysiaca, 269, 276–86, 308
Christianity, typology, and the Hebrew Bible, planting trees for future generations, 85–6
107–12 geology and time, 74
classical biography, as exempla, 392 Gibbon, Edward, 150
classicism and the exemplary, 100–7 Gigli Piccardi, Daria, 271, 273, 305
Nonnus, Dionysiaca, typology in, 309–13 Glaucus, 46, 276
Orosius’ Historiae, exemplarity in, 416–18 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 214
other Christian concepts of time affecting, 13 God’s time, 11, 19–44
Prudentius’ typology, 108, 371, 372, 373 biblical account of creation, Septuagint’s
Sulpicius Severus, on exemplarity in Christian mistranslation of timing of, 19–24
hagiography, 392–4 in Christian late antiquity, 34–44
Sulpicius Severus, use of typology in continuing influence of Homer and Hesiod in
Chronicon, 402 Christian culture, 34–5
typology changing temporality of as fundamental issue in conceptualization of
exemplarity, 111 time, 24
untimeliness involved in, 103, 110 in Greek and Roman cultural tradition, 24–34
life-writing and, 182
Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other, 161–3 other Christian concepts of time affected by, 13
Faulkner, Andrew, 230 n. 21 Gospels; see also John, Gospel of
Fear, Andrew, 413 canonization of, 226
Felicity (saint), 188 Luke-Acts, historical approach of, 239
Festus, 398 n. 46 waiting in, 90–3, 94, 95
Ficino, Marsilio, 300 Gosse, Philip, 75
flood story, 267–9, 380–5, 408 Grafton, Anthony, 152
Fontaine, Jacques, 341 Greco-Roman culture, 8–9; see also Athens;
Forms, Platonic theory of, 168 Rome; specific Greek and Roman authors
Foucher, Louis, 255 n. 91, 269 n. 3 Christian anxiety over adaptations of, 238–40

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continuing influence in Christian culture, on poetry of Eunomius, 347
34–5, 57 Prudentius compared, 363, 364, 365, 366
Egyptian history and, 144–7 public/institutional life, rejection of, 389
epigraphy in, 132–6 Second Theological Oration, 315–20
exempla in, 100–7 Sulpicius Severus compared, 405
foundation of Rome and Carthage in Third Theological Oration, 328
same year, 140 Gregory of Nyssa
God’s time in, 24–34 Against Eunomios, 36
history and memory in Athens and Rome, On Fate, 319
113–20 on God’s time, 36–7
imperial temporal regimes, 173–7 on Greek education tradition, 34
Josephus straddling boundaries between Gregory of Nazianzus compared, 315, 319, 336
Judaism and, 21 monastic time and, 82
life-writing in, 184–8, 192–7 negotiation between Christianity and Greek
memorialization of death in Greek tradition, cultural tradition in life-writing of, 203
Christian reconstruction of, 59–63 on pervasiveness of Christological
Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, acknowledgment of argument, 35
Roman culture in, 283–6 on pilgrim narratives, 122
Philo’s ideological investment in harmony of on sister Macrina, 199–201
Hellenism and Jewish culture, 21 On the Soul and Resurrection, 200
Stoicism as adapted by, 57 Gregory the Presbyter, 238
telling time in, 71, 80–1 Grethlein, Jonas, 371
terms of identification and orthodoxy in, 9–11 Griffiths, Alan, 145
timelessness and the now, experience of, Gurvitch, Georges, 162
163–72 Gūthenke, Constanze, 102 n. 7
‘universal histories’ and simultaneity, 137–41
virginity in, 32 Hadjittofi, Fotini, 246, 256
Greek independence movement (nineteenth Hadrian, 132
century), 214 Hagia Sophia, Constantinople, 209
Greensmith, Emma, 88, 311, 407 hagiography. see life-writing and time
Greenwich Mean Time, 5, 76 halacha, 67, 83, 205
Gregory of Nazianzus, 9, 314–36 Halbwachs, Maurice, 122 n. 35
achronos, use of, 243 Hannibalic War, 138
on Apollinaris, 238 Hardie, Philip, 89
Aporrhēta (Poemata Arcana), 314, 320–30, Harmodius and Aristogeiton (tyrannicides),
331, 332 statues of, agora, Athens, 116
on astrology/astronomy, 296, 298, 314, 317–20, harmonia/Harmonia, in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca,
321–7 268, 271, 275, 278, 284, 289–91, 305
autobiographical writing of, 203 Harnack, Adolf von, 240
Basil of Caesarea compared, 315, 336 Hartog, François, 72, 163
on Christmas (Oration 38; first Epiphany Hawking, Stephen, A Brief History of Time, 6
Homily), 314, 337, 363, 366 Hebrew Bible/Old Testament; see also
on God’s time, 37 Septuagint; specific books
on Greek education tradition, 34 calculation of years between Adam and the
Gregory of Nyssa compared, 315, 319, 336 flood, 148
on ‘living martyrs’, 202 n. 45 Christian typology of, 107–12
on mixing, 237–8, 325, 333 Philo’s Platonizing approach to, 20, 30,
negotiation between Christianity and Greek 108, 226
cultural tradition in life-writing of, 203 Hecataeus, 146, 147
Palatine Anthology, Book 8, 60–3, 258 n. 103, Hector, 48, 49, 60, 164, 174, 218, 244, 392
320 n. 18 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 74, 102
on pervasiveness of Christological Heidegger, Martin, 10, 160, 165, 174, 211, 212, 216
argument, 35 Helen of Troy, 29, 31, 49, 62, 134
Poem on Himself, 390 Hell, Julia, 174
poetry, in defence of writing, 235–8 Hephaestus, 26, 279, 282, 301

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 490 Subject Index
Heracleidai, 143 Pausanias on, 114 n. 4, 120
Heracles, 29, 31, 55, 105, 275, 286, 288 phenomenology of memory, 126–31
heresy, concept of, 152, 187; see also specific heresies in pilgrim/martyr narratives of late antiquity,
Hermes, 27, 275, 283 122–6
Hermes Trismegistus, 248 in Plato’s Republic, 118
hero cults, 56 political engagement with, 72
Herodotus in rabbinical writing, 66–7
on death and temporality, 47 in Rome, 118–20
epistemology of evidence, commitment Hitler, Adolf, and Nazi empire, 175
to, 402 Hobbes, Thomas, 115, 215
on God’s time, 24 Homer, 10, 11
history of historiography and, 139 on afterlife, 56
imperial temporal regimes in, 173 centos, 228
on instability of empire, 414 continuing influence in Christian culture, 34–5
Lucian compared, 121 on death and temporality, 45–50, 61
on myth versus history, 143–7 Eusebius of Caesarea and, 150
on timelessness and the now, 163–4 on God’s time, 24–8, 29–31, 44
Hesiod Gregory of Nazianzus and, 330
ages of man in, 165, 410 Nonnus’ Dionysiaca and, 268, 270, 273, 275,
Aratus, Phaenomena, and, 292 276, 277, 286, 311
Chaos in, 280 Nonnus’ Paraphrase and, 233, 234, 238, 244,
continuing influence in Christian culture, 34–5 245, 247, 248, 252, 254, 257, 259, 264
on God’s time, 25, 28–9 Origen’s Contra Celsum and, 34 n. 38, 35 n. 41
Theogony, 28–9, 301 Plato on, 45–7
on timelessness and the now, 165 Ps-Apollinaris referring to, 231
Virgil compared, 88 Rhodes and Lindos, connections to, 134
Works and Days, 25, 28, 48, 291 on timelessness and the now, 164–5
Hestia, 32 Homer, Iliad; see also specific characters
Hilary of Poitier, 387 death/temporality in, 46–9, 60, 62, 275
Hipparchus, 295 simultaneity and, 134
Hippolytus of Rome Thetis’ supplication of Zeus in, 273
Apostolic Tradition, 348 timelessness and the now in, 164, 174
Refutation of All Heresies, 187, 298 waiting in, 86, 87, 88
historiography, history of, 139, 402 ‘wrath’ in, 218
history, Christianization of, 380–419; see also Homer, Odyssey; see also specific characters
Orosius; Sulpicius Severus cave of the Nymphs in, 127
by Augustine, 410 death/immortality and, 46, 48, 49–50, 275
Chronicon of Sulpicius Severus and, 380–5, 388, on God’s time, 24–8, 29–31, 44
397–406 household, generational defence of, 308
in Historiae of Orosius, 406–19 Jerome’s praise of women compared, 202
Noah, the flood, and the raven, retellings of, metamorphosis/disguise of hero in, 185
380–5 Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica and, 87, 88
tempora Christiana, 409–12 on timelessness and the now in, 158, 164
Vita Martini of Sulpicius Severus and, 380, waiting in, 85, 86
385–97 Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, 31–4, 44, 270
history and memory, 12, 113–31; see also Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 31, 302
simultaneity and synchronicity Horace, 174, 196, 361 n. 80, 366, 372, 376, 391
anamnēsis (recollection), 127, 128 horologium of Augustus, Roman forum, 87, 118
in Athens, 113–18 ‘human race’, as phrase, 45–7, 144
classicism and the exemplary, 100–7
damnatio memoriae, 119–20 Iacchus, 312
death as memorialized in Greek tradition, idealism, genealogy, and classicism, 101–2, 103
Christian reconstruction of, 59–63 Ignatius, Letter to the Ephesians, 298
in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, 307 Iliad. see Homer, Iliad
other Christian concepts of time affecting, 13 imitatio Christi, 58, 124, 126, 335, 336

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 Subject Index 491
immortality; see also death and temporality; Neo-Platonism and Platonic idealism in,
God’s time 165, 166
generational succession as human means of, oral law, 224 n. 1
46, 50, 190 Philo’s ideological investment in harmony of
human desire for glory (kleos) and, 45–9 Hellenism and Jewish culture, 21
Plato on, 172 Prudentius attacking, 367
promise of immortality after death in regulation of time, sanctification of calendar
Christianity, changes caused by, 58, 63 as, 349–52
Socrates on, 56–7 the Sabbath and the week, as unit of time, 217
Incarnation, Nonnus’ Paraphrase expressing Septuagint, authority of, 19
concept of, 248–50 telling time, in rabbinical writing, 64–70
industrialization and time, 5, 73, 76, 83 terms of identification and orthodoxy in, 9–11
institutional church, resistance to, 388–90 typologizing of Hebrew Bible, 107–12
international/national time, 4, 73, 137 waiting, in rabbinic writing, 85
Iphigeneia, 52 John, Gospel of, 37; see also Nonnus, Paraphrase
Irenaeus of Lyon, Adversus haereses, 93, 152, 187 of the Gospel of John
Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, 342 n. 20 beginning of, 41, 223, 239
Islam, 15, 27, 72, 224 n. 1, 240 Greek philosophy, influence of, 239–40
Isocrates, 104 John Chrysostom, 92 n. 13, 95, 123, 153, 239,
346, 347
James, William, 156, 157 John the Baptist, 257, 259 n. 107, 395 n. 38
Jameson, Frederic, 6, 212 Joseph and Aseneth, 204
Jerome Joseph of Arimathea, 247, 261
Epistles, 122, 126, 201 Josephus
hagiographies of, 201–3 on astronomy/astrology, 300
Hebrew privileging of, 235 on biblical Hexameter, 232
Life of Paul the Hermit, 201 on Daniel, 92 n. 13
on life of St Paul, 390 on flood story, 383
negotiation between Christianity and Greek Jewish Antiquities, 21, 226
cultural tradition in life-writing of, 203 Life, 204
Orosius and, 406 on philosophical choice in life, 186
on pilgrimage, 122, 126, 201 on Septuagint, 21
public/institutional life, retreat from, 81 Joyce, James, 78
on sack of Rome (410), 406 n. 57 Ulysses, 79
Sulpicius Severus, dialogues of, 386 Jubilees, Book of, 23, 225, 300, 351
Vulgate, 111, 340, 382, 383 Julian calendar, 7, 175
Jerusalem, Synod of (415), 406 Julian the Apostate, 35, 238, 387, 395
Jerusalem Temple Julius Africanus, 147
Christian churches compared to, 208, 215 Julius Caesar, 7, 87, 134
destruction of, 66, 67, 92, 93, 141, 208, 350 Justin Martyr, 93, 167, 409
prophesied reappearance of, 208 Justinian, 209
Jewish culture, 8–9; see also specific Jewish authors Juvenal, 372, 376
and literary works Juvencus, 9
astrology/astronomy in, 296, 299, 300
Bible, re-reading/rewriting, 225–7 kairos (the decisive time)
halacha, 67, 83, 205 death/immortality and, 50–6
Hebrew privileging of, 235 end of days, waiting for, 93, 94
historical time in rabbinical writing, 66–7 Melito of Sardis on typology, 110
imperial temporal regimes, reactions simultaneity and, 138
against, 175 Kalends, 176
Jerusalem Temple, destruction of, 66, 67, 92, Kanaan, V. L., 102
93, 141, 350 Kaye, Lynn, 65
Josephus straddling boundaries between Keble, John, The Christian Year, 83 n. 56,
Roman culture and, 21 360 n. 77
life-writing in, 204–5, 395 Kepler, Johannes, 300

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 492 Subject Index
Kermode, Frank, 89 Lindos Chronicle, Temple of Athene at Lindos,
Kierkegaard, Søren, 159, 262 Rhodes, 133–5, 136, 137
Concept of Anxiety, 211 liturgical hours, 81–4, 347–9, 352
King, Martin Luther, 90 Livy, 105–6, 139, 140, 338, 397
Kingsley, Charles, Hypatia, 185 Longinus, On the Sublime, 103–4
Koerner, Joseph, 120 Loraux, Nicole, 115, 142
Koselleck, Reinhart, 72, 136 Lowth, Robert, 232 n. 33
Kosmin, Paul, 173, 175 Lucan, Pharsalia, 87
Lucian
Lacroix, Benoît, 412 n. 77 On Astrology, 294
Lactantius, 44, 339 on death and temporality, 49, 56
Laertes, 50, 85, 87, 308 on history and memory, in De dea Syria, 121
Lambert, David, 184 on philosophical choice in life, 186
Langlands, Rebecca, 105 Lucius Valerius, 106
last days. see end of days Lucretius, 169–72, 338, 361 n. 80
Lawrence (martyr), 58, 360, 372 n. 101 Luhman, Niklas, 72
Lawrence, D. H., 157, 158, 159, 160, 165 Luke-Acts, historical approach of, 239
Lazarus story, 277, 324, 343 Luther, Martin, 300
Leach, Edmund, 162
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 162 Macaulay, Charles, 175, 176
Lewis, Wyndham, 78 Macedonia, and theory of Four Empires, 413
Li, Yukai, 218 Macrina (saint), 199–201
Licinius, 150 Macrobius, Saturnalia, 287
‘Life of Pelagia’, 198 Manetho, 147
Life of St Gregory of Akragas, 320 n. 17 Manichaeans, 328
life-writing and time, 12, 181–205 Manilius, 339
asceticism after conversion as feature of Marathon, battle of, 56, 114, 136, 143, 308
Christian biography, 197–204 Marcella, letter of Jerome to, 122, 123
Augustine’s Confessions, 181–3, 185, 189–92, Marcellus, 246, 414
390 Marcian, 231 n. 25
autobiographies, 390 Marcion and Marcionites, 226, 329 n. 31
conversion, Christian focus on, 183–92 Marclay, Christian, The Clock, 1–5, 215
erotic life, in classical writing, 195–7 Marcus Argentarius, 294, 298
God’s time and, 182 Marcuse, Herbert, 211
in Greco-Roman culture, 184–8, 192–7 Marduk, 70
hinge between classical biography and Martial, 80, 349 n. 51
Christian hagiography, 390 Martin of Tours, 9, 348, 380, 385–97
Jerome, hagiographies of, 201–3 Martindale, Charles, 102
in Jewish culture, 204–5, 395 martyrs and martyrdom; see also specific martyrs
life choices versus conversion, in classical asceticism as feature of Christian biography,
writing, 184–8 197–204
negotiation between Christianity and Greek Augustine on, 125
cultural tradition in, 203 death and temporality, 57–8, 63
other Christian concepts of time affecting, 13 Gregory of Nazianzus on ‘living martyrs’,
Paulinus of Milan’s biography of Ambrose, 202 n. 45
388, 390 Prudentius, on Cassian of Imola, 122, 124–6
Plato’s Euthydemus, on development of the Marx, Karl, 74, 106, 214
self, 192–5 Marxism, 6, 73
Plato’s Protagoras, on time of loving, 192–5 Mary, as theotokos, 249, 282
Sulpicius Severus’ Vita Martini, 380, 385–97 Mary of Egypt, 58, 191, 197, 201
who am I/what am I, as beginning of, Mary Magdalene, 245
181–3, 192 Massacre of the Innocents, 365, 371
youth and ageing, in classical writing, Maurice, F. D., 271 n. 13
194–7 Maximius, 387, 395
limmu lists, 71 Maximus the Confessor, 36 n. 47

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 Subject Index 493
Mbembe, Achille, 213 Ninus (Assyrian ruler), 407, 412
McCabe, M. M., 193 Niobe, 305
McKinnon, James, 347 Nock, Arthur Darby, 184
Melanchthon, Philip, 300 Nonna (mother of Gregory of Nazianzus), 62–3,
Melito of Sardis, Peri Pascha, 109 258 n. 103
Memnon, 87 Nonnus, Dionysiaca, 9, 242, 267–313
memory and memorialization. see history and akikhētos (unattainable), use of, 268
memory astrology/astronomy/Zodiac in, 291–307
Mendelsohn, Daniel, 218, 345 Beroe/Beirut and Dionysus in Asia,
Menelaus, 29, 48, 49, 52, 164 279–86, 288
metanoia, 183 Christian context of, 272, 278, 282, 288, 292,
Metis, 28 295–301, 303–4, 307
midrash, as re-reading/rewriting of biblical on creation, 270
text, 227 Deriades and the Indians, battle against, 307–9
Milan, Edict of (313), 150 eternity/Aion in, 267–76, 278, 280, 282, 283,
Minos, problem of, 143–5 286, 288, 305
mixing, Gregory of Nazianzus on, 237–8, 325, 333 flood story in, 267–9
modern concept of time, 1–6, 72–5 on genealogy and beginnings, 269,
modern experience of the now, 156–63 276–86, 308
Modern Times (film), 4 Gregory of Nazianzus compared, 321, 322,
modernity and secularism, 7 324, 331
Momigliano, Arnaldo, 148 on harmonia/Harmonia, 268, 271, 275, 278,
monastic time, 81–4, 375 284, 289–91, 305
Monica (saint), 190, 191, 192, 200 Paraphrase compared, 246 n. 71, 246, 258
Monroe, Marilyn, 1, 4 n. 106, 260 n. 109, 113, 263 n. 118, 268,
Montesquieu, 104 270, 271, 272, 273, 275, 277, 292, 297, 302,
Mucius Scaevola, 134 303, 311, 312
mystery cults, 56 prophetic tablets of Harmonia in, 289–91, 305
myth and history, distinguishing, 141–7, 148 rebirth/regrowth/regeneration in, 270, 271,
Mytilene, Athenian vote to execute men of, 183 273, 276–8, 310–11
religious and cultural identity of Nonnus
Nachträglichkeit, 78 and, 240
national/international time, 4, 73, 137 return in, 267
Nausicaa, 202, 416 Seasons (Hōrai) in, 278, 289–91, 305
Nazis, 175 on shield of Dionysus, 304, 311
Nebuchadnezzar (Babylonian ruler), 208 Sulpicius Severus’ Chronicon compared, 405
Neo-Platonism, 165, 200, 216, 226, 239, 258 typology in, 309–13
n. 105, 287, 288 Tyre and hymn to Sun in, 286–9
Neoptolemus, 29, 87, 308 wine, invention of, 269
Nephilim, 358 Nonnus, Paraphrase of the Gospel of John, 9,
Nero, 396 223–66
Nestorius, 224, 249 achronos at beginning of, 223, 242–4, 327
Netras of Pharan, 393 aiōn/aiōnios (everlasting/eternal)/Aiōn as deity,
New Testament. see Gospels; Paul and Pauline use of, 253–6, 257, 258–9, 268, 302
writings; specific books akikhētos (unattainable), use of, 244–7,
Newman, John Henry, Cardinal, 10, 340 248, 256
Newton, Isaac, 77 Ambrose, hymns of, 356
Newtonian absolute time, 137 ambrosios, use of, 259
Nicaea, First Council of (325), Nicene creed, and aporrhētos (inexpressible), use of, 248
Nicene theology, 36, 38, 224, 225, 244, archē arrhētos (ineffable beginning), use of, 247
249, 250, 251, 334, 335, 347, 354, 373 Dionysiac imagery in, 241
Nicodemus, 247, 263 Dionysiaca compared, 246 n. 71, 246, 258
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 214 n. 106, 260 n. 109, 113, 263 n. 118, 268,
Nightingale, Andrea, 129 270, 271, 272, 273, 275, 292, 297, 302, 303,
Nilus of Ancyra, 239 311, 312

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 494 Subject Index
Nonnus, Paraphrase of the Gospel (cont.) on human physical existence, 316 n. 8
on divinity of Jesus, 251 Jerome referencing, 123
empedos (fixed), use of, 256–8, 260, 292, 322 Philo’s influence on, 226
expansiveness and excessiveness of, 252, 260 on philosophical choice in life, 186
Father, relationship of the Son to, 250 on providential unification of Roman
first five verses, analysis of, 243–51 empire, 179
Gregory of Nazianzus compared, 322, 324 typology of, 108, 110, 111
homochronos (contemporaneous), use of, 252–3 Origenists, 406
Incarnation, expressing concept of, 248–50 original sin, 182, 333, 360
Lazarus story in, 277, 324 Orosius, 9, 141 n. 23, 333 n. 38, 338
logos, use of, 249 Commonitorium, 406
on metatropos (change) and on triumph of Historiae, 406–19
Jesus over death/time, 260–5 Liber Apologeticum, 406
metratropos (change) in, 260 Orpheus, 60
palinauxei (rebirth/regrowth/regeneration) Orphic Hymn, 8, 287
in, 271 Orphism, 270, 282, 289, 290, 305, 306
pandamator (conquerer of all), time as, 259 Ouranos, 28, 282
poetry, defences of use of, 230, 231–4, 235–40 Overbeck, Franz, 150
Ps-Apollinaris, Metaphrasis of the Psalms and, Ovid
230–5 Fasti, 14, 293
religious and cultural identity of Nonnus, Metamorphoses, 89, 185, 293
240–2 Nonnus’ Dionysiaca and, 268, 283
rewriting the scriptures, concept of, 223–35
Sulpicius Severus, Chronicon, and, 400, 405 Pachomius, 81, 82
on surprise, suddenness, and the unexpected ‘pagan’, concept of, 10, 242
(aproïdēs), 261–2 paideia and paideusis, 10, 35, 61, 136, 151–2, 200
transformation of theological time in, 251–65 Palatine Anthology, 59–63, 206–9
novelty, late antique negativity of, 228 Pamphilus, 152
the now. see timelessness and the now Pan, 267, 308
Pantheon, Rome, 132, 135, 415
O’Daly, Gerard, 340, 341, 370 Paphlagon, Nicetas David, 320
Odysseus Paraphrase, 277; see also Nonnus, Paraphrase of
death/temporality and, 46, 48, 49–50, 53, 275 the Gospel of John
exemplarity of, 416 poetry, defences of use of, 230, 231–4, 235–40
God’s time and, 24–8, 29–31, 44 Ps-Apollinaris, Metaphrasis of the Psalms,
household, generational defence of, 308 230–5, 400
Macrina compared, 200 rewriting the scriptures, concept of, 223–35
waiting and, 85, 86, 99 single message of Christianity echoing through
weeping at song of his own exploits, 125 different languages, 234–5
Odyssey. see Homer, Odyssey translations versus centos, 228
Oedipus, 51, 55, 101, 181, 274 Parian Marble, Paros, 135, 136, 137, 412
Old Testament. see Hebrew Bible/Old Paris (Homeric character), 29, 49, 87
Testament Parmenides, 150, 213, 215
Olympiads, as dating mechanism, 139, 140, 148 Parthenon, Athens, 113, 115, 121, 143
Ophion, 289 Pascal, Blaise, 159
Oppian Law against extravagance, 106 ‘Passion of Perpetua and Felicity’, 188
Origen Passover/Easter dating controversy, 153–4
on astrology/astronomy, 296 past time. see history and memory
on continual prayer, 348 Pater, Walter, 157–9, 160
Contra Celsum, 34 n. 38, 35 n. 41 Marius the Epicurean, 158
on 1 Enoch, 93 The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 158
Eusebius of Caesarea and, 148, 151, 152 Patroclus, 86, 164
Gregory of Nazianzus and, 321 n. 20 Pattison, George, 159
on Hebrew verse, 232 Paul and Pauline writings
Hexapla, 19 n. 2, 148 aiōn/aiōnios (everlasting), use of, 255

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 Subject Index 495
in Ambrose’s hymns, 355, 360, 371, 377–8 pilgrims and pilgrimage
Augustine’s sortes sacrae in, 190, 192 Augustine on earthly life as pilgrimage, 179
conversion of Paul, 184, 188 history/memory and, 122–6
Jerome’s life of Paul, 390 Pindar
Prudentius on, 360, 371, 377–8 Eusebius of Caesarea and, 150
typology, use of, 107 exemplarity and, 105
waiting in, 94–5, 99, 177 generational significance of games in, 308
Paul the Hermit, 201 on God’s time, 30, 31
Paula (friend of Jerome), 123, 201 Nemean Odes, 31
Paulinus of Milan, biography of Ambrose, praise, poetics of, 164
388, 390 Pinter, Harold, 4
Paulinus of Nola, 122, 208, 370 n. 96, 380, 386 Pirkei Avot (The Ethics of the Fathers), 86
Paulus Orosius. see Orosius Pirkei de Rabbi Eliezer, 383
Pausanias, 114 n. 4, 120, 136 Piso (Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso), 119
pax Romana, 149 Plato, works, 295
Pelagia (saint), 198, 201 Euthydemus, 192–5
Pelagians, 406 Laws, 45, 274
Penelope (wife of Odysseus), 25, 48, 49, 50, Parmenides, 211
87, 158 Protagoras, 195–6
Penthesileia, 87 Republic, 45, 118, 142, 210
Pepys, Samuel, 77 Symposium, 210, 236
Peri Parthenion, 32 Theaetetus, 172d, 71
Pericles, 115 Timaeus, 165–9, 216, 271, 287
periodization, 73, 161 n. 25, 213 Plato and Platonism, 14; see also Neo-Platonism
Perpetua (saint), 188, 191 Augustine compared, 182
Persephone, 31, 301–3, 310 cave, parable of the, 142, 210
Persia Cicero responding to, 169
Athenian war with, 113, 114, 115, 146 on creation, 166–9, 173, 270
Greek and Roman versus Persian history, 163 on death and temporality, 45–7, 56–7, 63
Seleucid empire, temporal regime of, 173, 175 on demiurge, 339
Peshitta, 383 on Egyptian history, 146
Peter (apostle), 261, 342, 343, 354, 355, 360, 377–8 Eusebius of Caesarea and, 150
Petronius, 81 Forms, theory of, 168
Phanes. see Eros/Phanes Gregory of Nazianzus and, 318
Pheidias, statue of Zeus at Olympia, 273 on history and memory, 118
Phidias, 132 n. 1 on Homer, 45–7
Philip of Macedon, 138 on ‘human race’, 45–7, 144
Philo of Alexandria on immortality of the soul, 172
on astronomy/astrology, 300 Jewish and Christian influence of, 165, 166
creation, Platonic ideas about, 167 on memory, 126–7
denial of gap between languages and cultures myth, use of, 142, 143
by, 228 Nonnus’ Dionysiaca and, 270, 271, 274
on flood story, 383 Philo and, 20, 30, 108, 226
on Greek roots of Hebrew, 232 on rebirth, 263
ideological investment in harmony of sexology, nineteenth-century, 214
Hellenism and Jewish culture, 21 Socrates, death of, 56–7
Life of Moses, 204 Sulpicius Severus and dialogues of, 386
Platonizing approach to Hebrew Bible, 20, 30, on surprise, suddenness, and the unexpected,
108, 226 210–12
rewriting biblical texts in Greek prose, 226 on timelessness and the now, 156, 157,
on Septuagint, 20, 22 165–9, 172
on telling time, 64 on water-clocks, 71
Philo of Byblos, 280 Pliny the Elder, 81, 134, 136, 398 n. 46
Philoctetes, 88 Pliny the Younger, 71, 120
Philomela, 305 Plutarch, 140, 186

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 496 Subject Index
poetry, defences of use of, 230, 231–4, 235–40 private versus public Christian practice and,
Polemo, 186 361, 388–90
politics Psychomachia, 360
classicism as politics and aesthetics of Sulpicius Severus compared, 385, 404
untimeliness, 103, 214–15 Against Symmachus, 360
of history and memory in Athens, 113–18 typology, use of, 108, 371, 372, 373
Lindos Chronicle and, 135 Psammetichus, 146
liturgy, politicization of, 347 Ps-Apollinaris, Metaphrasis of the Psalms,
Pantheon, Rome, restoration of, 132, 135 230–5, 400
public versus private Christian practice, 361, Ps-Clement, Recognitions, 296
388–90 Ps-Manetho, 295 n. 70, 323 n. 22
telling time as means of political control, 71–5 Psyche and Cupid, 184
of Virgil’s Aeneid, 272 Ptolemy Philadelphus, 20, 233
waiting as politicized issue, 90 Ptolemy Philopater, 138
Polybius, History, 138–41, 150, 174, 210, 412 public versus private Christian practice, 361,
Polycrates, 143, 144 388–90
Polydeuces (brother of Helen of Troy), 30–1 Pucci, Joseph, 361 n. 80
polyptoton, 339 Puffendorf, Samuel, 115
Pompeius Trogus, 409 Purves, Alex, 26
Pomponius Mela, 398 n. 46 Pyramus and Thisbe, 268, 272, 305
Ponticianus, 189, 191 Pythagoras, 302
Porphyry of Tyre, 127, 281 Pythagorean transmigration of souls, 56
Against the Christians, 280 Pythonax, 59
Pranger, Bert, 339
the present. see timelessness and the now queer time, 78 n. 43
Priscillian and Priscillianists, 387–9, 406 Quintilian, 292
private versus public Christian practice, 361, Quintus of Smyrna, 9, 263 n. 118, 285 n. 37, 407
388–90 Posthomerica, 87, 278
Proclus
Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, 287 n. 47, ‘rape’ of time in dedication poem for
325 n. 28 St Polyeuktos, Constantinople, 12,
‘Hymn to the Sun’, 287 206–9
Marinus’ life of, 349 n. 51 raven, Noah, and the flood, 380–5
Prometheus Bound (attrib. Aeschylus), 54–5 Redfield, James, 163
Protestant work ethic, 74 Reformation, 11, 15, 122, 215, 382
Proteus, 273 regulation of time, sanctification of calendar as,
Proust, Marcel, 127 345–52; see also Ambrose of Milan;
Prudentius, 9, 15, 360–79 Prudentius
Ambrose and, 337 n. 4, 339, 344 n. 26, 360–1, in Jewish cultic practice, 349–52
363, 364, 365, 368, 369, 372, 375–9 liturgical use of composed hymns versus
Apotheosis, 372 psalms, 346–7
Augustine and, 179 politicization of liturgy and, 347
Cathemerinon, 360–74, 376 times of prayer in Christian liturgy, setting of,
on Christmas, 366–8, 374 347–9
Dittochaeon, 337 n. 4 repentance
dynamic tensions within Christianity of fifth conversion, Christian life-writing focused on,
century and, 376 183–7
on Epiphany, 368–72, 374 death/temporality and, 58
on flood story, 383 Revelation, Book of, 94
Gregory of Nazianzus compared, 363, 364, rewriting the scriptures, concept of, 223–35
365, 366 Rheia, 28
Hamartigenia, 360, 371 ring composition, 218
Peristephanon, 57, 122–6, 360, 365, 377–8 ritual, changing experience of time, 213
pilgrimage poem on Cassian of Imola, 122, Roman consuls’ election years, as dating
124–6 mechanism, 140

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 Subject Index 497
Roman culture. see Greco-Roman culture Seasons (Hōrai) in Nonnus, Dionysiaca, 278,
Rome 289–91, 305
Christian purpose of history of, 413 secularism and modernity, 7, 161 n. 25
fall of, 174–5, 177 Seder Olam, 67, 351
foundation of Rome and Carthage in Sedley, David, 167, 169
same year, 140 Seleucid empire, temporal regime of, 173, 175
Four Empires, theory of, 413 Semele, 269, 305
history and memory in, 118–20 Senacherib (Assyrian ruler), 70
horologium of Augustus, in forum, 87, 118 Seneca, 178
Nazi imitation of, 175 Seneca, suicide of, 57
Pantheon, 132, 135, 415 Septimius Severus, 133, 415
sack of (410), 176, 406, 411 Septuagint
Virgil’s Aeneid on founding of, 338 aiōn/aiōnios (everlasting), use of, 255
Rousseau, Philip, 393 authoritativeness in Christianity and Judaism,
Rufinus, 19 n. 2, 296 19, 22
rupture and continuity, 12, 206–19; see also calculation of years between Adam and the
conversion flood, 148
Aristotle, Parmenides and Zeno on movement deliberate mistranslation of timing of creation,
and change, 213 19–24, 226
classicism, revolutionary or conservative, Gospel references to, 90, 223
214–15 Jerome’s Vulgate compared, 111
marking out time, necessity of, in human lack of poetic impact of original verses in, 233
culture, 215 makhairē (dagger), use of, 246
other Christian concepts of time affecting, 13 metanoia not occurring in, 183
Plato on the sudden, 210–12 narratives of creation of, 20–2
‘rape’ of time in dedication poem for Noah, the flood, and the raven, compared to
St Polyeuktos, Constantinople, 12, Sulpicius Severus’ Chronicon, 380–5
206–9, 215 Ps-Apollinaris, Metaphrasis of the Psalms, 230
ritual, changing experience of time, 213 Seven Against Thebes, 143
surprise, suddenness, and the unexpected, sexology, nineteenth-century, 214
functional effects of, 209–13 Shafi-i, Imam, 15
theories of time and social behaviour, dynamic Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 214
between, 215–19 shema, 68, 351–2
Ruskin, John, 158 Sherman, Cindy, 4
Russian Revolution, 214 shield of Dionysus, 304, 311
Shimon ben Yochai, 23
the Sabbath and the week, as unit of time, 217 Shlovsky, Viktor, 89, 210, 213
sack of Rome by Visigoths (410), 176, 406, 411 Simelidis, Christos, 320 n. 17
St Polyeuktos, Constantinople, dedication of, Simeon Stylites, 58, 198, 201, 216
206–9 Simonides, 59
Sallust, 386, 390, 391, 392 Simplicianus, 389 n. 24
Sanchuniathon of Beirut, 281 simultaneity and synchronicity, 12, 132–55
Sappho, 164, 195 classical ‘universal histories’ and local history,
Saragossa, Council of (380), 388 137–41
Scaliger, Joseph Justus, 149 n. 43 Egyptian versus Greek and Roman history, 144–7
Schadewaldt, Wolfgang, 211 epigraphy, Greco-Roman, and location of the
Scheindler, Augustin, 229, 246, self in time, 132–6
260 Eusebius, historical time in, 147–55
Schmitt, Carl, 174 myth and history, distinguishing, 141–7, 148
Scholem, Gershom, 93 Orosius, Historiae and, 412
Schutz, Alfred, 162 other Christian concepts of time affecting, 13
Schwartz, Seth, 225 n. 6 single clock and single time-scale predicated
Scipio, dream of, 174 on problem of, 136–7
Scott, Walter, 72 symbolic significance of, 140, 149, 154
Scripture. see Bible Sinaiticus, Codex, 225

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 498 Subject Index
Smith, Mark, 224 story of creation of Septuagint as tool of, 22
Smith, Zadie, 1 typology and, 110
Social War, 138 violence of, 10, 13
Socrates (historian), 238 n. 42, 347 surprise, suddenness, and the unexpected
Socrates (philosopher) functional effects of, 209–13
death of, 56–7, 186 in Nonnus, Paraphrase of the Gospel of John,
myth, use of, 142 261–2
in Plato’s Euthydemus, 192–5 Plato on, 210–12
Sulpicius Severus on, 392 Sykes, Donald, 326
in Symposium, 210 Symmachus, 360
on water-clocks, 71 Syncellus, 141
Solomon (biblical king), 208 Synesius of Cyrene, 172, 185, 270, 389, 390
Solon, 47, 140, 146, 283, 305 synkrisis (comparison), in Plutarch, 186
songs and singing, Christian suspicion of, 346
Sophocles, 102, 268 Taautos/Thoth, 281
Hegel and, 102 Tacitus, 105, 139, 140, 185, 386, 392, 408
Oedipus Tyrannus, 101, 181 Agricola, 391
Sorabji, Richard, 76 Annals, 149
soul Taft, Robert, 349, 351
Plato on immortality of, 172 Tatian, Address to the Greeks, 98
Pythagorean transmigration of, 56 Teiresias, 49, 87, 181
Sozomen, 238 n. 42 Telemachus, 26, 29, 50, 308
Spanoudakis, Konstantinos, 238 n. 42, 277 telling time, 12, 64–84
Spencer, Herbert, 74 Aristotle on, 75–6, 77
spolia, poetics of, 150 Assyrian calculations of astronomical time,
stars. see astrology/astronomy/Zodiac 70
Stephen I (pope), 228 n. 17 Christian transformation of, 74, 77, 81–4
Stern, Sacha, 175 clocks and watches, 77
Stesichorus, 29, 239 n. 46 digression and, 80
stoa poikilē (Painted Stoa), agora, Athens, 114 in Greco-Roman world, 71–2, 80–1
Stoicism, 57, 169, 216, 255, 339 n. 10 historical overview of, 70–80
Strachey, James, 78 ordering of narrative and ordering of time,
Suetonius, 185, 390, 391 interrelationship of, 69, 78–80
Sulpicius Severus, 9, 380–419 political control, as means of, 71–5
Ambrose compared, 404 in rabbinical writing, 64–70
Augustine compared, 386, 394, 405 Temple, Jerusalem. see Jerusalem Temple
Bible, Chronicon as retelling/abridgment of, tempora Christiana, 409–12
397–406, 412 Tertullian, 22, 179 n. 79, 224, 298, 299, 339, 348,
biographical information, 380, 385–7 368, 376
Chronicon, 380–5, 388, 397–406 De baptismo, 310 n. 113
on continual prayer, 348 De spectaculis, 299
Dialogue, 386, 398 Thecla, 188, 191, 199
Gregory of Nazianzus compared, 405 Themis, 28, 283
Noah, the flood, and the raven in Chronicon, Themistocles, 53 n. 19
compared to Septuagint, 380–5 Theocritus, 302
Nonnus compared, 400, 405 Theodectes, 239
Orosius compared, 406, 407, 408, 409, 412 Theodoret of Cyrrhus, 314 n. 1
on the present, 411 Theodosius II, 208, 242, 387
Prudentius compared, 385, 404 Theodotus, 298, 325
as ‘villa-Christian’, 388 Theophilus, 388, 389
Vita Martini, 380, 385–97, 401, 406 theotokos, Mary as, 249, 282
Sun, hymn to, in Nonnus, Dionysiaca, 286–9 Therapeutae, 232
Superbowl, time in, 2 Thetis, 55, 273, 276, 309
supersessionism Thomas (apostle), 245, 261
destruction of Temple and, 92 Thucydides

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 Subject Index 499
epistemology of evidence, commitment classicism and, 103, 214–15
to, 402 ring composition as structure of, 218
exempla/typology and, 105
historical time, invention of, 141–2, 143–4 Valerius Maximus, 105
history and memory in, 115, 116 van Nuffelen, Peter, 413
on myth versus history, 141–2, 144, 145 Varro of Atax, 295 n. 71
Mytilene, vote to execute men of, 183 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 28
simultaneity, problem of, 139 Vian, Francis, 305
on telling time, 66 Victorinus, 389 n. 24
Tiberius, 185 ‘villa Christianity’, 361, 388
Tillich, Paul, 326 Virgil
Timaeus (historian), 66, 140 centos citing, 228
Time; see also Christian invention of time Prudentius and, 361 n. 80, 370
in antiquity, 6 Virgil, Aeneid
architecture as expression of, 216 Ambrose of Milan and, 338, 341, 353
marking out time, necessity of, in human on founding of Rome, 338
culture, 215 imperial temporal regime of, 174
modern concept of, 1–6, 72–5 Nonnus and, 272, 287
theories of time and social behaviour, dynamic Orosius, Historiae, and, 416, 417
between, 215–19 politics of, 272
timelessness and the now, 12, 156–80; see also waiting in, 88–9, 90
creation virginity, in Greco-Roman culture, 32
Augustine on, 11, 156, 157, 176–80 visibility of time. see history and memory
Greco-Roman experience of, 163–72 Visigoths, sack of Rome by (410), 176, 406, 411
imperial temporal regimes, 173–7, 179 Vision of Dorotheos, 330
modern experience of, 156–63 Vitruvius, 81
other Christian concepts of time affecting, 13 Vlastos, Gregory, 167, 169
Sulpicius Severus on, 411
tempora Christiana, 409–12 Wagner, Richard, 214
waiting providing structure to the now, 156 waiting, 12, 85–99
Titans, 310 Augustine on, 96–8
Tithonus, 33 Christian transformation of, 90–9
Tlepolemus, 134 in Daniel, 91–2
tragedy, Greek, 101, 117, 125, 180, 186; see also in 1 Enoch, 93, 94
specific plays, by author eschatological expectations and, 86, 91–6,
Trajan, 72 156
translatio imperii, 139 in Gospels, 90–3, 94, 95
translations in Greco-Roman epic, 85–90
versus centos and paraphrases, 228 Jerusalem Temple, destruction of, 66, 67,
single message of Christianity echoing 92, 93
through, 234–5 the now structured by, 156
transmigration of souls, 56 other Christian concepts of time affecting, 13
Traub, Valerie, 196 in Pauline writings, 94–5, 99
Trent, Council of (1545–63), 382 n. 6 planting trees for future generations, 85–6
Triphiodorus, 256 as politicized issue, 90
Trump, Donald, 421 in rabbinic writing, 85
Typhon, 270 reading, endemic to, 90
typology. see exempla and typology in Revelation, 94
tyrannicides (Harmodius and Aristogeiton), Warhol, Andy, 3, 4
statues of, agora, Athens, 116 The Wasteland (Eliot), 3
Tyre, Dionysus’ visit to, in Nonnus, Dionysiaca, water-clocks, 71, 159
286–9 the week and the Sabbath, as unit of time,
217
untimeliness Weil, Simone, 175
of Christian typologizing of Hebrew Bible, 110 Wetzel, James, 97

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 500 Subject Index
Wilcox, Donald, 140 Yerushalmi, Yosef, Zakhor, 66
Williams, Bernard, 141–2, 143, 148
Williams, M. S., 152 Zagreus, 310, 311
Williams, Rowan (archbishop of Canterbury), 11 Zeno of Verona, 213, 299
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 62, 216 Zerubavel, Eviatar, 8, 162
Woolf, Leonard, 78 Zeus
Woolf, Virginia in Aratus’ Phaenomena, 292
T. S. Eliot and, 79 death/temporality and, 52, 55
Mrs Dalloway, 79 God’s time and, 25, 26, 28, 29, 31, 33
Orlando, 78 in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, 267, 268, 269, 270,
Wordsworth, William, 73 273, 280, 307, 309, 310
Zodiac. see astrology/astronomy/Zodiac
Xenocrates, 186 Zonaras, John, 238
Xerxes, 173 Zosimas (saint), 58, 197

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