Kairos: A Cultural History of Time in the Greek Polis.

Abstract

The history of Greek timekeeping, although it has often been viewed as an aspect of the history of science, has strong social aspects. This dissertation seeks to elucidate the social functions of timekeeping as conducted by Classical Greek communities. Rather than seeking after ever-more-precise harmony with natural cycles such as the solar year, Greek communities developed institutions that structured time in ways reflecting their priorities and values. To demonstrate this, I draw upon ancient literary and epigraphic sources and use comparative material from the anthropological literature. Each chapter addresses a different aspect of this construction of time. Chapter 1 examines the separation between the means by which farmers decided when to perform their tasks and the artificial calendars used to schedule religious festivals and civic events, showing that Greek civic and religious calendars were founded upon cycles only loosely connected to the seasonal year. In chapter 2, I identify the means by which Athens and Sparta tracked the eligibility of their citizens for military and civic service. Chapter 3 examines social memory and the private appropriation of civic ideology via speeches in court and before the Athenian assembly. Private citizens, when bringing their disputes before courts, strategically chose to refer to past events in terms that characterized themselves as part of the community of the polis. Finally, chapter 4 looks both within and beyond individual cities to identify ways in which the scheduling of religious festivals was used to articulate relations among communities at scales ranging from neighboring villages to the Athenian empire and the Greek world as a whole. Through a series of case studies, I show that Greek approaches to time sought to maximize flexibility. Awareness that uncontrollable factors strongly influenced the probability that any human action, from planting crops to waging war, would succeed meant that identifying the right time to act and being able to act then were crucial. This reactive approach to scheduling events of all kinds, in turn, allowed communities the relative freedom to structure time in ways reflecting their ideals and priorities.