Volume 22, Number 8 · May 15, 1975
Telling Time
By Robert Craft
Time in Greek Tragedy
by Jacqueline de Romilly
Cornell University Press, 180 pp., $7.50
From Stonehenge to Monte Alto, some of the most enduring monuments of prehistoric cultures are the solar observatories. Other timekeeping tools used by these megalithic builders, whose very existence depended on accurate predictions of changes of season, included the sundial, clepsydra, and gnomon, as well as two-symbol numerals, the concept of zero, and spherical trigonometry. Whether or not time was conceptualized in any culture that survives only through ruins and artifacts, the peoples themselves were highly skilled in chronometry. In fifth-century Athens on the other hand—that summit of civilization—the measurement of time was haphazard, calendars differing from city to city and even the years beginning on different days, a chaotic state of affairs satirized by Aristophanes in Clouds. Greek tragedy, which was to discover and exploit philosophical concepts of time, itself developed in a society that was far from time-conscious.[1]
Review, 1766 words
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