The Measure of Times Past. Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Time

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Title......Page 3
Contents......Page 7
Acknowledgments......Page 9
1. Introduction......Page 11
2. The Rise and Fall of Absolute Time......Page 26
3. The Relative Time of Herodotus and Thucydides......Page 61
4. The Time of The Oecumene......Page 93
5. The Time of the Incarnation......Page 129
6. The Time of the Renaissance......Page 163
7. The Dating of Absolute Time......Page 197
8. Conclusion: The Truths of Relative Time......Page 231
9. Epilogue......Page 262
Notes......Page 283
Index......Page 295

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Pre--Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of RelativeTin1e The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

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Donald J. Wilcox is professor of history at the University of New Hampshire.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 1987 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 1987 Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wilcox, Donald J. The measure of times past. Bibliography: p. Includes index. r. Chronology, Historical. I. Title. 011.w59 1987 902'.02 ISBN0•226-89721-4 ISBN0-226-89722-2 (pbk.)

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Historiography. 87-1669

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J.R.G. Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit

Contents

Acknowledgments I.

2. 3·

4· 5. 6. 7. 8. 9·

ix

Introduction 1 The Rise and Fall of Absolute Time The Relative Time of Herodotus and Thucydides The Time of the Oecumene 83 The Time of the Incarnation 119 The Time of the Renaissance 153 The Dating of AbsoluteTime 187 Conclusion: The Truths of Relative Time 221 Epilogue 252 Notes Index

273 285

51

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the National Endowment for Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies for their generous support, which enabled me to devote a full sabbatical year to the final stages of research and writing. I am also grateful to the Rockefeller Foundation for providing the magnificent environment of the Cultural Center at Bellagio for a most productive period of rewriting and finishing the final drafts. Finally I appreciate the support of the Wheeler Fund of the History Department at the University of New Hampshire for its support of my research travel. Several people have read and criticized parts of the manuscript, including Alan Bernstein, Mark Phillips, William Bouwsma, John Marquand, and David Walters. I appreciate their interest and their suggestions. In addition, parts of the argument have been presented to history department seminars at the universities of New Hampshire, California at Berkeley, California at San Diego, Oregon, and Washington. Reactions to those seminars were most helpful in refining and formulating the final manuscript. Finally, my students at the University of New Hampshire have been among my most penetrating and helpful critics as I have exposed these ideas in my seminars and courses over the past several years. I am profoundly grateful to them, and the book owes much to their reactions.

ix

1 Introduction

"Mr. Palomar is standing on the shore, looking at a wave. Not that he is lost in contemplation of the waves. He is not lost, because he is quite aware of what he is doing: he wants to look at a wave and he is looking at it. He is not contemplating, because for contemplation you need the right temperament, the right mood, and the right combination of exterior circumstances; and though Mr. Palomar has nothing against contemplation in principle, none of these three conditions applies to him. Finally, it is not 'the waves' that he means to look at, but just one individual wave: in his desire to avoid vague sensations, he establishes for his every action a limited and precise object." 1 As the wave breaks up into other waves, Mr. Palomar does not lose heart. He changes viewpoint, enlarges and contracts his field of vision, and perseveres in the confidence that, should he succeed in seeing the wave as a single object, "it could perhaps be the key to mastering the world's complexity by reducing it to its simplest mechanism" (p. 6). But the waves prove recalcitrant; they are too shifting, too complex, and too interrelated. Abandoning his quest, "Mr. Palomar goes off along the beach, tense and nervous as when he came, and even more unsure about everything" (p. 8). ltalo Calvino has drawn his protagonist as an exemplar of twentiethcentury humanity seeking the certainty of concrete and objective truth in a world where particular events with simple locations in space and time are no longer seen as adequate expressions of reality. At first it might seem that Mr. Palomar in his anxious pursuit of a fixed and complete knowledge of his world has not heard of those changes in twentieth-century science that call into question the possibility of such knowledge. But such is not the case. Though he once felt he could construct a single conceptual

ChapterOne

model whose geometrical precision would correspond to the data of experience, the difficulties of implementing such a goal had forced him to change his approach. "Now he needed a great variety of models, whose elements could be combined in order to arrive at the one that would best fit reality, a reality that, for its own part, was always made up of many different realities, in time and in space" (p. no). Mr. Palomar's problem is not ignorance but anxiety and doubt. He does not know how to grasp experience in this new way, how to incorporate his own life into that multifarious world of nature which scientific theory has created, or even how to preserve his own identity when there is no fixed point of certainty from which knowledge can grow. "The swimming ego of Mr. Palomar is immersed in a disembodied world, intersections of force fields, vectorial diagrams, bands of position lines that converge, diverge, break up. But inside him there remains one point in which everything exists in another way, like .a lump, like a clot, like a blockage: the sensation that you are here but could not be here, in a world that could not be but is" (p. 17). Most troubling of all to Mr. Palomar are the uncertainties of space and time. Trying to look at the stars, he cannot find the right place from which to make the observations; he cannot manage to look at the chart and the stars at the same time, and his contortions in the effort are "like the convulsions of a madman" (p. 48). On a visit to the reptile house he contemplates the slow and apparently aimless movements of the iguanas, wondering whether they exist in another kind of time from his. In what time are they immersed? In that of the species, removed from the course of the hours that race from the birth to the death of the individual? Or in the time of geological eras, which shifts continents and solidifies the crust of emerged lands? Or in the slow cooling of the rays of the sun? The thought of a time outside our experience is intolerable. Mr. Palomar hurries to leave the reptile house, which can be visited only now and then and in haste. (pp. 87-88) Mr. Palomar's flight from the reptile house and the multiple times it conjures up is a true metaphor of the twentieth century, for we have witnessed more profound changes in basic constructs of space and time than any period since the seventeenth century, when the Scientific Revolution laid down the notions of space and time that bounded the Newtonian world. Contemporary thinkers and artists in fields as diverse as physics, painting, poetry, psychology, and philosophy have challenged the sense of 2

Introduction

time and space as objective, continuous, all-embracing, and absolute that they inherited from the Newtonian revolution. In place of this sense of absolute time and space they have substituted a new view, one which sees space and time as subjective, fragmented, relative, overlapping, and disconnected. 2 Einstein and Mach, Mallarme and Apollinaire, Proust and Joyce, Picasso and Boccioni, Bergson and Freud all worked toward this reorientation. In some cases the participants in the revolution were acutely conscious of achievements in other fields and looked on their work as part of a large change fraught with conceptual significance. The Futurists saw in the early cinema a realization of their sense of simultaneity (Kem, pp. 71 - 72), and Proust sensed in the music of Franck a representation of his own sense of time. In other cases writers in one field disavowed the metaphysical or universal application of their ideas. Most significantly, Einstein was skeptical of metaphysics in general and never acknowledged that his special theory of relativity contradicted the bases of classical science. He sought to integrate his own modifications into the framework of classical Newtonian science, just as Copernicus in the sixteenth century had tried to fit his solar system into the mechanics of Aristotelian physics. Unsophisticated attempts to extend the implications of relativity theory into ethics and social analysis in the twenties and thirties lent weight to Einstein's disclaimer. Their failure reinforced the validity of Newtonian science for real life, relegating the human application of the new time and space to modem art and literature. But the separation between art and life is not complete. In some cases practical achievements have depended directly on artistic representation of the new time and space. One of the most striking examples of the connection between practicality and art lies in the development of camouflage in World War I. Picasso, when he saw the first camouflaged truck moving down the streets of Paris, observed to Gertrude Stein that he and the other Cubists had created that form. He saw instantly the affinity. Both camouflage and Cubism overturned the distinction between background and foreground that had dominated Western visual arts since the Renaissance, a distinction deeply intertwined with the Scientific Revolution and with Newtonian time and space. But Picasso's comment was not simply a brilliant artistic insight. The affinities he saw were not accidental. The inventor of camouflage, Giaurand de Scevola, a telephone operator for an artillery unit, claimed that he had indeed learned the technique of camouflage from the Cubists, and furthermore he used Cubist painters in the early stages of design. "In order to totally deform objects, I employed the means Cubists used to represent them-later this permitted me, without giving reasons, to hire in 3

ChapterOne

my [camouflage] section some painters, who, because of their very special vision, had an aptitude for denaturing any kind ofform whatsoever" (in Kem, pp. 302-4). The new time of the twentieth century poses special problems for historians. Not only are they particularly concerned with events in time, but the practice of historical research in the modem era is closely linked, both conceptually and historically, to Newtonian time. The continuous and universal qualities of Newton's time and space have made it possible for historians-as well as the natural scientists-to view the basic components of reality not as processes or organic wholes but as a series of discrete events that can be placed on a single time line and at a single point in space. Large historical trends, major events, overarching generalizations, and broad issues of causality and direction remained as important as they had been in the works of earlier historians, but with the dominance of absolute time and space they became secondary realities, agglomerations of more basic units of historical study. Working historians seldom have occasion to think about such metaphysical issues as the implications of absolute time and most often prefer to dismiss them as irrelevant to the practice of history. After all, not all conceptual implications contained in an idea need find expression in reality. The existence of a tendency in Newtonian time to reduce historical events to simple, primary facts and discourage the perception of realities that could not be so reduced might be overcome in many ways. Since historians more often than not operate without even a conscious awareness of such a tendency, it has been commonly ignored by the historical profession. Many scientists even argue that these features of absolute time and space have no particular relevance in natural science. Newton had many theological interests which were not connected with his purely scientific work. Especially in the General Scholium to his Principles,which he added in later editions, he introduced a number of metaphysical and theological concepts which give expression to his religious needs but which were not essential to his laws of motion. Nevertheless Newton's laws of motion are dependent on absolute time and space, and those concepts occur not in the General Scholium but at the beginning of the Principles,where he defined the concepts he considered essential to his laws.3 By the same token modem historians operate under the assumption of an absolute and continuous time line, even if they are not always immediately aware of it, and this assumption colors their sense of what history is about. Marc Bloch, certainly one of the greatest and most sophisticated historians of this century, defined history as the science of men in time. In defining this time and distinguishing the historian's approach from that of 4

Introduction the natural scientist, Bloch presented clearly the notion of individual historical events which take on their meaning by being located as points within a general and continuous time. 4 Historical time is a concrete and living reality with an irreversible onward rush. It is the very plasma in which events are immersed, and the field within which they become intelligible. . . . No historian would be satisfied to state that Caesar devoted eight years to the conquest of Gaul, or that it took fifteen years for Luther to change from the orthodox novice of Erfurt into the reformer of Wittenberg. It is of far greater importance to him to assign the conquest of Gaul its exact chronological place amid the vicissitudes of European societies; and without in the least denying the eternal aspect of such spiritual crises as Brother Martin's, he will feel that he has given a true picture of it only when he has plotted its precise moment upon the life charts of both the man who was its hero and the civilization which was its climate. This sense that the most elemental act of the historian is the location of single events in time should not be confused with the issue of historical objectivity. The absolute time line was indeed an essential support for many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians who felt that history consisted of irreducible and indisputable concrete facts that were immune to all interpretive distortion. Lord Acton, for instance, when he sought to make the CambridgeModem History a work that would transcend all bias and personal interpretation, conceived that work in absolute space rather than the relative geography of nations. "Contributors will understand that we are established not under the Meridian of Greenwich, but in Long. 30 degrees W.; that our Waterloo must be one that satisfies French and English, Germans and Dutch alike; that nobody can tell, without examining the list of authors, where the Bishop of Oxford laid down the pen, and whether Fairbairn or Gasquet, Liebermann or Harrison took it up."s Acton's insistence on objectivity certainly depended on the concept of ideally isolated events unequivocally existing in time and space, but the absolute time line and the spatial coordinates that accompany the concept permeate most modem historical thinking, even when the focus is on generalization, on universal history, and upon-secular historical trends. In fact it is often the very minuteness and number of the individual events that have led historians to insist on the importance of generalizations. As Henri Pirenne described the historian's metier, "The subject of the historians' study is the development of human societies in space and time. This 5

ChapterOne

development is the result of billions of individual actions. But in so far as they are purely individual, these actions do not belong to the domain of history, which has to take account of them only as they are related to collective movements, or in the measure to which they have influenced the collectivity." 6 The task of reducing complex processes to the simple events that constitute them often produces in historians the same sense of confusion and frustration that Mr. Palomar experiences as he tries isolate the waves on the seashore. Listen to the great intellectual historian Carl Becker, as he addresses the question of what constitutes a fact. First then, what is the historical fact? Let us take a simple fact, as simple as the historian often deals with, viz.: "In the year 49 B.c. Caesar crossed the Rubicon." A familiar fact this is, known to all, and obviously of some importance, since it is mentioned in every history of the great Caesar. But is this fact as simple as it sounds? Has it the clear, persistent outline which we commonly attribute to simple historical facts? When we say that Caesar crossed the Rubicon we do not of course mean that Caesar crossed it alone, but with his army. The Rubicon is a small river, and I don't know how long it took Caesar's army to cross it; but the crossing must surely have been accompanied by many acts and many words and many thoughts of many men. That is to say, a thousand and one lesser "facts" went to make up the one simple fact that Caesar crossed the Rubicon; and if we had someone, say James Joyce, to know and relate all these facts, it would no doubt require a book of 794 pages to present this one fact that Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Thus the simple fact turns out to be not a simple fact at all. It is the statement that is simple-a simple generalization of a thousand and one facts. ( in Meyerhoff, pp. I 2 I -22) Two features of this passage are especially noteworthy: the reference to Joyce and the use of the A.o./a.c. system to characterize a simple fact. Joyce, together with Proust and Mann, was among the novelists who in the first half of this century worked to devise a narrative style that would present reality outside of the traditional constructs of space and time. Their works represent a new approach to experience, an attempt to see life in multiple times and as a group of related processes that cannot be reduced to simple elements. They looked at human life organically, as part of a totality of experience. Becker's awareness that he cannot reduce the crossing of the Rubicon to its component elements, like Mr. Palomar's

6

Introduction failure with the waves, is part of the consciousness that produced and accepted this m~jor revolution in twentieth-century writing. If the reference to Joyce shows Becker's acceptance of twentieth-century trends, the type of fact he chose as an example demonstrates his commitment to older notions of space and time. Just as Lord Acton used a numerical measurement, longitude, to illustrate the complete objectivity he wanted for Waterloo, Becker chose as a typical fact one to which he could give a precise numerical location in time. The number he used to locate the crossing of the Rubicon, 49 B.c., is part of the dating system in universal use, at least in the Western world. He could have dated the crossing by telling us Caesar's age at the time, or he might have told us what office Caesar held in the republic when the event occurred. He might even have dated it in reference to some other event, like the Roman civil wars or the consulship of Cicero. Contemporary historians do use such relative dates in their writing, but only for literary effect or to bring out a specific theme. When we wish to present an event as a naked fact, the surest way to do so is to give it its own date. This dating system is a truly remarkable instrument and worthy to be the symbol of objectivity and certainty for historical facts. It can perform the most minute and immediate quotidian tasks-organize our checkbooks, fix our entry into school or our retirement from the work force, and calculate fiscal and legal responsibilities. The saine dating system can locate such distant events as the battle of Marathon, the period when people first engaged in agriculture, and even the time when life on earth began. Precision certainly diminishes as the times retreat into the distant past, but the same series of numbers, extending indefinitely forward and backward, serves to locate vastly dissimilar events within a single, unambiguous, and absolute time frame. Our comfortable familiarity with this dating system makes it seem a natural means of expressing temporal relationships. Certainly by quantifying the temporal interval between events it makes them more susceptible to analysis. As one student of ancient chronology has remarked, "Time is the proper dimension of history. A fact is historical when it has to be defined not only in space but also in time. A fact is placed in the fourth dimension, that of time, by measuring its distance from the present. Chronology, an auxiliary of history, enables us to state this time-interval between a historical fact and us by converting the chronological indications of our sources- into units of our own time reckoning." 7 The B.c.!A.o. dating system displays all of the features of Newtonian time. Indefinitely extended forward and backwards from an arbitrary

7

ChapterOne point, it is truly universal in application and seems to carry with it no thematic or interpretive weight. It can date events which have no intrinsic relationship to one another and quantify their temporal distance precisely and unambiguously. It is a continuous, universal, and endless time line with no external reference, a chronology perfectly adapted to the needs of Newtonian time. Though the system might seem tied to the birth of Christ, its inventor considered that reference point to be purely arbitrary. He was fully aware of the discrepancy between the actual birth date of Christ and the conventional date used in the B.c.lA.D. system. The bonds between the modem dating system and Newtonian time are not simply conceptual; they are historical. The system was devised and implemented during the same century in which the ideas were formulated that led to Newton's great work. A Jesuit scholar named Domenicus Petavius published the key work setting out the B.c.!A.D. system in 1627, ten years before Descartes proposed in his Discourseon Method some of the essential notions behind the new scientific methodology. Petavius' system came slowly into use during the seventeenth century, with many chronologers preferring an older system, named the Julian Period. Newton himself, in a chronological work published in r 728, was among the first scholars to use the new system exclusively, and it became the standard dating system in the West only during the eighteenth century. Not only did Newton find it congenial, but those who rejected the notion of absolute time, such as Vico, were also among the few critics of the system in the eighteenth century. The B.c.lA.D. dating system allows us to quantify the relationship between any two events with a precision no ancient historian could imagine and to express this precision with a single number. Furthermore, we can also use numbers to identify general characteristics of an era that might not so easily be traceable to a single event. Historians can refer to the "1930s" whether they are discussing the economic history of the Depression, the political history of the New Deal, or the international history of fascism. These numerical terms are important to our claims to historical objectivity, for they provide the units by means of which different views of the past can be discussed. One historian, considering the dominant trait of the early nineteenth century to be industrialization, might refer to the period as the Age of the Spinning Jenny; a second, having in mind the romantics' interest in nature and the emotions, might call it the Age of Wordsworth; while still a third, calling attention to the spread of revolutionary ideas and institutions, might call it the Age of Napoleon. But they would all agree on what events they could exclude from the period, since

8

Introduction

all understand the meaning of the term "nineteenth century." It has a quantitative sense which seems to transcend interpretation and bias. Yet the use of centuries barely antedates the B.C.!A.D. dating system. Although Moslem historians had long organized events by centuries, the first major work in the Western world to mark periods in such an abstract form was the MagdeburgCenturies, an ecclesiastical history written by a group of Lutheran scholars in 1559. Though it appeared during the Reformation, the concept of centuries did not come into widespread use before Newton's time. Not until after the seventeenth century did most literate contemporaries identify the epoch in which they lived as their "century," and only in the course of the Enlightenment did the term take on the epochal significance we now attach to it. 8 Scholars now enjoy the luxury of complaining that centuries are meaningless as indicators of major changes, but they could not even decry the use of such epochs if they had no sense that abstract quantities could contain and characterize a group of events occurring within them. The dating systems in use before Newton were not absolute and did not contain the implications about absolute time that characterize the B.c./ A.O. system. Pre-Newtonian time had no conceptual grid to give universal applicability to its numbers. Dates in that time were tied to specific themes, events, and moral lessons, and they gave a meaning and shape of their own to the events they dated. Without the conceptual grid the fundamental sequence of measurement and judgment was radically different from ours. Whatever our attitude toward the function of history and the possibility of objectivity, we assume that a historian answers the question of when an event occurred before determining its meaning; judgment follows measurement. Historians writing before Newton reversed this order. Events created their own time frames. Before locating an event in time, the historian had to make judgments about its meaning and its thematic relation to other events. New insights, syntheses, or major events, such as the rise of Rome, the coming of Christianity, the development of modem nations, or the revival of culture in the Renaissance all created their own time frames. For historians before Newton the time frame did not include a group of events; a group of events contained a time frame. This perspective led them to use a variety of relative dating systems, none of which had an absolute temporal significance apart from the group of events that gave it its meaning. Since we use an absolute time line as a basis for our synthetic understanding of the past, modem scholars have often viewed the relative time frames of early historians with condescension, calling relative time simple and primitive. One of the foremost authorities on chronology in

9

ChapterOne

the twentieth century has observed, "The simplest and most ancient method of dating is the relative time-reference which does not require any chronological devices .... [In primitive tribes,] except for savants, men have little interest in absolute time notations; they use, instead, relative time-references. Primitive peoples usually do not know how old a man is, but only who is the oldest in the group" (Bickerman, p. 62). In fact relative dating in so-called primitive tribes betrays only the most superficial similarity to the chronologies of Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Augustine, Machiavelli, or the other historians who wrote before Newton. Nevertheless the absence of absolute dating systems from their works has helped create some of the common misconceptions about their sense of time, particularly with the classical historians. Without an absolute dating system they could more easily be accused of lacking a true sense of time and of viewing events from a framework in which only unchanging concepts had any reality. 9 If the philosophers, writers, and artists of the twentieth century are correct, then there are aspects of experience which cannot be treated as simple concrete events existing as points on a time line, even though they have unmistakable temporal dimensions. Historians are slowly coming to acknowledge the importance of such realities. In one of the seminal works of contemporary historiography, Femand Braudel has sought to tell the story of the Mediterranean world during the late sixteenth century. In the introduction to that work, Braudel, writing in 1946 as a member of the Annales School that had been founded in part by Marc Bloch, described a variety of times that made up the parts of his book. 10 The first part [of the book] is devoted to a history whose passage is almost imperceptible, that of man in his relationship to the environment, a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles .... On a different level from the first there can be distinguished another history, this time with slow but perceptible rhythms. . . . Lastly, the third part gives a hearing to traditional history-history, one might say, on the scale not of man, but of individual men, what Paul Lacombe and Fran