How Ancient Rome Kept Time

Marcus Valerius

The light comes grey through the shutter of my room, and I know the hour before I see a single clock, because there are no clocks in my room. There is only the grey, and the first bakery cart rattling below, and my neighbor's rooster on the roof. That is enough. The day has begun, and in Rome that is all the Romans mean by the first hour.

Marcus Valerius

Let me explain, because this is the thing that trips up every guest I show around. Our day, from sunrise to sunset, is cut into twelve hours. Always twelve. Summer, winter, rain, or shine. But the daylight itself is not always the same length. In midwinter here we get something like nine hours of sun, and at midsummer more than fifteen. So the twelve hours must stretch and shrink to fit. Today is high summer, and a daytime hour is about seventy five of your minutes. In deep winter it shrinks to around forty four. Only at the equinoxes does it come out at a plain sixty. An hour, for us, is not a fixed length. It is a twelfth of whatever daylight the gods have given us.

Marcus Valerius

I say the first prayer to my household gods at the little shrine by the door, and I go down the stairs. Six flights. The rich take the lower floors, and I am not rich, so I take the climb. On the way I pass a neighbor already carrying her chamber pot to the street, and I keep close to the wall. That is a lesson of its own. Whoever lives in that window is answerable for whatever comes out of it, but that is cold comfort when you are the one who is wet.

Marcus Valerius

By the first hour the streets are loud. Shopkeepers are pulling back their shutters. Boys with wax tablets are dragging their feet toward school. And all over the city, the clients, men like me, are putting on their togas and heading for the houses of their patrons for the morning greeting, the salutatio. I have a patron. I stand in his atrium with forty other men and wait to be noticed. Martial put it neatly. The first and second hour, he says, wear out the clients at their morning salutations.

Marcus Valerius

Today my patron is in a hurry. He wants to know whether he will be late to the courts, and he doesn't ask me. He claps his hands, and a thin young slave named Sosias comes running. Sosias is what we call a time caller. Nobody in Rome owns a watch, because there is no such thing. A man of means owns a slave instead, and sends him out to look at the nearest public sundial and run back with the news. The old Latin question is quotas sit hora. What hour is it? And Sosias is the answer, on two legs.

Marcus Valerius

I follow him, since I am going to the Forum anyway, and since I enjoy watching a man run on an errand that is not mine.

Marcus Valerius

The Forum by the third hour is a roaring bowl of voices. This is when business begins in earnest, when the advocates clear their throats, and the courts get going. Martial says the third hour exercises the hoarse voices of the advocates, and he is right. Rome stretches her varied labors into the fifth hour, he says, and she does. Moneylenders, jewelers, men selling cheap oil, men selling expensive lies.

Marcus Valerius

Sosias stops at a stone sundial, the kind carved like a hollow bowl, with curved lines cut into it for the seasons. The shadow of the little pointer falls across the lines, and that tells you the hour. Beautiful, clever, and utterly useless the moment a cloud rolls over the sun, or a haze comes up from the river. And of course it tells you nothing at night. Sosias reads it and bolts back to his master. Then, about half a minute later, a second slave arrives at a second sundial across the square, and reads a different hour.

Marcus Valerius

This is a famous problem. The dials never quite agree. Seneca wrote that it is easier to get philosophers to agree than clocks. At noon, he says, one dial claims the sixth hour has passed, another says it has barely begun, and a third is somewhere in between. And the great sundial of Augustus, on the Campus Martius, with an Egyptian obelisk for its pointer and bronze lines set in the marble pavement, is magnificent, but I cannot carry it in my pocket.

Marcus Valerius

So most of us use our own bodies. Ask a Roman on the street when to meet and he may say, when your shadow is six feet long. You stand, you look down, you count your own feet. It is quite accurate enough for a man who is only going to a friend's door.

Marcus Valerius

Then comes the sixth hour, noon, with the sun straight above us. And the whole city stops. The courts adjourn. The shops close. People eat a light lunch, the prandium, bread and cheese and olives, and then lie down. We call it the meridiatio, the midday rest. Martial says the sixth hour brings rest to the weary, and the seventh ends it. And if you wish to hear a Roman grumble about all this, listen to Plautus, the old comic poet. A character of his curses the man who first found out how to distinguish hours, the man who set up a sundial in the city and chopped his day into pieces. When he was a boy, he says, his belly was his only sundial, and the truest and best of all. Now, what there is to eat is not eaten unless the sun allows it. The town is so full of sundials, he says, that most of the citizens crawl about dried up with hunger. I have never decided whether to laugh at him or agree with him.

Marcus Valerius

I settle in the shade of a colonnade and doze. The air hums. Somewhere a fountain gurgles. In the law courts, I am told, the advocates are timed by a water clock, a clepsydra, dripping through a tiny hole, so that a long speech is measured by how much water it runs through. We even have a phrase for a man who rambles on. He is wasting water.

Marcus Valerius

Then the eighth hour comes, and from somewhere down the narrow street behind the insulae, I hear it. A bronze clang, rolling and rolling between the walls. The bell of the baths. It means the furnace is stoked, the hot rooms are ready, and the working day is over for any man who has a quadrans in his purse. Martial says the eighth and ninth are enough for the oiled wrestlers, and the ninth hour invites us to press the piled up couches of the banquet. By the tenth, a modest household like mine sits down to dinner.

Marcus Valerius

So I stand, I shake the dust from my toga, and I walk toward that sound. No tick, no tock. A shadow crossing travertine, a bell down the street, a hunger in the belly that Plautus would approve of. That is how Rome tells me the time. And tonight, in an hour that will be a good deal shorter than the one I started with, I will be asleep.