Society and contemporary culture seem forever fascinated by the topic of time. In modern fiction, Ian McEwan (The Child in Time) and Martin Amis (Time’s Arrow) have led the way in exploring the human condition in relation to past, present and future. In cinema, several cultural texts (Memento, Minority Report, The Hours) have similarly reflected a preoccupation with temporality and human experience. And in the sphere of politics, debates about the ‘end of history’, prompted by Francis Fukuyama, indicate that how we live is deeply determined by our relationship not only to place but also to the passing of time. But what did the ancients think about time? Is our interest in chronology a relatively recent phenomenon? Or does it go further back? In his major new work, Duncan F. Kennedy indicates that our own fascination with time-reckoning is by no means unique. Discussing a number of key texts (such as Homer’s Odyssey; Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex; Virgil’s Aeneid; and Augustine’s Confessions) and imaginatively setting these side-by-side with modern works (such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four; the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges; and Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time), he shows that, from era to era, and in different ways, human beings have uniformly striven to understand the unfolding of history and their relationship to it. This sophisticated cross-disciplinary book will appeal not only to classicists, but also to scholars and students in the humanities more broadly, as well as beyond.

Duncan F. Kennedy is Professor Emeritus of Latin Literature and the Theory of Criticism in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Bristol University. In addition he is the co-editor, with Charles Martindale, of the ‘New Directions in Classics’ series published by I.B.Tauris. His previous books include The Arts of Love: Five Studies in the Discourse of Roman Love Elegy (1993) and Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and the Textualisation of Nature (2002).

‘Smart, wide ranging, fascinating and well written.’

– Simon Goldhill, Professor in Greek Literature and Culture,

‘What distinguishes Duncan Kennedy’s approach to the subject of time in antiquity is his focus on how conceptions of time are constituted in and by narrative. Where many scholars might use works like the Confessions, the Aeneid, Oedipus the King, Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, or Livy’s History as fragments allowing us to look backwards and recover the different thought worlds of Greece and Rome, Kennedy’s dazzlingly precise readings treat them as integral manifestations of time’s workings. And his lucid analyses look emphatically forward to place these works not so much behind as alongside those of Barthes, Amis, Borges and Heidegger in investigating how texts shape the way we think about divinity and empire, truth and free will. In equal measure challenging and absorbing, Kennedy’s exploration of time and narrative offers an exemplary demonstration, for classicists as well as non-classicists, of how Greek and Latin literature can enrich thought about ideas vital to contemporary experience.’

– Andrew Feldherr, Professor of Classics, Princeton University