An issue of abiding concern, time seems a particularly pressing one at the moment. Renewed interest in chronology and time-reckoning within specific cultural contexts; a readiness to experiment with temporality even in mainstream novels, cinema and television; the recent vogue for counterfactual history; reflections about the nature of time in physics; controversies in epistemology about relativism and in politics over ‘the end of history’ – all attest to current preoccupations with time. Whether events are seen as determined or as contingent deeply affects our sense of ourselves and our actions. Debates over concepts central to human experience (causation, choice, knowledge, identity, hope and desire) have often been related to human beliefs about time and the different ways we situate ourselves in relation to past, present and future. Antiquity and the Meanings of Time will engage with these issues, but first, a few remarks on what this book is not. It is not about ancient chronologies, which have recently received the expert attention of Denis Feeney in Caesar’s Calendar (2007). Nor is it a history of ancient theories of time, of which the standard treatment remains Richard Sorabji’s Time, Creation and the Continuum (1983). Nor is it a philosophical investigation of time per se, though the metaphysics of time cannot but come into the reckoning.
Rather, it takes as its point of departure Paul Ricoeur’s influential observation in Time and Narrative (1984–88) that
between the activity of narrating a story and the temporal character of human experience there exists a correlation that is not merely accidental but that presents a transcultural form of necessity. To put it another way, time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence.1
The philosophical consideration of time, he suggests, leads to irresoluble aporias. He invokes, as many have done before him and many will again, Augustine’s agonised reflection as he contemplates time in the Confessions (11.14.17): ‘What is time?...We surely know what we mean when we speak of it. We also know what is meant when we hear someone else talking about it. What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an enquirer, I do not know.’ That is not to rule out, even if we could, the question of the nature of time;2 however, what we should not expect to come upon is a definitive answer. Aristotle looks outward towards the physical world to define time not as movement but as having ‘something to do with movement’ (though conceding also that ‘it is impossible for there to be time if there is no mind – except that there might still be whatever it is that time is’ [Physics 4.14]). By contrast, Plotinus insists that we turn inward (looking outward only to the eternity that time for him mimics), and Augustine develops this internalisation of time in his notion of the stretching out of consciousness (distentio animi). Ricoeur terms these approaches to time respectively the ‘cosmological’ and the ‘psychological’.
The psychological conception of time can, he argues, legitimately be added to the cosmological conception but cannot replace it, and neither conception can absorb the other into a unified account of the nature of time.3 ‘A constant thesis of this book,’ he remarks, ‘will be that speculation on time is an inconclusive rumination to which narrative activity alone can respond.’4 We may never be able to say, finally, what time is, but we can, through the various stories we tell, gain purchase on our experience of time. He asserts that ‘what is ultimately at stake in the case of the structural identity of the narrative function, is the temporal character of human experience. The world unfolded by every narrative work is always a temporal world.’ He then states what is the mantra of his work: ‘time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience.’5
Although Ricoeur is the starting point for this book, it is not a book about Ricoeur nor a systematic critique of his ideas;6 in that sense it is after Ricoeur. Nor is it a book exclusively about narrative, although the analysis of narrative will be a prominent concern. Genevieve Lloyd has suggested that Ricoeur’s distinction between philosophy and literature in Time and Narrative is too rigid, and that philosophy also fashions its own sorts of ‘fictions’ through which we extend our understanding of what is problematic in the human experience of time.7 She also points to the ‘changes in the angle of intellectual vision’ that philosophical writings have provided on the relations between time and consciousness. Gary Saul Morson has put it well:
Intellectual models – whether pertaining to the natural or the social world, to history or psychology, to ethics or politics – implicitly or explicitly depend on a specific sense of time. Some of our schools of thought seek to transcend time, others to reveal the temporality of all things, but in one way or another our interest in time is chronic.8
So, Antiquity and the Meanings of Time will seek to address the questions raised by temporality in discourse more generally, and in particular the ways in which time is configured in acts of interpretation, including my own. The relationship between time and texts is a fiendishly complex one which I hope the chapters that follow will help to disentangle a little. The chapters each address specific issues which are adumbrated in the introductions, but arcs of argument bridge them. The issues raised are often ones of very long standing, but the texts from what we call ‘antiquity’ – a term that will come under scrutiny in the final chapter – continue to address these questions in fresh and unforeseen ways. Each chapter takes as its focus the analysis of a ‘classical’ text – Augustine’s Confessions, Virgil’s Aeneid, Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, Livy’s monumental history of Rome, and Lucretius’s poetic exposition of Epicurean philosophy – but then brings in texts of other times and other provenances to tease out some of the interpretative issues raised in the course of reading them.
We hear a lot these days about research-led teaching, but this book is, unashamedly, the result of teaching-led research. For ten years at the University of Bristol, I co-taught a final-year undergraduate unit entitled ‘Time, Temporality and Texts’ which rejoiced in a wonderfully flexible syllabus that brought a welcome element of the unexpected into the learning experience we shared. Each cohort of students introduced me in their seminar presentations to books and movies I was unfamiliar with, and which wrestled with intriguing configurations of temporality; they kept me thinking with their enthusiasm, curiosity and insights, and with questions to which I knew I was responding inadequately. I was fortunate to have over that period three intellectually agile colleagues as co-teachers – Genevieve Liveley, Joanna Paul and Ika Willis – whose commitment to the pleasures and challenges of reading have made this the most enjoyable experience of my academic career. They will recognise here much that they have made me familiar with, but I hope they will find a thing or two to surprise them yet. When the time came to condense this into a book, I received help, guidance and encouragement, without which it would never have been completed, from Alessandro Barchiesi, Simon Goldhill, Stephen Hinds, Charles Martindale, Ellen O’Gorman and Alex Wright at I.B.Tauris – whose patience I have abused for long enough. The research and writing of the book was to a significant extent made possible by the award of a two-year Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust, which is owed the greatest respect and gratitude by many for its continuing commitment, against the grain, to funding research projects that are open-ended and embrace a future that is, as yet, unknown.