How Did Romans Order their Day? What We Know and What We Don’t Know

James Ker, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania

There are many modern handbooks entitled “Daily Life in Ancient Rome”, because many ancient Roman texts give information about everyday time. This talk will review the history of daily timekeeping at Rome, the ordering of people’s lives within the structures of the day, and the use of “Roman daily life” as a convenient framework for organizing what we know. But there are also many “untold times”, since not everyone’s time was equally valued in the ancient world and there are problems with our evidence and sometimes also with our methods. How close can we get to recovering the “untold times” of the Roman day?