As it is now at the margins of the twenty-first-century global economic imperium, so it was everywhere in antiquity, in Egypt and Mesopotamia as in Africa, India, and China, when time was understood by its human companions not as the measure of an abstract quantity but as a particular and concrete experience. Myriad sorts and kinds of time, all of them vividly alive in wind and leaf, bird and water, shifting with the change of mood or weather, marching to different drums in different directions, turning on the wheel of fortune that is the revolving of the sun and moon, flowing into the rivers Nile and Styx. Hesiod’s Works and Days, the preclassical Greek poem dating from around 700 BC, names the days of the month in accordance with their character (“Beware of all fifth days; they are harsh and angry”) or for their alignment with a human undertaking, some days good “for shearing sheep,” other days “to geld the boar and the bellowing bull.”
Lewis H. Lapham
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