Kassandra J. Miller (Colby College)
By the Roman Imperial period, tools for hourly timekeeping, such as sundials and water clocks, had become so widespread that monumental versions could be found in many urban squares, sanctuaries, and gymnasia; and private clocks had become common sights in the gardens (and even on the persons—see Talbert 2017) of the sociocultural elite. Over the past two decades, modern scholars (see, for example, the contributions in Miller and Symons 2020) have become increasingly interested in reconstructing how the elite, male authors whose works have come down to us interacted with clocks, and how these tools influenced the ways that they organized, valued, and experienced time within their days. However, few attempts have yet been made to discover how subalterns, such as enslaved men and women, interacted with and thought about the clocks in their environments, and how their experiences with hourly timekeeping might compare with those of the educated male elite.
The proposed paper addresses these questions by considering a series of short case studies drawn from a wide range of sources. The paper examines inscriptions from Puteoli (AE 1971. 88 II), Crete (SEG 26: 1044), and Iberia (the Lex Metalli Vipascensis), and puts them in conversation with literary references (from Galen’s On Hygiene and Suetonius’ Life of Augustus) and the artistic trope, manifest in statuettes and on sarcophagi, of depicting enslaved persons standing next to sundials. Ultimately, this paper will demonstrate how daily timekeeping practices and regimens could be used to reinforce the power imbalances in Roman societies between free and enslaved, male and female.