The Unity of Time in Plautus’ Captivi
By Robert Germany
Roman comedy follows the practice of its Greek models in conforming to the Unity of Time, i.e. the events represented in the play do not extend over more than one day of story time. It has long been recognized that, apart from the striking exception of the Heautontimorumenos, all the plays of Plautus and Terence abide by this stricture (see, for example, Duckworth 1952, 130-31), but scholarship on these comedies has yet to take full account of their self-conscious play with this temporal limit.
A Doctor on the Clock: The Roles of Clocks and Hours in Galen’s Medical Treatises
By Kassandra Jackson
At the time of writing, databases list over 500 examples of sundials and water clocks from the Greek and Roman worlds. These clocks range in date from the 4th c. BCE to the end of antiquity and appear in both urban and rustic settings throughout the Roman Empire. Monumental sundials and water clocks have been found in sanctuaries, marketplaces, and theaters; smaller, fixed clocks appear in bathhouses, gymnasia, and gardens; while portable devices have been found included among grave goods, dedicated as offerings in temples, or simply left lying in the street.
Chronos as all-encompassing – Plato’s Unification of Time
By Barbara Sattler
This paper aims to show that Plato’s account of time in the Timaeus can be understood as the first attempt to provide a universal temporal framework by synthesizing many of the preceding notions of time. The secondary literature on time in the Timaeus (cf. as especially influential Vlastos, Mohr and Broadie) simply takes such a universal framework for granted, since it does not look at the Platonic account in connection to preceding temporal notions in early Greek literature – philosophical as well as non-philosophical.
The Greco-Roman Sundial as Virtuoso Greek Mathematics
By Alexander Jones
More than 500 Greco-Roman sundials are extant in varying degrees of preservation (Bonnin 2012). There is a profusion of types, differentiated by shape and orientation, for example spherical and conical bowls, horizontal planes, equatorial planes, and vertical planes facing the various cardinal directions (Gibbs 1976). While the most common manner in which the moving Sun indicates the time of day and year is by a gnomon shadow, some types project sunlight through an eyehole on a shaded surface, or track the moving boundary between the illuminated and shaded part of the sundial's surface.