Time, Power, and the People

Roman Calendars Without Privileging Western Chronologies

Studying ancient societies is difficult, and it helps to begin with the most basic point. Ordinary people rarely appear in the record. This problem is not only about loss over time. Many voices were never recorded in the first place. As modern scholars, we bring our own values to the past, and we tend to ask questions about daily life. We want to understand laborers, women, and enslaved people. These questions matter, yet the ancient systems that produced records did not share these priorities.

The Roman calendar demonstrates this principle directly. Because temporal organization prioritized elite civic and military activities, the structure of time itself marginalized ordinary people’s experiences, and the historical record we inherit necessarily reflects this hierarchy of what was considered worth counting and preserving.

To move a step further, it is important to see who controlled information. Elites managed literacy, shaped civic memory, and sponsored the monuments we now depend on. As a result, what survives reflects what they thought was worth preserving. With this in mind, the evidentiary gap becomes more than a frustration. It becomes a guide. Sparse traces encourage close reading.

Graffiti, legal petitions, and incidental references help. As we build toward a clearer understanding, the Roman calendar becomes a useful case study. By examining what the calendar counted, and what it ignored, we can see how time itself was organized around political power.

This creates a methodological puzzle. When we professional historians search for “the common people” in ancient sources, we are often looking for a category that the sources themselves did not prioritize or even fully recognize as historically significant. That does not mean ordinary people were not there, they obviously were, living full lives, making daily decisions, experiencing joy and suffering. It means the administrative and literary structures of their societies were not designed to capture those experiences as important data. Acknowledging this gap is not pessimistic; it is realistic. It helps us understand why the evidence is sparse and fragmentary.

Both Aboriginal and Hebraic traditions remind us that time can be cyclical, relational, and tied to land or covenant, demonstrating that Roman and modern Western calendars represent only one cultural logic for organizing temporal experience, not the universal standard.

* Info shown above. Recommended Scholarly Source: Anthony F. Aveni, Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures (1987; repr., Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2002), 308, note 7.

The Roman calendar offers a useful example of how this works in practice.

By examining what the calendar counted and what it ignored, we can see how temporal organization itself reflected political priorities. Here’s what the evidence suggests.

Early Roman Calendar ^[1]

– The original Roman calendar had ten months (March to December)

– Winter months were not initially part of the formal calendar

– Winter reduced military campaigns significantly

– Fields were dormant and roads became difficult

– The formal calendar year restarted in spring

– Mars was honored and campaigning resumed

Time as Action-Based ^[2]

– Roman timekeeping centered on ritual, religious festivals, farming, and warfare

– The calendar’s primary function was organizing religious observances

– Periods of reduced state activity received less calendrical structure

– Winter became less formally organized in the early system

– Numa’s reforms later added January and February

– This gave winter months formal names and festival dates

– The shift marked transition from a ten-month to twelve-month system

Who the Calendar Counted ^[3]

– The calendar primarily tracked elite activities: senators, magistrates, armies

– Months organized state and religious activity

– The calendar reflected the priorities of those with political power

– Laborers, women, enslaved persons, provincials, non-citizens had limited political standing

– These groups lived fully but had minimal role in official civic processes

– The state structured time around elite religious and political needs

– Calendar organization mirrored political hierarchies

Citizenship in the Christian New Testament as Temporal Access ^[4]

– Paul’s experience illustrates citizenship’s power

– Acts 22: Paul halted interrogation by asserting Roman citizenship

– Officials had to follow procedures that didn’t apply to non-citizens

– Acts 25: He appealed to Caesar (provocatio, a citizen right)

– Citizenship granted access to specific legal protections and processes

– The state’s attention and formal procedures suddenly engaged

– Most empire inhabitants lacked this legal status

– They existed within the empire but with different legal standing and protections

A note on what is missing here: I have shown what the calendar did organize, but I have not yet demonstrated the flip side, meaning specific examples of ordinary activities that occurred but left no calendrical trace. More research for identifying the absences in the record that correspond to my claims about deprioritization will develop the discussion of what should be there but is not.

The Acts passages about Paul are useful for illustrating Roman citizenship mechanics, but they come with methodological complications. First, Acts was written decades after the events it describes, with theological purposes that may have shaped how legal encounters were presented. Second, we lack independent corroboration for these specific incidents, Roman administrative records don’t survive to verify Paul’s appeals. This does not make the passages useless, but it does mean we should treat them as evidence of how the text shows how canonized Christian scripture presents the force of citizenship and the boundaries of legal status in the empire.

This framework helps us see how ancient systems prioritized some lives over others and why recovering ordinary experience requires careful, layered interpretation.

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^[1] Robert Hannah, “The Calendars of Rome,” in Greek and Roman Calendars: Constructions of Time in the Classical World, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005, 98-130.

^[2] Nathan Rosenstein, “Appendix 2: The Accuracy of the Roman Calendar Before 218 B.C.,” in Rome at War: Farms, Families, and Death in the Middle Republic (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 189–96.

^[3] Denis Feeney, Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History (Berkeley, CA: Univ of California Press, 2007), sec. Introduction and page 298, note 174.

^[4] John B. Polhill, “Paul Witnesses Before Gentiles, Kings, and the People of Israel (21:17–26:32),” in Acts: An Exegetical and Theological Exposition of Holy Scripture (Volume 26) (The New American Commentary) (Nashville, TN: B & H Publishing, 1992), 504–88.

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1. Image source. Daryn Lehoux, “Image, Text, and Pattern: Reconstructing Parapegmata,” in Instruments – Observations – Theories: Studies in the History of Astronomy in Honor of James Evans, ed. Alexander Jones and Christián Carman (New York: New York University Archive Online, 2020), 109–131. https://archive.nyu.edu/bitstream/2451/61288/52/07.%20Lehoux.pdf ↩︎