Time in History: Views of Time From Prehistory to the Present Day

by G. J. Whitrow

  Besides historiography and mathematical astronomy another great innovation by the Greeks of the fifth century BC was the art of tragedy. Jacqueline de Romilly, Professor of Greek Literature at the Sorbonne, in her Messenger Lectures at Cornell University in 1967 on 'Time in Greek Tragedy', has argued that it was no coincidence that Greek tragedy was born at the same time as historiography. Tragedy involves the past, and it arose when the Greek awareness of time was becoming clearer and stronger. Greek tragedy concerns a single problem that becomes more and more urgent until it culminates in crime. A short continuous crisis, the origins and consequences of which cover a long period, seems to be the double requirement of tragedy and its double relationship to time. 'Its strength rests on a contrast between before and after; and the deeper

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  the contrast the more tragic the event.'12 Nevertheless, as Professor de Romilly makes clear, the Greeks disliked showing the action of time on moods and feelings. For example, when Euripides allows Iphigeneia to change her decision within a short time, Aristotle was shocked!

  Contact with other nations ( Egypt in the case of Herodotus) led to a greater awareness of the past, because of the evidence for long periods of time presented, for example, by the pyramids. Consequently many Greek writers of the fifth century and later realized that their own society was the end-product of a long period of advance. The more sophisticated Greeks were thus made to regard man in pre-Trojan times as much the same as his distant offspring, and this tended to demythologize the Greek legends, thereby placing the past in quite a new perspective.

  After the fifth century, however, few, except writers on scientific subjects, had any belief in the idea of progress in the future. Indeed, the typical Greek tended to be backward-looking, since the future appeared to him to be the domain of total uncertainty, his only guide to it being delusive expectation. As for the philosophers, Plato thought that all progress consisted in trying to approximate to a pre-existing model in the timeless world of transcendental forms and Aristotle believed that it was the realization of a form which was already present potentially. Thus, for both of them the theory of forms excluded all possibility of evolution. Even in the sciences it was thought in later antiquity that all wisdom lay in the past. As E. R. Dodds has remarked, 'where men can build their systems only out of used pieces the notion of progress can have no meaning--the future is devalued in advance'.13 Consequently, it is not surprising that in this period the main philosophical schools tended to reject the idea of progress and to hold cyclical views concerning the nature of time. Aristotle himself believed that the arts and the sciences have been discovered many times and then lost again. For example in the Meteorologica ( 339b27) he asserts: 'We must say that the same opinions have arisen among men in cycles, not once, twice, nor a few times, but infinitely often.'

  Nevertheless, Arnoldo Momigliano has warned us that many Greek historians, as distinct from philosophers, paid little attention to the cyclical concept of time.14 He has also pointed out that the future did not loom so large for them as it did for the Roman historians, who were anxious about the fate of their empire. Instead, the Greeks were more concerned with the present and the past. Writing c. 40 BC, the historian Diodorus Siculus said of his predecessors:

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  Two views about the origin of mankind have been current among the most notable scientists and historians. One school, premising that the cosmos is ungenerated and indestructible, declares that the human race has always existed, and there was no time when it began to reproduce itself. The other holds that the cosmos has been generated and may be destroyed, and that men similarly first came into existence at a definite time.15

  As regards the cyclical view, Momigliano says that the principal upholder of it in Greek historiography was Polybius (c. 202-120 BC), but this opinion is based only on the constitutional chapters in his history of the world, for elsewhere he shows no sign of it. For example, he did not treat the Punic wars as repetitions of events that had already occurred in the past and would occur again in the future. His main theme was the increasing power of Rome in the Mediterranean and this, as Momigliano points out, provided him with a new historical perspective: 'Just because Fortune made almost all the affairs of the world incline in one direction, it is the historian's task to put before his readers a compendious view of the ways in which Fortune accomplished her purposes.'16

  The concept of Fortune (i.e. Fate or Destiny) played a crucial role in later Hellenic thought, but different views were held. Aristotle criticized Democritus (c. 460-390 BC) for believing only in efficient and not in final causes, that is, in strict determinism rather than in teleology. Aristotle believed that strict determinism must be rejected because it destroys the natural basis for distinguishing between voluntary and involuntary actions. For the purposes of law some actions must be regarded as voluntary, since only these can be justifiably punished. For Aristotle this argument was decisive. Similarly, although Epicurus ( 342-270 BC) unlike Aristotle accepted Democritus' atomism, he too rejected Democritus' belief in the strict determinism of all human actions. Instead of teleology, however, Epicurus advocated the existence of chance and free will, partly because, like Aristotle, he argued that you cannot blame or punish a man for something he cannot help doing, but also because he believed that there is a kind of spontaneity in men (and possibly in animals) that is manifested in our apparent freedom, to originate actions. Epicurus introduced the famous 'swerve' into the chain of strict causality, so as to account both for human free will and also for the existence of random motion in the universe; for otherwise all bodies would, in his opinion, fall with the same speed downwards. It was by stressing the chance element in destiny that he was led to the hedonistic philosophy of 'eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die!'

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  A very different point of view was advocated by the Stoics, beginning with Zeno of Citium ( 335-263 BC). Zeno and his followers rejected Plato's two-worlds theory of ideal forms and sense data. Instead, they believed in the organic unity of the whole universe, and they regarded intelligence as a refined material substance with a fiery nature. Unlike the Epicureans, the Stoics were strict determinists who advocated a philosophy of resignation in the face of worldly difficulties. For them Fate had a cyclical, or eternally recurrent, character. It was identified with Necessity and was symbolized by the unceasing rotation of a wheel, like the mythical wheel of Ixion. Since Fate was the power that kept order in the universe, as revealed particularly by the stars and planets, the prevalence of Stoicism influenced the growing belief in astrology in Hellenistic times and in the days of the Roman empire. The cyclical nature of events was regarded by many thinkers as inevitable, because it was thought that otherwise they would be deprived of both 'rationality' and 'legality'.

  In late antiquity, both Plutarch (c. AD 46-120), the famous biographer and moral philosopher, and Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. c. AD 200), an important commentator on Aristotle, criticized the views of the Stoics, as well as those of the Epicureans. Although he did not completely discard the astrological concept of destiny, Plutarch argued that there was a place in it for contingency. He formulated explicit definitions of 'necessity' and 'contingency' that are somewhat like the modern definitions of 'analytic' and 'synthetic': 'The necessary is a possibility, the contradiction of which is impossible, but the contingent is a possibility, the contradiction of which is also possible.'17 This distinction applies particularly to the future. Like Plutarch, Alexander of Aphrodisias argued that not everything is the product of inevitable destiny, since things that are produced by reason and by artists in the exercise of their craft 'do not seem to be produced by them through necessity, for they make each one of them indeed, but they are equally at liberty not to do so'.18

  Just as there was no unique Greek idea of time, the history of the human race also presented itself to the Greeks in various forms. Besides the cyclical view and the progressive, there was the important tradition concerning a Golden Age in the remote
past. The earliest extant account of this is to be found in the Works and Days of Hesiod (c.700 BC), who sought to account thereby for man's present condition and, in particular, for his need to work. According to Hesiod, in the 'good old days' before the lordship of Zeus when his father Kronos was king, there was a

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  Golden Age. Strictly speaking, Hesiod refers to a golden race rather than to the golden age of later writers. The idea of a primeval golden age can be traced back to the Sumerians (c. 2000 BC). For them its most significant feature was freedom from fear. According to a Sumerian poet: 'Once upon a time there was no snake, there was no scorpion, / There was no hyena, there was no lion, / There was no wild dog, no wolf, / There was no fear, no terror, / Man had no rival.'19

  According to Hesiod the age of idle luxury was followed successively by an age of heroes, a silver age, an age of bronze, and finally by the present iron age. Contrary to our knowledge today, this last was considered to be less civilized than the bronze age that preceded it. The original decline from the primeval Golden Age was explained by the myth of Prometheus, which has points of resemblance to the Hebrew myth of 'The Fall' described in Genesis. These include not only the creation of woman ( Pandora corresponding to Eve) and the alleged evils that followed therefrom, but also the acquisition of 'forbidden knowledge', which in the Greek case included the discovery of fire.

  By the classical period of Greek thought the myth of the Golden Age had partially given way to the opposite idea that man's early condition was nasty, brutish and short'. According to Moschion, who lived about the third century BC but wrote in the spirit of a century or two earlier, it was due to Time--'the begetter and nurturer of all things'--that 'The earth, once barren, began to be ploughed by yoked oxen, towered cities arose, men built sheltering homes and turned their lives from savage ways to civilized.'20 Some writers on cyclical theories explicitly held out the hope that, although the world was in decline, the wheel would turn again so that eventually another Golden Age would repeat the idyllic conditions of the remote past. In his Politics Plato put forward a myth of cyclical change in which the creator imparts rotation to the universe and keeps it under his rule until, at the end of an era, he releases control. Thereupon the world reverses its rotation and everything starts to deteriorate until God reasserts his control and lets the universe rotate once again in the same direction as before. W. K. C. Guthrie, who has drawn attention to this myth, also points out that what Aristotle particularly deplored in the recurrent world catastrophes was the loss of accumulated knowledge and wisdom that they entailed.21 Aristotle also doubted whether there could be time without thinking beings, since he regarded time as not merely succession but 'succession in so far as it is numbered', and nothing can be numbered unless there is someone to do the counting. The germ of this idea can be traced back to the sophist

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  Antiphon (c.480-411 BC), one of whose fragments contains the earliest Greek definition of time.22 According to this definition, time has no substantive existence but is a mental concept or means of measurement--a point of view that strikes us today as being remarkably modern.

  Finally, in surveying the role of time in ancient Greece, brief mention must be made of the instruments available for its measurement. Besides the gnomon, or sundial, and the clepsydra, or water-clock, an improved version of which with a more constant flow was invented by Ctesibius of Alexandriac. 270 BC, there is evidence of more elaborate instrumentation, such as the 'Tower of the Winds' which can still be seen in Athens, north of the Acropolis. Designed and built by the astronomer Andronicus Kyrrhestes of Macedonia in the second quarter of the first century BC, with a wind vane and complicated sundials on each of its eight walls, its most interesting feature is a reservoir in a smaller building that stood next to its south side. Water from a nearby spring kept it filled. This is a requirement for water-docks of the inflow type. With a constant bead of pressure, the flow of water from a tap near the base of the reservoir could also be kept constant. The tap could be regulated so that the water flowing from it filled another tank in exactly twenty-four hours, while raising a float inside the tank a fixed distance. With a water- dock inside the tower and sundials outside, visitors could observe the time both by day and by night and also when the sky was cloudy as well as when it was clear. To cope with the traditional use of variable hours, so that the period of daylight always comprised twelve, Andronicus is thought to have used a system that is described in detail by his Roman contemporary, the architect Vitruvius. The clock's float was connected by a line to a counter-weight and this line passed round a horizontal shaft. As the float rose the shaft rotated and so did a circular metal plate attached to the end of it. On this plate was depicted a map of the heavens, and holes along the line of the ecliptic made it possible for a representation of the sun to be moved at intervals of a day or two in imitation of its annual motion. A complete rotation of the map every twenty-four hours simulated the daily rotation of the heavens. A grid of reference wires in front of the rotating map presented the hours, and as the solar image passed each wire it indicated the time as well as any sundial could. J. V. Noble and D. J. de Solla Price, who have described this Tower of the Winds in detail, believe that the interior must have been a dazzling sight. ( Price has called the Tower of Winds 'a sort of Zeiss planetarium, of the classical world'.) They conjecture that Poseidon was a central

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  figure between two fountains and that Hercules and Atlas held the wire grid before the bright disk which simulated the motion of the heavens. 'We live in an era in which we accept science and technology as commonplace,' Noble and Price conclude, 'and we expect them and our architecture to be efficient and functional. Athens . . . was a place of wonder and beauty, and it was a time to marvel at the achievements of mathematicians and astronomers--a time to build and admire a Tower of the Winds.'23

  Ancient Israel

  It has for long been held that our modern idea of time derives from that of early Christianity, which in turn can be traced back to that of ancient Israel and Judaism. Instead of adopting the cyclical idea of time, the Jews are said to have believed in a linear concept, based in their case on a teleological idea of history as the gradual revelation of God's purpose. Although there is much to support this view of the origin of our modern idea of time, it is now realized that it can only be adhered to with some reservations, as we shall see.

  Following the Exodus from Egypt and the Settlement in Canaan in the latter part of the second millenium BC, the Jews found themselves in a region which was on the main line of communication between Egypt and Babylonia. Some time after the reigns of Saul, David, and Solomon the Jewish realm split into two. In 722 BC the northern kingdom, Israel, was overthrown and its capital destroyed by Sargon II. Two years later its people were deported to Assyria. In 586 BC the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem, including the Temple, and many of the inhabitants of the southern kingdom, Judaea, were deported to Babylonia. According to Theodore Vriezen, Professor of Old Testament Studies at the University of Utrecht, the Babylonians deported mainly the upper classes and left perhaps 20,000 of the lower classes behind, so as not to let the country fall into total decay.24

  The reaction of the Jews to these vicissitudes of fortune was profound. Appeal was made to the past for evidence of divine providence, current misfortune being explained as punishment for unfaithfulness to Yahweh, or God. It was believed that, if the nation were to become more zealous in its service of God, there would be more hope of deliverance. Although this was predicted to occur at some unspecified date in the future, belief in it was strengthened by the promise of a Messiah who would defeat Israel's enemies and restore the nation to its former glory. Consequently, the essential aim of the Jewish God in history was the salvation of Israel.

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  The definitive account of this belief was presented in the Book of Daniel, written long after the return from the Babylonian Exile under the stress of danger from the Seleucids just before the Macc
abean rising in the second century BC. The appeal to the past was thus developed into a forward-looking philosophy of history. It has therefore frequently been maintained that for the ancient Hebrews time was a unidirectional linear process extending from the divine act of creation to the ultimate accomplishment of God's purpose and the final triumph, here on earth, of the chosen people, Israel.

  According to the theologian O. Cullmann in his book Christ and Time, 'the symbol of time for primitive Christianity as well as for Biblical Judaism . . . is the upward sloping line, while in Hellenism it is the circle'.25 On the other hand, the historian of political philosophy J. G. Gunnell has argued that, although the Hebrews were more oriented towards the future than the Greeks, who tended to look more towards the past, 'the concept of linear progression is a rationalization of the Hebrew experience of temporality'.26 More recently another historian, G. W. Trompf in his study The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, has drawn attention to the prevalence of what he calls 'notions of re-enactment' in the Old Testament which formed an ideological basis for the great Israelite festivals. Trompf also cites examples of reenactment in Hebrew historiography, such as the crossing of the Jordan in Joshua, which was consciously likened to the traversing of the Red Sea in Exodus, and the similarity of the Babylonian exile to the earlier Egyptian bondage.27 Moreover, even in eschatology and its presentation in terms of history, the idea of the future that dominated Hebrew thought involved a return to the primeval state that the Jews believed they had lost.28 In other words, although they transferred their own Golden Age from the past to the future, a quasi-cyclical factor was involved.