Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Space and Time 51
The author of an inscribed marble column known as the Marmor
Parium, who claimed to have “written up the dates [of Athenian history]
from the beginning,” maintained that Kekrops, the first king
of Athens, came to the throne 1,218 years prior to the setting up of
the inscription in 264/3 b.c.e. In the same century, the geographer
Eratosthenes devised a dating system that took as its departure the
fall of Troy, which he assigned (not inaccurately, it may well be) to
1183 b.c.e.
Like other Greeks, Athenians did not celebrate the New Year,
mainly because their calendar, which was based on the phases of
the moon, was in a state of almost constant turmoil. A lunar calendar
is extremely convenient in a subliterate society for arranging
the dates of monthly festivals, payment of debts, public assemblies,
and so forth. As a basis for marking the passage of the seasons,
however, it is virtually useless, because the lunar year is 11 days
shorter than the solar year. Because, however, the success of the
harvest was thought to depend on ritual activity performed at precise
moments of the year, the Greeks had to intercalate (i.e., insert)
an extra month from time to time in order to keep their calendar in
line with the annual circuit of the sun. In fact, over a 19-year cycle,
they had to intercalate seven extra months.
The End of the World?
Although the Greeks were spared the anxiety that is associated
with global warming, they did have an appreciation that the
world’s biological clock was running down. One indication of this
was the perceived diminution in human stature and capability. In
The Iliad, for instance, Homer claims that the heroes who fought at
Troy were giants compared with the men of his day. A Greek warrior
called Diomedes, for instance, effortlessly picked up a stone
“which two men could not lift, of the kind that mortals are today”
(5.302–4). Belief in the earth’s biological decline was not confined
to the hyperbolic medium of Greek epic. Herodotos tells us that,
in Egypt, a sandal had been preserved two cubits in length, which
had once belonged to the hero Perseus. Likewise, the image of a
giant footstep made by Herakles was allegedly engraved on a rock
in Scythia (2.91.3; 4.82).
A particularly bleak prophecy, which may well reflect deteriorating
economic and social circumstances in the late eighth and early
seventh centuries, appears in Hesiod’s Works and Days. The poet
informs his audience that they are presently living in the Age of