ROMAN TIME
 
For the most part, Romans organized time differently from us, although there are similarities.  We inherited their organization of the months.  Our calendar with months that vary in number of days from 30 to 31, with a 28 day February, is almost exactly the one created by a reform of the calendar made under Julius Caesar.  Before the reform, Rome had a lunar calendar that was very difficult to reconcile with the solar year.  With a lunar calendar you must insert extra days every year to make the year come out right seasonally.  Throughout their history, the Romans were very careless about inserting these necessary extra days, so by Caesar's day (1st century BC), the calendar was three months ahead of the seasons.  For example, a festival (with a fixed date on the calendar) that was originally intended to be celebrated in the late spring was coming too early (in late winter).

Another element of Roman time that is foreign to us is the absence of the week.  Our seven day week did not become part of Roman life until late in their history (321 AD).  The week divided into seven days named after planets was borrowed from the Babylonians by way of the Jews.  The seven day week of late Roman times has survived in the French names for the days (except for Sunday, which the French call dimanche, "the Lord's Day"): lundi (same as Monday, "the moon's day"), mardi ("Mars' day" = Tuesday: we substitute a Germanic divinity's name, as with Wednesday, Thursday and Friday), mercredi ("Mercury's day" = Wednesday), jeudi ("Jupiter's day"  = Thursday), vendredi ("Venus' day" = Friday), and samedi ("Saturn's day" = Saturday).  Before the fourth century AD,  the Romans did have a division of the month based on a market day recurring every eight days.  The market day was called nundinae (novem dies = "nine days," the Romans counted both ends of a series), but this unit of time did not seem to shape the lives of the ancient Romans the way our week does for ours with its regular recurring rest days at its end (Saturday and Sunday).  But don't feel sorry for the Romans for not having the weekend, they had plenty of irregularly recurring holidays.

The Romans had two ways of referring to a specific year; they gave the names of the two consuls who were in office for that year.  We do something similar with our presidents, but when we say that such and such happened when Jimmy Carter was president we know that the event took place in the late seventies, but nothing more exact than that.  The Roman use of the consuls' names for the year made the identification of a specific year difficult, unless one had access to a year-by-year list of consuls, so this dating system must have been inexact at best.  One system of identifying specific years  that some Roman historians use gives the year a number, counting forward from the date of the founding of the city (AUC, "from the founding of the city [ab urbe condita]).  Julius Caesar was assassinated in AUC 709, which we call 44 BC (BC and AD dating was not introduced until the 6th century AD).  The Romans did not shape history in the form of numbered centuries (e.g., the nineteenth century).

As for identifying a particular day of the month, Romans did not determine the numerical date by counting from the beginning of the month, but by expressing the date with reference to three temporal markers in the month: the kalends (cf. calendar), the first day of the month; the nones, the fifth or seventh day; and the ides the thirteenth or fifteenth day of the month.  The nones and ides came later in March, May, July, and October.  All dates that fell between these markers would be identified by counting back from the next marker.  For example,  the Romans called February 13 days before the Kalends of March.  If you are wondering why this date is not twelve days before the first day of March, you must remember that the Romans counted both ends of a series, so the number is always one more than we expect it to be.

The Romans divided up the day in a way that seems familiar to us.   Their day was divided into 12 hours from dawn to sunset and 12 hours from sunset to dawn.  The difference is that, as we all know, daylight is shorter at certain times of the year and longer at others.  Therefore for the Romans, the length of an hour varied by the season.  Twelve hours of daylight in December required shorter hours than twelve hours of daylight in June.  The length of the hour varied between two extremes:  45 minutes long at the winter solstice and 75 minutes long at the summer solstice.   Our hour divided (no matter what the season) into 60 minutes and 3600 seconds is a creation of the mechanical clock, which of course was unknown to the Romans.  The Roman based the time of the day on their observation of the sun and the shadows it created.  The device that helped them divide up the day into hours according to the season was the sundial.  In 264 BC a Roman general brought the first Greek sundial (horologium) to Rome from Greek Sicily and had it set up in the forum.  Of course, the sundial did not work on cloudy days and in the dark, but in these conditions the Greek water clock (clepsydra) served very well.  In 10 BC, Augustus set up a horologium in the Campus Martius with a obelisk as a pointer, with bronze lines on  pavement below to mark the hour and the day of the month.   The choice of an obelisk imported from Egypt as a pointer was significant because it was intended to remind Romans of Augustus' defeat of Antony and Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt in the battle of Actium (31 BC), which made Augustus the sole ruler of the Roman world.  As we shall see, this was not the only obelisk that Augustus set up in Rome.
 

 
This is an obelisk, but not the one that Augustus used for his horologium;  that one stands in another part of Rome today.  This obelisk stands in front of the Pantheon.
 

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