Presocratic Age

Time in Presocratic Greece

In the Presocratic world of the Greeks, as across ancient civilizations, the sky was the universal timepiece. The time length from sunrise to sunrise was the natural basic unit of recording time. Each day was divided into 12 parts, as was the night, which would change in length by the season. Time within the daylight hours would have been told by sun dial; time across day and night would have been measured by a terra cotta water clock (clepsydra)

The ancient Greeks used a lunar/solar calendar, using both sun and moon, of 12 months. Each month was a lunar cycle. In addition, there were alternate months with 29 or 30 days and alternate years of 354 or 384 days. Extras days or even months were inserted in the calendar to prevent accumulated error. Nautical Greeks navigated and estimated time during the night by the movement of the constellations, planets, moon, and stars. Each city-state kept its own calendar, maintained by magistrates, which began at the new moon. Athenians began the year in summer, and it ran from July to June. Years were marked off into 4-year cycles, called olympiads. The first year of Olympiad 1 was 776 BCE. The cycles of the Milky Way would have been the final, limiting hand on the cosmic clock (by repeating its four-fold pattern in its own time). There were also planetary conjunctions and eclipses recorded. Astronomers used such cycles to correct accumulated error in the calendar.

Early Greeks had a circular notion of time; at the beginning of time was a primordial event that began the subsequent cycles of time. Human beings celebrated the passing and coming-to-be of cycles with festivals that harkened back to the first days (in Ulo tempore, ab origine, as Mircea Eliade put it). And indeed many months on the Greek calendar were named after festivals. Time was thought of as a cycle of festivals rather than as an abstraction. The early Greeks adopted much from Egypt, including calendar making. Greek civilization had gone through the Bronze Age during the Homeric period, but their folk religions bore witness to a distant Neolithic past, as well. Olympian sky gods had displaced mother earth goddesses and agricultural gods along with the Titans.

...