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A new history of time

How Christianity transformed antiquity
by
September 2022, no. 446

The Christian Invention of Time: Temporality and the literature of late antiquity by Simon Goldhill

Cambridge University Press, $66.95 hb, 500 pp

A new history of time

How Christianity transformed antiquity
by
September 2022, no. 446
Central part of a large floor mosaic, from a Roman villa in Sentinum  (now known as Sassoferrato, in Marche, Italy), c.200–250 ce. Aion, the god of eternity,  is standing inside a celestial sphere decorated with zodiac signs. (Detail from a photograph taken by Bibi St Pol at the Glyptothek, Munich/Wikimedia Commons)
Central part of a large floor mosaic, from a Roman villa in Sentinum (now known as Sassoferrato, in Marche, Italy), c.200–250 ce. Aion, the god of eternity, is standing inside a celestial sphere decorated with zodiac signs. (Detail from a photograph taken by Bibi St Pol at the Glyptothek, Munich/Wikimedia Commons)

Long gone are the days when the discipline of classics was almost exclusively focused on the golden ages of fifth-century Greek and first-century BCE Roman literature and their antecedents. During the past decades, under the leadership of the indomitable Peter Brown and others, the period of later antiquity has become a burgeoning field of research. Yet it cannot be said that the study of specifically Christian thought and literature has been fully integrated into this development. Too often it has remained the domain of departments of theology and religion and of their associated vehicles of publication. In his thought-provoking and stunningly erudite new cultural history of time, the distinguished Cambridge classicist Simon Goldhill not only diagnoses this state of affairs but also seeks to remedy it.

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