Acknowledgments
The idea for this volume first germinated in 2015 when Kassandra Jackson Miller (then at the University of Chicago) and the late Robert Germany (Haverford) decided to organize a panel on “Representations of Time in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds” at the 2016 annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies. This panel, which also featured papers by Alexander Jones and Barbara Sattler, was so stimulating that the four speakers felt a follow-up conference was needed, which would allow them to dig more deeply into the material and involve more voices in the conversation. Thus, in February 2017, they reconvened at the University of Chicago for a conference, organized by Miller, called “Down to the Hour: Perspectives on Short Time in the Ancient Mediterranean.” The chapters of the present volume represent revised versions of papers delivered at this conference, as well as pieces specially commissioned from other experts.
We are grateful to the many individuals and institutions without whom this project might never have come to fruition. The Society for Classical Studies and the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago provided us with important venues in which our ideas could be developed. New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, as well as University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, Fishbein Center for the History of Science and Medicine, Center for the Study of Ancient Religion, Stevanovich Institute for the Formation of Knowledge, and the departments of Classics and of Near Eastern Languages & Literature contributed funding to the conference at the University of Chicago and thereby helped us to bring participants to the United States from Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Many thanks are owed to Prof. Christopher Faraone (University of Chicago), who helped to facilitate the conference and advised the editors of this volume at critical junctures along the way, and to Giulia Moriconi, Assistant Editor of Classical Studies for Brill, who has guided us through the publication process. We would also like to thank the Israel Institute for Advanced Study, which hosted several of our contributors as part of its working group on “The Day Unit in Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” led by Profs. Sacha Stern and Jonathan Ben-Dov.
The editors wish to express their gratitude to the contributors to this volume, to the other colleagues who attended or participated in the activities out of which this volume grew, and to our families who supported us throughout the editorial process.
Our final thanks must be reserved for Robert Germany, who did not live to see this volume completed. His sudden death in 2017 saddened the authorial team deeply. His future contributions to the field must surely have enriched it, and we dedicate this volume to his memory.