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The reach of the Romans' time schemes was very great. They extended back to the fall of Troy when the Roman story could be said to begin, and sideways to take in the developments of the empires of Greece and the Near East. Horace's generation, and the ones immediately before and after it, are the ones to which this article returned repeatedly. This was a period when things were changing fast, and many people were actively engaged in creative work with Roman time. Julius Caesar's reform of the calendar was only part of a revolution in the representation of time under the evolving new order, with all the inherited forms undergoing profound change. The Romans' chronographic perspectives were in many respects superseded by their successors in the Renaissance, but not before they had contributed fundamentally to the creation of a new set of instruments for the charting of time.

The question of how “alike” are the present and the distant past is one that preoccupies this chapter, and the fall of Troy will once again be an important focus. The chapter investigates the transition from myth into history from a rather different angle, with a data bank made up mainly of poetic, rather than historiographical, texts. It investigate the most important transition in myth, at once the most important beginning and ending moment in myth—the transition from the Gold Age to the Iron Age. This is when humans enter upon patterns of life that are still current, and begin living a knowable and familiar life. According to this way of thinking the movement of historical time has taken humans out of a state of harmony with nature and locked them into a place in nature unlike that of any other animal.

This chapter considers distinctively Roman modalities for shaping time—their cult of the anniversary, their internal dating systems, and their molding of the temporal patterns of the year, especially in the form of that great Roman monument, the Julian calendar. It begins with eras, which mark off watersheds from which time may be counted, and with anniversaries, which link points in time. Often, anniversaries make their connections between points in time through symbolic totals of years, but what most Roman anniversaries connect are significant days, so that the article considers the beguiling intricacies of the mechanisms of the Roman calendar, in order to understand what is at stake in the recurrence of days. The use of Troy in anniversary contexts has been the subject of a study by David Asheri that collects much fascinating evidence for the role of Troy in the construction of symbolically significant anniversaries, especially millenarian anniversaries.

Chapter 2 shows how surf culture continued to globalize after World War II and became a popular cultural phenomenon. Surf tourism grew with the advent of jet travel and the expansion of the postwar American and Australian middle class, and this surf tourism became a defining feature of modern surf culture. The United States missed an opportunity to tout this surf culture when it withdrew The Endless Summer from the 1967 Moscow Film Festival, but it did use surfing as a form of cultural diplomacy in its sports exhibit at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. Hollywood also embraced the sport, memorably associating it with the Vietnam War.