Skip to main content
Harvard University Press - home
Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire

Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire

Paul J. Kosmin

ISBN 9780674976931

Publication date: 12/31/2018

In this eye-opening book, Paul J. Kosmin explains how the Seleucid Empire’s invention of a new kind of time—and the rebellions against this worldview—transformed the way we organize our thoughts about the past, present, and future.

In the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s conquests, the Seleucid kings ruled a vast territory stretching from Central Asia to Anatolia, Armenia to the Persian Gulf. In a radical move to impose unity and regulate behavior, this Graeco-Macedonian imperial power introduced a linear and transcendent conception of time. Under Seleucid rule, time no longer restarted with each new monarch. Instead, progressively numbered years, identical to the system we use today—continuous, irreversible, accumulating—became the de facto measure of historical duration. This new temporality, propagated throughout the empire, changed how people did business, recorded events, and oriented themselves to the larger world. Challenging this order, however, were rebellious subjects who resurrected their pre-Hellenistic pasts and created apocalyptic time frames that predicted the total end of history. The interaction of these complex and competing temporalities, Kosmin argues, led to far-reaching religious, intellectual, and political developments.

Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire opens a new window onto empire, resistance, and the meaning of history in the ancient world.

Praise

  • Without Paul Kosmin’s meticulous investigation of what Seleucus achieved in creating his calendar without end we would never have been able to comprehend the traces of it that appear in late antiquity…A magisterial contribution to this hitherto obscure but clearly important restructuring of time in the ancient Mediterranean world.

    —G. W. Bowersock, New York Review of Books

Awards

  • 2019, Joint winner of the Runciman Award
  • 2019, Joint winner of the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit

Author

  • Paul J. Kosmin is Philip J. King Professor of Ancient History at Harvard University. He is coeditor of Spear-Won Land: Sardis from the King’s Peace to the Peace of Apamea. Kosmin has been a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellow and a PAW Fellow at Princeton University, as well as an Oliver Smithies Lecturer at the University of Oxford.

Book Details

  • 392 pages
  • 6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
  • Belknap Press

From this author

Recommendations