Hoe laat zien we elkaar? Tijd in de antieke praktijk

On the basis of examples from daily life, this paper explores how people arranged meetings in antiquity, focusing on the question of how they knew when to arrive. This question is interwoven with a larger one: how people oriented themselves in time. The article argues that the role of precise time measurement by means of clocks always remained situational. Starting with an anecdote about meeting for dinner in classical Athens, before clocks existed, the article then moves to the introduction of clock time and clocks in the Greco-Roman world, and presents several contexts in which clock time became well-established, such as the military and elite etiquette. Then, the article discusses situations in which clock time plays barely any role, even when we would expect this from a modern perspective. The last section discusses visual and auditive signals as alternative temporal cues.