The Evolution of Time in the Mediterranean From the Dawn of Human History to the First Mechanical Clock
- Liz Publika
- 5 days ago
- 12 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
by Liz Publika
Before our days became divided into 24 shifts consisting of 60-minute segments, the world operated with very different understandings of time. From the dawn of human history to the first mechanical clock, the evolution of time and our perception of it have undergone a transformation that is hard to comprehend without taking a closer look at the ideas that moved them from one to the next, or the words that shifted along with them.
People have always taken existing ideas and upcycled them by giving new meanings to old words, new attributes to established figures, and new interpretations to ancient constructs — like time. Among other reasons, it was done to explain cosmic origins, engage in democratic persuasion, provide clinical judgment, uphold religious pluralism, legitimize imperial rule, and even offer salvation. Thus, time was fluid and shaped by what someone needed to do with it.
This practice can be traced all the way back to the Ancient Greeks who have served up several explanations and personifications of time. Each major shift in how the Greeks and their Mediterranean neighbors conceptualized time tracks directly onto a social or political pressure that the old vocabulary and social structures could no longer support. That’s why their priests, philosophers, and rulers all had an interest in understanding the nuances of time.
Very little is known about their mythology before Homer (c. 800 BC) because written records are so sparse, but archaeological evidence suggests that it was very different from what was depicted in the poet’s seminal works. The people of the New Stone Age, who originally occupied the Greek peninsula, did not speak Greek and overwhelmingly engaged in goddess-worship centered around agriculture and fertility. But this began to change around 2200-1900 BC.
First, the Greek mainland was invaded by nomadic warriors who spoke an early form of Greek, brought horses, and introduced ideas of male Sky Gods. Then, around 1450 BC, the Mycenaeans — warriors who were quite possibly the descendants of the initial invaders and the same society that Homer wrote about roughly 650 years later — introduced versions of gods around whom Greek mythology would later take shape.
In archaic Greece, the closest people had to the personification of time were the Horae — goddesses of the three seasons. Thallo (the goddess of spring blossoms), Auxo (goddess of growth and vegetation), and Carpo (goddess of autumn fruit) functioned as forces of nature and literal gatekeepers responsible for the opening and closing of the heavenly cloud-gates to Olympus. They were associated with Demeter, the goddess of agriculture and the harvest.
It’s important to note that the shift from goddess-centered agricultural religion to Sky God pantheons is itself a shift in whose time mattered, moving from seasonal-cyclical fertility time to the more hierarchical, event-driven time of warrior mythology. And when time moves from point A to point Z, the beginning and the end suddenly take on more importance, hence the origin, organization, and ending take on a gravity that didn't initially exist.
Like many civilizations, early Greek communities understood time through the rhythms of agriculture and nature — time examined through theology and philosophy would come later. Understanding of time and its personification evolved in line with semantics, objectives, and politics. As the world started to embrace the early traces of the scientific method, time and timing became pragmatic ideas of increasing importance.
For our purposes, this examination focuses on the elite textual, philosophical, imperial, and numismatic evidence regarding the evolution of time's personification. And it does not start with Chaos, the primeval abyss that existed before the creation of the cosmos. Nor Chronos, a pre-cosmic being who went on to personify time, though introduced centuries later. It starts with kairos, a term Homer used in the Iliad to describe a lethal spot on the human body.
In the book, it pops up as an adjective four different times: first in Book 4, when Pandarus’s arrow narrowly fells Menelaus by grazing a precise anatomical breach; then in Book 8, when Hector’s chariot driver falls to a strike between the shoulder and the neck, and again when Hector strikes the archer Teucer in the exact seam where the collarbone separates the neck from the chest; and finally in Book 11, used to describe a killing blow.
Thanks to Hesiod (c. 700 BC), Homer’s close contemporary, and his Works and Days, kairos moved from an anatomical term to a practical one; in a warning against overloading a cargo wagon, he used it as a noun to mean “due measure” or “proper proportion,” meaning that exceeding kairos would break the wooden axle and ruin the harvest. Eventually, the term would apply to Caerus — the divine personification of opportunity, luck, and the fleeting right moment.
Interestingly, both Homer and Hesiod refer to the Horae in their works. The former never mentions them by name, but implies that the Horae are a group of weather-related Olympian divinities. It’s Hesiod who, across Works and Days and the Theogony,
presents the Horae as goddesses of natural, social, and civic order and connects the predictability of nature to the stability of human society (Eirene), thereby making them forces of justice (Dike) and order (Eunomia).
The Theogony is pivotal because it traces the history of the world from its origin to the battle between the Olympians and the Titans, culminating in the ascension of Zeus as the absolute ruler of all of the Olympian gods. This is a huge upgrade from his role in Mycenaean mythology, in which Poseidon was the most powerful deity. The poem goes on to detail the birth of Zeus’ many children but does not address the struggles between them and mankind.
Much of the Greek mythology we know today comes from the works by these two poets. But theirs is by no means the final version. One example is the eventual fusion of Hesiod’s Kronos — son of Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth) — the youngest of the Titans, and Chronos, the aforementioned personification of linear time, whose emergence in mythology is differently detailed by two competing schools of thought which emerged around the 6th century.
Pherecydes of Syros (c. 550 BC) established Chronos, alongside Zas and Chthonie (the material earth), as one of the pre-cosmic, co-eternal forces of ontological production. In his version, Chronos is the ultimate creator — a self-generating first principle that transforms the mythological landscape by creating the fundamental elements (fire, air, and water) from his own seed by depositing it in the recess of the Earth, and organizing the universe into five (or seven) primary cavities.
This changes things at a fundamental level; by positioning Time as the ultimate container in which the cosmos happens, the Horae are demoted from cosmic architects of the seasons to subordinate agents acting strictly within the boundaries of Chronos' overarching temporal order. More importantly, the Horae lose their role as active, independent administrators of the earth's bounty and become mere manifestations of the broader, inexorable progression of Time.
The Orphists (c. 600 BC) had different ideas. In one of the Orphic versions, before anything, there was a cosmic ocean where the first two principles, earth and water, existed in abundance. From these emerged Chronos, an incorporeal god who, paradoxically, was serpentine in form and had three heads — one of a man, the other of a bull, the last of a lion — and Ananke, the serpentine goddess of Necessity and Inevitability.
The two gods entangled their serpentine bodies and created Aether (the bright, upper air), Chaos (a void), and Erebus (the deep darkness) — collectively the raw matter of the universe. From Chaos and the Aether, the gods shaped a silver egg. The two gods then coiled around it, splitting the egg apart, thereby allowing the hatching of Phanes — an androgynous golden-winged primordial god of light and procreation — who generates the first divine order.
As is evidenced in this examination, in just 300 years, the Horae are transformed from agents of cyclical time into subordinate symbols of it, while two different Chronos variants are positioned as its creators and personification. Although there are a lot of variations in the Orphic versions of these myths, the one mentioned here is one of the better-documented accounts. And yet, this is not the final take on the personification of time. Kairos would evolve into one as well.
Pythagoras (570–495 BC) and his followers believed that more than a literary or rhetorical tool, kairos was an essential law of the universe that brought harmony, order, and proportion to chaos. Focused heavily on dualism (the clash of opposites), they believed that kairos was the structural "knot" holding reality together; if the proportion was off by even a fraction, the balance would unravel and chaos would take over.
Another cosmogonic perspective was offered by Empedocles (492-432 BC) who tried to explain reality by framing divine forces as physical-cosmological principles. He argued that the universe is made of four permanent elements — Earth, Air, Fire, Water — that are constantly mixed and separated by two cosmic forces: Love and Strife. Kairos, to him, reads as the exact mathematical and physical tipping point between them.
Arguably, the biggest contributions of philosophers in respect to time are to the nature of timing itself and its influence on logic, rhetoric, and persuasion. Given the political nature of Hellenic as well as Hellenistic Greece, being able to make an argument was worth its weight in gold. But it was more than that; in many ways, it was also divine. Inspiration could be your own, but it could also be a blessing. That duality would be a lasting one, hardly ever resolved in full.
By the 5th century, how people understood kairos began to split: kairos as rhetoric and kairos as deity. In Athenian democracy, debate and persuasion were very valuable skills. Enter the Sophists: professionals travelling teachers who taught students how to make timely arguments. Their main offering was educating people on “when to speak,” or kairos, so as to win public arguments in front of people who could disagree with a position, or worse, vote against it.
The Sophists paired kairos with two companion concepts: prepon and dynaton. Prepon meant tailoring the message to a specific audience and the gravity of the occasion. Dynaton dealt with targeting what was practically achievable and politically plausible so as to ground the argument in pragmatism. All three had to align: kairos without prepon resulted in the right message delivered to the wrong people, and kairos without dynaton created an unachievable objective.
At around the same time, in a hymn by Ion of Chios (490-425 BC), Caerus is regarded as the youngest child of Zeus. A statue of Opportunity, or Caerus, is erected along with one of Hermes at the Zeus sanctuary at the site of the first Olympiad signifying kairos’ morphing into a deity on a mainstream level. The god is depicted as a young man with a forelock, but no hair at the back of his head so that there would be nothing to hold on to once he passed you by.
But not everyone was quick to adapt the idea of kairos as a deity. Hippocrates (460-370 BC) argued that the timing had to do with a clinician’s judgement about when to intervene. The right medicine administered at the right moment is beneficial, but could be harmful if done at the wrong one. The unique state of the patient, the choice of remedy, the dosage and timing — these were all subjective variables that had to be considered for kairos.
Plato (428–348 BC) took a more mystical position. He viewed the Sophist perspective on tactical timing as manipulation that can lead crowds to draw irrational or false conclusions. As far as he is concerned, kairos was still about the right moment, but it must be paired with a deep, philosophical understanding of human nature and cosmic order. In other words, it was about revealing some divine or objective truth at the right pedagogical moment.
Aristotle (384-322 BC), however, focused on shaping the Sophist's definition of kairos into philosophy by tying it to setting. In his teachings, a kairotic speaker must first read the room and then decide on the elements of speech that acknowledge and draw support from the particular setting, time, and place where the speech occurs by relying on logic, credibility, or emotion. To him, timing was a pragmatic and contextual variable unrelated to cosmic order.
Aristotle was the tutor of Alexander the Great (356-323 BC), who carried out extensive military campaigns and conquered territories stretching from the Balkans and Egypt in the west to the Indus Valley (modern Pakistan/India) in the east. This led to a wide dissemination of ideas and introduction of mystery religions that ultimately altered the fabric of established mythologies; Persian, Egyptian, and Babylonian religions all shared the idea of cosmic continuity.
A linear understanding of time, as personified by Chronos, does not quite lend itself to the concept of renewal or rebirth, which require something eternally recurring. And Caerus was too wrapped up in the moment. The situation needed something akin to the cyclical nature of Demeter and the Horae. And so Aion entered the picture who was also, rather impressively, foreshadowed by none other than Homer and Hesiod.
The poets use the term aion to refer to a lifeforce, literally the energy that keeps a person alive. Since the mystery religions dealt with dying-and-rising deities and promised initiated followers participation in the rebirth process, the word felt like a natural fit; the body perishes, but the lifeforce remains indefinitely. The ouroboros — the snake biting its own tail — perfectly fit the bill and became a poignant emblem of self-sustaining cosmic repetition.
It’s familiar enough to those acquainted with Orphist beliefs, and easily recognizable to people following mystery religions, where reincarnation was commonly accepted. But an emblem is different from personification. Keeping the circular image at the forefront, the Greeks went in a different direction. Aion usually appears as a nude or mostly nude young man standing inside a zodiac ring. And since all ages are part of the cosmic cycle, he may also appear as an old man.
Much like the term kairos made its way into the sciences, so did aion. The Stoics (c. 300 BC) integrated it into their understanding of physics via the apokatastasis doctrine. In their cosmology model, the universe is periodically consumed by fire followed by complete restoration of the same world order. Simply put, aion serves as the structural backdrop for this endless repetition or the container within which each cycle of destruction and restoration plays out.
As Greek ideas migrated across the Roman Mediterranean, selective parts of their mythology were politically transformed. In the Roman Empire, Aeternitas — the female counterpart to Aion — was used to legitimize imperial rule. Emperors regularly minted coins stamped with the inscription "AION,” pairing a mystery-religion deity with the image of a phoenix rising from its ashes or a zodiac wheel, asserting their imperial rule belonged to a different order of time.
Meanwhile, early Christian writers were repurposing existing Greek terminology in The New Testament. Chronos (which appeared 54 times) secularly denoted the flow of ordinary time, such as a lifespan or a journey, but kairos (which was used 86 times) was utilized to mean God’s sovereign, appointed disruptions of history. To this day, the phrase "Kairos tou poiesai to Kyrio" (It is time for the Lord to act) is used in Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Liturgies.
By the early centuries CE, the Mediterranean was operating with three different personifications of time. Furthermore, since Hesiod’s Theogony, Chronos (as in Time) was becoming increasingly interchangeable with Cronus (the Titan), whose devouring of his own children was understood as linear time consuming its own creations. To clean up the inconsistencies, Plutarch (46-119 CE) allegorically equated the two in a number of his essays.
The wildest fusion of ideas arguably took place in Alexandria, where dozens of faiths regularly competed. A dream oracle identified Serapis, a Greek-Egyptian hybrid deity, as Aion Plutonius. According to Epiphanius (315-403 CE), Aion, not Serapis, was born from Kore the Virgin (alternate name for Persephone) and celebrated on January 6; his statues were marked with crosses on the hands, knees, and forehead. According to the Suda — a 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedia — he was likely connected to Osiris and Adonis. By the 3rd century, every dying-and-rising deity around was linked to Aion.
Scholars tried to tidy the mythologies during the 4th and 5th centuries CE. Doing retrospective work, they explained what the snake meant, why Cronus and Aion kept getting confused, and how their various symbols connected. The three-part distinction — Chronos as sequence, Aion as eternal cycle, and Kairos as decisive moment — got codified into the history books as a more streamlined perspective. And then, in 476 CE, the Western Roman Empire fell apart.
That collapse sent a shockwave through the cultural stratosphere in that part of the world. Until then, different segments of that landscape treated ideas as interchangeable, adaptable, and influenced by local politics as well as mythologies, a melting pot of concepts that served the particular communities they marinated in. With no empire left to arbitrate between them, something had to fill the vacuum, and increasingly, that something was the Church.
In the centuries that followed, slowly but surely, the Church rose as the leading institution that controlled how people experienced time, which was focused on their specific understanding of kairos. This is why the liturgical calendar was and is organized around sacred moments: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost. And when the mechanical clock first appeared in European towns in the late 13th century, time got divided into equal units regardless of season.
By the 14th century, clock towers appeared in Italian and Northern European city centers. In the 1960s, historian Jacques Le Goff argued that this represented a shift from "Church time" — organized around liturgical seasons and qualitative sacred moments — to "merchant time" — uniform, measurable, tradeable. This was the moment when Chronos became mechanical. But this was not the end of the evolution of time, which seems to transform and evolve indefinitely.
Note* Dedicated in loving memory to Professor James (Jim) Pletcher. Images available via Fair Use and Public Domain.