Exhibition Opens October 19th: Time and Cosmos in Greco-Roman Antiquity

The ancient Greeks and Romans contributed more than any other past civilization to the rise of time’s dominion over individual and public life. Time and Cosmos in Greco-Roman Antiquity, which will open at ISAW on October 19, 2016 and run through April 23, 2017, explores the ways in which they organized time, marked its passage, and linked it to their understanding of the larger universe. The exhibition brings together more than 100 objects from international collections, comprising both tools of time reckoning and items—many of them rarely on public display—that illuminate the social role, perception, and visualization of time and its relationship to the cosmos. In so doing, it opens a window onto the roots of our modern system of time measurement, as well as how our understanding of it influences our conceptions of the world and our place in it.

Time and Cosmos is curated by Alexander Jones, Interim Director and Professor of the History of the Exact Sciences in Antiquity.