Leofranc Holford-Strevens explores time measurement and the organisation of time into hours, days, months and years using a range of fascinating examples from Ancient Rome and Julius Caesar's Leap Year, to the 1920s' project for a fixed Easter.

• Preface


• 1: Principles of time measurement


• 2: Prehistory and history of the modern calendar


• 3: Weeks and seasons


• 4: Easter


• 5: Other calendars


• 6: Marking the year


• 7: Dividing the day


• Further Reading

Leofranc Holford-Strevens, a classicist, received a D.Phil from Oxford University in 1971. The author of Aulus Gellius (1988), and co-author of The Oxford Companion to the Year (OUP 1999), he is a desk-editor with Oxford University Press. He has a long-standing interest in calendars, chronologies, and the calculation of time.