Did Romans complain about sundials?
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Pliny's Natural History relates some sundial history at the end of Book 7. He says that Rome's first public sundial was taken there from Catania during the First Punic War, in 491 AUC or 263 BC. Because it was calibrated for that city, it did not tell time accurately for Rome, but stood in the Forum for 99 years before the censor Quintus Marcius Philippus installed a corrected instrument. Pliny says this was "an act which was most gratefully acknowledged, as one of the very best of his censorship" (trans. John Bostock and H. T. Riley; London: Henry G. Bohn, 1857), or in Latin "inter censoria opera gratissima acceptum est". He further describes the installation of a water clock only a few years later, which allowed people to note the hours of the day or night in all weather conditions. This is attributed to Scipio Nasica but apparently did not rate as one of the best deeds of his long and colourful career.
If Pliny is right about this - he's writing two and a half centuries later - and if human nature was about the same as it is today, then it is probable that Romans had been complaining about the original sundial for 99 years. If they were happy about the new one then they had probably been grumbling about the old one. This is not the same sort of complaint as in Plautus (who died before the new sundial was installed) but is a tiny hint about attitudes to timekeeping.
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Source: stackoverflow.com
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