Days of Yore

Roman playwright Plautus objected to the new fad of timekeeping via a character in one of his plays: “The gods damn that man who first discovered the hours, and—yes—who first set up a sundial here, who’s smashed the day into bits for poor me! You know, when I was a boy, my stomach was the only sundial, by far the best and truest compared to all of these.... But now what there is, isn’t eaten unless the sun says so. In fact, town’s so stuffed with sundials that most people crawl along, shriveled up with hunger.”