C.[407] We may well find it hard to understand how such business as
the meeting of the senate, of the comitia, or the exercitus, could
have been fixed to particular times under such circumstances; perhaps
the best way of explaining it is by noting that the Romans were very
early in their habits, and that sunrise is a point of time about
which there can be no mistake[408]. But in any case the date of the
introduction of the sun-dial, which almost exactly corresponds with
the beginning of the Punic wars and the vast increase of civil
business arising out of them, may suggest at once the primitive
condition of the old Roman mind and habit, and the way in which the
Romans had to learn from other peoples how to save and arrange the
time that was beginning to be so precious.
This first sun-dial came from Catina in Sicily, and was therefore
quite unsuited to indicate the hours at Rome. Nevertheless Rome
contrived to do with it until nearly a century had elapsed; at last,
in 159 B.C., a dial calculated on the latitude of Rome was placed by
the side of it by the censor Q.
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