Here in Modern Times we’ll indicate a range of years using a hyphen: 1942-1958. Did the classical Romans have a comparable shortcut?
I doubt it. For one thing, they did not have a fixed calendar that provided the same sort of numbering as our current calendar. They had available the notation A.U.B. (Ab Urbe Condita, from the city’s founding), but it was only used a few times by historians who were setting up a specific timeline. In general use, they dated things according to the paired consul names of whomever held the offices in a particular year.
Their language was just not set up to refer to periods of time in the same way.
(Similarly, the days of the month were not normally numbered 1 through 30 or 31. Instead, they identified days of the month by indicating how many days it was before specific name-days within the month:
Roman calendar - Wikipedia )
I suspect that the range would’ve been indicated by using the words “from” and “to”. The “shortcut” which the OP asks about is a kind of punctuation, which seems to have developed with the printing press.
Thanks TomnD.
It’s interesting that the Romans didn’t place value on continuous dating, considering that we now love using roman numerals to denote years (in movie credits) or continuity (SuperBowls).
If there was a correct format I was planning on sneaking it into a logo I’m designing (as an Easter Egg element, like the infamous FedEx arrow). I’ll use a hyphen or just a large space instead. Authenticity would have be a nice touch, but isn’t crucial.
Since all their dates were originally BC, they were initially decreasing as time went by. Then, because they hadn’t invented zero yet we ended up with no year zero, it goes from IBC to ADI. Must have been very confusing.Well duh
Well, certainly, someone is confused. 
How do you mean this? There’s nothing in Latin as a language that prevents you from constructing phrases such as ‘between X moment and Y moment’, with X and Y being years. They just chose not too, but they could have if they wanted to, and started doing so when they felt like it.
NOBODY did. Every culture counted its calendar years starting from some important event. Sometimes that event would be the creation, as calculated by the dominant religion, but it was most often counted from the beginning of the reign of the current ruler. The Christian calendar is no different, except for how long it has lasted.
For authenticity in our OWN tradition, don’t use a hyphen. Use an en dash.
This is similar to the hyphen put in the names of Assyrian kings like Tiglath-Pileser. There weren’t any hyphens in cuneiform, but at some point the transliterators decided that they needed them. Why them and not any of the other ancient languages? I’ve never seen an answer to this.
Ancient languages had no punctuation at all, not even periods. They just wrote
Disagree. If I’m working for a publication I’ll use their preferred style manual. On a logo I’ll do what communicates clearly and looks nice. To me an en dash is short, ugly and doesn’t visually convey the passage of time. I might well use a tilde.
I will admit to being unclear on the point.
Certainly, one could easily say “from the year of the Consuls T. Numicius Priscus and A. Verginius Caeliomontanus to the year of P. Servilius Priscus and L. Aebutius Helva”. One could also say “From the sixth day before the May Kalends to the third day before the May Kalends.”
However, they did not reckon their months by numbered days until after the third century C.E., so saying “I will be in Ostia from the second of May to the ninth of May” would have simply confused one’s audience. Similarly, announcing that “G. Julius Cæsar lived from 653 to 709 A.U.B.” would have forced one’s audience to step back and try to work out when that period actually occurred.
??? Twice in this thread, tomndebb said A.U.B. Innit A.U.C.?
Yes. It is A.U.C.
Heck, the first time, I spelled out what it stood for and still couldn’t get the initials correct.
Old age is a terrible malady.
I was estimating a 65% chance you knew something I didn’t! (“Yes, but the Romans used the ‘B’ to abbreviate ‘Burbiae,’ another word for ‘City.’”)
Well, then, there have been some number of ancient languaguers around on this board. I’ve seen a number of posts with no punctuation, capitalization, or consistently correct spelling!
Somebody mentioned it earlier in the thread, but usually they reckoned years by who were the consuls that year.
For instance in “The Gallic Wars” Julius Caesar writes:
“M. Messala, et [P.] M. Pisone consulibus…” (when Marcus (?) Messala and Piso were the consuls…" . It’s almost always two different guys every year. Maybe it got harder to keep track of stuff before living memory, but maybe people kept better track of who the consuls were mentally because of that, especially for important years.
A Latin joke was “Iulio Caesareque consulibus” - ‘when Julius and Caesar were consuls’ (because he dominated so much the other guy basically didn’t matter ).
In all of book one of “The Gallic Wars” there is not a single dash or hyphen in the Latin, at least not that I could find. I would imagine they would use a preposition like ad or per, or one of their many, more specific than single words in English, time related adverbs or conjunctions.
I might take that back about Latin having many time related adverbs which were more specific than single words in English. I forgot about all the ‘heretofore’ and thereunder type words
It always struck me how similar this is to Americans dating things by Presidential administrations.
The OP would really be on the Baal if they did something similar with their logo Easter egg: Latinize a President’s name and use a similar construction to the above.