For all time or for the moment? This paper considers two opposed temporal “modes” or “idioms” in the work of turn-of-the-century philologists: one dismissing the clock (and the calendar) and orienting itself towards the eternal and unbounded, the other embracing the budget and deadline, calibrating itself to the stroke of the hour and the passage of the year. Focusing on the Thesaurus linguae Latinae, a monumental Latin lexicon begun in Germany in the 1890s and still in progress today, I will ask how these opposed currents are reflected both in the shape of one of the era’s characteristically ambitious philological enterprises and in the quotidian realities of the scholars who worked on it. Engaging larger questions about what kind of scholarly work could and should be done on the clock, the tension between extra-temporal designs and measured règlement had stakes not just for planning and publicity around the Thesaurus, but also for the careers of philologists associated with the project, the disposition of their daily work, and the assessment of their results.
