Few people had - or needed - a long historical perspective. Only rich and sophisticated merchants needed to think in cycles much longer than a couple of years. For politics, in most places everything was reset anyway when the king changed, so regnal years were quite enough. For farmers, the planting and the harvest dominated everything, and the horizon was the year. For most city dwellers, the margin above bare survival was so slight that the horizon was the next bread dole (for lucky Romans) or even next meal, not the next year.

Pagan time was cyclical, based on festivals and games with their accompanying sacrifices, and it was only when the idea of an end time became imprinted through the millenarial religions, that a continuous time became desirable. Although the Romans had their AUC (ab Urbe condita- from the city's foundation) based on somewhere about 750BC, it was never used for much, and it was after the failure of the Second Coming to arrive as soon as expected, that the desire to count the years since the Nativity led Little Dennis (Dionysius Exiguus) to create our present linear and continuous dating in the 6th century.