Founding the Year Ovids Fasti And the Poetics of the Roman Calendar

  

FOUNDING THE YEAR:

OVID’S FASTI AND THE POETICS

OF THE ROMAN CALENDAR

  

MNEMOSYNE

BIBLIOTHECA CLASSICA BATAVA

_COLLEGERUNT

_{H. PINKSTER • H. S. VERSNEL}

  

I.J.F. DE JONG • P. H. SCHRIJVERS

_{BIBLIOTHECAE FASCICULOS EDENDOS CURAVIT}

_{H. PINKSTER, KLASSIEK SEMINARIUM, SPUISTRAAT 134, AMSTERDAM}

SUPPLEMENTUM DUCENTESIMUM SEPTUAGESIMUM SEXTUM

MOLLY PASCO-PRANGER

  

FOUNDING THE YEAR:

OVID’S FASTI AND THE POETICS

OF THE ROMAN CALENDAR

  

FOUNDING THE YEAR:

OVID’S FASTI AND THE POETICS

OF THE ROMAN CALENDAR

BY

  

MOLLY PASCO-PRANGER

BRILL

  

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  CONTENTS Acknowledgments ........................................................................ ix List of abbreviations .................................................................. xi List of illustrations ...................................................................... xiii Introduction ................................................................................

  1 Chapter One. The politics of tempora ......................................

  21 The date(s) of composition of the Fasti and the ‘political context’ ................................................................

  23 Power and the calendar ........................................................

  27 Multa exempla maiorum exolescentia : recuperating the past ......

  34 Exempla imitanda posteris : providing for the future ................

  50 Calendrical revisions and social control ..............................

  64 Chapter Two. Praeceptor anni: The calendrical model and the Fasti’s didactic project ..............................................

  73 Poetry and the calendar-builders ..........................................

  73 Reading the calendar ............................................................

  98 Alter ut hic mensis, sic liber alter eat .......................................... 102 Calendrical order, month pairs, and meaning .................... 112

  

Series rerum ................................................................................ 117

  Chapter Three. Venus’ month .................................................. 126 “The poet and the month are yours . . .” ............................ 126

  

‘Alma, fave’, dixi ‘geminorum mater Amorum’ .............................. 128

Almae matres .............................................................................. 131

  Venus Verticordia and Fortuna Virilis ................................ 144 Venus Verticordia and Venus Erycina ................................ 151 Venus Verticordia and Magna Mater .................................. 152 Magna Mater and Ceres ...................................................... 159 Flora ........................................................................................ 167

  Chapter Four. Quoscumque sacris addidit ille dies:

  ontents viii Actian Apollo and the Augustalia ........................................ 181

  Domus Augusta, Pax Augusta : January 11–30 .......................... 187 Praeteriturus eram . . . : The death of Caesar .......................... 201 Aufer, Vesta, diem : Resettling Vesta on April 28 .................. 209

  Chapter Five. Looking forward to July .................................... 217 Whose majesty? (5.11–52) ...................................................... 227 “The older god fell . . .” ........................................................ 240 Concord comes at last (6.91–96) .......................................... 244 Starting with a glance back (the kalends of May) .............. 249 Aiming at kingship ................................................................ 259 The young avenger ................................................................ 275 Resurrecting the dead ............................................................ 285

  Conclusion .................................................................................. 293 Works Cited ................................................................................ 297 Index Locorum .......................................................................... 309 General Index ............................................................................ 317

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project began as my doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan, and owes much to the guidance offered me in its earli- est stages by David Potter and K. Sara Myers. In addition to pro- viding me with an excellent model of Ovidian scholarship in her own work, Sara’s command of the poetic tradition and persistence in complicating my literary readings have helped me enormously in making sense of this difficult poem. David has led me to a sem- blance of historical sophistication on at least this very limited topic, and has helped me struggle with the relationship between literary and historical realities in the Fasti. Of my peers in graduate study, I must thank in particular John Muccigrosso and Kristina Milnor, both of whom helped to bring that first phase of the project to a close with a bit of good humor. They, along with David Kutzko, Jeremy Taylor, and J. H. Kim-On Chong-Gossard, read drafts of parts of this study, and offered valuable criticism. I have since had the benefit of supportive colleagues at the University of Puget Sound and Wesleyan University; among these, Michael Roberts was an invaluable reader. Parts of Chapter 4 are a revised version of mate- rial previously published as “Added Days: Calendrical Poetics and the Julio-Claudian Holidays” in Ovid’s Fasti: Historical Readings at its

  

Bimillennium , ed. G. Herbert-Brown (2002) and are reproduced by

  permission of Oxford University Press. My thanks to Geraldine Herbert-Brown and the Oxford editors for their suggestions on that material. Finally, I owe thanks to Brill’s anonymous reader and edi- tors for their help in bringing this project to fruition.

  LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Abbreviations for periodical titles follow those in L’Année Philologique.

  Abbreviations for Latin works follow those of the OLD, and those for Greek works follow Liddell-Scott’s A Greek Lexicon.

  ANRW

  H. Temporini and W. Haase (eds.), Aufstieg und Niedergang

  der römischen Welt: Geschichte und Kultur Roms im Spiegel der neueren Forschung (Berlin and New York: W. de Gruyter,

  1972–).

  

CAH Cambridge Ancient History (notes specify edition and volume).

CHCL

  E. J. Kenney and W. V. Clausen (eds.), The Cambridge

  History of Classical Literature , vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). CIL Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (Berlin, 1863–). LTUR

  E. M. Steinby (ed.), Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae, 6 vols. (Rome: Quasar, 1993–2000).

  Neue Pauly

  H. Cancik and H. Schneider (edd.), Der Neue Pauly: Encyclopädie der Antike (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1996–2003).

  

OLD P. G. W. Glare (ed.), Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1982). RE

  A. Pauly, G. Wissowa, and W. Kroll (edd.), Real-Ency- clopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1893–).

  TLL Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (Leipzig: Teubner, 1900–).

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Plate 1: Fasti Amiterni, July–December. L’Aquila, Museo Nazionale d’Abruzzo. Photo after Degrassi, Inscr. It. 13.2, Tab. LXII. Courtesy of the Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, Rome. Plate 2: Augustan ‘Sorrento base’. Sorrento, Museo Correale. Kop- perman, Neg. D-DAI-Rom 1965.1252. Courtesy of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut – Rom. Plate 3: Augustan ‘Belvedere altar’ of the Lares Augusti, side with the apotheosis of Caesar. Rome, Vatican. Rossa, Neg. D-DAI-Rom 1975.1289. Courtesy of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut – Rom.

  INTRODUCTION In the course of the French Revolution and in the spirit of the dawn- ing of a new age, proposals for calendar reform proliferated in Paris. In the years just before and after the storming of the Bastille, sweep- ing changes were advocated in numerous almanacs, and new counts of ‘Years of Liberty’ and ‘Years of Equality’ were adopted by the popular press and eventually by the Legislative Assembly and the Paris Commune as well. With the official establishment of the French Republic on September 21, 1792 came yet another new calendrical era: the National Convention declared on September 22 “that hence- forth all public acts shall bear the date of the first year of the Republic.” A year of lobbying for and debate over the establishment of a revised calendar of the French Republic followed, resulting in a September 20, 1793 report to the National Convention by the Committee of Public Instruction whose preface stated the reasons the Republic needed a new calendar:

  The arts and history . . . also require of you new measures of time that may be equally free from the errors which credulity and superstitious customs have brought down to us through centuries of ignorance . . . the common era was the era of cruelty, of falsehood, of treachery, and of slavery; it has ended with royalty, the source of all our woes . . . Time is opening a new book of history and in its further progress, majestic and simple as equality, it will write with a new and virile pen the ₁ annals of regenerated France.

  The calendar that the Committee proposed and the National Conven- tion adopted with revisions in a law of November 24, 1793 can only be described as radical: it counted ‘years of the Republic’ from the abolishment of the monarchy on September 21, 1792, and made September 22 the first day of the new year; a ten-day décade replaced ₁ As translated in G. G. Andrews, “Making the Revolutionary Calendar,” The

  

American Historical Review 36 (1931): 515–32, whose history of the calendar I follow

here. See also, at greater length, M. Meinzer, Der französische Revolutionskalender

(1792–1805): Planung Durchführung und Scheitern einer politischen Zeitrechnung (Munich: introdution

  2 the week that was too closely linked to the superstitious customs of the Catholic church; days were decimally divided into ten hours of 100 minutes of 100 seconds; and new state holidays linked to the rhythm of the décades aimed to divorce the calendar further from the ₂ festal cycle of the church. The major revision to the original pro- posal involved new names for all twelve months and, to replace the Saints days of the church calendar, a complex nomenclature for the days of each décade naming them for farm products, tools, and ani- mals. The special commission that proposed these revisions aimed “to substitute for visions of ignorance the realities of reason and for sacerdotal prestige the truth of nature” and “to exalt the agricul- tural system . . . by marking the days and the division of the year ₃ with intelligible or visible signs taken from agriculture and rural life.”

  This calendar, then, was explicitly designed to both mark and enforce a break with the past and with the church. It was an ideological tool for remaking the French citizen and state on the foundations ₄ of rationality and nature. At least one eighteenth-century agitator for calendar reform saw the changes to the Roman calendar that began in the first century b..e. as a model, if not an altogether positive one, for French reforms. An anonymous letter published in the May 17, 1790 issue of Le

  Moniteur opened: When Julius Caesar achieved the destruction of Roman liberty, when he accepted the perpetual dictatorship and had himself named emperor, his first concern, as if to mark this disastrous epoch, was to reform the calendar. Is not this moment, when France has just been reborn, when the love of liberty is making even more extensive conquests and appears to want to expand further, still more favorable for proposing ₂ a similar change? . . . [my translation]

  On the aims and meaning of the décade, E. Zerubavel, The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week ₃ (New York: The Free Press, 1985), 28–35.

  This report and the November 24 decree that adopted the calendar are printed in full in Le Moniteur of December 18, 1793. I again use Andrews’ translation. ₄ On the social significance of this calendar: E. Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 82–95. Cf.

this 1944 statement by Elisabeth Achelis, the founder of the World Calendar Asso-

ciation, on the need for a World Calendar in the midst of World War: “For Time

to be really a healer, and we certainly have need of it in these catastrophic days,

Time itself must be healed through its instrument, the calendar, and aid in greater

world cooperation, order, balance, stability and above all—unity” ( Journal of Calendar

Reform

  3 Though this account of the calendar reforms that accompanied the ‘Roman revolution’ is clearly rhetorically charged, it is true that the calendrical revisions brought about by Caesar and his successor were no less socially significant than those adopted by the French Republic. They were decidedly subtler, however, and their very subtlety speaks to the difference of their social purpose. Caesar’s alignment of the calendar year with the solar year, the addition of holidays com- memorating the births, deaths and accomplishments of members the imperial household, and the renaming of the seventh and eighth months of the year for ( Julius) Caesar and Augustus in no sense undo the old Roman calendar: like so much else in Augustan cul- ture, the calendar reforms depend upon at least an appearance of continuity with or restoration of the past. The correction of the cal- endar to match the stars made the Julio-Claudian house the neces- sary link between a pre-existing Roman ordering of time and natural order; the inscription of the names of Julius, Augustus, and their heirs and intimates throughout the calendar reinforced that link. The cultural ‘work’ done by the Roman calendar in the early empire was thus not reinvention: rather, it participated in the gradual but thor- ough reorientation of cultural institutions under the pull of a new node of power embodied in Augustus and his heirs. The longevity of the calendrical changes accomplished in these years is perhaps the best evidence of their success in working with, rather than against, ₅ the established calendar. The French décade met with resistance from the start, and the calendar as a whole was completely out of use by 1805; Caesar’s reforms, by contrast, were welcomed as salutary and the addition of holidays commemorating him and later, his heir, was so gradual as to pass almost unnoticed. We hear grumbling only ₆ about the renaming of Quintilis for the dictator; by the time Sextilis becomes Augustus, even that change is acknowledged as the due of the princeps.

  In contrast to the wealth of official reports on the formation and system of the French revolutionary calendar, we have no official doc- ument explaining the purpose and meaning of the Julio-Claudian calendar. This is not surprising: Roman religion is in fact charac- terized by a marked lack of doctrinal and liturgical texts. It is also ₅ introdution

  4 characterized, however, by a strong exegetical impulse: as a num- ber of recent studies have emphasized, exegesis of rites, whether in the form of mythologizing, etymologizing, commentating, or etiolo- gizing, is one of the many ways the participants in Roman religion ₇ adapted cult to changing social and historical circumstances. If we are lacking official documentation and explanation of the Roman calendar, we do have one extraordinary text, a half-finished elegiac poem, organized around the calendar, and composed by a poet who witnessed the slow but steady addition of some twenty-five Julio- Claudian holidays and had seen the month of Sextilis become officially ‘Augustan’ in 8 b..e. Ovid’s Fasti constitutes, among much else, a supremely topical exploration of the how the Roman calendar makes and remakes meaning as it moves through these changes.

  That the calendar does, in fact, ‘make meaning’ needs a bit of attention before we go further. J. Scheid has argued that the sub- stantial variation in contents among the extant epigraphical calen- dars of the Augustan and Tiberian ages suggests that they themselves are a form of exegesis; they are not ritual objects, not prescriptive documents or painstaking records of ritual, but rather a sort of a memorandum of the ritual year as tailored to particular locations, ₈ audiences and patrons. Despite this variation, the calendars also par- ticipate in a shared discursive form: a horizontal series of month columns, reading left to right, days numbered from top to bottom, etc. The inscribed calendars’ representation of the year is thus nec- essarily tailored to fit a limited set of categories and subdivisions, a very concrete demonstration of the dictum that all experience is reduced, encoded, and systematized as a precursor to intelligibility. The Julio-Claudian calendars are in fact an ideal ‘cultural model’ as

  G. B. Conte uses the term. In his work on literary genre, Conte defines genre as “a means of signification incorporated into the text to give form and meaning to the discourse and instructions to its ₇ M. Beard, “A Complex of Times: No More Sheep on Romulus’ Birthday,”

  PCPS 33 (1987): 1–15; J. Scheid, “Myth, Cult and Reality in Ovid’s Fasti,” PCPS

38 (1992): 118–31; F. Graf, “Römische Aitia und ihren Riten,” MH 49 (1992):

  

13–25; D. Feeney, Literature and Religion at Rome: Cultures, Contexts, and Beliefs (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1998), 127–33. ₈ Scheid, “Myth, Cult and Reality,” 119–21, where the point is primarily that

we should not see “the calendar” as unfailingly right and true, or even as meant

  5 reader, . . . the horizon marking the boundaries of its meaning and ₉ delimiting its real possibilities within the system of literary codification.” He further suggests that this conception of genre offers a means of mediating between empirical and theoretical approaches to litera- ture, a means of relating literature to “real life”: “For there is no reason to believe that the ‘system’ (let us call it this) which I have outlined functions only in literature. ‘Real life’ too is structured by cultural images and models, by symbolic choices, by communicative and perceptual codes . . . Literature acts on cultural models, which ₁₀ act on ‘real life’ and transform it.” If there are details and modes of expression that Ovid is more and less likely to use in an elegiac poem, there are surely also details and modes of expression that do and do not ‘belong’ to the epigraphic representation of the year. This study takes as its basic premise a complex interaction in the

  

Fasti between the genre of etiological elegy and the cultural model

  of the calendar. Ovid’s poem forces these two systems into a dynamic play that defines and transforms both and along the way teaches a great deal about how the Roman calendar made meaning.

  This approach has analogies, of course, with cultural poetics, the new historicist movement to treat literary texts as contiguous with ₁₁ and in dialogue with non-literary, cultural ‘texts.’ One critic has summarized the common theme of the concerns of cultural poetics as “the way in which the materials and beliefs of everyday culture, politics and society are transformed into specialised cultural practices ₁₂ called art, theatre, literature and so on.” Even in this brief sum- mary, however, one of the potential pitfalls of cultural poetics is revealed: the habit of looking at literature as a generalized ‘cultural practice’ and thereby giving less than satisfactory attention to the ₉ G. B. Conte, Genres and Readers, trans. G. W. Most (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 36–37. ₁₀ Ibid., 110–11. Cf. G. B. Conte, The Rhetoric of Imitation, trans. C. Segal (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 98–99. ₁₁ The term ‘cultural poetics,’ or ‘poetics of culture’ was coined by S. Greenblatt,

  

Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1988), 5; “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” in The New

Historicism , ed. H. A. Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), 1–14. Cf. H. A. Veeser’s

excellent discussion of the benefits and potential drawbacks of cultural poetic (or

New Historicist) approaches to literature: “The New Historicism,” in The New Historicism Reader introdution

  6 complex interpretation of individual works. My intentions then, are not fully in concert with the impulses of cultural poetics: I am con- cerned with the very specific and self-conscious engagement of this poem, the Fasti, with other cultural texts, but most specifically with the Roman calendar.

  The great advantage of the Contean ‘generic’ model for consid- ering this engagement is that it allows me to keep the literary nature and context of the Fasti fully in mind as I historicize it as a cultural ₁₃ text. Whatever its relation to realia, the Fasti must be acknowledged as a poetic text with its own modes of representation, and with an ever-present literary tradition behind it. This Contean adjustment to the model of cultural poetics is further justified by the poem itself. As we will see, Ovid, in discussing the origins and structure of the calendar, treats it as a ‘blueprint’ for the world (i.e., Rome), con- sciously constructed and manipulated by those in political power, that is, as a cultural model par excellence. Once this is recognized, the question of the relationship of Ovid’s poetic project (which presents itself as an exposition of the year) to the calendrical model is inevitable, as is the question of Ovid’s ‘authority’ to create an alternative model of the year and of the world. I will argue that the Fasti’s exagger- ated picture of the calendar’s social function serves as a defining ele- ment of its poetic project.

  My approach also has as an advantage its productive treatment of the Fasti’s singular use of the calendar as an organizational prin- ciple. The search for the reasons for Ovid’s choice to ‘versify the calendar’ has proceeded in several directions, with limited success. The most common approach proceeds from the literary antecedents of the poem. The influence of Callimachus’ Aetia on Ovid’s gener- ation of poets can hardly be underestimated, and the Fasti borrows its focus on causae as well as many elements of presentation from the ₁₃ J. Griffin’s argument for a direct relation between Roman poetry and ‘lived

  

reality’ has been criticized for its extremism in focusing on the poems’ reflections

of the minutiae of daily life and denying the influence of the literary tradition in

the way those minutiae are deployed: Latin Poets and Roman Life (Chapel Hill: University

of North Carolina Press, 1986) and critique in R. Thomas, “Turning Back the

Clock,” CP 83 (1988): 54–69. G. Herbert-Brown’s effort to make historical use of

the Fasti in particular has likewise met with criticism for its devaluation of the lit-

  ₁₄

  7 Aetia . Nonetheless, though it frequently focuses on religious etiol- ogy, the Aetia does not offer a structural model to the Fasti: it is divided into four books, with no apparent unifying theme to each; the Muses as interlocutors offer a unifying framework to the first two books, but the second two seem to lack any framing narrative ₁₅ whatsoever. Aratus’ Phaenomena is likewise often pointed to as a model for the Fasti’s astronomical entries; the great popularity in the late Republic and early Empire of this single book of hexametric didactic has been well documented, with translators including Varro of Atax, Cicero, Ovid himself, and Tiberius’ nephew Germanicus, ₁₆ to whom the later revision of the Fasti is dedicated. The Fasti does not, however, borrow its structure from the Phaenomena: only a small portion of Aratus’ book (559–732, on the risings and settings of the constellations) is temporally arranged, and the Fasti borrows these brief astronomical observations primarily as a means of marking the ₁₇ passing days. The star myths that make up the longer astronomical ₁₄ Cf. esp. J. F. Miller, “Callimachus and the Augustan Aetiological Elegy,” ANRW

  

2.30.1 (1982): 371–417; “Ovid’s Divine Interlocutors in the Fasti,” in Studies in Latin

Literature and Roman History III , ed. C. DeRoux (Brussels, 1983), 164–74; and Ovid’s

Elegiac Festivals

  (Frankfurt am Main, 1991); J. Loehr, Ovids Mehrfacherklärungen in der

Tradition aitiologischen Dichtens (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1996), 87–126. Less systematic

treatments are B. Harries, “Causation and the Authority of the Poet in Ovid’s

Fasti ,” CQ 38, no. 2 (1989): 164–85; A. Barchiesi, “Discordant Muses,” PCPS 37

(1991): 1–21; P. Hardie, “The Janus Episode in Ovid’s Fasti,” MD 26 (1991): 47–64;

  

C. Newlands, “Ovid’s Ravenous Raven,” CJ 86 (1991): 244–55; G. Williams, “Vocal

Variations and Narrative Complexity in Ovid’s Vestalia: Fasti 6.249–468,” Ramus

20.2 (1991): 183–204. ₁₅ R. Pfeiffer, Callimachus (Oxford: Clarendon, 1949), vol. II, xxxv; A. Cameron,

  

Callimachus and his Critics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 107–8. On

the relationship of the Aitia’s structure to that of the Fasti, see Miller, “Divine

Interlocutors,” 157–58, n. 5; Herbert-Brown, Ovid and the Fasti, 9. ₁₆ E. Fantham, “Ovid, Germanicus, and the Composition of the Fasti,” PLLS 5

(1985): 243–79, esp. 245–46, note 11. On the influence of Aratus on the Fasti, but

with no claim that the Phaenomena serves as a structural model, see E. Gee, Ovid,

Aratus and Augustus: Astronomy in Ovid’s Fasti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2000). ₁₇ L. P. Wilkinson, Ovid Recalled (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955),

264–65; C. Santini, “Motivi astronomici e Modulli didattici nei Fasti di Ovidio,”

  

GFI n.s. 6 (1975): 1–26. The more expanded astronomical entries more often join

in the thematic texture of the surrounding festal entries; cf. C. Newlands, Playing

with Time: Ovid and the Fasti (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 27–51; and

“Ravenous Raven”; A. Barchiesi, The Poet and the Prince: Ovid and Augustan Discourse

(Berkeley and California: University of California Press, 1997), 81–82; Gee, Ovid, Aratus introdution

  8 ₁₈ entries are more closely related to Eratosthenes’ Katasterismoi. Likewise, Hesiod’s Works and Days is always in the background as a didactic model and the recurring address to the Fasti’s poet, vates operosus

  

dierum (1.101, 3.177), likely refers to the poem’s Latin title, Opera

₁₉

diesque . It too, however, fails to provide a structural model for the

Fasti : its focus on the ‘days’ appropriate to various kinds of work,

  marked by astronomical phenomena, weather signs, or natural phe- nomena (e.g., the appearance of cranes [448], or the emergence of snails [571]), does not progress systematically through the year, and remains more tied to the natural world than to the social, civic cal- endar. A possible debt to Simias of Rhodes’ lost poem the M∞new , ₂₀ or On the Months, has been suggested, but we know nothing about this poem beyond its name.

  On the Roman side, Vergil’s Georgics has also been adduced as a ₂₁ model for the Fasti. However, like the Works and Days to which it owes so much, Vergil’s didactic poem goes nowhere towards explain- ing Ovid’s choice to write a calendar-poem. Propertius, in his fourth book of elegies, is more promising, naming his topic as sacra diesque . . . et

  

cognomina prisca locorum [Rites and days and the ancient names of

₂₂

  places] (4.1.69) and claiming a debt to Callimachus in doing so, ₂₃ boasting that he will be the Romanus Callimachus (4.1.64). It is this

  

of the star myths: C. Martin, “A Reconsideration of Ovid’s Fasti,” ICS 10 (1985):

261–74; C. R. Phillips III, “Roman Religion and Literary Studies of Ovid’s Fasti,”

Arethusa

  25 (1992); R. J. King, “Spatial Form and the Literary Representation of

Time in Ovid’s ‘Fasti’” (Ph.D. diss. Indiana University, 1994), 94–101; contra, see

Newlands, Playing with Time, 3. ₁₈ B. Pressler, “Quaestionum Ovidianarum capita duo” (diss. inaug. Halle, 1903),

24–39; F. Bömer, ed. and comm., P. Ovidius Naso, Die Fasten (Heidelberg: Carl

  Winter, 1957), vol. 1, 28–29; Newlands, Playing with Time, 29. ₁₉ See Hardie, “Janus,” 59 and n. 40, and Barchiesi, The Poet and the Prince, 52

and n. 9. However, as Barchiesi notes, that the work was so called in this period

is only conjecture. _{20 21} Wilkinson, Ovid Recalled, 242; Miller, “Augustan Aetiological Elegy,” 400.

E. Fantham, “Ceres, Liber, and Flora: Georgic and Anti-Georgic elements in Ovid’s Fasti,” PCPS 38 (1992): 39–56; Gee, “Vaga signa”.

  ₂₂ R. Hanslick’s 1979 Teubner edition emends the text to sacra deosque, following

J. P. Sullivan’s suggestion (Propertius: A Critical Introduction [Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1976], 138). P. Fedeli’s 1984 Teubner rightly returns to the diesque

reading of the manuscripts. ₂₃ Propertius’ extensive use of Callimachean programmatic language begins earlier,

of course, and is especially heavy in 3.1–3. The first poem of Book 4, however,

  9 book that comes closest in conception to Ovid’s Fasti, promising to be a book length collection of etiological poetry, and focusing in part ₂₄ on religious material and on ‘days’; nonetheless it too is far from serving as a structural model for the Fasti. Certain passages of the

  

Fasti have been shown to play against Propertius’ treatment of the

₂₅

  same material, but Propertius’ book continues in the elegiac tradi- tion of short poems, so that an explanation for the Fasti’s calendri- cal organization is not to be sought there any more than in Callimachus. This avenue of inquiry does a great deal towards explain- ing the etiological focus of the Fasti, and alerts us to the literary models against which the Fasti sets up certain passages, but leaves us at a loss to explain the calendrical organization of the poem.

  Prior to the late 1980s, most readings, whether literary-critical or religio-historical in focus, took the calendrical framework as a given, but bemoaned its use as ill considered. Indeed, if the poem is read as simply a versification of the calendar, and the epigraphical cal- endars are used as a standard of comparison, the poem will be (and has been) found lacking in accuracy and full of ‘irrelevant’ mater- ial. Some have argued that the inclusion of astrological information and Hellenistic mythology in the poem was due to the poor premise of basing a poem on the rather scanty Roman calendar; the result was a disorganized hodge-podge. For many years it was generally agreed that the calendrical framework was a hindrance to Ovid’s artistry, an organizational straightjacket that restrained his talent and resulted in a failed poetic project. Alternatively, the solemnity of the calendrical project was considered too great a burden for Ovid’s light talent and playful personality, or for the elegiac meter that was ₂₆ his forte—the resulting critical judgment was the same. The boom in literary critical work on the Fasti in the last two decades has done ₂₄ In the end, only five of Book 4’s eleven elegies are etiological. A topograph-

  

ical scheme of organization may have been envisaged for the book as a whole

(Miller, “Aetiological Elegy,” 381–82), but this too is not clear in the book as we

have it. ₂₅ P. Hardie, “The Augustan Poets and the Mutability of Rome,” in Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus

  , ed. A. Powell (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1992), 59–82; Barchiesi, The Poet and the Prince, 186–89. ₂₆ Catalogs of such judgments have become a commonplace of new work on the

Fasti , so I will not indulge in yet another recitation, but only refer the reader to introdution

  10 much to change its reputation as a poetic failure. Small-scale stud- ies have demonstrated the artistry and allusiveness of Ovid’s treat- ment of particular rites, and literary critics have come to recognize the Fasti as work of merit, worthy of comparison with the rest of the poet’s corpus. Nonetheless, in many of these studies, the calen- dar still does not receive the attention it deserves as an integral and constructive element in Ovid’s poetic project; it is often dismissed as an organizing framework and little else or simply pointed to as a source of material.

  G. Herbert-Brown’s historical study of the Fasti looks for a posi- tive explanation for the poet’s choice to write a calendar-poem, and fi nds it primarily in political expediency: the poet wanted to write something Augustus would like; he saw the attention and effort the

  

princeps had given to his correction of the calendar, and thus decided

  on a poem on the subject. The study proceeds to a valuable survey of the encomiastic portions of the poem, measuring them against more official propaganda, including the evidence of the epigraphic calendars for the celebration of imperial anniversaries. However, Herbert-Brown’s premise that the work is at base encomiastic and that all of Ovid’s poetic choices are motivated by the desire to please Augustus leads her to the surprising conclusion that “the Julian anniversaries provide the central focus of the Fasti,” and that the rest of the calendar comprises the decorative “filigree” of the anniver- ₂₇ saries. She thus effectively excludes from consideration a complex function for the calendar within the poem. This conception of the

  

Fasti ’s use of the calendar also does a disservice to the calendar’s

  function in society: the embedding of the Julian anniversaries in the ancient calendrical structure was far from ornamental. The calen- drical structure worked to assimilate the new festal days to the old, and was an integral part of the ideological message of the new hol- idays. An approach is needed that takes both the calendar and poetry into account as modes of expression and systems of signification when discussing the political content of the Fasti.

  Several other recent readings of the poem which take into con- sideration the epigraphical fasti answer to the charge that the cal- endar was an uncomfortable formal constraint to Ovid’s talent by demonstrating the poem’s frequent manipulation of the calendrical

  11 models as the poet picks and chooses among the possible calendri- cal entries, and takes advantage of the jarring juxtapositions ensu- ing from the day-by-day treatment of rites and festivals in order to ₂₈ create thematic effects. Though the calendar is still seen to impose a basic structure, these readings emphasize the poem’s triumph over, and indeed through, that structure. While this recent work has offered many useful observations about the poem’s play with the calendri- cal form in individual passages, it nonetheless construes the use of that form as essentially negative, an obstacle to be overcome with virtuosity and to great effect, but still an obstacle. In addition, this line of observation tends to extend to political readings of the poem whereby Ovid’s artistic manipulations of the calendar and the reli- gio-political material of the poem are treated as ‘subversive’ of the ₂₉ Augustan construction of the calendar. These discussions have the merit of acknowledging the contemporary significance of the calen- dar, but they continue to treat the calendrical model, along with its nationalistic implications, as a foil to Ovid’s ‘real’ purposes, a means ₃₀ of foregrounding Ovid’s poetic artistry and political discontent. This tendency to dismiss or read as ironic the avowedly patriotic material of the Fasti proceeds in large part from expectations based on Ovid’s earlier corpus of amatory elegy. Whether these expecta- tions are figured as the personal political leanings of Ovid, or as the ₃₁ generic political associations of elegy, they have shaped the recep- tion of the calendrical material and framework of the poem. While in earlier scholarship preconceptions of Ovid’s natural inclination or character, similarly based on the amatory elegy, caused the poet to be deemed unfit to compose a serious poem on a nationalistic topic, many of today’s political readings of the Fasti tend toward the same ₂₈ Newlands, “Ravenous Raven,” and Playing with Time; E. Fantham, “The Role

  

of Evander in Ovid’s Fasti,” Arethusa 25 (1992): 155–72; Barchiesi, The Poet and the

Prince . ₂₉ Not all such readings make this second step: of the studies in the above note,

Fantham avoids it entirely; Barchiesi also refuses to make a statement of the poet’s

political intentions, though his treatment of the Tristia as a preface to his readings

in the Fasti surely preconditions his readers’ interpretations of his observations, slant-

ing them toward the ‘anti-Augustan,’ as does his emphasis on ‘counter-effects’ and

‘tensions.’ ₃₀ Cf. Newlands: “Ovid can thus circumvent the arbitrary strictures of the cal-

endrical order and produce complementary or competing systems of meaning in

  introdution

  12 vice, but construct a more admirable picture of Ovid, and of the

  

Fasti . The same passages that once seemed to show the poet’s con-

  stitutional failure to live up to his material by letting the playful, ele- giac amator and praeceptor amoris peek through the mask of the vates

  

operosus are now read as intentional subversions of the Augustan ide-

  ology displayed in the calendar. As our reading of Roman amatory elegy has changed to include its engagement with other literary and political discourses, our estimations and expectations of what is Ovidian ₃₂ have changed as well. On the one hand, these preconceptions are entirely legitimate, part of the necessary apparatus of reading the Fasti, and I, too, will

  fi nd some of what we recognize as Ovidian play with his audience’s expectations, especially in the realm of genre. We might, indeed, expect the Fasti to perform a ‘reduction’ of its material to fit elegy, the Ovidian genre par excellence, the genre pointed to by the poem’s meter, and by several of its programmatic passages. Most famously, in the proem to Book 4, the poet promises Venus, the patroness of his amatory elegy: ‘tu mihi propositum, tu mihi semper opus’ [‘You are my topic, you are always my work’] (4.8), implying some degree of continuity between the work at hand and his earlier corpus. The proem to Book 3 on the other hand dramatizes amatory elegy’s con- ventional negotiation of its boundaries with the epic genre, as the poet asks Mars to disarm as he enters the poem and makes a lover ₃₃ of the god of war (Fasti 3.1–22). Nonetheless, the Fasti’s departures from amatory elegy are at least as significant as its references back ₃₂ In addition, in the background of many of these readings, and in the foreground

  

of the Boyle article cited above, lurks the ghost of Ovid’s exile, a biographical fact

which Ovid’s poetic corpus forces into our critical vision, and which the exile poetry

represents as radically transforming the poet and his poetry; cf. G. Williams, Banished

Voices: Readings in Ovid’s Exile Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).