Male Homosocial Readership and the Dedication of Ovid's Fasti

Abstract

In dedicating his Fasti from exile (F. 1.1-26), Ovid longed for Rome's male-dominated literary culture, where audience response to the recitation of works-in-progress guided composition. Such a desire for alternating cooperation and competition among men drives the poet to construct Germanicus, a popular warrior-prince, as an ideal male adviser and literary guide. Shifting erotic and military metaphors in the dedication and in subsequent prefaces position both the author and his unfinished poem-in-progress as passive objects of the potentially active, editorial desire for a Roman male readership. Analysis begins with Eve Sedgwick's notion of male homosocial desire, but illuminates a concept of a feminized and eroticized elegiac text.