TheFasti

Abstract

Abstract‘The Fasti’ is a study of the Fasti, Ovid’s poetic version of the Roman calendar. Each book of this poem corresponds to a month of the Roman calendar, and the books, like the Roman calendars they imitate, detail the religious observances associated with individual days. The Fasti is Ovid’s most topical poem, indirectly inspired by the great calendrical reform of Julius Caesar, from which our modern calendar derives. Of all Ovid’s poetry, then, this brings him closest to the concerns of Augustus, heir to Caesar, and his reformist regime. It is the most Roman of his poems, too, directly engaged with the religious, and hence political, culture of the city, and its sacred and secular topography. At the same time, this chapter explains, Ovid reverts to elegiac form from the epic form of the Metamorphoses, and while the poem contains much in the way of celebration of Augustus’ Rome, Ovid’s trademark wit and self-awareness are undiminished, and hints of a more dangerous irreverence are to be found.