Fasti

The Fasti is one of Ovid's most complex, inventive, and remarkable works. This commentary on Book 2 - the first detailed commentary in English - guides the reader towards a fuller appreciation of the poem, through detailed analysis of its religious, historical, political, and literary background.

Presents a clear and detailed guide to a central book of the Fasti, Ovid's account of Rome and its calendar.

"This book was first published in 1955, after a lean period for Ovidian studies. In it, L. P. Wilkinson set out to restore Ovid to his rightful position. Writing for the educated reader as well as for students of the Classics, he examines Ovid's life and work, quoting extensively from Ovid's poetry both in Latin and almost invariably also in his own English verse translation, making the book easily accessible to those with no Latin."--BOOK JACKET.

"After a period of neglect, the Fasti, Ovid's elegiac poem on the Roman calendar, has been the focus of much recent scholarship. Joy Littlewood suggests that Book 6 is unified by the theme of War, so providing a framing bracket to balance the dominant theme of Peace in Book I. While January celebrates the blessings of Augustan peace, June presents a multifaceted portrait of Roman war, a uniquely Roman combination of virtus and pictas. The three goddesses who dispute the origin of the month in the Proem have associations with military success and Roman power, a distinguishing characteristic that they share in varying degrees with the goddesses whose festivals fall in June (Carna, Vesta, Mater Matuta, Fortuna, and Minerva), most of whom, like Juno of Lanuvium, are also the focus of women's cult. Throughout the month, republican military conflicts are recalled in temples vowed and anniversaries of victory and defeat in Rome's struggle for hegemony. Finally, a complex extended epilogue, which culminates in the celebration of Hercules Musarum, coalesces with familiar themes of Augustan ideology: apotheosis, dynastic eulogy, and the monuments of the Pax Augusta. These and other themes are discussed in the Introduction to the Commentary, which includes analyses of the literary and historical background of the work, Augustus' dynastic restructuring of Roman religion, as evinced in the iconography of his new monuments, Ovid's adaptations of material from Livy's Histories and Horace's Roman Odes, his narrative technique, and his expansion of the elegiac genre through the antiquarian content of the book. Fascinating literary questions are raised by the poet's audacious violation of generic boundaries, no less than by his inclusion of sound antiquarian material artfully camouflaged by literary allusion. Ovid's Fasti Book 6 offers new insights into the complex role played by religion in Roman life."--BOOK JACKET.

This commentary provides a detailed analysis of the first book of Ovid's Fasti, a complex poem which takes as its central framework the Roman calendar in the late Augustan/early Tiberian period and purports to deal with its religious festivals and their origins. Book I covers the month of January, and has proven to be particularly challenging to readers in light of the apparent revision/reworking of the text undertaken by the poet whilst in exile. This commentary - the most extensive yet on any single book of the poem - locates the text of Book I firmly in its literary, historical, and socio-political contexts and seeks both to incorporate and build on the recent scholarship on the poem. In light of the special nature of Book I, the commentary is prefaced by two introductory sections, the second of which tackles head-on the problems (and dynamics) of post-exilic reworking of the text.

This book analyses the mythical and legendary narratives in Ovid's Fasti as narrative and concentrates on the neglected literary aspects of these stories. It combines traditional tools of literary criticism with more modern techniques (taken especially from narratology and intertextuality). From a narratological viewpoint it covers important features such as aperture, closure, characterization, internal narrators, description, space, time and cinematic technique. On the intertextual level it examines the narratives' complex relationship with Virgil, Livy and Ovid's own earlier works. Recent criticism on the Fasti has addressed various elements (religious, historical, political, astronomical etc.), but detailed narrative study has been wanting. This book fills that gap, to provide a more informed and balanced appreciation of this multifaceted poem aimed at classicists and literary critics in general (for whom all the Latin is translated).

"Vivam" is the very last word of Ovid's masterpiece, the Metamorphoses: "I shall live." If we're still reading it two millennia after Ovid's death, this is by definition a remarkably accurate prophecy. Ovid was not the only ancient author with aspirations to be read for eternity, but no poet of the Greco-Roman world has had a deeper or more lasting impact on subsequent literature and art than he can claim. In the present day no Greek or Roman poet is as accessible, to artists, writers, or the general reader: Ovid's voice remains a compellingly contemporary one, as modern as it seemed to his contemporaries in Augustan Rome. But Ovid was also a man of his time, his own story fatally entwined with that of the first emperor Augustus, and the poetry he wrote channels in its own way the cultural and political upheavals of the contemporary city, its public life, sexual mores, religion, and urban landscape, while also exploiting the superbly rich store of poetic convention that Greek literature and his Roman predecessors had bequeathed to him. This Very Short Introduction explains Ovid's background, social and literary, and introduces his poetry, on love, metamorphosis, Roman festivals, and his own exile, a restlessly innovative oeuvre driven by the irrepressible ingenium or wit for which he was famous. Llewelyn Morgan also explores Ovid's immense influence on later literature and art, spanning from Shakespeare to Bernini. Throughout, Ovid's poetry is revealed as enduringly scintillating, his personal story compelling, and the issues his life and poetry raise of continuing relevance and interest. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Ovid's poetical calendar of the Roman year is both a day by day account of festivals and observances and their origins, and a delightful retelling of myths and legends associated with particular dates." --from back cover.

Ovid's Fasti, unlike his Metamorphoses, is anchored in Rome: religion, history and legend, monuments, and character. The poem interprets the Augustan period not as a golden age of peace and prosperity, Carole E. Newlands asserts, but as an age of experimentation, negotiation, compromise, and unresolved tensions. Newlands maintains that, despite the Fasti's basic adherence to the format of the calendar, the text is carefully constructed to reflect the tensions within its subject: the new Roman year. Ovid plays with the calendar. Through the alteration or omission of significant dates, through skilled juxtapositions, through multiple narrators and the development of an increasingly unreliable authorial persona, Ovid opens to a critical and often humorous scrutiny the political ideology of the calendar. By adding astronomical observations and aetiological explanations for certain constellations, Newlands says, Ovid introduced the richly allusive world of Greek mythology to the calendar. Newlands restores the poem to a position of importance, one displaying Ovid's wit and intellect at its best. The incompleteness of the Fasti, she adds, is a comment on the discord that characterized Augustus' later years and led to enforced silences.