Um manjar de poesia: comidas e etiologias míticas nos Fastos, de Ovídio

Focusing on the relationship between food and literature in Classical Antiquity, this paper deals with some dishes – such as libum (sacrificial cake made of flour, cheese and honey), animal meat and horse-beans – offered to the gods in festivities described in Ovid’s Fasti, and explores their status in these rites and their literary status in Ovid’s text. In this calendar poem, the dates of importance in Roman culture are reconstructed and recreated from a perspective that inserts the myth in history, through narration of etiological accounts, which expose the causes of Roman celebrations and their food. Thus, we first show that the poem, through explanations concerning the food used in rites, contributes to the construction of a memory of the Roman cultural tradition. Second, we investigate how these food’s etiologies introduce reflections on poetic making, in order to turn food into ingredients for self-reflexive and meta-poetic comments