Editing and interpreting Ovid’s Fasti: text, date, form

Ovid’s Fasti can be seen as the pivotal work of his career. It was composed alongside the Metamorphoses in his maturity, but issued in the 6-book form we have after his banishment by Augustus to Tomi on the Black Sea. It gives an account of the first six months of the Roman calendar, describing the city’s many festivals, touching on the rising and setting of constellations and on other annual phenomena, and underpinning all these with aetiological narratives drawn from Greek and Roman myth and history. To end a calendrical poem after six months is to produce an absurdity: Ovid surely did so by design, thus symbolizing his own truncated life in Rome — and avoiding July and August, the months of the Caesars. The poem has traditionally been of greatest concern to students of religion for the insight it gives into cult: it is no coincidence that the Loeb edition (as well as a discursive commentary) was produced by James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, and a founding father of social anthropology and comparative religion. But in recent decades, as interest in Ovid has grown generally, the Fasti has attracted increasingly varied attention: there have been at least six translations published in the last twenty five years, for example, and commentaries in English on four of the six books, as well as considerable numbers of monographs and articles. It will remain a text where the studies of literary critics, historians and comparativists intersect