Ovid, Fasti 6 notes

Fasti proem

• Opens discussing the etymology of June → ‘you will choose whatever pleases you from all put down’

• ‘I will sing true facts some will say I am lying’ & especially right for him to see the gods since he is a poet & sings of holy things

• Locus amoenus of the grove (motif especially with interrupting water), pondering the origins of the month when Juno appears and addresses him ‘oh poet who worships the Roman year, who dared to speak of great things with his slight verse’

  • Juno deserves the honour of the name as she is wife & sister of Jupiter, first child of Saturn, and gave up so much for the Romans (eg. her hatred of the Trojans)

  • She is also worshipped by many around (eg. in wooded Aricia and the Laurian people and my Lanuvium)

• The wife of Hercules then speaks (also daughter of Juno)

  • Could she also not get given the honour since she is the wife to Hercules (who defeated Cacus)

  • June is for young men → Juventas

• Concordia then arrives! Shortest speech of just one line (about two kingdoms that formed one - Tatius and Quirinus)

• BUT ‘this case is not settled by my judgement. Go away equally successfully by me. Pergama perished because of a judgement of beauty: two goddesses harm more than one helps’

(just a

Fasti as genre:

• Is Fasti actually a genre?

  • Is based off of physical calendars such as the one by Verrius Flaccus BUT not made by / for the state

  • No state canon for Roman religion at this time

  • A very private venture (surrounds a statue) AND outside Rome (so not even in the city where the rites are taking place)

  • The Fasti of Arvales was placed in the grove of dea Dia = for the deity’s eyes?

• Festivals were most likely announced orally by priests → calendars like these not a necessity for state rite to occur (Macrobius 1.15.12)

  • + how many people could actually read!

• ‘memorials without authority’

• fasti were not intended to objectively inform, yet Cairns suggests that the Augustan poets’ ‘lack of pure intellectual curiosity’ led them to write fantasy descriptions rather than ‘factual accounts’

  • But fasti was not functional in that way, people who could read would know the traditions

  • Fasti as ‘reflections, not revelations’

  • And did not need to be unified in any sense as there was no canon!! Thus as Feeney calls them, we find ‘wormholes of the Fasti’

  • A very different religion! Misunderstood by many such as Mommsen - ‘behind the origins he saw only an empty and hypocritical formalism, not a religion or faith in the spirit of the New Testament’

• Interestingly though, in book 3 where Ovid is about to take about men turning into fish, he states ‘but that is not the job of this poem’ and then goes into the reasons why the paltry little old lady summons the people to her cakes (mythology for the purpose of understanding)

Epic vs elegy?

• Juno’s line to Ovid - ause exiguous magna referre modos at 22 - suggests that grand material is going to be transmuted through small tones (elegy as effecting the material)

  • ‘the Greek pentameter which supplements the very first hexameter of the poem is a dramatic declaration of intent, announcing that Ovid’s treatment of Roman ritual will be in continual dialogue with another form of knowledge and another frame of reference’

• Yet the opening too also pulls from Hesiod’s encounter with the Muses in the Theogony (epic!)

  • + his own Amores (3.1 - elegy vs tragedy) & Heroides 16 (Paris relaying the judgement to Helen)

    • fas vidisse fuit / fas mihi praecipue voltus vidisse deorum

    • This elegy is also concerned with interplay between erotic elegy and traditional epic

  • Juno as epic?

    • Longest speech at 44 lines & epic diction (nec levior …)

    • Juno also reminds of Rome’s military authority (she gave up Carthage, Argos, Samos, Faliscans etc)

  • Juventas is introduced as Ovid turns to face the other way = opposition

    • ‘I flatter and play the part of wooer almost…’ = elegiac lover?

  • AND we end with Concordia who should answer our question BUT she has one line of direct speech, rape of the Sabines hidden away and Romulus whitewashed

    • Concordia is also aligned to Augustus by appearance - ‘Concordia approaches, her long hair braided with Apollo’s laurel, the spirit and achievements of our temperate leader’

    • Funnily enough, Juno’s name comes from iungo (Concordia’s answer = humour?)

Fasti proem .2

• centum celebrantur in aris…inspice quos habeat nemoralis Aricia fastos et populus Laurens Lanuviumque meum

  • Very very vague! The focus here is not the rite, but that many people do

  • But consistent in how little we see of actual cult practice in the fasti (Ovid is not concerned with practicalities)

• Does the three explanations undermine Ovid?

  • Competing interpretation is endemic to the system of cult and very Roman!

  • Out of 113 Roman questions, Plutarch provide 86 multi-answer responses but only 3 for 59 Greek questions

  • The range of different etymologies reveals the ways that the Roman citizen engaged in religion (multifold meaning is going to arise from variety of sources when there is no doctrine)

  • BUT Ovid never chooses!

    • Is he really letting the reader make their own path or is this intended to undermine him?

    • Are we meant to laugh at the poet who says he has the right to see the gods’ faces because he is a poet and that he ‘sings the truth’ BUT is too scared to choose one goddess?

    • quae placeat a little earlier is also quite an erotic phrase = not a serious offer to the audience

1st June

• First day is dedicated to Carna, the goddess of the hinge (wrong name!!)

  • ‘Her fame has been obscured by time, from where she gained her powers provided: but you will become certain after hearing my song’

  • Old grove, where priests now sacrifice, held a nymph much desired and when suitors came she would ask them to lead her to a cave and then hide (when Janus tried, she was caught as he faces both ways and he had his way with her and then gave her power over the hinge in return

  • Very elegiac vocabulary (nequiquam, amantia verba, visaeque cupidine captus ad duram verbis mollibus usus erat)

  • The hinge has quite erotic connotations (the opening of a woman’s body)

• + temple to Juno Moneta from Camillus (used to be home of Manlius but torn down once he tried to seek kingship - quondam)

  • + festival for Mars & storm (attempt to control the uncontrollable by praying to Nature)

1st June .2 : the striges

• Into story of the striges (seize children bereft of their nurse and pluck innards that still feed on milk)

  • Might be old women turned into birds

  • Way of understanding the lot of death for children (30-40% infant mortality rate in classical antiquity)

    • Witches as solution, not the problem

    • But the striges are still quite unknown (Pliny did not know their origin)

    • Sepulchral epigram: ‘a cruel and cunning (witchly) hand seized me, while she remains everywhere on earth and does harm with her craft. You parents, guard your children together, lest grief be fastened in your whole heart’

  • Some striges find Proca (only know that he becomes an Alban king) and sucked out his chest = the nurse calls for Carna (touched door-posts with arbute and then scattered herbed water, and offers the innards of a pig in turn)

    • Substitution ritual

  • Reason why they eat bacon on the kalends and also hot spelt to protect one’s innards (also because she is an old-fashioned goddess)

    • ‘the fish swam without harm from people then, and oysters were safe in their shells; nor did Latium know what rich Ionia offered…’

2nd June

• The next day calls upon Hyadas, the horns upon the Bull’s front, and who wets the land with plenty rain

  • Astrology!

  • Only see this as fixed part of the Roman calendar way later (354AD)

  • Not viewed as religion, and was written about in Aratus’ Phenomena (translated by Cicero & Germanicus)

    • = inclusion of Greek poetry (more Hellenism)

  • Is aware that he is being cheeky when he asks, ‘quid vetat et stellas, ut quaeque oriturque caditque dicere?’ in book 1

  • But fasti is not a strict genre!! He is not stepping out of bounds by doing this

3rd June

• On this day, Bellona (Roman goddess of war) was said to have been sanctified in the Tuscan war & is always prosperous for Latium

  • She has a temple before which there stands a small column of not small renown (from this area, one sends forth his spear when he wishes to wage war)

• Ovid is fixing the cult in place in Rome (cult is as much as about time as it is space)

  • THIS is where this ritual happens, nowhere else

  • tempus is found 87 times, but locus at 72!

  • Elsewhere but relevant - ‘the very place (locus) demands that I speak of the rape of the maiden’

4th and 5th June

• 4] Another part of the Circus is safe under Guardian Hercules

  • + Sulla approved the inscription!

• 5] Ovid asks whether the Nonas are for Sancus or Fidionis or father Semo BUT they are all him (different names for the same god)

  • And the ancient Sabines set up a shrine for this man on the Quiriline hill

6th June

• ‘I pray, I have a daughter and may she outlive me, by whose safety I will always be happy…’

  • Is this evidence of a real daughter?

  • Rare in this poem to see anything of Ovid’s identity (mainly narrating mythologies / facts)

  • Also have at 237, he remembers seeing the games on the grass of the campus Martius and knew they were for smooth Tiber

• Wants to know what times will be fit for her marriage & shown that June after sacred Ides were most useful (Ides are 6th-13th June(

  • Importance of religion in every-day life! Religion cannot be separated from ‘culture’ for Romans

  • Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Polybius were shocked at the prevelance of ritual in Roman life

• BUT the wife of sacred Dialis says that ‘until the happy Tiber brings the waste to the sea with its yellow stream from the temple of Vesta Ilia…’ (while it is being cleaned)

7th & 8th June

• 7] More astrology (Phoebe said to have removed Lycoana and the Bear does not have to fear behind her back)

  • Quite anthropomorphised here

• Festive day for fishermen!!

• 8] Temple set up for Mens

  • ‘By fear of your war, treacherous Carthaginian’

  • Built a temple and suddenly war gets better (transactional!)

9th June

• 9th June is for Vesta

  • ‘Be gone, lies of poets’ (Vesta cannot be seen)

  • Vesta was received into Rome (after 40 celebrations of the Parilia, for shepherds)

  • Roof of straw, now bronze !! Emphasising how long ago

  • And temple built in the shape of the earth (sphere!)

• Why is the goddess worshipped by virgin priests?

  • Because she, unlike her sisters of Juno and Ceres, is a virgin herself + she is a living flame and nothing is borne from fire

• Origin of her name = ‘standing power’ (vi stando) & the cause of her greek name might be similar

  • And moves into why asses are garlanded for her

• Cybele had thrown a party, and Silenus came uninvited but good as his ass woke Vesta as Priapus was sneaking up on her (he says he didn’t know!)

• Moves into similar topic of the altar of baker Juppiter, after the survival of the Gallic sack

  • But very different (and divine) story of the sack

  • Mars asks Jupiter to help the Romans (men in togas of triumph dead in homes, pledges of Iliac Vesta transferred from seat, barbarian mob traps them on own mount)

  • Venus, Quirinus and Vesta plead too → Jupiter suggests they trick the Gauls into thinking there is no famine (omen - send off the summut what you would least want to = bread! = success?)

9th June .2

• Then to Ovid’s own perspective when he was returning from Vestal festival on new road connected to Roman forum (now)

  • Matron walking barefoot and an old lady explains that it is because the land here used to be marsh and drunken party-goers would wander back home through here = evokation of a drunken citizen, not a deity!

• Now going to look at the origin of Vesta (in Troy!)

  • Omen of Minerva jumping down and Apollo then ordering that they protect this goddess as she will protect them (Rome requires the fall of Troy)

  • ‘I wished to see: I saw the temple and the location’ (cura videre fuit = retaining his free will, not like he was forced into exile)

  • Was stolen by Diomedes, Ulysses or Aeneas and now in Rome!

• But once her temple was nearly destroyed! Pious and unholy fire mixing together!

  • Metellus tried to rouse the maidens but then prayed to her to forgive him and ran in to save the statue

  • Caesar? ‘Now sacred flame of Caesar, you shine bright: now there will be and is fire in the hearth of Ilus; no priestess was said to have defiled the fillets under this leader, nor to have been buried in the living ground’

10th June

• ‘But at the same time are the violets removed from the long-eared asses and the rough stones crush the corn of Ceres…’ = cult practice as temporally fixed

  • Limited to one day, and then normalcy returns

• And now the sailors will see the dolphins at night!

11th June: Mater Matuta

• Opens with Tithone who laments that her husband has left (Helios), but quickly moves to the happy mothers who celebrate the Matralia & give yellow cakes to the Theban goddess

  • On this day they say Servius dedicated a temple to Mater Matuta

  • And asks Bacchus to direct and aid the poet, if she (MM) is of your house

  • Semele destroyed so Bacchus given to Ino which causes Juno to madden her and her husband (kill older son & younger one is boiled but then carried into sea by Ino)

    • We don’t hear about this though here, instead we hear of Learchus’ funerary rites that Ino observes (hair loose from mourning, not bacchant activities)

    • And ‘furiis in scelus isse pudet’ = modesty!

  • Both are then carried by the 100 Nereids from Thebes to Ausonia (Rome not there yet) and meet maenads

    • Movement from Greece to Rome almost like elegy

      • + many other gods travel (Carmentis, Hercules, Venus from Eryx, Anna Perenna and Cybele)

      • ‘Rome is a place to which it is appropriate for every god to go’

    • But Juno then rouses the Latian bacchants saying that Ino is coming to uncover the rites so they try to kill her child

      • revellere used here very like Bacchae

      • + in the grove of Stimua (Bacchanalia scandal of 186BC)

    • Hercules hears and he waves away the maenads and takes her to Carmentis’ home (she quickly makes cakes and sets them down!! ritual)

      • The maenads fleeing so fast feels very similar to Aeneid book 5 (and they are roused by disguised agent of Juno too)

11th June: Mater Matuta .2

• And Ino becomes Matuta and her son Palaemon (Melicerta)

• Why does she hate slave girls? One revealed to her husband who slept with her that she was giving burnt seeds to the farmers (see this in Plutarch’s Roman questions 16 & 17)

  • However in the Carmentis scene, she is aligned to Ceres searching for her daughter in 4

  • hospita Carmentis fidos intrasse penates from fidos intrasse penates & diceris et longam deposuisse famem from longam exsoluisse famem

  • Given stature as mother!

• In Apollodorus’ bibliotheca, the fables of Hygenus and Euripides’ Ino, she is never taken to Rome to become mater matuta

  • Cicero at least reports the identification of Matuta with Leucothea (deified version of Ino)

  • = Ovid’s creation?

• + we see connections to Aeneas!

  • Both travel from the East (Thebes, Troy) and chased there by Juno

  • Both arrive at site of Rome and will become Roman local deities

  • Land in a locus amoenus (lucus in both)

  • Presence of Hercules in Ino’s narrative is an allusion but also a justification to the rites that Evander and Arcadians perform to Hercules when Aeneas arrives

  • + mention of Rumour here (who in Virgil flies like a bacchant)

11th June: Fortuna

• This same day is also for Fortuna (said to make sense as they both inhabit the forum Boarium and both associated with Servius Tullius)

  • Parallels in how we find two female trouble-makers BUT cult soon harmonises it all within the framework of Roman women’s cultic practice (and ends with altar to Concordia)

  • Like the opening where Concordia tries to halt the strife between Juno and Juventas

• BUT who is the man hidden under the togas! Servius but why is he hiding? (others believed it was Fortuna or Pudicitia)

  • Might be because Fortuna used to sneak for secret affairs and she was ashamed to have slept with a mortal thus covers her lover’s face with a toga

    • Elegiac! furtivos amores at 573, arsit enim magno correpta cupidine regis, amatos

  • OR after the death of Tullius, common folk confused and grief increased by statue so they covered him with their togas

  • 3rd! But ‘let me rein in my steeds’ ?

11th June: Fortuna .2

• Tullia urges her new husband to kill Servius Tullius, her father, and be a man (weakened old man was overwhelmed)

  • Fortuna looks over girls being wedded and associated with kings = Tullia as mix of regicide and mariticide (BUT she is punished!)

  • BUT on the way to her father’s home, she finds his body in the street and tells her weeping driver to ride over his body

  • So when she tried to touch the statue, it was said to have placed a hand over its eyes and voice told them to cover his face so he did not have to see his daughter

  • And Fortuna said that when the face is revealed, then modesty is gone (and matrons should not touch the forbidden garments)

• Temple had burnt down but fire spared statue as ST was the son of Vulcan (phallus appeared in fire and his mother, Ocresia, was told to sit in the fire)

11th June: Concordia etc

• End with altar to Concordia that Livia dedicates

  • To her dear husband!

  • But prior to this, there was an immense palace built but it was flattened because luxury was seen to do harm

  • Caesar led as example as he was heir to such wealth - ‘when he as protector of the law did what he had warned others’

• Political undertones of the Fasti?

  • Means of naturalising the Augustan invasions into the old Republican calendar = appeasing Augustus?

  • In book 4, Venus referred to as the daughter-in-law to Assaracus so that one day great Caesar would have Julian ancestors (Venus was NOT married to Anchises!)

    • + apotheosis of JC in book 3

  • In 46BC, we see a reformation of the calendar which associated the organisation of the official year with the gens Iulia

    • The calendar ‘did not present a fixed unchanging view of Romanness…it incorporated new changing divergent images of what Rome was’

    • ‘a positive invasion, a planned and systematic act of intrusion which has the cumulative effect of recasing what is means to be Roman’

    • BUT soon Roman religion became a function for the state not for the individual

• Livia - June as time of Juno, Vesta and Concordia (her goddesses!)

12th / 13th of June

• Nothing to note on 12th but on the 13th, can narrate the lesser Quinquatrus

  • And asks blonde Minerva why flute players wander through the city? Why do they wear masks and long cloaks

• She explains that the flute was beloved in performance BUT times changed and only ten musicians allowed in funeral parades SO they left for Tibur in exile

  • And there, there was a party by freedman and the bands were playing but then someone played a trick by suggesting his master was coming so he hid them in a cart

  • This cart got moved to Rome while they slept so when they woke, they hid their faces (Plautius is here!)

  • And covered in long cloaks so women could also play

• But why is the day called the Quinquatrus?

  • Festival of such name in Mars

  • AND I invented the pipe! But cheeks puffed up very ugly so I threw it away, but was picked up by satur who challenged Apollo and then was flayed

12/13th June: exegesis!

• Interest into etymology and reasoning behind religion!

  • Ritual not a priority, but the origin of which (which validates the ritual)

  • Schied - suggests exegesis is ‘not a cultic necessity’ and to understand a rite in Rome was to know how to perform it

• BUT interpretation has a function within religion!!

  • Exegesis is a means by which ritual continues to have meaning for contemporary (and radically different) audience

  • Also a means of justifying the ritual by retrojecting it into the mythological past

  • ‘forma manet facti, mos tamen ille manet’ in book 1

  • ‘when exegesis stops developing, when the significance of the ritual is blocked by the frozen fingers of orthodoxy, Roman religion is dead’

  • But exegesis is not the ‘recovery of a fixed sense’ but ‘creation and story-telling’

(14th) 15th, 16th and 17th June

• 14/15] More astrology (Thyone of Dodona standing on the brow of the cow of Agenor) AND the day when the waste of Vesta is sent through the Etruscan waters = Ides of June are over

• 16] If you have any trust in the winds, sailors, give your sails to the West Wind: tomorrow a fortunate breeze will come onto your waters

• 17] More astrology (child of Hyrieus raises up strong arms and Dolphin will be seen on the next day)

  • This sign the Volsci and Aequi must have seen when they fled over your plain, Algidus (mt in Alban hills)

  • And where Tuburtus won that famed victory and had a triumph on snowy horses

  • Roman victory over these tribes in 431BC

  • BUT the constellation is in the sky for large portions of the year (sort of forced into this connection)

  • Humans trying to force celestial plain to link to our own time and history

19th, 20th, 21st and 22nd June

• 19] Six days remain! But add one day as the sun leaves Gemini behind and the sign of the Cancer reddens (slow movement into July?)

  • And Pallas begins to be worshipped on Aventine hill

• 20] Daughter-in-law to Laomedon (Hecabe?) drives off night, and temple dedicated to Summanus (whoever he is) in time of Pyrrhus

  • = do NOT know anything about this god! Only vague time period!

• 21] story of Hippolytus’ death

  • But here Asclepius brings him back to life (dies as recompense) and Hippolytus becomes Virbius of the Arician lake

• 22] ‘Although you will hurry to conquer, Caesar, I don’t want you to move your standard, if the auspices forbid’

  • Placed in opposition to the gods?

  • Shows the range of control that cult has (augury dictates action in battle)

24rd, 25/26th & 27/28th June

• 24] ‘Time will glide past and we will age through the silent years, and the days will flee with no bridle to delay it’

  • Honours of fors Fortuna arrive! fors holds regal offerings on the bay of the Tiber

  • Some come by foot, or boat but not shameful to be drunk

  • And the commons worship her because he who initiated the rites was one of them & for slaves too because Servius dedicated her a temple

• 25/26] someone returns badly drunken from the neighbouring altar and tells Orion he will soon be seen

  • If he wasn’t drunk, would have said a solstice was coming

• 27/28] Lares given sanctuary here

  • + also a temple for Jupiter Stator which Romulus founded once before the face of the Palatine hill

29th & 30th June

• 29] As many days remain of the month as the names of the Fates. At the time when a temple was dedicated to your striped gown, Quirinus

• 30] Tomorrow is the birthday of the July kalends

  • Peirides, provide a conclusion to what I have begun!

  • Clio now speaks = goddess of history

  • Memorial of famed Philip, from whom Marcia descends (beautiful and noble, and she was married to Caesar = Livia?)

  • BUT Philip did not found this temple but restored it (first in 178BC by Fulvius Nobilior)

    • Hinted at in nobilitate

    • Was patron to Ennius

    • And Annales 15 might have ended where Nobilior seized statues = closing off his piece in the same way (sort of)