Ovid - Fasti (Oxford Worlds Classics)

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Anne Wiseman and Peter Wiseman 2011

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First published 2011 as Ovid: Times and Reasons
First published as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 2013

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

ANNE AND PETER WISEMAN

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

FASTI

P UBLIUS O VIDIUS N ASO (43 BC AD 17)known to Chaucer as Venus clerk Ovyde and to Touchstone in As You Like It as the most capricious poet, honest Ovidwas born in Sulmo (modern Sulmona) in the central highlands of Italy. He came to Rome in his teens, soon after the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra and the annexation of Egypt had brought about peace and prosperity and the rule of Caesar Augustus. Giving up his original ambition to enter public life, he soon became the sophisticated citys favourite poet. His subject was sex and love and the pursuit of pleasure, and his medium was the elegiac couplet, of which his mastery was unparalleled. Between about 25 BC and the turn of the millennium he wrote Amores (pseudo-autobiographical adventures of the poet as lover), Heroides (letters from love-lorn mythological ladies) and the didactic Art of Love and Remedies for Love, varying the elegiac output with a tragedy, Medea (now lost). Augustus disapproved of the Art of Love, and Ovid turned to more serious subjects, a great mythological epic (Metamorphoses) that went from the creation of the world down to his own times, and a myth-historical treatment of the Roman calendar in elegiacs (Fasti). His celebrity life did him no good: in AD 8 he was involved in a scandal, probably involving Augustus family, and was banished to the outpost of Tomis on the Black Sea (modern Constana in Romania). He continued writing (Tristia, Letters from Pontus), and outlived Augustus, but there was no recall. He died in exile.

A NNE W ISEMAN taught Latin in the Exeter University Department of Classics after her retirement from school teaching.

P ETER W ISEMAN is Emeritus Professor of Classics, University of Exeter, and a Fellow of the British Academy.

For Barbara Levick

magistrae discipula

19571961

Teacher and prophet

O VIDS calendar poem, Fasti, advertises itself in the first couplet as a source of information:

Tempora cum causis Latium digesta per annum
lapsaque sub terras ortaque signa canam.

Times and their reasons, arranged in order through the Latin year, and constellations sunk beneath the earth and risen, I shall sing.

It is (among other things) a didactic poem addressed to an unnamed pupil: the narrator constantly speaks to you in the singular. In book 1 (a special case) you may be Germanicus Caesar, but otherwise you are the reader with the book in your hand, or the listener having it read to you.

It is assumed that you have an interest in history, and can even carry out your own research: if you have time, your instructor suggests, look up the calendars of other cities ().

You look at the night sky (e.g. ).

So far, so intelligible. But the poem also has a quite different dimension.

The narrator describes himself as a uates (e.g.

Two generations before Ovids time the Romans had begun to use the term uates metaphorically, to mean inspired poet. That applied most characteristically to epic, where ever since Homer the poet had appealed to the Muse to sing the song through him, but poets in other genres used the term as well, including Ovid himself in his youthful Amores.12), explaining the rituals owed to the gods, and so he makes his identity as a uates more than just a metaphor.

Twice he makes the point that the uates has privileged access to the gods (4). And so the narrator is able to report face-to-face interviews with several divinities: Janus in book 1, terrifying but genial; Mars in book 3, macho but ill at ease; Venus in book 4, an old friend ironically teasing; Flora in book 5, ingenuous and very fanciable; and in book 6 a trio of goddesses quarrelling among themselves.

6), the gods can tell him what he needs to know.

For a poet to pray to the Muses for inspiration is commonplace enough. Our narrator prays to Carmentis, the goddess of prophetic song (), and may have their own agendas.

Subject and metre

What is it all about? Tempora cum causis, times and their reasons. That is a striking formulation, since chronology and causation are two of the defining characteristics of history writing. As Cicero observed, the genre of historiography demanded the ordering of times and explanation of reasons. This is something we shall come back to, but in the meantime, are we to think of Times and Reasons as the title of the poem?

Certainly the opening phrase of a work could be regarded as its title, as Ovid himself demonstrates in Tristia, book 2, where he cites Lucretius poem as