Festivals, fools and the Fasti: the Quirinalia and the Feriae Stultorum (Ovid, Fast. 2.475-532) (original) (raw)

Author and Authority in the Medieval and Renaissance Commentaries on Ovid's FASTI (2012)

The Fasti by Ovid, his six-book poem on the Roman festival calendar, is being regarded more and more by scholars as a complex interaction between literature and realia . It follows the generic model of aetiological elegy and the cultural model of the Roman calendar. The calendar is not just an organizational principle, but an intertext. To understand Ovid's Fasti , in other words, it is essential to 1 understand the calendar itself. Jörg Rüpke clarifies a matter which it seems both the medieval magistri and the Renaissance humanists also knew, namely, that Ovid did not write a fasti , but rather a book about fasti ( Fastorum libri ), a very common appellation for Ovid's work. It has been theorized that Ovid knew and used as a source the marble fasti in the forum at Praeneste. Written calendars were open to omissions and variants, even errors. Ovid took this feature of written calendars and explored it at length in his poem.

Transformations of Ovid in Late Antiquity

Ovid could be considered the original poet of late antiquity. In his exile poetry, he depicts a world in which Rome has become a distant memory, a community accessible only through his imagination. This, Ovid claimed, was a transformation as remarkable as any he had recounted in his Metamorphoses. Ian Fielding's book shows how late antique Latin poets referred to Ovid's experiences of isolation and estrangement as they reflected on the profound social and cultural transformations taking place in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries AD. There are detailed new readings of texts by major figures such as Ausonius, Paulinus of Nola, Boethius and Venantius Fortunatus. For these authors, Fielding emphasizes, Ovid was not simply a stylistic model, but an important intellectual presence. Ovid's fortunes in late antiquity reveal that poetry, far from declining into irrelevance, remained a powerful mode of expression in this fascinating period. CONTENTS Introduction: a poet between two worlds 1. Ovid Recalled in the Poetic Correspondence of Ausonius and Paulinus of Nola 2. Ovid and the Transformation of the Late Roman World of Rutilius Namatianus 3. The Poet and the Vandal Prince: Ovidian Rhetoric in Dracontius' Satisfactio 4. The Remedies of Elegy in Ovid, Boethius and Maximianus 5. The Ovidian Heroine of Venantius Fortunatus, Appendix 1 Conclusion: Ovid's Late Antiquity.

Identity crisis: scriptae personae in Ovid's Amores 1.4 and 2.5

2011

The purpose of this thesis is to discuss the multifaceted personae of Ovid's Amores, specifically in Amores 1.4 and 2.5. These personae range from Ovid as poet (poeta), lover (amator), and love teacher (praeceptor amoris); the poet's love interest, the puella; the rival, the vir; other unnamed rivals; and reader. I argue that Ovid complicates the roles of the personae in his poetry by means of subversion, inversion and amalgamation. Furthermore, I conclude that as readers, when we understand how these personae interact with each other and ourselves (as readers), we can better comprehend Ovid's poetry and quite possibly gain some insight into his other poetic works. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One. Introduction 1 Chapter Two. Personae in Amores 1.4 12 Chapter Three. Personae in Amores 2.5 36 Chapter Four. Conclusion 59 Bibliography 64 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ars adeo latet arte sua. Met. 10.252 In his book Arts of Love (1993), Kennedy discusses the Pygmalion myth in the tenth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses: 1 Pygmalion creates a statue; the story 'ends' with it becoming a 'real' woman. However, a sign 'stands' not for reality, but for another sign in a continuing chain of signification. A statue stands for the female body, but the female body is a signifier in its turn; and so on. It is the function and effect of rhetoric to efface itself, to dissolve the distinction between 'illusion' and 'reality' (ars adeo latet arte sua). The object of such rhetorical persuasion may be its exponent no less than its audience. Pygmalion's statue 'becomes' a 'real' woman; her 'reality' is beyond question because she 'represents' nothing beyond the fulfillment of his desire. The same concept of a realistic yet illusive kind of character can also be seen (or rather, read about) in Ovid's Amores. 2 As a result of these illusive, realistic characters-or what I prefer to call personae-, Ovid is often judged (or even criticized) 3 as deceptive, parodic, and witty. The focus of this thesis is how these characteristics function and what that function suggests about Ovid's poetry. My primary texts will be Amores 1.4 and 2.5, using thorough studies of personae in this 1 Specifically found in lines 243-297 of Met. 10. 2 I owe thanks to Tara Welch, Michael Shaw, and Pamela Gordon for their patience, profound insight, and supportive assessments that have helped make this thesis both comprehensible and knowledgeable. 3 Kennedy (1993) 93 makes a good point, which can be applied to Ovid's critics: "Elegy is thus no less artificial and rule-bound a literary genre than Virgil's Eclogues, the only difference being that the literary genre in elegy wear city clothes and live in Rome whereas the characters in the Eclogues wear rustic clothes and live in the country, a theme Veyne then goes on to develop in his chapter 7." Katz (2009) 2 explains that up until the 1970s, many scholars viewed Ovid as a mere imitator of his elegiac predecessors and thus considered his use of "parody" and constant irony and humor to be deficiencies. However, Katz (2009) 2 includes that many scholars today see Ovid's elegiac lover as "complex, humorous, and irreverent-as a true desultor amoris whom the poet portrays as both the lover dominated by his puella and the dominating lover who shrewdly manipulates his beloved." 145 And like when a Maeonian or Carian woman stains ivory with crimson to be a cheek piece for horses; And it lies in a treasure chamber, and though many horsemen pray to possess it; but, as a king's prize, it lies there, 87 Miller (2002) 257. 88 Booth (1991) 122. Booth also adds that "Roman thought lilies & roses 'went' together; see Plin. Nat. xxi. 22 et interpositum (lilium) etiam maxime rosas decet."

DIVINE JOURNEYS: GEOGRAPHICAL CATALOGUES IN OVID'S FASTI 4

CLASSICAL JOURNAL 115: 397-423., 2020

This paper examines the geographical catalogues that describe the journeys of the goddesses Cybele and Ceres in Fasti 4. Looking beyond their narratological function as transitional devices and as displays of erudition, it seeks also to show how geography intersects with and further illustrates the poem's interest in religious innovation, generic experimentation and imperial expansion. The journeys of the two goddesses, which are notable as the only geographical catalogues of the poem, provide imaginary maps of both the previous literary tradition and of the Roman empire.

Reconsidering Closure in Ovid's Fasti

Labor Imperfectus. Unfinished, Incomplete, Partial Texts in Classical Antiquity, eds. J. Fabre-Serris, M Formisano, and S. Frangoulidis, 2024

This chapter explores the dynamic between open-endedness and closure in Ovid's calendar-poem, Fasti, both in the work as a whole and especially at the end of individual books. Among the book-ends, that of Book 5 stands out as in some respects unique, but is shown to come to an artful close via retrospective references, dense metapoetic phrasing, and the evocation of the experience of standing before a calendar on public display.