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.

A. Chiu, Ovid's Women of the Year: Narratives of Roman Identity in the Fasti. Ann Arbor, MI 2016.

Michigan (2016) h/b 220 pp. £56.26 (ISBN 978-0-472-13004-7) Angelina Chiu As the title indicates, the author focusses on the "calendar girls" in Ovid's Fasti. The goal is to see how this long-marginalised group of characters contribute to the poem, (Ovidian experiments with) the genre of elegy, and contemporary discourses. In particular, C. reads Ovid's women against the backdrop of parallel episodes in Livy's Ab urbe condita (Ch. 1) and Vergil's Aeneid (Ch. 2), but also against the figure of Augustus himself (Ch. 3) and Ovid's other elegiac/elegiacizing output (Ch. 4). The result is a fast-paced series of close readings of figures such as Anna Perenna (and her namesakes), Carmentis, Vesta, and of course Livia.

A Poet between Two Worlds: Ovid in Late Antiquity

In C.E. Newlands and J.F. Miller, eds., A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell) 100-13., 2014

This chapter examines the reception of Ovid’s erotic and exilic elegies in the Latin literature of late antiquity (fourth to sixth centuries CE). Revising Hermann Fränkel’s thesis of Ovid as a “poet between two worlds,” it draws particular attention to a number of examples in which late antique authors allude to Ovid as a means of reflecting on the transitions taking place in their own time, with the emergence of Christianity and the disintegration of the Roman Empire. Texts discussed include Rutilius Namatianus, De Reditu; Dracontius, Satisfactio; Orientius, Commonitorium; and the elegiac collection of Maximianus.