«La estructura de sucesión en el libro III de los Fastos: de Rómulo a Numa como prototipo de Augusto», Emerita. Revista de Lingüística y Filología Clásica 86 (2018) 133-149. (original) (raw)

In the Fasti the image of Romulus fails to allude to Augustus because Ovid’s contemporary Augustus no longer responds to the Romulean prototype of a new founder of the city, and resembles Numa instead, king devoted to peace, rites and to the study of the stars. This circumstance is especially dramatized in II 119-144 as well as in I 27-44 and III 73-166. Nevertheless, Book III is the locus of the work in which this dramatization is most emphasized, since little less than a half of the Book (the first half) is devoted successively to Romulus and to Numa. In this paper we study how this succession-structure influences the construction of Augustus as a character, with conclusions about the Ovidian poetic construction of history: Ovid presents his interpretation of the after-Actium Augustus, which becomes rather a poetic device.