Over the last decade, works that have not traditionally been seen as “canon” are getting much more attention. This volume is timely in that it continues the discussions of genre and intertext in these texts and their significance for understanding the broader literary landscape. Questions of how writers of the late 1st century BCE to 1st century CE engaged with the ideology promoted by Augustus and other members of his house are not new. Yet the expansion of these discussions into lesser studied texts is providing fruitful additions to the ongoing debate.
This volume further develops the analysis of Ovid’s Fasti as an elegiac poem and focuses on how Ovid’s description of the calendar plays with and critiques Augustus’ religious innovations and ideology. Whereas other recent volumes have examined the Fasti in terms of Roman identity and gender (such as Angeline Chiu’s 2016 Ovid’s Women of the Year), this volume focuses specifically on how Ovid presents Augustan religious innovations and his “ingenuous and highly creative reconstructions of Roman cultural memory related to religion.” (5) It demonstrates how Ovid is playing with genre, incorporating aspects from panegyric, elegy, mime, Alexandrian philosophy, and literary traditions in order to present Augustan ideology and its appropriation of religious time in ambiguous ways.
The volume is divided into three sections of two or three chapters each. Each chapter centers around a case study in order to illuminate a particularly ambiguous engagement with Augustan ideology. The first section, “The Religious Self-Legitimation of the domus Augusta,” establishes the elegiac context for the poem and its content. Chapter 1 argues that the presentation of concordia, especially as it relates to relationships within the imperial house, serves as a common thread which runs through the poem. The discussion chooses as its case study the dedication of the temple of Concordia in the Roman forum and the tension between members of the imperial house that is hidden under the heavy-handed ideological presentation of Concordia Augusta.
Chapter 2 focuses on another Augustan goddess, Pax Augusta, and the Ara Pacis Augustae in order to explore how messages might be transferred from one medium to another, in this case from marble calendar (the Fasti Praenestini, for example) to literary calendar (Ovid’s aetiological elegy) and from monument (Ara Pacis Augustae) to calendar (Ovid’s Fasti). It argues that Ovid presents the messages of Augustus’ control of time in ambivalent ways by juxtaposing Augustan peace with the Actian victory, thereby encouraging his readers to “remember” the civil wars that Augustan messaging is trying to get people to forget. While the Altar itself focuses on peace, Ovid’s discussion of it focuses instead on the civil war. The chapter concludes by arguing how the presentation of Janus, the two-faced god, invites a bifocal and ambiguous reading of the entire poem, especially in terms of the idea of “peace through victory” when one considers the context of such victories.
The second section explores an important aspect of political and religious component of Augustus’ self-fashioning: deification. Chapter 3 summarizes how deification is presented in the literary tradition as an adoption of Hellenistic practices and builds on Bobby Xinyue’s 2022 volume Politics and divinization in Augustan poetry. It examines how Alexandrian discussions of deification are translated and adapted into Latin literary texts, focusing mostly in the latter half of the chapter on Callimachean astral panegyric and its influence on the Augustan poets. This chapter sets up the framework and background for the remaining two chapters in this section and provides an excellent summary and discussion of current scholarly discussion on how the deification of mortals is presented in Hellenistic and early imperial Latin texts. It concludes with an analysis of how poets themselves might be ‘deified’ through their works and highlights how Ovid’s inherent desire for his own artistic deification is embedded within his text.
Chapter 4 analyses Ovid’s innovative aetiology of the Quirinalia festival in February. Ovid appears to be the first to connect Romulus’ deification and epiphany as Quirinus to the aetiology of this festival which then served as the model for both Julius Caesar’s and Augustus’ deifications. It argues that in terms of “controlling time”, Romulus was an abject failure, even though Ovid attempts to justify Romulus’ ten month calendar. It also examines how the deification of Romulus is discussed in a number of texts and how authors and their audiences engage with the idea of mortals becoming gods. Although this chapter sits in the section on “deification”, it focuses mostly on discussions of calendars and revisits the familial concordia discussion from Chapter 1. This reviewer sees this as a missed opportunity. While the discussion recognises that the Fasti is a sequel to the Metamorphoses (120) in terms of deification, it does not use the opportunity to compare and analyse the different discussions of the deification of Julius Caesar in the two texts or how it might be compared with the various presentations of deification of Romulus discussed within the chapter.
Chapter 5 turns to Augustus’ presentation of his divine origins in Rome’s distant mythological past. It suggests that Ovid invents new aetiologies about Servius Tullius and the foundation of the temple of Fortuna in order to present Tullius as Augustus’ mythical prototype. Following an existing tradition of divine ancestry used from at least the 2nd century BCE as a means of self-aggrandisement, Augustus as divi filius (son of the newly deified Julius Caesar) then promotes himself as the great restorer: restoring temples, festivals and priesthoods that had fallen into disuse or disrepair while also establishing new ones. The case study for this chapter demonstrates how Ovid uses an elegiac presentation of Tullius and Fortuna to transform the association of Augustus and that same goddess. The discussion in this chapter is wide-ranging and explores parallels in terms of dynastic strife, conspiracy, and mortality, and how each individual’s daughters are presented. In places, the parallels seem forced and this chapter is not clearly linked to deification, so that it is difficult to see how the chapter advances the argument of this section. While framing the discussion in terms of Augustus’ divine origins, this reviewer suggests that it might have been better suited to the final section, but it could be that it was intended to serve as a transitional chapter between these two sections.
The final section draws together the key themes discussed throughout the volume and focuses specifically on Augustus’ self-fashioning and his appropriation of existing religious structures for his own purposes. Chapter 6 explores how Augustus acquired and dominated positions in the religious priesthoods. It revisits the Augustan restoration programme introduced in the previous chapter and how Augustus presented himself as Numa, restoring Rome’s relationship to its gods. Yet, many of such “restorations” were in fact novel establishments (such as the ritual of the Fetials) which were presented in terms of their continuity with the past. This chapter focuses on how Augustus used religion to legitimize his rule and concentrate religious priesthoods and ritual obligations in the hands of the princeps. Much of Ovid’s discussion of these priesthoods and titles borders on eulogy and yet in some aetiologies, such as that of the Salian song, Ovid follows a separate tradition from antiquarian literature (196-8), erasing Augustus from the discussion entirely. Thus in terms of priesthoods and offices, Ovid undermines Augustus’ self-aggrandising through such omissions and other ambivalent references to divine epithets in order to present a more ambiguous or even contested presentation of Augustus’ “religious revival.”
Chapter 7 further develops many of the ideas present in Chapter 6 and shifts from priesthoods to festivals and other religious inventions. Its case study focuses specifically on Augustus’ relationship to Vesta and the cult of the Lares. It explores the tension between Augustus’ so-called revival of traditional practice which masked the development of novel and innovative religious practices. It also discusses how Ovid emphasizes and presents an ambiguous eulogy of Augustus’ actions making the public “private” through his appropriation of Vesta’s hearth into his own house. Ovid then elaborates on Augustus’ incorporation of Vesta into his house in his discussion of the Floralia. By framing the discussion around Flora, the analysis demonstrates how Ovid undermines Augustus’ stern and reverent actions with licentious jokes, thereby ridiculing many of the gods central to Augustan Rome. This chapter reintroduces themes from the introduction in terms of Ovid’s use of satire and mime in his aetiologies in order to present these ambiguous readings (18). This chapter could have been strengthened by including a discussion of another relevant aetiology: that of the festival of Anna Perenna on the Ides of March. Ovid’s aetiology of the festivities incorporates many of the same themes presented here in terms of the erotic episodes, ridiculing the gods, and licentious jokes. Moreover, the significance of the Ides of March for Augustan ideology is also treated ambiguously as Ovid’s description of the death and deification of Julius Caesar appears as almost an afterthought, and it is the goddess Vesta who is invoked. The remaining part of the chapter discusses the Lares, Ovid’s invented aetiologies for them, and the blurring of the lines between public and private. Ovid’s discussion allows for ambiguous presentations of the actions of members of the imperial house and their involvement in the reconstruction, restoration, or dedication of various sacred buildings and rituals.
This volume is easy to navigate and clear in its signposting for each section and each chapter. The presentation of the discussion as a series of case studies means that readers can explore particular aspects of Ovid’s calendar poem both in connection with others and in isolation; the clear structure allows particular chapters of interest to be read (or assigned) on their own. However, a reader who reads the volume as a whole is also rewarded, as many significant themes and important components of Augustan ideology, such as concordia and familial piety/strife, reappear in different contexts and discussions throughout. Some chapters include images, but in many cases, such as the inclusion of images of busts of particular figures, these do not add anything to the overall argument and are not integrated into the analysis.
Ambiguity and religion in Ovid’s Fasti provides a valuable contribution to current discussions of genre, poetic intention, and audience expectations in literature of the late 1st century BCE to 1st century CE. It highlights the playful juxtaposition of Augustan self-fashioning with the self-fashioning of the poet. Just as Augustus is playing with time and reinventing Rome’s past, so too is Ovid through his innovative aetiologies, elegiac presentations, and ambiguous descriptions of those very same religious festivals, rituals and traditions. As this volume demonstrates, the discussion of the composition of poetic jokes has been underappreciated in the scholarship on religion in the Fasti. This volume is a welcome contribution to discussions of Ovid’s poetic playfulness and will encourage readers of the Fasti to read beyond the calendar.