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  • Ovid's Fasti: Historical Readings at Its Bimillennium
  • Matthew McGowan
Geraldine Herbert-Brown (ed.). Ovid's Fasti: Historical Readings at Its Bimillennium. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xv, 327. $166.00. ISBN 0-19-815475-5.

In her preface Herbert-Brown explains that "[t]here is no party line in this collection, no neat tying up of themes. The tension arising from the discrepancy in interpretation and approach is an apt reflection of the tension arising from the contradictory and elusive nature of the Fasti itself" (vi). Her remarks are apt for an uneven collection of twelve specialist papers from both established and emergent Ovid scholars writing in English. Whatever their individual discrepancies, all of the approaches here differ substantially from those of the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth century: they accept the poem as a significant artistic achievement, which they attempt to situate within its literary-historical context, rather than treating it as a sourcebook on Roman religion to be mined for the odd ritual or mythological aition.

The "discrepancy in interpretation" is most obvious in comparing the articles of Barchiesi and Newlands with those of Fantham, Knox, and Pasco-Pranger. The former advance the line of interpretation established by Barchiesi in The Poet and the Prince (Berkeley 1997), where Ovid is represented as undercutting Augustus' attempt to unify the calendar, along with much else in Roman culture and politics, around the house of the Julio-Claudians. In the present volume, Barchiesi's analysis of Mars' epiphany in the forum Augustum in Fasti 5 proceeds along familiar lines with an enviable ease of interpretation, and Newlands' engaging discussion of the porticus of Livia (6.637–648) suggests that Ovid's Fasti challenges the princeps' attempt to control civic time. Both she and Barchiesi make a strong case for a politically destabilizing poem, but I am more inclined to accept the latter group's less overtly subversive Ovid. Their view is best represented by Fantham on the purpose of the Fasti: "Ovid aimed to enrich the essential calendar structure with aetiological legends from Greek myth and Roman prehistory . . . [and] to please (or appease?) Augustus by honouring the new Imperial and dynastic anniversaries and assimilating them into the traditional Republican calendar" (24). Indeed, in her informed account of the poet's treatment of Julio-Claudian holidays, Pasco-Pranger provides "an answer to a strong tendency in literary readings of the Fasti to expect an ironic or subversive approach to Augustan and authoritarian themes from the Ovid we think we know" (273).

The remaining seven contributors form no such convenient groups but often respond to each other's scholarship. In her analysis of the felices animae (1.295–310), Herbert-Brown argues that the Fasti's astrological material is original and was not added by Ovid from exile to please the poem's second dedicatee, Germanicus Caesar (so Gee, Ovid, Aratus and Augustus [Cambridge 2000]). Gee herself convincingly challenges the strict dichotomy between the constellation Orion and the god Mars posited by Newlands (Playing with Time [Ithaca 1995]), although her attempt to link this to the Robigalia festival on the basis of an allusion to Vergil's representation of Philippi in Georgics 1 is strained. Similarly, Littlewood's paper on the role of Numa in the Fasti begins with promise but falters because of a misguided attempt to use the Aristaeus episode from Georgics 4 to interpret the heaven-sent ancile in Fasti 3 and Ovid's apparent ambivalence there towards Augustan ideology. [End Page 169]

The range of quality in the collection is perhaps most visible in the last four articles. Green's contribution posits that the theologia tripertita found in Varro shapes the Fasti narrative, but her argument is flawed by a misunderstanding both of the tripertita itself and of Ovid's narrative technique. Keegan takes on Barchiesi and Fantham for "gender-exclusive" readings, but his article is unconvincing, not least for its overuse (abuse?) of the parenthesis-cum-questione construction and its apparent disregard of Graeco-Roman literary history (e.g., 132, Saturnia invidiosa, Juno's "prejudicial epithet"). Miller's analysis of "Ovid's Liberalia," by contrast, brings together a wide range of ancient...

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