Fasti
Fasti
The Roman religious calendar, its festivals, origin myths, and star-risings, is itself a rich poetic subject, worth the same careful antiquarian and mythological treatment usually reserved for epic material.
- Roman calendar and festival origins as poetic subject
- combines antiquarian scholarship with mythological narrative
- left unfinished, likely interrupted by Ovid's exile
- major surviving source for Roman religious practice
An unfinished elegiac poem covering the first six months of the Roman calendar, month by month, explaining the mythological and historical origins of festivals, the movements of constellations, and points of religious antiquarian interest, mixing serious scholarship on Roman ritual with characteristically Ovidian wit and digression. Composed alongside the Metamorphoses and left incomplete, breaking off after June, likely disrupted by Ovid's exile in AD 8 before he could complete the second half of the year, the poem is a major surviving source for Roman religious practice and calendar lore, valuable to historians precisely because Ovid treats antiquarian material with the same narrative energy he brings to myth.
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