Stephen Blair (UCL)
Interrupted (according to Ovid) by his exile, the fasti abruptly break off halfway through the calendar, a monument to the fracturing effects of Augustan imperialism: for Ovid presents his spatial dislocation from Rome to the Black Sea as coinciding with the fragmentation of his portrait of the cosmically complete religious year (Feeney 1992). At first glance, the fasti might appear to present a homogenizing, centripetal vision of Roman hegemony, which hoovers up gods, cults, and festivals along with the territory of those it subjects, incorporating them into an administrative machine and a systematic calendar that run like clockwork: when Jupiter looks at the world, he sees nil nisi Romanum (1.86). Religious accretion accompanies imperial violence, as the cult of Minerva capta attests (3.837). Yet at the same time, the proliferation of antiquarian mini-narratives atomizes the totality of Roman religion into a multitude of specialized Sondergötter, site-specific rites, and cult epithets with multiple possible origins: scholars rightly emphasize the text’s “polytonality” (Miller) and “multiplicity” (Feeney 2020). Ovid’s aetiologies dissolve the superficial uniformity of imperial space by revealing local variegation: when the ignorant poet asks Erato if the cult of magna mater is native to Rome (4.248), Erato’s wide-ranging answer uncovers the complex aetiological and historical realities of cult migration and appropriation.
Important studies exploring Ovid’s use of Varronian theology (Green) and suggestive manipulation of the systematic scheme (Barchiesi) illustrate how creatively he was playing with prose antiquarian models. Moreover, in the spirit of the “global village” (McLuhan), the emerging information technologies of Augustan encyclopedism and philological-antiquarian research (perhaps most clearly visible in the work of Verrius Flaccus) uncovered the surprising interconnectedness of town with town, past with present, Roman with other. The Pisces, who warned Romans celebrating the Arcadian Lupercalia to expect six days of wind, were the same ones whose service to Dione Syrians commemorated by abstaining from seafood (2.453–74).
While antiquarians wrestle with systematic schemes (Momigliano, Rawson, Feeney 2007), they also celebrate their material’s inherent chaos (Volk). In the fasti, too, “Chaos” is a generative principle (Hardie), whom Ovid identifies with the Roman Janus. Ovid’s prehistory vacillates between firmly localized Euhemerizing moments in which Saturn and Janus are kings of ancient Latium and the ubiquitous placelessness of a Hesiodic-Stoic cosmogony.
Paradoxically, the cosmic calendrical structure of the fasti is a testament to Caesarian hegemony (Beard), while its constant deep dives into a past before Romanocentrism depict the world as a decentralized, interconnected web of aetiologically significant sites. Its universal scope clashes with its celebration and elevation of the local, the particular, and the unassimilated. Like Ovid, Evander is an exul; but for Evander, the site of Rome was exilium (1.539–40), and being there was a hard fate demanding consolatory exempla of other nationless wanderers. If Varro’s antiquarianism brought the Romans home when they were foreigners in their own city (Cic. acad. 1.3), Ovid’s makes them strangers once again, rewinding the cosmic clock to reveal an ancient world as fragmentary as it is interconnected.