Emma Brobeck, Washington and Lee University
In describing the Quinquatrus at Fasti 3.809-48, Ovid exhorts a catalogue of celebrants—weavers, cobblers, and carpenters, among others—to worship Minerva, the patron goddess of a thousand crafts (mille dea est operum, 3.834). Scholarship on this passage typically focuses on the social history of the festival (Cinaglia, Fowler, Frazer, Pasco-Pranger). However, Ovid’s vocabulary throughout is explicitly metapoetic, thereby placing the poet among Minerva’s celebrants. Furthermore, the programmatic language and literary allusions within the passage map onto several distinct genres, including elegy and epic. This talk argues that rather than presenting a straightforward depiction of the Quinquatrus, Ovid uses the programmatic language of elegy and epic to portray poetry as the ultimate craft and himself as the consummate poet capable of tackling any genre.
I begin with a brief discussion of the initial celebrants of the festival: tenerae puellae who learn to weave from Minerva (3.815-20). The girls who pray to Minerva become learned (doctus, 816), an image that evokes the Alexandrian tradition to which the Fasti is indebted (Miller). Minerva then teaches (erudit, 820) the girls to soften wool (mollire, 817) and make the work dense (rarum . . . denset opus, 820). This lexical network of softness and erudition positions weaving as the representation of didactic elegy, a genre at which Ovid excels (to his own detriment, in the case of Ars Amatoria).
Ovid then turns to cobblers and carpenters (3.823-26), who would not be able to work without the support of Minerva. These lines continue to use metapoetic language through the image of vincula (bonds) to describe sandals (Henkel). However, Ovid quickly shifts to allusions that denote epic rather than elegy. He names two epic artisans: Tychius, the creator of Ajax’s shield, and Epeus, the builder of the Trojan Horse. Aeneas notably describes Epeus’ construction of the horse in Aeneid 2, which itself refashions the song of Demodocus in Odyssey 8 from a Trojan perspective. Demodocus is a clear stand-in for the poet, but I argue that by referring to Epeus and not to Demodocus, Ovid reflects specifically on the reworking of epic material from Homer to Vergil. Meanwhile, Tychius appears once in Iliad 7 in the description of Ajax’s shield. In a metapoetic reading of the Fasti passage, the name Tychius evokes famous epic ekphrases of shields, which in turn exemplify the same bonds between poetry and art that Ovid highlights throughout the description of the Quinquatrus.
Ovid ends the catalogue with the hope that Minerva will find his poetry worthy. This closing remark places Ovid both within the ranks of Homer and Vergil and as the pinnacle of the catalogue of poetry. Furthermore, Ovid composed the Fasti at a critical juncture in his career. A metapoetic catalogue at this point encourages the reader to reflect on Ovid’s poetic oeuvre from the early elegiac works to the recent Metamorphoses. The final wish for Minerva’s approval poignantly reminds the reader of a long career interrupted.