Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

THE FASTI
(Acontius and Cydippe), Callimachus figures only by way of sporadic allusion. 1
This is in contrast to Propertius, who had pledged formal allegiance to
Callimachus (2.1.39-41, 3.1.1-2); who, indeed, in announcing the new kind
of antiquarian elegy to which he had turned after the rupture with Cynthia
(3.24, 25), had actually styled himself the Roman Callimachus (4.1.64). Now
Ovid, as he had done with the Heroides, moved in to annex and consolidate
the new genre. Whereas Propertius had experimented in a rather tentative
fashion with a mixed collection of erotic and aetiological elegies, Ovid, as was
his habit, went the whole hog and projected a single homogeneous poem of epic
scale; the Fasti if completed would have been almost exactly the same length
as the Aeneid. The break with love and love-elegy announced at the end of the
Amores was now apparently complete.
Ovid's plan was to describe the Roman calendar and the various observances
and festivals of the Roman year, and to explain their origins:
tempora cum causis Latium digesta per annum
lapsaque sub terras ortaque signa canam. {Fast. 1.1-2)
The seasons of the Roman calendar in due order, their origins, and the risings and
settings of the constellations — these shall be my theme.
His chief models were Hellenistic, Callimachus' Aetia and Aratus' Pnaenomena,
and the ostensible impulse for the poem came from Propertius. However, the
Aeneid must also be taken into account. The originality of Ovid's undertaking,
as usual in Latin literature, consists in the combination of hitherto disparate
elements: learning of a distinctively Hellenistic type is used to adorn themes
from Roman history and antiquities, with a gloss of contemporary allusion
which frequently shades into outright propaganda for the Pax Augusta. In
crude terms this would also serve as a description of the Aeneid. That the two
poems are in fact vastly different from each other is due in the first place to their
different literary forms: the epic is impersonal, whereas Ovid's Callimachean
model was didactic and anecdotal. More important still is the difference in
temperament between the two poets, with their respective preference for the
suggestive and the explicit. Most important of all, however, is the fact that the
Aeneid represents a deeply meditated credo, whereas the Fasti is a purely literary
exercise.
This was Ovid's first and only attempt at an Augustan poem, in the sense
that, whatever derogations from high solemnity he might permit himself,
his ostensible aim was to celebrate the idea of Rome, the res Romana.
The original proem, displaced in revision, not only stresses the literary
1
E.g. Art Am. 1.619-20 ~ Callim. Epigr. 44.J-4. The same is generally true of Augustan poetry:
Ross (19750) 6-7.
429
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