Fasti (Penguin Classics)
Date: 2004-10-28
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Rights: All rights reserved.

FASTI

PUBLIUS OVIDIUS NASO was born in 43 BC at Sulmo (Sulmona) in central Italy. Born into a wealthy Roman family and seemingly destined for a career in politics, he held some minor official posts before leaving public service to write, becoming the most distinguished poet of his time. His published works include Amores, a collection of short love poems; Heroides, fictional verse-letters written by mythological heroines to their lovers; Ars Amatoria, a satirical handbook on love; Remedia Amoris, a sequel to the Ars; and Metamorphoses, his epic work on change. He was working on Fasti, a poem on the Roman calendar, when, in AD 8, the emperor Augustus exiled him to Tomis on the Black Sea, far from Rome and the literary life he loved. The reason for his exile is unclear; the pretext was that he was exiled for the immorality of Ars Amatoria, but there was probably a political aspect to the affair. He continued to write, notably the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto and to work on Fasti. He never returned to Rome and died, in exile, in AD 17 or 18.

ANTHONY JAMES BOYLE was born in 1942 and educated at St Francis Xavier’s College, Liverpool, and Cambridge University, where he later taught. He served twenty years at Monash University, Melbourne, before moving to the USA in 1989, where he is Professor of Classics at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He is editor of the classical literary journal Ramus, and his publications include Ancient Pastoral, The Chaonian Dove: Studies in the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid of Virgil, Seneca’s Phaedra and Troades, The Imperial Muse, Roman Epic, Roman Literature and Ideology, and Tragic Seneca. He has also edited (with J. P. Sullivan) Roman Poets of the Early Empire and Martial in English for Penguin Classics.

ROGER DILLARD WOODARD was born in 1951. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He holds the Andrew V. V. Raymond Chair of Classics at the University of Buffalo (SUNY), having formerly served on the faculties of Swarthmore College, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Southern California. His publications include Greek Writing from Knossos to Homer and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages.

OVID

Fasti

Translated and edited with an Introduction and Notes by

A. J. BOYLE and R. D. WOODARD

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This translation first published 2000

Reprinted with corrections 2004

5

Copyright © A. J. Boyle and R. D. Woodard, 2000, 2004

All rights reserved

The moral right of the translators has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

EISBN: 978–0–140–44690–6

For our sons
James Boyle and Paul Woodard
and to the memory of
Kathryn Emma Boyle (1975–97)

I was despatched to Tomi, on the Euxine,
And had the privilege besides to lodge
With Ovid, the great poet, exiled there.
He was unlike the Ovid in my mind,
(All graceful, wanton, charming, credulous,)
Being an old, bleak, broken-hearted man
Dressed in wool trowsers and a sheepskin coat,
Living in dire poverty on biscuit,
Salt mullet and the country vinegar.
He had a one-roomed hovel, floored with clay,
A lamp, a bed of goatskins, a few books,
A hearth, where seldom any firing burned,
A few relics of his happiness,
And implements for writing: nothing else.
John Masefield, ‘A Letter from Pontus’
(1936)

CONTENTS

PREFACE

MAPS

The World of Ovid’s Fasti

Greece in Ovid’s Fasti

Italy and Sicily in Ovid’s Fasti

Ovid’s Rome: Major Sites and Monuments

INTRODUCTION

FURTHER READING

TRANSLATION AND LATIN TEXT

SUMMARY OF FASTI

OMISSIONS FROM FASTI

OVID’S FASTI

Book 1

Book 2

Book 3

Book 4

Book 5

Book 6

Notes

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

GLOSSARY

PREFACE

This translation and edition of Ovid’s Fasti need no justification. The poem has long been recognized as a major source for Roman religion, myth, anthropology and culture; and the neglect which the work has suffered during this century from literary historians and critics has been amply compensated for by the energies of the last decade. Fasti is now widely acclaimed as the final masterwork of the poet from Sulmo. The authors offer this volume as an attempt to bring Ovid’s late cultural and literary edifice to a wider readership.

The book has benefited from the acuity and critical judgement of several friends and scholars. Thanks are due to Peter Davis of the University of Tasmania, Ruth Morse of Cambridge and the Sorbonne, Carole Newlands of UCLA, John Penwill of La Trobe University Australia and Alex Watts-Tobin of USC. Hannah Fearnley of USC laboured hard and brilliantly as an early critic; so too did Joseph Smith of SDSU, who in addition produced the copy for the maps. The original idea for the project arose from discussions with the late James W. Poultney of Johns Hopkins University. King’s College Cambridge and John Henderson jump-started the book.

The preparation of this work has been a collaborative effort, with each of the authors working intensively on both the text and the interpretation of Fasti within the course of the project. The translation which is found herein is chiefly the responsibility of Boyle, offered as a tribute to his daughter. The notes are mainly the responsibility of Woodard. Sections 1, 4 and 5 of the Introduction rewrite and reformulate parts of Boyle’s essay on ‘Ovid’ in A. J. Boyle and J. P. Sullivan (eds.), Roman Poets of the Early Empire (Harmondsworth 1991), pp. 1–4, and his chapter ‘Postscripts from the Edge: Exilic Fasti and Imperialized Rome’, in G. D. Williams and A. D. Walker (eds.), Ovid in Exile: Ramus 26 (1997), pp. 7–28 (to which readers are referred for full bibliographical annotation). Works to which the authors are indebted include the editions of Franz Bömer (Heidelberg 1957/58) and Elaine Fantham (Cambridge 1998), and the translations of Sir James Frazer (Cambridge, MA 1931) and of Betty Rose Nagle (Bloomington, Indiana 1995). Ted Hughes’s rewriting of the Metamorphoses in Tales from Ovid (London 1997) also illuminated. The Teubner text of Alton, Wormell and Courtney (2nd edn, Leipzig 1985) has been the surest guide to what Ovid wrote, and has been rejected on only a handful of occasions (see Translation and Latin Text). The authority for all matters astronomical during Ovid’s day remains Ideler 1825. Other works from which this book has benefited are listed in Further Reading and the List of Abbreviations. But the authors would like here to acknowledge their especial indebtedness to the commentary of Sir James Frazer (London 1929), the influence of which is self-evident on every page of the Notes. We dedicate the book to the memory of Kathryn Emma Boyle, and to our sons, James Boyle and Paul Woodard: quibus felices sospitibus semper erimus.

A. J. Boyle

R. D. Woodard

USC, Los Angeles
New Year’s Day 1999

MAPS

‘Sites of Rome’
(enlarged detail of central area overleaf)

Sites built, finished or refinished between 30 BC and AD 14 and those particularly associated with the Augustan programme of architectural and moral renewal are indicated in CAPITALS.

01. MAUSOLEUM OF AUGUSTUS
02. HOROLOGIUM OF AUGUSTUS
03. ARA PACIS AUGUSTAE (ALTAR OF AUGUSTAN PEACE)
04. Gardens of Lucullus
05. Temple of Flora
06. Temple of Venus Erycina (of Eryx)
07. Gardens of Sallust
08. Precinct of Fortuna AD Portam Collinam
09. Temple of Quirinus
10. Temple of Juno Lucina
11. PORTICUS LIVIAE
12. MONUMENTAL ARCHES OF AUGUSTUS
13. GARDENS OF MAECENAS AND AUDITORIUM
14. Temple of Tellus (conjectural identification)
15. ARCH OF DOLABELLA
16. Temple of Camenae (location uncertain)
17. TEMPLE OF HONOS ET VIRTUS (with ALTAR OF FORTUNA REDUX)
18. TEMPLE OF BONA DEA SUBSAXANA
19. Scipionic Monuments
a. Temple of Tempestates (location uncertain)

b. Tomb of the Scipios
20. Pyramid of C. Cestius
21. Porticus Aemilia
22. Grove of Furrina
23. NAUMACHIA OF AUGUSTUS (dimensions uncertain)
24. ARA DITIS PATRIS ET PROSERPINAE (ALTAR OF DIS AND PROSERPINA)

25. BASILICA NEPTUNI
26. PANTHEON
27. SAEPTA JULIA
a. PORTICUS ARGONAUTARUM
b. PORTICUS MELEAGRI
c. DIRIBITORIUM

28. Temples of Isis and Serapis
29. BATHS OF AGRIPPA
30. Theatre of Pompey
a. Temple of Venus Victrix
b. Theatre
c. Porticus
d. Republican Victory temples

31. Porticus Minucia Vetus enclosing the Temple of Lares Permarini (conjectural identification of both porticus and temple)
32. Theatre of Balbus with cryptoporticus
33. Temple of Mars (or Neptune? – conjectural identification)
34. Temple of Hercules Custos (location at west end of Circus uncertain)
35. Temple of Castor and Pollux
36. Temple of Neptune (location on Circus uncertain)
37. Circus Flaminius
38. PORTICUS PHILIPPI enclosing the TEMPLE OF HERCULES MUSARUM
39. PORTICUS OCTAVIAE enclosing
a. Temple of Juno Regina
b. Temple of Jupiter Stator

40. Temples of Apollo Sosianus (west) and Bellona (east)
41. Tarpeian Rock
42. Forum Holitorium
43. THEATRE OF MARCELLUS
44. Republican temples of Janus, Juno Sospita and Spes (assignment of names to temples conjectural)
45. Temple of Vedjovis (identified as Jupiter in Fasti, its location on Tiber Island is uncertain)
46. Temple of Aesculapius
47. Forum Romanum
48. Temple of Saturn
49. BASILICA JULIA
50. Temple of Castor (and Pollux)
51. Temple of Vesta
52. House of the Vestals
53. Temple of Jupiter Stator
54. TEMPLE OF DIVUS JULIUS
55. ARCH OF AUGUSTUS
56. PORTICUS JULIA and PORTICUS GAII ET LUCII
57. Regia
58. BASILICA AEMILIA
59. CURIA
60. CHALCIDICUM
61. FORUM OF AUGUSTUS enclosing TEMPLE OF MARS ULTOR
62. FORUM OF JULIUS CAESAR enclosing the TEMPLE OF VENUS GENETRIX
63. Clivus Argentarius to the Comitium
64. Temple of Janus Geminus (location uncertain)
65. Arx
66. Temple of Juno Moneta
67. TEMPLE OF CONCORDIA
68. ROSTRA and GOLDEN MILESTONE
69. Porticus Deorum Consentium
70. Tabularium
71. Temple of Vedjovis
72. Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus
73. Attendant temples of JUPITER TONANS, Fortuna Primigenia, Mens, Fides and Ops
74. Forum Boarium
75. Temples of Fortuna and Mater Matuta
76. Temple of Portunus
77. Ara Maxima (location uncertain)
78. TEMPLE OF CYBELE (Magna Mater)
79. TEMPLE OF VICTORIA
80. ‘HOUSE OF LIVIA’ (north) and HOUSE OF AUGUSTUS (south)
81. TEMPLE OF PALATINE APOLLO
82. LIBRARY OF PALATINE APOLLO
83. Lupercal
84. Scalae Caci and Casa Romuli
85. Circus Maximus
86. Temple of Hercules Victor
87. Temple of Ceres, Liber and Libera
88. Temple of Hercules Invictus (conjectural identification)
89. Temple of Minerva
90. Temple of Diana
91. TEMPLE OF JUNO REGINA (location uncertain)
92. Temple of Serapis
93. Temple of Semo Sancus Dius Fidius (location uncertain)
94. Hall of Liberty
A. PONS AGRIPPAE
B. PONS FABRICIUS
C. Pons Cestius
D. Pons Aemilius
E. Pons Sublicius

INTRODUCTION

1. Ovid’s Life and Poetry

I. In AD 8 Ovid was Rome’s most distinguished living poet. Virgil and Horace were long dead and Ovid’s poetic achievement brilliant, lauded and extensive: several books of erotic verse, a tragedy, a fifteen-book epic, an unfinished poem on the Roman calendar, Fasti. In the same year he was banished. In an act virtually unprecedented in Roman history the empire’s major poet was removed by its political leader – and removed, in part, for his verse. The political leader was the first emperor, Augustus, sole master of the Roman world since 31 BC, now an embittered autocrat, frustrated by a long series of misfortunes – military, financial, dynastic (Pliny HN 7.149f.). He expelled Ovid to a half-Greek city called Tomis (modern Constanza), situated on the Pontus or Black Sea in what today is Romania, at the extreme edge of the Roman empire. The effect on the fifty-year-old poet was devastating. Tomis was the inversion of the Rome he loved: barbarous, insecure, intemperate of climate, spiritually and culturally barren. Its inhabitants spoke Getic, Sarmatian, hybrid Greek and no Latin. For a man such as Ovid separation from friends, society, the literary world, even his own native tongue, constituted a death-sentence. It was during this death-sentence that he revised Fasti.

Ovid mentions in his later poetry two reasons for his exile (technically relegatio, ‘relegation’ – the poet lost neither property nor civic rights): carmen, ‘a poem’ or ‘poetry’, and error, ‘a blunder’ (Tristia 2.207). The ‘blunder’ or ‘indiscretion’ is (intentionally) described obscurely and remains obscure. Ovid claims that he saw something unwittingly (Tristia 2.103ff.), and explanations have ranged from the poet’s involvement in the sexual misdemeanours of Augustus’ granddaughter Julia, also banished in AD 8, to entanglement in the factional rivalries of the imperial family. Whatever the truth of the former, the latter seems to some extent correct, and it appears less than accidental that Augustus’ grandson and joint heir (with Tiberius), Agrippa Postumus, was banished a year before Ovid, and that Ovid’s friend, Paullus Fabius Maximus, on whom he placed many of his early hopes for a reprieve, sought unsuccessfully to reunite Augustus and his grandson, and was swept away in the dynastic struggle of AD 14 (Tacitus Annals 1.5). Neither Ovid nor Fabius were friends of Tiberius.

The poetic pretext for Ovid’s exile was Ars Amatoria, The Art of Love, published much earlier (about 1 BC), but now an alleged factor in the banishment itself. The objection to it, according to Ovid’s defence especially in Tristia 2, was its moral subversiveness, its encouragement of sexual immorality (‘foul adultery’, obsceni adulterii, Tristia 2.212), at the time of Augustus’ attempts to improve the mores of the aristocracy. As a consequence, Ars Amatoria and, it appears, Ovid’s books as a whole were removed from Rome’s public libraries. But neither that essentially symbolic act (there were only three such libraries) nor his own poetry’s involvement in the banishment stopped Ovid from writing. Only death would do that. For Ovid, poetry not only consoled (Tristia 1.11.12, 4.10.115ff.). To be alive and to be a poet were the same.

II. Publius Ovidius Naso was born at Sulmo (modern Sulmona), a town about 90 miles (150 kilometres) east of Rome, on 20 March 43 BC – one year after the assassination of Julius Caesar and twelve years before Octavian (later called Augustus) defeated Antony at the battle of Actium and ended civil war and the Roman republic. He died at Tomis on the Black Sea in the fourth or fifth year (AD 17 or 18) of the reign of Augustus’ successor, Tiberius – his sentence of exile unremitted. After his departure from Rome in AD 8, evocatively described in Tristia 1.3, he never saw the city again. He came from a fairly wealthy family of the Roman ‘equestrian’ class and was destined for a public career, but after holding some minor official posts he jettisoned the political world for that of poetry. Although apparently attached in his early years to the literary coterie of the influential statesman Messala Corvinus, who died in the year of Ovid’s banishment, the young poet resisted the pressure for public, i.e. political, poetry of the kind associated with the circle of Augustus’ administrator Maecenas (exemplified most especially by the later works of Horace), and devoted his talents to what was always to be his prime concern: the human world and its poetization.

III. Ovid’s early poetry eschewed the imperial grandeur of Roma and turned to its linguistic inversion, Amor. It focused on love, sex, friendship, poetry, words, life, on the paradoxes and absurdities of human emotion and human relationships, on emotional distress, on the female mind – all approached with wit, humour, empathy, insight, and a self-conscious, animated literariness (vigorous literary allusion defines all Ovid’s works), expressed in language as technically brilliant as it was poetically and verbally suggestive. The important works of the first period were Amores or Loves, originally five books of generically playful ‘love’ poems published perhaps 20–16 BC, later (c. 2 BC) reduced to three; Heroides or Heroines, date uncertain (published perhaps about the same time as Amores), fourteen fictive epistles from mythological heroines to their lovers (to which were later added perhaps by another hand six paired letters in which the woman answers the man); Medea, a tragedy now lost, also of uncertain date, but perhaps written to coincide with the explosion of the atrical building in the Campus Martius in 13–11 BC; three mock-didactic poems: Medicamina Faciei or On Cosmetics, date uncertain, Ars Amatoria or The Art of Love, three books of parodic, satirical verse purporting to teach seduction, published c. 1 BC, and Remedia Amoris or Remedies of Love, a mocking sequel to Ars, published shortly afterwards.

From AD 1 to 8 Ovid was at work on two narrative poems: Metamorphoses, an episodic epic poem in fifteen books on change, and Fasti, an aetiological poem on the Roman calendar, of which six books survive and probably only six were written, and which Ovid revised and rewrote in exile. All Ovid’s extant poems, including the other exilic works, were composed in elegiac couplets (dactylic hexameters alternating with dactylic pentameters), except Metamorphoses, which was composed entirely in hexameters, the standard metre for epic. At the time of Ovid’s banishment not only Fasti was incomplete. If the poet’s protestations in Tristia 1.7 are to be believed, Metamorphoses too required revision before publication. It was published anyway. Noticeably it was in this work and the unpublished Fasti that the poet began to include political panegyric, concluding Metamorphoses, for example, with an account of the apotheosis of Julius Caesar, Augustus’ ‘divine’ father, and a eulogy and predicted apotheosis of Augustus himself. It was too little and too late. And perhaps too obviously ironic. Indictment of power in Metamorphoses is not always implicit.

Ovid reached Tomis in AD 9 and immediately sent back to Rome a volume of eleven short poems represented as composed on the outward journey, the first book of Tristia or Sorrows. It is an innovative, experimental, polyvalent book of verse, the first of a collection of five books (each composed as a separate entity), in which the poet articulates the pain and deprivations of exile and petitions for imperial clemency (for at least amelioration of the place of exile, if not return to Rome itself). The whole of Tristia 1–5 occupied four years of Ovid’s life (AD 8–12), during which time too (c. AD 11) he wrote a 642-line curse poem, entitled Ibis. Three books of Pontic Epistles, Epistulae ex Ponto, followed, published as a unit in AD 13. These were collections of short poems like Tristia, dealing with the tribulations of exile but more resigned, even apathetic in tone, and more comprehensive and explicit in the use of epistolary form.

The final four or five years of Ovid’s life and exile were devoted to the composition of a fourth book of Pontic Epistles (perhaps also a poem in Getic: Pont, 4.13.17ff.) and the revision of Fasti 1–6, but it is Fasti which seems to have occupied the poet’s last attentions. The last dateable reference in Pontic Epistles is to the year AD 16 (Pont.4.9.5), that of Fasti (so Syme 1978: 24) to AD 17 (Fasti 1.63). Ovid’s carmen ultimum, Fasti, seems not only Ovid’s final song, but one which occupied him for the last decade and a half of his life and contains his maturest thoughts on, and evaluations and revaluations of, imperial Rome and its political and religious structures. And because Fasti takes as its subject-matter the religious rituals of the Roman year, it is among our most important sources for Roman religious practice. Sections 2–5 of this Introduction address in turn the religious-anthropological and calendrical aspects of the poem and its literary and cultural force.

2. Roman Religion and Society

I. It was the French Indo-Europeanist Joseph Vendryes who, in the midst of the first global conflict of the twentieth century, and in a somewhat understated fashion, drew attention to the remarkable similarities among the religious vocabularies of Indo-European languages of the far west, Italic and Celtic, and those of the far east, Indic and Iranian. Vocabulary of cult and sacrifice shared by peoples so distantly separated from one another by time and space, and, more than that, vocabulary which is, in the technical linguistic sense, cognate, owes its existence to one cause. Italic and Celtic speakers in Europe, Indo-Iranian in Asia, independently preserved a religious tradition and its lexicon which had been possessed by their common ancestors, the Proto-Indo-Europeans – a people of the fifth to third millennia BC, perhaps living in the Pontic Steppe region of eastern Europe, who eventually spread across Europe and into Asia, taking with them the various dialects of their language, which, becoming far flung geographically, would in time evolve into a great many distinct languages, those of the Indo-European language family. The reason why Proto-Indo-European religious language is so well preserved in these particular four daughter cultures is not difficult to perceive. It was among the Italians, as well as the Celts, Indo-Aryans and Iranians that prominent, influential priestly offices – Flamen, Druid, Brahmin, Athravan – had survived, keeping alive, century after century, the religious practices and language of the distant ancestral culture.

II. The Roman Flamen, whose name looks to the comparative linguist seductively like Sanskrit Brahmán, a priest of Vedic India (see ARR: 580, n.7), is a priest of an archaic sort, there being three Flamines Maiores (‘Major Flamens’) and twelve Flamines Minores (‘Minor Flamens’). Each of the Flamines Maiores serves one of the three principal deities of early Rome – Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus (the archaic or pre-Capitoline triad; see ARR: 141–7). Georges Dumézil has insightfully argued that the assemblage of these three gods reflects the tripartite social structure of the primitive Indo-Europeans. As attested in historical periods among the Indo-Aryans, and also the Celts, Proto-Indo-European society appears to have structured itself by a division of its members into three components, or functions in Dumézil’s terms: those of sovereignty (with magicoreligious and legal aspects), of physical force, and of fertility and goods-production – that is, the priestly (first), warrior (second), and worker, chiefly herder-cultivator (third), functions respectively.

III. The Flamens constitute but one element of the Roman priesthood. There were four principal colleges of priests in Rome, the one to which the Flamines belonged being the Pontifical College, in which they shared membership with the Rex Sacrorum and the Pontifices (see 1.657–62n.). The Augural College was composed of the Augures, those priests charged with divining the gods’ will by the taking of auspices (see 1.178–80n.; 6.375n.). A third college was that of the priests called the Decemviri (Quindecimviri, in Ovid’s day) Sacris Faciundis, those who consulted the Sibylline Books (see 4.247–8n.; 4.257–60n.), and a fourth, that of the Triumviri Epulones (later called Septemviri Epulones). This latter was established only in 196 BC. The college originally consisted of three priests, later seven, then ten. Their chief duty was to attend to the feast of Jupiter (epulum Iovis) which formed a part of the Roman Games and Plebeian Games.

IV. In addition to the priests of the four major colleges, there were still other priests at Rome, organized into sodalities (from Latin sodalis, ‘close companion; member of a fraternal society’). Chief among these were the sodalities of the Salii, priests of Mars and Quirinus (see 3.809–10n.); the Luperci, who officiated at the festival of the Lupercalia (see 2.267n.); the Fratres Arvales (‘Arval Brethren’), dedicated to the goddess Dea Dia (see 2.608n.); and the Fetiales, priests who declared war and made treaties (see 1.201–202n.).

V. In Rome, Dumézil argues, a tripartite ideology survives – seen, for example, in the history of early Rome as recorded in the traditions of the annalists, such as Livy. The early history of Rome is a mythic history produced by the transposition of Indo-European myth into historical narrative. Romulus and Numa Pompilius, the first two kings of Rome, embody the magical and legal aspects of the Indo-European first function respectively. Tullus Hostilius, Rome’s third king, is a warrior figure, corresponding closely in his role in this history to Indra, chief among the members of the second function of divine society in India. The wealthy Sabines under the leadership of Titus Tatius – providing infant Rome with a means of fertility in the persons of the Sabine women abducted by Romulus – continue the Proto-Indo-European third function. Further, the war waged by Titus Tatius against Romulus over the abduction of the Sabine daughters is the Roman reflex of a widely attested Indo-European myth about a conflict among the functions, occurring at the foundation of society – divine society (in most of its avatars) here humanized as a part of the historicization of Indo-European myth in the Roman tradition (see ARR: 60–78). It is of no small significance, Dumézil observes, that those gods whose introduction to Rome Varro (Ling. 5.74) credits to the Sabines and Titus Tatius (citing the annalistic tradition) are remarkably homogeneously of a third-function nature (noted in our commentary as ‘gods of Titus Tatius’, using Dumézil’s phrase; see ARR: 169, n.34).

VI. Dumézil’s interpretations have, of course, been criticized by certain students of Roman society and religion in recent years. At least in part, such criticisms may arise from a misunderstanding of Dumézil’s view of the status of the parent Indo-European tripartition within the daughter culture of Rome, the ideology of which long outlives its expression in the actual division of society. Beyond this, it must be acknowledged that one is impressed by the Indo-Europeanness of Roman religion and culture much more when one approaches the study of Roman religion by moving from the outside in (the perspective of the comparativist), rather than by starting from within Rome. The authors of the present work would be quick to point out that they advocate no slavish dependency upon, or allegiance to, Professor Dumézil’s method and analysis. It would be, at the same time, both presumptuous and short-sighted to deny that there is much of great value in Dumézil’s investigation of Roman religion, and to fail to see, moreover, that it is, beyond its own considerable significance, a springboard from which much valuable work may yet be launched.

3. The Roman Calendar

I. Ovid’s Fasti has as its background a calendar of the first six months of the Roman religious year, into which are woven episodes drawn from Roman historical tradition and Greek mythology, embroidered with astronomical observations and political sorties. The result is a tapestry of times and seasons, myths and beliefs, ancient lore passed down from deep antiquity, or borrowed from foreign peoples. To be sure, Ovid’s literary purposes in producing his Fasti extend far beyond those of one whose chief aim is merely to chronicle; nevertheless, even if unwittingly, Ovid has left for us one of our most precious records of Roman cult and ritual and its cyclic celebration.

II. Numerous calendars, or fasti, have survived from ancient Rome, though many are fragmentary (collected in Degrassi 1963). Of these, only one dates to the period of the Roman republic (and precedes the calendrical reforms of Julius Caesar; see 1.657–62n.; 3.155–66n.): the Fasti Antiates Maiores. The imperial Roman calendars are chiefly products of the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius – the Fasti Amiternini, Caeretani, Esquilini, Maffeiani, Tusculani and Venusini, to name but a few. Of the imperial fasti, the extensively annotated Fasti Praenestini is particularly noteworthy. According to Suetonius (Gram. 17), its compiler was Verrius Flaccus, tutor of Augustus’ grandsons, and Ovid’s contemporary. The calendar was engraved in marble and erected in the forum of the city of Praeneste, south-east of Rome. From the third and fourth centuries AD have survived manuscript treatments of the Roman calendar by Philocalus and Polemius Silvius respectively. In the sixth century AD, the Byzantine scholar Joannes Lydus (John the Lydian) produced a work on the Roman religious calendar entitled De Mensibus (‘On Months’).

III. The use of Latin fasti to denote ‘calendar’ is a generalized application of one of the several notations which mark each day of the year in the Roman calendar. Days are marked as either F, N, C, EN (see Varro Ling. 6.29–31) or NP. F is an abbreviation of dies fasti, being days on which it is permissible to undertake legal action (legis actio) in the court of the magistrate called the Praetor Urbanus. In contrast, no such action is permitted on days which are noted to be N, dies nefasti (and so days on which the praetor cannot utter his ‘three words’; see 1.47). Days marked C are dies comitiales, those on which the comitia, citizen assemblies, can be assembled for a vote – an action which is also prohibited on days marked N. An EN day is endotercisus, ‘divided’: in the morning a sacrificial victim is immolated, and in the evening its entrails offered; both periods are nefastus (N), but in between them, the time is said to be fastus (F). The abbreviation NP (actually a ligatured character looking like N with a small loop at the top of its right leg) is quite uncertain, perhaps standing for dies nefasti publici. During the late republic the days so marked are the Kalends of March (New Year’s Day in the old Roman calendar; see 1.27–30n.), the Ides of each month and 36 of the 45 named festival days (on NP see Michels 1967: 68–83; note especially the discussion of nine named days which are not marked NP, pp. 76–7).

IV. In the calendar of the Roman republic, four months have 31 days (March, May, July and October), while the remainder have 29, except for February with 28; by Julius Caesar’s reform, ten days were added to the calendar, these being apportioned among the months of 29 days. Each month of the year possesses three days of particular significance: the Kalends, Nones and Ides. Kalends is the name given to the first day of the month. The Nones falls on the seventh day in those months having 31 days, on the fifth day in months having fewer. The Ides occurs on the fifteenth day in 31-day months, and on the thirteenth day in shorter months. These three days perhaps have their origin in a time when the ancestors of the Romans reckoned time on the basis of a true lunar month, the Kalends marking the first appearance of the lunar crescent after a new moon, the Nones the first quarter moon, and the Ides the full moon (see Michels 1967: 21).

V. The Roman calendar is further subdivided by ‘weekly’ cycles running between the days called nundinae, ‘ninth-days’. The nundinae were said to have been in origin market-days – regular occasions on which those people living in the country came into town to conduct business (see inter alios Varro Rust. Praef. 1–2). Each day of the calendar was assigned a nundinal letter between A and H, with the letter assigned to the nundinae presumably varying from year to year (as the number of days in the year is not equally divisible by eight; see Michels 1967: 26–8, 84–9). Though the cycle is one of eight days (A to H), the event which defines it is designated the ‘ninth-day’, the nundinae, because of the inclusive method of Roman counting (that is, A to A, or B to B and so forth).

4. The Poem

But don’t regard all my work as unrestrained;

I have often put huge sails on my ship.

I have written six Fasti and as many books,

And each volume finishes with its month.

That was lately written under your name, Caesar;

My fate ruptured the work consecrate to you.
(Tristia 2.547–52)

I. Ovid’s Fasti consists of six books of elegiac couplets, descriptive of, and corresponding to, the first six months of the Augustan calendar. The closural devices of Book 6 and the poem’s internal structure and ideology suggest that Fasti 7–12 were never written. Begun at the same time as Metamorphoses, Fasti is yet the last of Ovid’s works, rewritten in exile to constitute his carmen ultimum, ‘final song’. It proclaims itself and is an aetiological poem, one which investigates aitia, the origins or causes of things, in this case the origins or causes of Rome’s religious festivals, the ‘times’ or dates they occupy in the calendar (1.1).

II. Ovid’s Fasti displays in its six books a conspicuous self-consciousness of its literary pedigree, which it exuberantly parades. The professed subjects of Fasti are times, stars, altars, days, rites – specifically not ‘Caesar’s arms’ (1.13). Its Greek subtexts are many, and include Theocritus, Pindar, Hesiod and Homer; but its two primary Greek models are Hellenistic, Aratus’ didactic hexameter poem Phainomena and Callimachus’ elegiac, aetiological poem, Aitia, the poem’s allegiance to the latter reflected in its titular opening words (repeated at 4.11): ‘Times and their causes [causae = aitia]’. The first two books of Callimachus’ Aitia furnish Ovid with his model of narrator as interviewer. Important Roman subtexts in Fasti include Ennius Annales, Catullus 63, 64, 68, 101, and Lucretius’ famous hymn to Venus in the proem to De Rerum Natura 1. In prose, Varro’s antiquarian research and the whole tradition of antiquarian scholarship underlie Fasti’s enterprise, as does Livy’s account of Rome’s early history in Ab Urbe Condita 1. The Augustan historian’s treatment of such politically charged figures as Romulus and Lucretia are expressly rewritten by Ovid. Propertius’ aetiological elegies in Book 4 are often noted, and certainly they constitute an overt and major influence, in terms of topic (the Herculean foundation of the Ara Maxima, for example), the union of aetiology and elegy, the poem’s closure in matrona paradigms (cf. Prop. 4.11) and its opening formulation of intent (cf. Propertius 4.1.69 and Fasti 1.7f., 2.7). Virgil of course looms large, and seems to be the major influence on Fasti’s language and not only through Georgics. Manifest rivalry with the great epicist can be seen in several mini-Aeneids, such as the tale of Anna Perenna in Book 3 which dominates the Ides of March, or the rewriting of the Hercules – Cacus conflict in Book 1. In Fasti the exile Evander becomes the Ur-founder of Rome; Anchises’ Roman vision is inverted (3.99ff.); pius Aeneas is relegated to the introducer of cult portrayed on the Ara Pacis (1.527f.; 4.37f., 77f.; 6.434), and in his role as avenger of Pallas, in a penetrating gloss on Virgil’s text, is proclaimed ‘no humble avenger’ (1.522).

Ovid’s own works, as one might expect, are implicated in Fasti: most obviously Metamorphoses and Ovid’s previous ‘didactic’ poem, the Ars. But virtually every text is there: the last words, for example, of Dido’s letter in Heroides become the starting point of Book 3’s sequel to Virgil’s Aeneid (3. 549f.), while the promise made to Germanicus in the letter to Suillius in Ex Ponto 4.8 seems realized as the proem to Fasti 1.

III. Ovid’s Fasti is modally complex. It contains a mixture of what many genericists call modes: didactic (1.317ff.), hymnic (1.711ff.), comic (3.675ff.), epic (2.195ff.), tragic (6.587ff.), erotic (3.11ff.), georgic (1.663ff.), narrative-idyllic (5.495ff.), precatory (4.747ff.), fabular (2.247ff.), encomiastic (proems to 1 and 2 and passim), satirical (1.191ff.). At the end of Book 1, the comedy of Priapus’ failed attempt at nymph-rape yields to the epic journey of Evander and Carmenta and the epic struggle of Hercules and Cacus, thence to imperial panegyric and didactic aetiology, to georgic instruction and religious hymn. The pater patriae section of Book 2 (127–44) is followed by erotic narrative which in turn yields to epic battle, followed by the aetiological ‘fable’ of the raven, snake and bowl.

IV. Ovid’s Fasti is discursively complex. It operates at the interface of several discursive systems: aetiological, calendrical, religious, political, sociological, anthropological, astronomic, antiquarian, sculptural, architectural, literary, poetic. Especially important is the interplay between the poem as vatic carmen and its status as political, religious, historical and antiquarian discourse, more conventionally represented in publicly decreed or inscribed calendars. The latter become a veritable industry from the Augustan period onwards. Only one inscribed calendar survives from the republican period, Fasti Antiates Maiores; whereas there are over forty extant calendars (in fragments) following the Julian reform. The most important of these, as suggested above (Introduction 3.II), in this context is the Fasti Praenestini by Ovid’s contemporary Verrius Flaccus, imperial employee, indeed tutor to Augustus’ household, whose massive marble calendar – 2 metres high and 5.5 metres wide – was set up in the forum at Praeneste in AD 6–9, as was a statue of Verrius himself (Suet. Gram. 17). Verrius also wrote a prose commentary to accompany this calendar.

As his employment of Verrius indicates, time was a major preoccupation of Augustus, especially in the middle and later years of his reign. Hence Augustus’ own interference with the calendar in 9 BC (to correct excessive intercalation: Macr. Sat. 1.14.13–15), his acceptance of the renaming of Sextilis as August in 8 BC (Suet. Aug. 31.2, Dio Cassius 55.6.6 – it had been voted on in 27), and his commissioning of calendrical projects. The most dramatic realization of Augustus’ temporal desires was to be found in the Ara Pacis area of the Campus Martius, transformed shortly after 10 BC into a huge sun-dial, the horologium solare Augusti. Measuring 160 metres by 75 metres (175 by 82 yards), the horologium served as both clock and calendar, marking the hours, days and seasons by means of its tall, red granite Egyptian obelisk, imported from Heliopolis; its positioning was made to interrelate with both the Ara Pacis and the Mausoleum. Topped by a gilded bronze sphere, crowned with a spire, symbolic of Augustus’ global power, the obelisk’s shadow is said at the vernal and autumnal equinox to have intersected the Ara Pacis, the description of which in Ovid’s Fasti intersects Books 1 and 2. The horologium was designed by the mathematician Novius Facundus (Pliny HN 36.72f.). But the control of time which it celebrated was that of the princeps.

V. Ovid’s Fasti is at the interface too of the civilizations of Greece and Rome. Astronomical observations are virtually absent from Roman calendars but Ovid makes a point of including them: ‘Who forbids me to tell of the stars also’ (1.295). Their inclusion has point; it enables Ovid to reflect the fusion of Greece and Rome and the appropriation of the former by the latter in Roman religion, ritual and culture, evident calendrically and imaged imperially in the profusion of Greek alphabetic and astronomic signs in the Augustan horologium. It also enables the poet to include a large number of Greek mythological narratives which qualify, modify, sustain or, more often, contrast with, the Roman religious and political passages with which they are juxtaposed. The star passages function in part as an editorial tool, a framing device which sets up its own semiotic signals in respect of the passages framed. It seems less than accidental, for example, that the panegyric of Augustus as pater patriae and Jupiter on earth in Fasti 2 (127–44) is followed by gratuitous passages on Ganymede and Jupiter’s criminal rape of Callisto (145–92), or that the celebration of the temple of Mars Ultor in Book 5 (545ff.) is preceded by a narrative of the creation of Orion out of god-piss (493–544). Throughout Fasti the politics of Roma and Amor are juxtaposed: patriotism, militarism and public virtue with desire, pleasure, joy and rape. Often the violent dimensions of the latter do not simply reflect upon, but impregnate the former.

VI. Ovid’s Fasti announces its theme as times, stars, altars, days, rites, but its deep project is the imperial revolution itself, the Augustan or rather Julio-Augustan appropriation of time, religion and history, the Caesarean reformulation and control of Romanitas. To control time at Rome was not only to control Rome. It was also to control Romanitas. Before the Julian reform, control of the calendar was in the hands of the Pontifices, who announced the Nones and Ides of each month, proclaimed new state feriae or ‘feast-days’, fixed the dates for the moveable feasts (feriae conceptivae), allowed, postponed or shortened the intercalary month, and dictated the entire rhythm of legal, commercial and political life. In the late republic the year was both arbitrary and unpredictable. From 1 January 45 BC the calendar was regularized, regulated and imperially restructured. Between 45 BC and AD 10 the number of state feriae marked NP increased from 49 to 69: there were 20 new dies nefasti publici, on which no assemblies (comitia) could meet or legal proceedings (legis actiones) take place – all Julio-Augustan feriae stativae, ‘fixed festivals’. Precisely because the Roman calendar lacked a continuous narrative thread linking the various festivals, it was always possible to incorporate new political feriae and remove old ones, continually mutating the image of what Rome was. The Julio-Augustan organization of the Roman calendar transformed that calendar ideologically, restructuring the life-patterns of Roman citizens and filtering those patterns through its own discourse of power.

VII. Ovid’s Fasti exposes and judges this discourse of power. His poem on religious festivals answers the question which the instructor of the Ars begs: If ‘it is expedient that there are gods’ (Ars 1.637), the question arises: ‘expedient for whom?’ Much of the judgement of this discourse of power arises from juxtaposition of the kind already mentioned, between the contrasting values of the star passages and those of Augustan panegyric; but there is a pervasive contrast anyway in the poem between the polyphony of the work’s religious discourse and the monotone of political obeisance. Almost always, too, the political passages themselves or the aetiological narratives with strong political resonance are forms of exposure.

Some non-random examples. On February 1 the narrator celebrates the restoration of temples by Augustus, heralded appropriately as ‘Builder of temples, holy rebuilder of temples’ (2.63), but he does so on the festival of Juno Sospita, whose ancient temple on the Palatine lay in ruins, near Augustus’ own house, completely unrestored (2.58). Not surprisingly, the anniversary of this temple is ignored by all extant Julian calendars – but not by Ovid, who underscores the ideological contradiction with wordplay, Sospita, positor (‘builder’), repostor (‘rebuilder’). On the Nones of February is the dies nefastus publicus celebrating Augustus’ award of the title pater patriae, ‘Father of the Fatherland’. Here the reader is treated to no unmediated eulogy but a bizarre comparison of Romulus and Augustus, in which the former is systematically, almost comically damned, and the latter is left without the central pillar of his ideological and iconographic programme. The role of Romulus in the ideosphere of Augustan Rome cannot be overplayed: Augustus’ house on the Palatine, surrounded by the walls of the original Romulean city, neighbour to the Lupercal, the Ficus Ruminalis and the Casa Romuli, the ‘Romulean Hut’, itself, made the princeps a Quirinus on the hill. He had refused the name Romulus, but the name Augustus with its concealment of augur implied it (1.609–12), and he did everything to further that implication. The Augustan Forum uses the statues of Romulus and Aeneas in its facing exedrae to form its semiotic cross-axis, places Romulus in the pediment of the temple of Mars Ultor and inscribes his title of pater patriae (‘Father of the Fatherland’), awarded in 2 BC to his distant relative Augustus, on the base of the quadriga statue erected at the Forum’s central point. Heralded as the second founder of Rome, Augustus even generated the legend that, when taking the auspices at his first consulship, he saw twelve vultures (Appian BC 3.94; Suet. Aug. 95); and he not only emphasized the Romulean augury in his restoration of the temple of Quirinus in 16 BC, inside which was a statue of divine Julius himself, but on his own triumphal arch, erected in the Forum Romanum 19/18 BC, he arranged to be fixed the Fasti Triumphales, with as the first triumphator, ‘King Romulus, son of Mars’ (victorious over King Acron of Caenina) ‘in the first year of the state’. Any description of Romulus, any historical or narrative account, positioned itself at the centre of Augustan politics. Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ ascription to Romulus of the four cardinal Augustan virtues (Ant. Rom. 2.18; cf. RG 34.2) reproduced imperial thinking. Ovid’s extensive references to Romulus in Fasti do not. The revisionary presentation of the founder of Rome, in the pater patriae passage and elsewhere, as an overrated thug, a bellicose primitive, violent and impious rapist and (at least in Book 2) fratricide, manifesting values quite other than those of the priest-king and civilizer Numa, founder of Rome’s religion and the twelve-month calendar, with whom the Ovidian narrator makes a clear association (3.274), could only be construed as inimical to the image-makers at Rome.

How such images are made seems precisely the subject of the account of Remus’ death in Fasti 4 (807ff.), where on Rome’s birthday (April 21) a variant narrative is produced in which Remus is not killed by his brother, but by his brother’s assistant ‘Swifty’, Celer, who acts all too quickly. Here Ovid’s narrator, with the help of Romulus himself, ignores the canonic account of Romulus’ fratricide endorsed by Ennius (Annales 95, Skutsch), Cicero (De Officiis 3.40f.), Horace (Epod. 7.17f.) and Ovid himself (Fasti 2.143). But even as he turns from what Livy calls the ‘more widespread story’ (vulgatior fama, 1.7.2) to the heterodox version attested for the first time in mid-Augustan Rome (Dion. Ant. Rom. 1.87.4: a ‘less persuasive account’), he signals precisely what is happening by reworking the Livian Romulus’ murderous taunt into the new narrative (Fasti 4.848). What Ovid here shows is not history but its ideological remaking, its mutation into a discourse of power.

The contemporary grounding of Caesarean rule in the elevation of Augustus’ proclaimed ancestors, Aeneas and Romulus, is problematized by another Ovidian strategy: the de-emphasizing of Aeneas in Rome’s prehistory and the counterpointed elevation of Evander, ‘the good man’ (eu ane¯r), to the status of proto-Roman. In Fasti it is Evander, not Aeneas, who is set up as the rival founder to Romulus. There are six extended narratives concerned with Evander, one even in Book 6 (during the Matralia, 505ff.) after the Romulean narratives have finished, all directly or indirectly concerned with his status as an exile and as founder of the Palatine settlement, as Ur-founder of Rome. Unlike the war-mongering primitive Romulus, whose spear-throw functions as eloquence in bastardized realization of the Virgilian Anchises’ Roman ‘arts’ (3.101ff.), Evander, accredited by Livy (1.7.8) with the introduction of the alphabet to Rome, is bound up not only with traditional Roman morality and the values of pietas, hospitality and peace, but also with Rome’s earliest religious foundations (the dedication of the Ara Maxima, for example, as well as the festivals of the Carmentalia, Lupercalia and Matralia), and with poetry too. His prophetess mother, named Themis by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, is called Carmenta (or Carmentis) by Ovid, not only in accordance apparently with the Roman tradition (Dion. Ant. Rom. 1.31, Livy 1.7.8, Fasti Praenestini), but to secure the connection with carmen. It was carmen in part which got Ovid banished (Tristia 2.207), but it is Ovid’s concern to emphasize in the Evandrian narratives that carmen and exile lie at the heart of what Rome is – religiously, morally, culturally. And not only carmen and exile, but by clear implication Ovidian carmen and Ovidian exile. Evander and Carmenta’s exilic journey to Rome in Fasti 1 not only imitates and reverses Ovid’s journey to Tomis, but imitates its causes too. Carmenta’s words of comfort to the weeping Evander are unambiguous:

‘Please stop your tears,

You must endure this fortune like a man.

It was fated. No fault of yours exiled you, but a god;

You’re banished the city by an outraged god.

You suffer not just deserts, but deity’s wrath;

In great misfortune innocence counts.’

(Fasti 1.479–84)

Sometimes in an Evandrian narrative other models of displacement are underscored, as in Book 5’s story of the Argeï, followers of Hercules who settle with Evander but who (here Ovid’s aetiological invention has more than amusing point) are so smitten by ‘sweet desire for the fatherland’ (5.653) that they request that their ashes be cast into the waves to return home. Hence the casting of straw dummies by the Vestals from the Tiber’s wooden bridge – by the Vestals of course before the goddess herself has been appropriated and domiciled by Augustus. The narrative effect of all these references to exile by the exilic Ovid is to place the periphery of Rome and the values for which Ovid stands at its centre, and by implication to locate the present centre at Rome’s edge.

Similar points may be made about the Magna Mater episode of Fasti 4, in which Claudia Quinta seems a transparent marker for Ovid, and whose triumph over injustice is achieved not through the agency of Rome’s centre but its periphery, as Cybele reverses the Ovidian journey to the Black Sea to establish Claudia’s innocence at Rome. Cybele’s temple on the Palatine flanked Augustus’ house. Not that exile is the only motif destabilizing contemporary notions of Romanitas. Important too is Fasti’s increasing focus on discord (until by Book 6 it has become the major focus), and the narrative emphasis on foundation-rapes: political (Lucretia and Silvia), cultural (the Sabine women), religious (Lara, Proserpina, Flora, Cranaë). Perhaps most revealing of the poem’s commentary on Romanitas is the city’s own foundation rape, that of Silvia. Only in Mars’ own account is the rape of Silvia conducted ‘happily’, feliciter (3.233). At 3.21 Fasti’s narrator is more blunt:

Mars sees her, desires what he sees, takes what he desires.

Echoing the rape psychology of Priapus and Faunus (1.417, 2.307), even as it anticipates that of Dis, Zephyrus and Janus (4.445, 5.201f., 6.119), Mars’ paradigmatic conduct reformulates Julius Caesar’s vainglorious cry to offer a more telling definition of Romanitas: ‘I see, I desire, I take’. Hardly an inaccurate gloss on Rome – nor on Romulus, who on the eve of the Sabine rape is given by Mars himself his ‘father’s spirit’ (3.197). The formulation, too, accords with the irreverent treatment of Romulus and the Sabine Rape in the Ars (1.101–34), where again gaze leads to desire, leads to possession, and love’s instructor volunteers to become a Romulean soldier in return for such rewards.

Other examples of layered laudation may be mentioned. On March 6 and April 28 Augustus as Pontifex Maximus is lauded, but the hyperbolic conceit of Augustus’ own divinity sits disquietingly with the brute realities of his appropriation of Apollo and the great Roman goddess Vesta. April 28 is especially important since it concludes Venus’ month, which begins with her appropriation of April and ends with her descendant’s appropriation of Vesta, one of the oldest deities of the Roman state, one of only four deities addressed in prayer by the Arval brethren (see Introduction 2.IV and 2.608–16n.). Vesta guaranteed the city identity and survival by remaining fixed in her place (hence the Ovidian derivation from ‘vital standing’, vi stando, 6.299). At the end of Fasti 4 (949–54) the narrator apparently lauds her movement to the Palatine. But first he sees Flora (943–8), the goddess with whose playful and fertile spirit he later associates his own olfactory verse (5.377), and whose games and the sexual licence which they allowed sat ill with the puritanical ethos of the Augustan regime. The contrast between the imperialized deities, Apollo and Vesta, and Ovidian Flora seems pointedly to replay the political commentary at the end of Metamorphoses, where juxtaposition of Caesar’s appropriation of Apollo and Vesta with Ovid’s own poetic eternity underscores the same religious theft. Comparable ideological theft is apparent in the extended proem to Fasti 4, which protests so strongly that the month belongs to Venus that it draws conspicuous attention to the fact that antiquarian scholarly opinion (including that of the esteemed Varro) disputed this. Having the Greekless Romulus name the month, allegedly derived from Aphrodite’s foam (aphros), is an especially piquant touch.

Setting up self-evidently false hypotheses is a technique employed too in the much studied description of the temple of Mars Ultor in Book 5, which concludes with the famous vow by Octavian on the field of Philippi to dedicate a temple to Mars for avenging the death of Caesar, ‘Vesta’s priest’ (5.573). Caesar was not Vesta’s priest, the vow was not and could not have been made, and the words attributed to Octavian (satia scelerato sanguine, ‘glut with guilty blood’, 5.575) echo the Virgilian Aeneas’ final vindictive sibilants (poenam scelerato ex sanguine sumit, ‘exacts payment from guilty blood’, Aen. 12.950) to reveal the fictive ideology in operation. One thing Aeneas was and Augustus was not was a military hero. The words placed in Octavian’s mouth also reproduce precisely the mechanics of the Augustan Forum’s own ideosphere. For just as Augustus had had himself imaged as ‘Father of the Fatherland’ in the Forum at the centre of the Aeneas – Romulus cross-axis, so Ovid has him fictionally utter at Philippi a line that binds him not only to Aeneas, but to Romulus. For, since the Virgilian line rewrites Romulus’ death-threat to Remus in Ennius Annales (mi calido dabis sanguine poenas, ‘you will give payment with hot blood’, Annales 95, Skutsch), Ovid’s allusion to Aeneas is an allusion to Romulus too. The construction of Augustan ideology is replayed in a transparently fictional context which yet alludes to the fratricidal paradigm the ideology seeks to conceal.

VIII. Ovid’s Fasti collapses its own narrative authority. Addressed by gods on two separate occasions as ‘industrious poet’ (1.101, 3.177), Fasti’s narrator is not the flamboyant instructor of the Ars, but a diffident, sometimes timorous teacher-reseacher, even pupil: naïve, informal, personal, unsystematic, unscholarly; dependent on rumour, folktale, hearsay and chance encounters; interviewing but not evaluating; presenting alternatives in the manner of antiquarians but without an assessment; on the same level of expertise as the reader, whose opinion is often sought; frequently given to odd selectivity, but able to distance himself from the interpretive possibilities of his explanations through their very plurality. What little authority the narrator might have claimed for himself in the first three books completely collapses in Books 4 to 6, as informants and their unreliability increase, the narrator becomes at a loss how to proceed (4.784, 5.1ff.), Callimachean authority (Aitia fragment 3–7) is inverted when the Muses themselves disagree (5.9), and three goddesses (including the goddess Concordia) fight it out over the right to the month of June. Divine testimony confers vatic authority; divine disagreement removes it, transferring it to the judging reader. As Fasti draws to its foreshortened end, self-interest is exposed as the constructor of belief, and the reader is left to decide: indeed reading is identical with choice (6.2). Not accidentally the collapse of authority climaxes in the very book, Book 6, which commemorates a host of military anniversaries – half of which are defeats. And as the narrator’s authority collapses, so does the foundational antithesis of Fasti’s text, the opposition between arma and arae, ‘arms’ and ‘altars’ (1.13). July and August approach, arma begin to dominate, imposing their inextricability from Romanitas, and the poem, narrator and Ovid dissolve into silence. The unwritten state of Fasti 7–12 is their meaning.

IX. Ovid’s Fasti is a ludic text, intricately and semiotically paradoxical: humorous and serious, panegyrical and subversive, pre-exilic and exilic, Roman and Tomitan, written at the centre of the empire and on its periphery, urban and alien, incomplete and complete, saturated with the language of the Latin literary tradition and Ovid’s own song, but toppling from its tower of speech at the summit of its ascent into poetic silence. The poem is two-faced, a Janus-text, and begins appropriately with an interview with the two-faced Roman god himself. Liminal and terminal, public and private, an evaluation of Roman culture and a mirror of Ovid’s life, formed by Romanitas but resistant to its control, a life which, like Fasti, stopped without explanation but pointed to a future beyond itself, this in the strongest sense extra-ordinary poem from its own ludicity and paradoxes, its shifting perspectives and tonalities, generates its textual pleasure and its political and cultural disquiet.

X. To understand Ovid’s Fasti is to understand Augustan Rome.

5. The Genre Issue

I. Fasti has been variously labelled: a versified, adorned ‘almanac’ (Fränkel 1945: 148); an Alexandrian ‘narrative collective-poem’ (Martini 1970: 108); ‘an unfinished torso to which has been added a reworked head by the same hand’ (Wormell 1979: 43); ‘a purely literary exercise’ (Kenney 1982: 429). None of these is especially helpful. More helpful is Fantham (1992: 155): ‘Ovid’s Fasti was not narrative epic, but aetiological, even didactic elegy, subordinating narrative to its very different generic tradition.’ But there is no generic tradition of large-scale aetiological elegy in Rome. The five aetiological elegies of Propertius Book 4 (2, 4, 6, 9, 10) do not constitute a tradition of large-scale aetiological poems of the Fasti type, and even reference to Alexandria proves deceptive. In Hellenistic poetry there seems to have been no generic clash, as there clearly was for Ovid, between elegiac aetiological narrative and hexameter narrative. Barsby (1978: 29) talks disdainfully in relation to Fasti about ‘the inability of the elegiac metre to sustain a work of such length’, but Ovid was fully aware of this and exploited it.

II. Interest in poetic genres is evident in the Roman tradition at least as early as the Didascalica of Accius (170–c. 86 BC), in which the varia genera poematorum, ‘various kinds of poems’, are specifically discussed (Book 9, fragment 8). The impact of Hellenistic poetry and theory, both Callimachean polemic and Alexandrian eidographia, combined with the emphasis on genera dicendi, ‘kinds of speaking’, in Roman rhetoric from at least the Ad Herennium onwards, to make Roman poets of the last days of the republic and the early empire extremely self-conscious about generic proprieties and imperatives. What stands out, as we can see especially from elegiac anxiety and Horace’s Epistle to the Pisos (73ff.), is the preoccupation with the relationship between metre and content. Despite Virgilian pastoral and Horatian satire, the hexameter was defined as the ‘heroic foot’ (Fasti 2.126), suitable for ‘the deeds of kings and generals and tearful wars’ (Ars Poetica 73), a subject-matter inappropriately dealt with in ‘slight elegy’, which Horace with an obvious disdain for his poetic rivals thinks suitable only for prayer and lamentation (Ars 75). Of course generic mixture is the norm: Catullus 64 confounds epic, tragedy, lyric, didactic, epithalamium, idyll, diatribe; Virgil’s epic masterwork embraces several modes, including lyric, elegiac, pastoral and tragic; and Propertian elegy even in the Monobiblos turns to narrative idyll and ‘Caesar’s swords’, Caesaris enses. But generic mixture would only be possible if Roman poets operated within a system of accepted generic conventions and prescriptions, ideal Platonic forms if you like, which were always imperfectly realized, more often flagrantly transgressed.

III. How does Ovid explicitly talk about Fasti’s ‘kind of speaking’, genus dicendi, or better genus fandi? The answer: always in terms of its maius or ‘grander’ subject-matter or its elegiac metre, especially the relationship of one to the other. Ovid’s only comment outside Fasti itself (Tristia 2. 547ff.) draws attention to its elevated subject-matter, its grandia vela, ‘huge sails’. But the metre is elegiac. The genre problematic is self-consciously paraded in Fasti itself: in the pater patriae passage already mentioned, in the proems to Books 3 and 4, most famously in the proem to Book 2 (1–18), where several allusions to Propertius 4 (2.7 and 9 echo Prop. 4.1.69 and 135–7 respectively) point to Fasti’s generic genesis. In a sense, as he did with Heroides, Ovid saw in Propertius 4 a generic possibility which the earlier poet had not realized, something in the margins of elegy waiting to be actualized. But the generic problems in Fasti were not shared by the erotic Heroides. And rather than disguise the generic problem, Ovid parades it, affirming in Book 2’s proem, as elsewhere in Fasti, the work’s elegiac status, even as he simultaneously exhibits its ‘grander’, maius, subject-matter.

It would have been easy to write the work in hexameters. Ovid’s choice of elegiacs is a self-consciously provocative one, and one whose provocativeness is underscored, whose creative transgression of Roman elegiac boundaries is deliberate and deliberated. Throughout the poem a constant strain is exhibited on and by the elegiac form, as tensions are exploited between the stereotyped boundaries of the elegiac genre and the poem’s maius scale and subject-matter, apparent not only in the proems to each large-scale unit but in the juxtaposition, too, of the range of tones and modes associated generically with elegy (erotic, bawdy, comic, funereal) with the didactic, hymnic, panegyrical, political modes associated, at least ideally, with the ‘heroic foot’. Virgil’s canonic status is here, as elsewhere, cardinal. Ovid’s commitment to the elegiac form is in Fasti simultaneously exhibited as a commitment to reformation. The result is an epic kind of elegy, and an elegiac kind of epic, more precisely, an elegiac, aetiological, didactic, serio-comic, erotic epic: a generic rainbow, even better, a kaleidoscope in which the main constant is the elegiac metre and the main destabilizer the narrative voice.

IV. And what does it matter? More precisely, what does it matter to the reader of the poem’s political discourse? It matters a great deal, because of the way Fasti uses its generic affiliations. By drawing attention to its own archaeology, the rules of formation which limit and shape what may be said and what is expected to be said, Fasti stipulates particular rules for its own reading. In this sense genre is a contract between reader and text dictated by the text’s own form, which not only generates expectations as to rhetorical conventions, situations, norms, style, tone, diction, stereotypes and content, but simultaneously implies and prescribes a code of interpretive behaviour and encodes a set of cultural values. These elegiac codes are a function of the form’s previous use by other poets and by Ovid himself. The decision to adopt a genre or metrical form is itself an intertextual strategy – and because intertextual, ideological. For intertextuality complicates, qualifies, enriches, even constitutes meaning.

V. Fasti, even in its maiora moments, is thus always operating with an absent (predominantly anti-Augustan) presence, whether it be the world of amatory values of the Roman elegiac tradition (separately narrativized in the star passages), the intrinsic rejection of arma in Amores, the female subjectivity of Heroides, the irreverent flouting of political and moral authority in the Ars, or the plangent lamentations of the exile epistles. Indeed Fasti, in the opening section of Book 4, goes out of its way to revive something underscored regularly in amatory Ovid (e.g. Am. 3.9.3f.), the ancient association of elegy and lamentation (Horace Ars 75), in a generically archaeological passage which is also the poem’s most overt autobiographical statement, ironically juxtaposed with Rome’s most famous epic figure:

Late from Ilium’s fires and after Antenor

Aeneas brought gods into our area.

He had a comrade Solimus from Phrygian Ida,

From whom the walls of Sulmo draw their name –

Cool Sulmo, my own fatherland, Germanicus.

Pity me, it is far from Scythic soil!

Therefore I, so far away – stop whining, Muse:

Sing no sacred rites with a grieving lyre.

Fasti 4. 77–84

The fine allusion in the phrase ‘grieving lyre’, maesta lyra, to the title of the already scripted Tristia, whose funereal mode is also alluded to in this imperative of suppression, foregrounds not only the lachrymose semiotics of elegy but its intimacy – and its deep personal connection with Ovid, whose exilic trauma is here located at the exact centre of the poem. Elegy is the Ovidian metre par excellence: to build on the poet’s own obsession with Flora, it almost smells of Naso. There is simply no couplet in Fasti which does not encode Ovidian values. The metre cannot be washed clean by imperial edict.

The consequence of these absent presences is to problematize the poem’s treatment of non-traditional subject-matter. This is especially conspicuous when it draws attention to its own creative transgressions, as in the pater patriae passage of Book 2 (119ff.), where the protestations of generic inadequacy are undercut by the passage’s implied criticisms and by its juxtaposition with two notorious instances of Jupiter’s sexual rapacity (Ganymede, 145f., and Callisto,153ff.) – traditional elegiac material, which points up the paradoxical appropriateness of this metre for celebrating Jupiter’s earthly counterpart, Augustus.

VI. There are also historical absent presences. The notion of genre as rules of formation controlling what can and what cannot be written or said governs the whole of this text. But the rules of formation are not simply generic. Thus the final lines of Fasti I’s dedication to Germanicus, 25f.:

If it’s allowed and lawful, poet, guide a poet’s reins;

Gladden the whole year with your auspices.

‘If it’s allowed and lawful’, si licet et fas. Fasti never loses sight of its origins in speech. The dies fasti et nefasti are the days on which one can speak or not speak in assembly or court. This work ponders the whole question of who gets to speak, and the relationship between power and voice. Ovid’s rewriting of Livy’s patriotic Lucretia story emphasizes precisely this issue. The focus on the limitations of the elegiac genre encourages the reader to look for what may not be said generically and politically, to explore the text’s silences and exclusions in such imperial passages, for example, as the dedication of the temple of Concordia, the pater patriae eulogy, the dedication of the temple of Mars Ultor, or the assassination of Julius Caesar, which is not only relegated to a coda to the Anna Perenna narrative and described provocatively as ‘the swords stuck in the princeps’ (gladios in principe fixos, 3.697), but is transformed into an amalgam of unhistorical fiction, farce and morally perverse political rhetoric. The bawdy tone of Fasti’s account of the Lupercalia similarly underscores what may not be said: that Augustus tried to clean up the festival in line with his attempt to improve the sexual morality of Rome (Suet. Aug. 31.4). The irreverently erotic treatment of Vesta in the self-consciously playful tale of Priapus’ aborted rape (6.321–48) not only anticipates the Pontifex Metellus’ penetration of Vesta’s hallowed space, which no man was allowed to enter (6.450), but serves to remind the reader of the actual seizure and possession of the goddess by Augustus on the Palatine.

The reader is also encouraged to ponder reasons for notorious omissions from Fasti. Octavian’s assumption of imperium on January 7 (43 BC), the Compitalia (important ‘for the cult of Augustus’ genius’) in early January, the closing of the temple of Janus after Actium on January 11 (29 BC), the festival of Dea Dia, goddess of the Arval Brethren, in May, the Ludi Saeculares on June 1 (17 bc), the adoption of Tiberius on June 26 (AD 4) are all strangely absent, as is any celebratory reference to Julius Caesar’s victories at Munda and Alexandria, both allocated dies nefasti publici in March (March 17 and 27), the former victory also associated in April with the Parilia and the birthday of Rome. The parameters of genre in themselves furnish Ovid with a form of Quintilianic emphasis (Inst. Or. 9.2.64ff.), encouraging the reader to probe for exclusions, while allowing the poet the necessary interpretive defence.

VII. Indeed Ovid not only allows passages like the dedication of the temple of Concordia, associated with both Tiberius and Livia, to impress through their exclusions (Augustus’ wife and her son were at the centre of the dynastic discordia which procured the banishment of Augustus’ granddaughter and grandson and all but wrecked the imperial system before it was established). He also sometimes exhibits, and exhibits in poetically self-referential form, the actual process of imperial exclusion, the way the past is appropriated by the winners, made an instrument of personal validation and control. I refer to Clio’s account of the temple of Hercules Musarum (‘Of the Muses’) which closes Fasti 6, i.e. the poem. Making not even the slightest reference to the original founder of this temple, Ennius’ patron Marcus Fulvius Nobilior, who placed in the temple not only the Greek Muses imported from Ambracia but an inscribed Roman calendar, this imperialized Muse of history focuses entirely on the temple’s restoration by Augustus’ relative, Philippus, and on the imperial women Atia and Marcia. Ignored too is Ovid’s friend and Marcia’s husband Paullus Fabius Maximus, who, according to Tacitus (Ann. 1.5), fell victim to the dynastic intrigues and murder surrounding Tiberius’ succession. In the silencing of Nobilior’s Fasti and the obliteration of Ovid’s friend is signalled not only the contemporary ideological rewriting of history, but Ovid’s personal and poetic status.

VIII. The semiotics of genre also extend to the issue of generic authority. Genre confers the authority appropriate to itself; hence Fasti’s own questioning of elegiac authority over the ‘grand’ subjects, maiora. As the poem unrolls, the text combines with its own generic imperatives to dissolve its narrator’s authority and in so doing dissolve the authority of the discourse of power which the poet was in business to extol. That the narrator is addressed by that quintessentially Augustan title conditor, ‘founder’ or ‘builder’ (of the Roman year, 6.21) – at the climax of his collapse, when the gap between language and reality is most clearly revealed, fuses poetic and cultural meanings. This ‘crisis within the narrator’ is also a crisis in the elegiac metre to sustain the unwieldy authority of another genre. Ironically, the metre collapses precisely at the moment when the calendar is aetiologically least ambiguous, that is to say, when the arbitrary power controlling the discursive structure of Roman life is naked. If Roman religion served to integrate liminal situations of human life into communal belief, the imperial restructuring of that belief to maintain personal hegemony and control is the subject of Ovid’s Fasti.

IX. Fasti thus proves itself a self-consciously genealogical text. The genealogical task of the self-styled Foucauldian critic – to unearth the rootedness of discourses in a network of power – is here performed by the poem itself. Antiquarian explanations of the Roman calendar increased its mystification. The new scholarly élite, Verrius Flaccus, Novius Facundus and others, relocated control of the calendar, of time and tradition, as of religion, language and law, in the princeps whose servants they were and who through them transformed and regulated the Roman world. Fasti demystifies the calendar and exposes the imperial cultural revolution for the arbitrary construction that it is. In so doing it makes a self-consciously desperate attempt to reassert the cultural centrality of carmen, in a world where knowledge, authority and power seem to have passed from the aristocratic community, which carmen had delighted and served, to the god on the Palatine. Augustus’ marginalization of Ovid reflects his view that the days of the vatic poet were over; as does Fasti, which in its present state reads like a work impotent to speak openly, focusing on silence, silencing and the excluded, even dependent for the ability to say what it does upon the patronage of the great, and then only what is fas. Fas, Fari, Fasti, Fanda. Ovid’s Fasti uses the rules of poetic speaking to refract the arbitrary control of all discourse by the acclaimed father of the state.

X. Ovid’s Fasti is a revolutionary act. Its self-conscious generic transgressions are a revolutionary act. Generic and ideological promiscuity coalesce. Ovid the anti-authoritarian pluralist dissolves his own authority in Fasti to underscore the new Sabine rape at Rome. The result is a ludic text of consummate seriousness, which generates profound political and cultural disquiet. It generates, too, awareness of things rarely attributed to Ovid: integrity and courage. The work is testimony to the poet’s refusal to be complicit in the Julio-Augustan control of time. Better to end in silence, but a silence that would always speak:

Anyone may close my life with the barbarous sword,

But yet my fame will survive the dying;

And while Martian Rome from her victorious hills

Surveys the whole world mastered, I’ll be read.

Tristia 3.7 (49–52)

Ovid understated the longevity of his text. He did not understate the Julio-Augustan control of time, as our annual experience of the nominal immortality of the deified general and his adopted son attests.

FURTHER READING

Adkins, L. and Adkins, R. A., Dictionary of Roman Religion (New York 1996).

Arethusa, vol. 25, no. 1, ‘Reconsidering Ovid’s Fasti’ (Baltimore, MD 1992), especially the articles by Fantham, Hinds, Newlands and Phillips.

Barchiesi, A., The Poet and the Prince: Ovid and Augustan Discourse (Berkeley and London 1997), translation of Il poeta e il principe: Ovidio e il discorso Augusteo (Roma-Bari 1994).

Beard, M., ‘A Complex of Times: No More Sheep on Romulus’ Birthday’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 33 (1987), pp. 1–15.

Beard, M., North, J. and Price, S. (eds.), Religions of Rome, 2 vols. (Cambridge 1998).

Bömer, F., P. Ovidius Naso: Die Fasten, 2 vols. (Heidelberg 1957/58).

Boyle, A. J., ‘Postscripts from the Edge: Exilic Fasti and Imperialized Rome’, in Williams and Walker (see below), pp. 7–28.

Boyle, A. J. and Sullivan, J. P. (eds.), Roman Poets of the Early Empire (Harmondsworth 1991).

Dumézil, G., Archaic Roman Religion, translated by P. Krapp, 2 vols. (Baltimore, MD 1996).

Fantham, E., ‘Ceres, Liber and Flora: Georgic and Anti-Georgic Elements in Ovid’s Fasti’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 38 (1992), pp. 39–56.

Fantham, E. (ed.), Ovid Fasti: Book IV (Cambridge 1998).

Feeney, D., ‘Si licet et fas: Ovid’s Fasti and the Problem of Free Speech under the Principate’, in A. Powell (ed.), Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus (Bristol 1992), pp. 1–25.

Feeney, D., Literature and Religion at Rome (Cambridge 1998).

Frazer, J. G. (ed.), Publii Ovidii Nasonis Fastorum Libri Sex, 5 vols. (London 1929).

Harries, B., ‘Causation and the Poet’s Authority’, Classical Quarterly 38 (1989), pp. 164–85.

Herbert-Brown, G., Ovid and the Fasti: A Historical Study (Oxford 1994).

Newlands, C. E., Playing with Time: Ovid and the Fasti (Ithaca, NY, and London 1995).

Richardson, jr, L., A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (Baltimore, MD, and London 1992).

Syme, R., History in Ovid (Oxford 1978).

Wallace-Hadrill, A., ‘Time for Augustus: Ovid, Augustus and the Fasti’, in M. Whitby, P. Hardie and M. Whitby (eds.), Homo Viator: Classical Essays for John Bramble (Bristol 1987), pp. 221–30.

Williams, G. D. and Walker, A. D. (eds.), Ovid and Exile: Ramus, vol. 26, nos. 1 and 2 (Bendigo, Australia 1997).

Wiseman, T. P., Remus: A Roman Myth (Cambridge 1995).

Woodard, R. D., ‘The Disruption of Time in Myth and Epic’, Arethusa 35 (2002), pp. 83–98.

Woodard, R. D., Sacred Boundaries and Spaces of the Indo-Europeans (Champaign, IL 2005).

TRANSLATION AND LATIN TEXT

This translation of Ovid’s Fasti aims to convey to the Latinless reader as much as it is possible to convey in English and without violation of English idiom about the form, meaning and poetic force of the Latin poem. It is with few exceptions line-by-line (always couplet-by-couplet) and adopts, as its paradigm couplet verse-form, a combination of the twelve-syllable iambic line (the ‘alexandrine’) and the ten-syllable iambic line (the so-called ‘pentameter’) of English blank verse. This seems about as near as one can get in English verse to the hexameter – pentameter combination of Ovid’s elegiac couplet. Flexibility however will be apparent, and metrical substitutions, resolutions and feminine endings have been allowed. Indeed the translation does not hesitate to use an eleven-, thirteen-or fourteen-syllable ‘alexandrine’, or a nine- or eleven-syllable ‘pentameter’, where appropriate. Such syllabic variation was a feature of the Ovidian couplet, which varies from thirteen to seventeen syllables for the hexameter line, and twelve to fourteen syllables for the pentameter. The verse-form of the translation tries to embody something of the subtlety and flexibility as well as the formal stringency of the Latin original.

The use of italics in the translation has been kept to a minimum. To avoid too much of a mosaic effect, italics have been restricted to the Latin names of star-systems, religious festivals, occasional single Latin words, and other words deserving emphasis, especially in etymological contexts. Cult-titles of divinities, e.g. Fortuna Virilis, titles of Roman priests, names of Roman monuments, etc., have not been italicized.

The Latin text used for the translation is that of the Teubner edition of E. H. Alton, D. E. Wormell and E. Courtney (Leipzig 1985). That edition’s punctuation and capitalization practices have not always been followed. In addition the following readings were adopted in preference to those of the Teubner edition:

Book 1: 295 Quis AMω; 296 fuit Mς; 652 gerentis Heinsius.

Book 2: 533–4 placate…ferte Heinsius; 739 nurus ς.

Book 3: 643 arva ζς; 647 tumidis AUω; 766 est Gς.

Book 4: 85 adit Auω 709 certa Frazer; 724 facta AUω; 741 maris rores Zς.

Book 5: 148: habet Uω; 335 pota Heinsius; 525 flore Bentley and Burman.

Book 6: 229 dentosa Heinsius; 396 qua UGω; 433 genus FΔς 690 collegae Mω.

SUMMARY OF FASTI

Festivals and constellations are in italics. Capital letters signify a major episode or narrative series.

Book 1

Proem

Dedication to Germanicus (1–26).

Early calendar: Romulus and Numa (27–44); rules for different days (45–62).

January 1

JANUS: New Year procession; epiphany of Janus; interview with Janus: his shape and function, cultural practices, the Golden Age, Tatius and Sabines, peace (63–288); temples of Jupiter and of Aesculapius (289–94).

January 3

Inclusion of astronomical signs: first astronomers (295–310). Cancer (311–14).

January 5

Lyra (315–16).

January 9

AGONALIA: name and rites; origin of sacrifice;

Aristaeus; failed rape of Lotis by Priapus; sacrifice of birds (317–456); Delphis (457–8).

January 10

Midwinter (459–60).

January 11

CARMENTALIA 1: Carmenta, Evander and exile; journey from Arcadia to Rome; Roman dynastic prophecy; Hercules and Cacus; Ara Maxima (461–586).

January 13

Restoration of republic and naming of Augustus (587–616).

January 15

Carmentalia 2: wagons, abortion, rites (617–36).

January 16

Temple of Concordia: Furius, Tiberius, Livia (637–50).

January 17

Capricornus and Aquarius (651–2).

January 23

Lyra (653–4).

January 24

Leo (655–6); sowing day: rites; prayers to Ceres and Tellus; peace and imperial house (657–704).

January 27

Temple of Castor and Pollux (705–8).

January 30

Ara Pacis: Actium, peace, rites, imperial house (709–22).

Epilogue

(723–4).

Book 2

Proem

Dedication to Augustus (1–18).

Origin of month’s name: februa and purification (19–46); early order of the months (47–54).

February 1

Juno Sospita and Augustus’ restoration of temples (55–66); Alernus’ Grove, temples of Vesta and of Jupiter, the Arx (67–72).

February 2

Leo and Lyra (73–8).

February 3

Delphis (79–82); Arion: escape from pirates on Dolphin’s back (83–118).

February 5

Father of the Fatherland/Pater Patriae: Augustus and Romulus (119–44); Ganymede/Aquarius (145–8).

February 10

Start of spring (149–52).

February 12

Ursa’s Guard/Boötes/Arctophylax (153–4); rape of Callisto by Jupiter and Juno’s revenge: Arctos, Arctophylax (155–92).

February 13

Fabii and the Etruscans at Cremera (193–242).

February 14

Raven/Corvus, Snake/Anguis and Bowl/Crater (243–66).

February 15

LUPERCALIA: origin of rites; naked format: Pan, ancient custom, failed rape of Omphale by Faunus, Remus’ recovery of rustled cattle; ‘Lupercal’; fertilityrites (267–452); Aquarius and Piscis (453–8); rescue of Venus and Cupid (459–74).

February 17

Quirinalia: origin of name Quirinus; apotheosis of Romulus (475–512); Feast of Fools: Fornacalia (513–32).

February 21

Feralia: rites, origin, taboos (533–70); goddess Tacita/Muta: rites; rape of Lara and Lares (571–616).

February 22

Caristia: family concord, rites, Caesar (617–38).

February 23

Terminalia: rites; laudation; sacrifice (639–84).

February 24

REGIFUGIUM: capture of Gabii; Brutus and the oracle; rape of Lucretia by Sextus Tarquinius; end of monarchy (685–852); spring and Procne (853–6).

February 27

Equirria: address to Mars (857–62).

Epilogue

(863–4).

Book 3

Proem

Invocation of Mars (1–8). MONTH’S NAME AND POSITION: Mars’ rape of Silvia; Romulus and Remus; founding of Rome; naming of month (9–86); original position; ten-month year; Numa and twelve-month year; Caesar’s reforms (87–166).

March 1

MATRONALIA; interview with Mars: Romulus; Sabine rape and war; Juno Lucina (167–258); Salii: Egeria; contest of Numa and Jupiter; shields and Mamurius (259–392); taboos: marriage; wife of Flamen Dialis (393–8).

March 3

Pisces (399–402).

March 5

Arctophylax/Boötes (403–6); Vindemitor: Bacchus and Ampelos (407–14).

March 6

Augustus as Pontifex Maximus (415–28).

March 7

Temple of Vedjovis: little Jove and she-goat (429–48); Pegasus: Perseus, Bellerophon, Hippocrene (449–58).

March 8

Corona: Ariadne and Bacchus (459–516).

March 14

Equirria (517–22).

March 15

ANNA PERENNA: festival; Dido’s death; Anna’s exile and welcome by Aeneas; nymph of Numicius (523–656); other identifications: Anna as baker woman; obscene songs and Anna’s trick on Mars (657–96); assassination of Caesar: Vesta, Philippi, vengeance, Augustus (697–710).

March 16

Scorpios (711–12).

March 17

Liberalia; origin of libation cakes: Silenus and honeycomb; toga libera; prayer (713–90); Argeï (791–2); Milvus/Kite Star: monstrous bull, Briareus, Jupiter (793–808).

March 19

Quinquatrus: Minerva’s festival, goddess of many skills (809–34); temple of Minerva Capta (835–48).

March 23

Tubilustrium (849–50); Ram: Phrixus, Helle, Golden Fleece (851–76).

March 26

Equinox (877–8).

March 30

Janus, Concordia, Salus Romana and Ara Pacis (879–82).

March 31

Luna on Aventine (883–4).

Book 4

Proem

Invocation of Venus (1–18).

VENUS AND APRIL: Romulus and ancestors; Greek for ‘foam’; narrator’s exile; time of ‘aperture’; hymn to Venus; Rome and Venus and spring (19–132).

April 1

Veneralia: Venus ‘Heart Changer’ and Fortuna Virilis (133–62); Scorpios (163–4).

April 2

Pleiades: origin and number (165–78).

April 4

MEGALENSIA: procession of Great Mother and shows; goddess’s love of din; lions and turrets; selfcastration and Attis; bringing of Cybele to Rome and Claudia’s vindication; cultural practices; Galli and rites (179–372).

April 5

Temple of Fortuna Publica (373–6).

April 6

Shows: Caesar’s victory at Thapsus; Ovid and the Caesarean veteran; Libra setting (377–86).

April 9

Orion (387–8).

April 10

Horse-races (389–92).

April 12

CERIALIA: shows for Ceres; hymn to Ceres; rape of Proserpina and wanderings of Ceres; Triptolemus; Jupiter and divided year; return of harvest (393–620).

April 13

Temple of Jupiter Victor and Hall of Liberty (621–4).

April 14

Augustus’ victory at Mutina (625–8).

April 15

Fordicidia: sacrifice of pregnant heifer; Numa and Faunus’ oracle (629–72); young Augustus as imperator (673–6).

April 17

Hyades (677–8).

April 19

Cerialia: horse-racing in the Circus; release of blazing foxes (679–712).

April 20

Aries and Taurus (713–20).

April 21

PARILIA: prayers to Pales, rites, origin of rites (721–806); Rome’s birthday: Romulus and Remus; augury and city’s foundation; Remus’ death (at the hands of Celer) and funeral; address to Caesarean Rome (807–62).

April 23

Vinalia: prostitutes and Venus of Eryx; vows of Aeneas and Mezentius (863–900).

April 25

Robigalia: Canis/ Dog-Star; Flamen and Grove of Robigo; prayer and sacrifice of dog (901–42).

April 28

Floralia: Flora displaced for Palatine Vesta, Apollo and Augustus (943–54).

Book 5

Proem

Address to reader (1–8).

DISSENSION OF THE MUSES: Polyhymnia and Maiestas, Urania and Maiores/Elders, Calliope and Maia; narrator’s refusal to judge (9–110).

May 1

Capella/Goat: Amalthea, horn, nursing of infant Jove (111–28); Praestites Lares: original two statues decayed, a thousand shrines with leader’s Genius (129–46); Bona Dea: Livia’s restoration of temple on Aventine (147–58).

May 2

Hyades: birth and death of Hyas, mourning sisters (159–82).

FLORALIA: invocation of Flora; Zephyr’s rape of Chloris; marriage and charge of flowers; birth of Mars from Juno; origin and lewdness of the shows; final questions; Naso’s prayer (183–378).

May 3

Chiron: rising; Chiron’s death, Achilles and Hercules (379–414).

May 5

Lyra (415–16).

May 6

Scorpios (417–18).

May 9

LEMURIA: rites; origin of name learnt from Mercury; ghost of Remus and exoneration of Romulus; Lemuria from Remuria; taboos (419–92).

May 11

Orion: Hyrieus’ hospitality to Jupiter, Neptune and Mercury; origin of Orion’s name, fatal defence of Latona (493–544).

May 12

Mars Ultor (‘The Avenger’): epiphany of Mars; Mars’ temple and Augustan forum; Augustus’ vow at Philippi; Parthian return of standards; shows in Circus (545–98).

May 13

Pleiades (599–602).

May 14

Taurus: Jupiter’s rape of Europa (603–20); Argeï: Vestals and straw dummies; Jove’s oracle and Hercules; Tiber’s story (621–62).

May 15

Mercury: invocation; rites of salesmen (663–92).

May 20

Gemini: fight of Castor and Pollux with Idas and Lynceus (693–720).

May 21

Agonia (721–2).

May 22

Dog-Star (723–4).

May 23

Tubilustria (725–6).

May 24

QRCF (727–8).

May 25

Temple of Fortuna Publica and Aquila (729–32).

May 26

Boötes and Hyas (733–4).

Book 6

Proem

Address to reader (1–8).

DISSENSION OF GODDESSES: Juno, Juventas and Concordia claim the month (9–100).

June 1

Carna: Janus’ rape of Cranaë/Carna, power over hinge, Proca, rites (101–82); temple of Juno Moneta (183–90); temples to Mars and Tempestas (191–4); Aquila (195–6).

June 2

Hyades, Taurus (197–8).

June 3

Temple of Bellona (199–208).

June 4

Temple of Hercules Custos, ‘Guard’ (209–12).

June 5

Temple of Sancus (213–18).

June 6

Narrator’s daughter and Flaminica (219–34).

June 7

Ludi Piscatorii: Lycaon, Ursa and Fishermen Games for Tiber (235–40).

June 8

Temple of Mens, ‘Mind’ (241–8).

June 9

VESTALIA: origin and shape of temple, Vesta as Earth, virgin attendants, Vesta as flame, rites, Priapus’ failed rape, Jupiter Pistor, early forum, Palladium, Metellus’ rescue, eulogy of Caesar (249–460); Brutus’ victory and Crassus’ defeat (461–8).

June 10

Delphis (469–72).

June 11

MATRALIA: Mater/Mother Matuta, Ino and Melicertes, Leucothea/Matuta and Palaemon/Portunus (473–562); military defeats: Rutilius and Didius (563–8); Fortuna: Servius Tullius, Tullia, Ocresia (569–636); Livia’s shrine to Concordia (637–48).

June 13

Temple to Jupiter Invictus, ‘Unconquered’ (649–50); lesser Quinquatrus: Minerva, flautists, Marsyas (651–710).

June 15

Thyone and Vesta’s scourings (711–14).

June 16

Favourable weather (715–16).

June 17–18

Orion and Delphis: victory of Tubertus (717–24).

June 19

Gemini and Cancer: Pallas on Aventine (725–8).

June 20

Temple to Summanus (729–32).

June 21

Aesculapius: healing of Hippolytus and Jove’s punishment (733–62).

June 22

Lake Trasimene disaster (763–8).

June 23

Military victories (769–70).

June 24

Fors Fortuna (771–84).

June 25–6

Orion and summer solstice (785–90).

June 27–8

Lares and Jupiter Stator (791–4).

June 29

Quirinus (795–6).

June 30

Temple of Hercules Musarum, ‘Hercules of the Muses’ (797–812).

OMISSIONS FROM FASTI

The following festivals/anniversaries of the Julio-Augustan calendar are omitted from Ovid’s Fasti (see Syme 1978: 23ff.; H-B 1994: 215ff.).

January 7

Augustus’ first assumption of imperium in 43 BC (RG 1.2–3, recorded in Fasti Praenestini, Feriale Cumanum).

January 8

Dedication of Ara Iustitiae Augustae (‘Altar of Augustan Justice’) in AD 13 (recorded in Fasti Praenestini).

January 11

Closing of temple of Janus in 29 BC (RG 13, recorded in Fasti Praenestini).

January 17

Marriage of Augustus and Livia in 38 BC (recorded in Fasti Verulani). Dedication of Ara Numinis Augusti (‘Altar of Augustan Divinity’) in AD 9(?) (recorded in Fasti Praenestini).

January

Movable feast of Compitalia.

March 17

Julius Caesar’s victory at Munda in 45 BC (recorded in Fasti Caeretani and Farnesiani).

March 27

Julius Caesar’s victory at Alexandria in 47 BC (recorded in Fasti Caeretani, Maffeiani and Verulani).

April 21

Announcement of Julius Caesar’s victory at Munda marked by commemorative shows (Dio Cassius 43.42.3; 45.64).

April

Movable feast of Feriae Latinae in honour of Jupiter Latiaris, god of the Latin League.

May/June

Movable feast of the Dea Dia of the Arval Brethren, to which Augustus belonged (RG 7.3).

June 1

Ludi Saeculares of 17 BC (RG 22.4).

June 26

Adoption of Tiberius by Augustus in AD 4 (recorded in Fasti Amiternini).

Ovid’s

Fasti

Fasti 1

TIMES and their causes, arranged through the Latin year,

Stars sunk beneath earth and risen, I’ll sing.

View this work peacefully, Caesar Germanicus,

And direct the course of my timid ship.

5      Do not refuse a trifling honour. Be present

To support service vowed to your godhead.

You will recognize sacred rites unearthed from ancient

Annals and how each day deserved its mark.

You will discover here the feast-days of your house,

10            And often read of your grandfather and father.

The glories they have stamped on the painted Fasti

You, too, will win with Drusus, your brother.

Let others sing of Caesar’s arms, me of Caesar’s altars

And all the days he added to our rites.

15       Sanction with a nod my effort to laud your kin,

And drive from my heart this dreadful terror.

Look kindly upon me and empower my song;

Genius stands and declines with your gaze.

My page shakes at the judgement of a learned princeps,

20            As if sent to be read by the Claros god.

We witnessed the eloquence of your refined voice

Helping fearful victims with civil arms.

We know, too, when passion impels you to our art,

How mightily your flood of talent rolls.

25       If it’s allowed and lawful, poet, guide a poet’s reins;

Gladden the whole year with your auspices.

Times were being arranged by the city’s founder,

When he established ten months for his year.

Clearly, Romulus, you studied arms more than stars,

30            The conquest of neighbours was your main care.

Yet reason, too, Caesar, may have prompted him,

And he has grounds to defend his error.

He decreed the time an infant needs to quit

Its mother’s womb sufficient for a year.

35       The same number of months after her husband’s death

Witness a wife’s grief in the widowed home.

Purple-gowned Quirinus was mindful of these things

When he gave simple folk the year’s rules.

The month of Mars was first, that of Venus second;

40            She was his line’s princeps, Mars was his father.

The third was named for the old, the fourth for the young,

The bunch following were marked by number.

Numa did not pass Janus or our ancestral dead,

And prefixed two months to the ancient ten.

45      In case you do not know the rules of different days,

Lucifer’s duties are not all the same.

The day is nefastus when the three words are mute;

Fastus when legal action is allowed.

Do not think the rules remain fixed for the whole day:

50            What’s fastus now, was nefastus this morning.

After the god gets his sacrifice, all speech is allowed

And the distinguished praetor’s words are freed.

A day exists, too, when law locks people in booths;

One, too, which recurs in cycles of nine.

55      Ausonia’s Kalends are claimed for Juno’s cult;

A great white lamb falls for Jove on the Ides.

No god protects the Nones. The day after these three

(Take care you are not deceived) will be black.

The curse is from history. On those days Rome suffered

60            Tearful losses beneath the frown of Mars.

I have stated once what applies to the whole Fasti,

Lest I am forced to cut the cord of events.

JANUARY I (KALENDS) Fastus

Look, Germanicus, Janus proclaims a happy year

For you and is present to start my song.

65      Two-headed Janus, source of the silent-gliding year,

Who alone of the gods see your own back,

Be present for our leaders, whose labours secure

Peace for the teeming earth, peace for the ocean.

Be present for your senators and Quirinus’ folk;

70            Unlock our gleaming temples with your nod.

The lucky day dawns. Voice and heart should show respect;

You must now speak good words on this good day.

Listen to no lawsuits, clear the air of frenzied

Strife; suspend your labours, jaundiced mob.

75       See how the air glimmers with its perfumed fires,

And Cilician saffron cracks on blazing hearths.

The flame lashes the golden shrines with light, and spreads

Flickering radiance on the temple roofs.

Spotless clothes process toward the Tarpeian heights,

80            The people’s colour matches their feast-day.

Now new rods of office lead, new purple dazzles,

The glinting ivory feels new weight.

Unbroken bullocks offer their necks to the axe,

Fattened by the grass of Faliscan fields.

85     Jupiter, viewing all the world from his citadel,

Observes nothing un Roman to protect.

Hail, joyful day, and happier returns always,

Worthy festival of a master people.

Yet what god am I to call you, biformed Janus?

90            For Greece has no deity like you.

Produce the reason why you are the only god

To see what is behind and what ahead.

While I contemplated this, writing-tablets in hand,

The house appeared much brighter than before.

95      Suddenly holy Janus in marvellous two-headed form

Thrust his binary face before my eyes.

I panicked and I felt my hair spike with fear,

My heart iced over with a sudden chill.

Clutching a staff in his right hand, a key in his left,

100            He delivered this from his facing face:

‘Lose your fear, industrious poet of the days,

And learn what you seek, marking my words.

The ancients (since I’m a primitive thing) called me

Chaos. Watch me sing events long ago.

105    This lucent air and the other three elements,

Fire, water and earth, were a single heap.

Once dissension of its matter had split the mass,

Which departed in fragments for new homes,

Flame headed for the heights, the next place took the air,

110            Earth and the ocean settled in mid-ground.

Then I, who had been a ball and a faceless hulk,

Got the looks and limbs proper to a god.

Now, as a small token of my once confused shape,

My front and back appear identical.

115      ‘Hear the other cause of the form you ask about,

So you may know both it and my duties.

Whatever you see around, sky, ocean, clouds, earth,

They are all closed and opened by my hand.

The vast world’s safekeeping belongs to me alone;

120            Only I have the right to turn its hinge.

When I choose to release Peace from her tranquil house,

She strolls the unending highways freely.

The whole globe would be confounded with deadly blood,

If unbending bars did not closet war.

125      I sit at heaven’s doors with the gentle Hours:

Jupiter goes and comes through my office.

Hence I am called “Janus”. When the priest offers cakes

Of barley and the spelt mingled with salt,

You’ll laugh at my names. Sometimes I’m called “Patulcius”,

130            Sometimes “Clusius” in sacrificial tones.

Surely crude antiquity wished to signify

Different functions with these alternate names.

‘I’ve told you my power. Now learn the cause of my form:

Yet you already see this, too, in part.

135       Every door has two fronts, this side and that:

One of them views the people, one the Lar.

Just as your janitor seated by the threshold

Watches the exits and the entrances,

So I the janitor of the celestial court

140            Observe the East and the West together.

You see Hecate’s faces turned in three directions

So she can protect the triple crossroads.

I, too, so I waste no time swivelling my neck,

Am allowed to see two ways without movement.’

145    He had spoken, and had signalled with his look

An openness to further questions.

I took heart, and thanked the god without any fear

And uttered more words, eyeing the ground.

‘Come now, tell me why the new year starts in the cold,

150            Which would far better commence in the spring.

Everything flowers then, then time has new life,

And the new buds plump on the bursting shoots.

Freshly formed foliage then canopies the trees,

Sprouting grasses penetrate the topsoil,

155     Melodious birdsong caresses the balmy air,

And cattle play and frolic in the fields.

Then suns are seductive, the strange swallow appears

And makes its mud nest in the soaring eaves;

Then land endures tillage and is renewed by the plough.

160            This would rightly have been called the new year.’

I had questioned him at length. He did not wait long,

But limited his words to two verses:

‘Winter has the first new sun and the last old one:

So Phoebus and the year begin the same.’

165     After this I was wondering why the first day

Had lawsuits. ‘Learn the cause,’ Janus says.

‘I entrusted this newborn time to business

Lest the year’s start enervate the whole.

Every man gives a taste of his occupation

170            And offers some proof of his normal work.’

Next me: ‘Why, though I propitiate other gods, Janus,

Do I offer you wine and incense first?’

‘So you can obtain access through me, the doorman,’

He says, ‘to any of the gods you please.’

175       ‘But why do we utter joyful words on your Kalends,

And exchange our mutual good wishes?’

Then the god leans upon the stick in his right hand,

And declares: ‘Beginnings contain omens.

The first sound makes you prick your timorous ears,

180            And the augur ponders the first bird seen.

The gods’ temples and ears are now open, no tongue

Frames pointless prayers, and words possess weight.’

Janus had stopped. I did not keep my silence long,

His concluding words and my own words brushed.

185     ‘What’s behind the date-gifts and wrinkled figs,’ I said,

‘And honey glistening in a snow-white pot?’

‘An omen,’ he says; ‘so their flavour sticks to things

And the year journeys sweetly from the start.’

‘I understand the sweet gifts. Explain the cash,

190            So no part of your festival eludes me.’

He laughed and said: ‘O how your century deceives you,

If you think honey is sweeter than cash.

Even in Saturnus’ reign I hardly saw anyone

Whose soul did not respond to sweet lucre.

195     In time, love of possessions grew. Now at its height,

It can scarcely proceed any further.

Wealth has more value now than in earlier times,

When the people were poor, when Rome was new,

When a little hut contained Quirinus, child of Mars,

200            And river grass supplied a tiny bed.

Jupiter could hardly stand in his narrow shrine;

Jove’s hand cradled a thunderbolt of clay.

They adorned the Capitol with leaves, as now with gems,

And a senator pastured his own sheep.

205     No one was ashamed to sleep peacefully on straw

And to cushion the head upon hay.

The praetor gave people justice fresh from the plough,

And thin silver plate was a felony.

But after the fortune of this place lifted her head

210             And Rome’s climbing pinnacle touched the gods,

Wealth increased and the raging passion for wealth.

In great affluence, people rummage for more:

They sweat to gain what they may spend, to regain

What they have spent; the changes feed the vice.

215       They are like men with bellies swollen from dropsy,

Who thirst for water the more they drink.

Today net-worth is worth: finance supplies office,

Finance friendships; the poor are all downtrod.

Yet you inquire if cash provides useful omens,

220            And why antique coppers delight our hands.

People once gave coppers, now gold’s a better prospect;

The old money surrendered to the new.

We, too, like golden temples, although we praise

The ancient ones: majesty suits a god.

225     We eulogize olden years, but enjoy our own;

Yet each custom merits equal respect.’

He had ended his advice. Again, as before,

I speak calmly to the god of the keys:

‘I’ve learnt much. But why is a ship stamped on one side

230             Of a copper and two heads on the other?’

‘So you could recognize me in the double image,

If time had not erased that ancient work.

The cause of the ship: the sickle god roamed the world

In a ship and reached the Tuscan river.

235     I remember Saturnus settling in this land;

Jupiter knocked him from the sky’s throne.

People long kept the name “Saturnian”; the land

Was called “Latium”, too, from the latent god.

Noble posterity stamped a ship on the copper,

240            To show the coming of the alien god.

I myself inhabited the land whose left bank

Is scoured by sandy Tiber’s tranquil wave.

Here, where Rome exists now, an unfelled forest greened,

Today’s greatness was pasture for some cows.

245    My stronghold was the hill, which this age commonly

Calls the “Janiculum” after my name.

I reigned at the time when earth could endure the gods

And human places were crammed with deities.

The crimes of man had not yet banished Justice

250            (The last divinity to leave the earth).

Shame controlled the people in place of fear or force;

No one toiled to give justice to the just.

War was not my business. I watched peace and doorposts.

These,’ he said, showing his keys, ‘are my weapons.’

255      The god had closed his mouth tight. Then I opened mine,

Eliciting the god’s voice with my own:

‘Though iani, archways, abound, why is your cult based

In the one where your shrine joins two forums?’

Stroking the beard which cascaded to his chest, he told

260       At once of Oebalian Tatius’ arms,

And how the fickle keeper, bribed with bracelets,

Led silent Sabines to the stronghold’s height.

‘From there,’ he says, ‘there was, like the present descent,

A steep slope through the forums to the valleys.

265     Tatius had already approached the gateway,

Whose bars spiteful Saturnia had slipped.

Afraid to enter battle with so mighty a god,

I cleverly used my own expertise,

And unlocked the mouths of springs with my power,

270            And jetted sudden spurts of water.

But first I threw sulphur into the sodden channels

To block Tatius’ path with boiling fluid.

After its service in repelling the Sabines,

The place safely resumed its former shape.

275    An altar was built for me next to a small shrine:

It burns the spelt and cakes in its flames.’

‘Why do you hide during peace and open when arms stir?’

No delay, he gives the reason I sought:

‘My doorway remains clear and is unbolted

280            So warring people have a clear way back.

In peacetime I lock the doors so peace must stay.

I’ll be closed long under Caesar’s godhead.’

He spoke and, raising his eyes which saw opposite ways,

Viewed everything in the whole world.

285    There was peace; and, Germanicus, (the cause of your triumph)

Rhine had yielded you its waters enslaved.

Janus, make peace and the servants of peace eternal;

Grant that the author not desert his work.

As I was allowed to learn from the Fasti themselves,

290            The Fathers consecrated two shrines today.

The son of Phoebus and of nymph Coronis settled

On the island which the split river hugs.

Jupiter has a share; the one place took them both.

The grandson’s shrine joins his high grandfather.

JANUARY 3 Comitialis

295     Who forbids me to tell of the stars also, their rising

And setting? That was part of my promise.

Fortunate souls, whom passion first drove to know

These things and ascend to the homes above.

We may believe they equally transcended

300           The vices and localities of men.

No Venus or wine fractured their lofty spirits,

No forum’s duty or labour of war.

No trivial ambition or false-coated fame

Rattled them, no hunger for great riches.

305   They brought the distant stars into their mental sight

And subjected heaven to their genius.

So the sky is reached: not by Olympus with Ossa’s

Load or Pelion’s top jabbing the high stars.

We, too, will survey the sky under these leaders

310          And assign wandering constellations their days.

So, when the third night’s here before the coming Nones

And the wet soil’s sprinkled with heaven’s dew,

Octopedic Cancer’s arms will be sought in vain.

He will plunge headlong in western waters.

JANUARY 5 (NONES) Fastus

315          The rain pelting from black stormclouds will signal

The Nones are here, as Lyra rises.

JANUARY 9 Agonalia (Nefastus Publicus?)

Add four days in a row to the Nones: it’s Agonal

Morning, when Janus should be placated.

The cause of the name may be the robed acolyte

320           At whose blow a victim falls to the gods,

And who asks, before dyeing his knife in hot blood,

Whether to act, agatne, and waits command.

Some, since sheep do not come but are driven, agantur,

Derive the day’s ‘Agonal’ name from driving.

325    Some believe the ancients called this feast Agnalia,

Dropping a letter from its proper place.

Or, since victims fear the knives mirrored in the water,

Does bestial ‘agony’ inscribe the day?

Possibly the day acquired a Greek title

330            From games celebrated in former times.

The ancient language called a beast agonia,

And the last reason is right in my view.

That’s not certain, but the Sacred King must appease

The gods with the mate of a woolly ewe.

335  ‘Victim’ comes from falling beneath a victor’s hand;

The sacrificial ‘host’ from vanquished ‘hostiles’.

Formerly what served to conciliate gods and men

Was spelt and pure salt’s glistening grain.

Foreign ships had not sailed the ocean’s waters,

340           Ferrying tears distilled from myrrh bark;

Euphrates sent no incense, India no nard,

Nobody yet knew red saffron’s threads.

Altars smoked contented with Sabine juniper

And the burning laurel crackled loudly.

345    A man was wealthy if he could add violets

To crowns fashioned from meadow flowers;

The knife which eviscerates a pole-axed bull

Had no role in the sacred rites.

Ceres first delighted in a greedy sow’s blood,

350            Avenging crops with the pest’s just slaughter.

She found a sow unearthing with its bristly snout

Early springtime’s succulent milk-shoots.

The sow paid the penalty. Her example, goat,

Should have scared you away from the vine-twig.

355      Someone caught you sinking teeth into the vine,

And vented displeasure with these words:

‘Gnaw the vine, goat! When you stand before the altar,

Your horns will be doused with its product.’

The words proved true. Your foe is passed to you, Bacchus,

360            For the crime, horns doused with flowing wine.

Error harmed the sow, error harmed the goat, too.

What did you deserve, ox and placid sheep?

Aristaeus wept, when he saw all his bees killed

And honeycombs abandoned incomplete.

365    His sea-blue mother could scarcely console his pain,

And attached these final words to her speech:

‘Stop your tears, my boy. Proteus will lighten your loss,

And tell you how to regain what is gone.

But so he does not baffle you by altering

370            Appearance, clamp his two hands in strong chains.’

The youth approaches the seer and binds the limp arms

Of the sleeping old man of the ocean.

Proteus uses his art to shift and feign his looks,

But soon resumes shape, mastered by chains.

375    Lifting his dripping face and sea-blue beard, he said:

‘You seek a technique to recover bees?

Sacrifice a bullock and inter its carcass:

The one interred will supply what you seek.’

The shepherd follows orders. From the putrid ox

380            Swarms bubble. One life axed bred a thousand.

The sheep is doomed. It wickedly cropped the twigs brought

By a pious crone for the country’s gods.

What safety can there be, when altars take the lives

Of wool-bearing sheep and the tilling ox?

385     Persia placates ray-crowned Hyperion with a horse,

Lest the swift god receive a slow victim.

The deer was once slain to twin Diana in place

Of a virgin and now falls without one.

I have seen Sapaeans and your snow dwellers, Haemus,

390            Offer the guts of dogs to Trivia.

A donkey, too, is killed for the countryside’s stiff guard.

The cause is shameful, but it suits the god.

You were holding, Greece, the feast of grape-crowned Bacchus,

Celebrated by custom each third winter.

395    The gods who serve Lyaeus also attended

And whoever is not hostile to play,

Namely Pans and young satyrs all ready for sex

And goddesses who haunt streams and lone acres.

Old Silenus came, too, on a sway-backed donkey,

400            And the red-groined terror of timid birds.

They discovered a grove suitable for party

Pleasures and sprawled on grass-lined couches.

Liber supplied wine, they had brought their own garlands,

A brook gave water for frugal mixing.

405    Naiads were there, some with hair flowing uncombed,

Others with locks artfully coiffured.

One serves drinks with a tunic hitched above her calves,

Another’s breast is glimpsed through a torn dress.

Another reveals a shoulder or drags her skirt

410            In the grass; no straps bind delicate feet.

Some generate tender fires inside the satyrs,

Others in you, whose brow is bound with pine.

They inflame you, too, Silenus; your lust can’t be quenched,

Lechery will not allow you to be old.

415     But red Priapus, the garden’s glory and protection,

Fell victim above all to Lotis.

He desires her, he wants her, he sighs for her alone;

He nods at her and pesters her with signs.

Disdain defines the pretty, beauty is trailed by pride:

420            She teases and scorns him with her looks.

It was night. Wine induced slumber and prone bodies

Lay everywhere, conquered by sleep.

Lotis rested furthest away, tired from partying,

In the grass beneath some maple branches.

425    Her lover rises and, holding his breath, tracks

Secretly and silently on tiptoe.

When he had reached the snow-white nymph’s secluded bed,

He took care his breathing was soundless.

And now he was poised on the grass right next to her,

430            And still she was filled with a mighty sleep.

His joy soars; he draws the cover from her feet

And starts the happy road to his desires.

Then look, the donkey, Silenus’ mount, brays loudly,

And emits untimely blasts from its throat.

435       The terrified nymph leaps up, fends Priapus off,

And awakens the whole grove with her flight.

And the god, whose obscene part was far too ready,

Was ridiculed by all in the moon’s light.

The author of the clamour was punished with death.

440            He’s a victim dear to Hellespont’s god.

You birds were inviolate, solace of the fields,

A forest-haunting, innocuous race,

Constructing your nests and warming eggs with feathers,

And voicing sweet music without effort.

445     You gain nothing from this, for your tongue is accused:

The gods believe you reveal their minds.

This is not false. As you are nearest to the gods,

You signal truth with feathers and cries.

After long immunity the bird brood was slain;

450            Gods at last enjoyed their informers’ guts.

And so the white dove, divided from her husband,

Often blazes on Idalian hearths;

And the Capitol’s defence fails to keep goose liver

Off your sacred plate, Inachiotis.

455     At night the goddess Night has the crested bird slain

For awakening the warm day with its cry.

Meanwhile the bright star of Delphis climbs from the sea

And pokes its face from ancestral waters.

JANUARY 10 Endotercisus

Tomorrow’s dawn denotes the winter’s middle point;

460            What is left will equal what went before.

JANUARY 11 Carmentalia Nefastus Publicus

Next day Tithonus’ bride will abandon him and view

The Arcadian goddess’ priestly rite.

The same dawn enshrined you, too, sister of Turnus,

Where the Aqua Virgo rings the Campus.

465     Where to trace the causes and practice of these rites?

Who will direct my sails in mid-ocean?

Be my mentor, you whose name is spun from song;

Favour this project lest your honour slip.

The land born before the moon (if we believe the land

470            Itself) derives its name from great Arcas.

From here was Evander, famous on both sides,

But nobler for his holy mother’s blood.

As soon as her spirit sucked in heaven’s fire,

She bulged with god and sang prophetic song.

475    She had announced the turmoil awaiting her

And her son, and much else truthed by time.

The youth is banished with a too prophetic mother,

And leaves Arcadia and Parrhasia’s Lar.

As he sobs, the mother speaks: ‘Please stop your tears,

480            You must endure this fortune like a man.

It was fated. No fault of yours exiled you, but a god;

You’re banished the city by an outraged god.

You suffer not just deserts, but deity’s wrath;

In great misfortune innocence counts.

485     Each individual’s conscience fixes hope

And fear in his breast from his actions.

Do not grieve as if the first to suffer this:

This storm has engulfed the mightiest men.

Cadmus suffered the same, when Tyrian shores expelled him

490            And he stood exiled on Aonian soil.

Tydeus suffered the same and Pagasaean Jason,

And others it would take long to record.

All land is home to the brave, as sea is to fish,

As the open world’s wide void is to birds.

495     No savage tempest rages for the whole year;

For you, too, (trust me) there will be springtime.’

Firmed by his mother’s words, Evander slices the waves

With his ship and reaches Hesperia.

Now, on wise Carmenta’s advice, he steered the ship

500            To a stream and sailed up Tuscan waters.

She sees the river bank next to Tarentum’s pool

And hovels scattered in lone places.

As she was, hair billowing, she stood on the stern

Crazed, and grabbed the navigator’s hand.

505     She stretches her arms toward the distant right bank,

Her brain storms. She stamps the pine deck three times.

Her lust to leap and set her foot on the soil

Was just restrained, just by Evander’s hand.

‘Gods of our journey’s end,’ she declared, ‘hail, and you,

510            Land destined to offer heaven new gods,

And the rivers and springs of this welcoming earth,

And the forest groves and the Naiad bands.

Be an auspicious sight for my son and for me,

Lucky be the foot which touches the bank.

515      Am I deceived? Or will these hills become great walls

And all lands from this land request justice?

The whole world has been promised to these hills one day.

Who would believe the place possessed such fate?

Soon Dardanian pines will touch these beaches;

520            Here, too, a woman will cause a new war.

Dear grandson, Pallas, why don fatal arms? Do it!

No humble avenger awaits your death.

Conquered, you will conquer, Troy; toppled, you will rise.

Your collapse crushes your enemies’ homes.

525    Conquering flames, devour Neptune’s Pergamum!

Will your ash not soar above the globe?

Soon pious Aeneas will bring sacred emblems

And sacred sire. Clasp, Vesta, Ilium’s gods.

Time will come when one gaze guards you and the world,

530            And the god himself conducts the rites.

The fatherland’s tutelage will stay with the Augusti;

It’s ordained this house holds empire’s reins.

Thence a god’s grandson and son will – reluctantly –

Bear his father’s load with celestial mind.

535    As I’ll be worshipped one day on eternal altars,

Julia Augusta will be a new god.’

As soon as these words plunged her into our era,

Her prescient tongue halted in mid-speech.

Leaving the ship, the exile stood on Latium’s grass,

540            Lucky to have that place for exile.

No long delay: new homes stood, and none surpassed

The Arcadian on Ausonia’s hills.

Look, here comes the club-carrying hero driving

Erythea’s cows on his long world journey.

545     And while he is hosted in the Tegean house,

Cattle roam unguarded through broad acres.

It was morning: the acting herder from Tiryns

Jolts from sleep and counts two bulls as missing.

He searches, but sees no tracks from the silent theft;

550         Cacus had dragged them backward to his cave,

Savage Cacus, the Aventine wood’s terror and shame,

No light problem for neighbours and guests.

His face was grim, his strength matched his body,

Huge: this monster’s father was Mulciber.

555     A vast labyrinthine cavern served as his house,

Remote: even beasts could barely find it.

Faces and limbs hang nailed above the doorposts;

The filthy ground blanches with men’s bones.

Jupiter’s son was leaving with part of the herd

560            Lost; the plunder bellowed raucously.

‘I welcome the recall,’ he shouts. The avenger tracks

The sound through the woods to the impious lair.

Cacus had blocked the entrance with a barricade of rock;

Scarcely ten ox-teams could have shifted it.

565    Heaving with his shoulders (heaven once rested there),

Hercules moves and topples the huge mass.

The crash of its dislodgement dismayed heaven itself;

The battered earth sank beneath the bulk’s weight.

Cacus at first fights hand to hand and skirmishes

570            Ferociously with boulders and trees.

When this does nothing, he resorts unbravely

To his father’s arts, and retches roaring flame.

You would think every blast was Typhoeus’ breath,

A bolt of lightning hurled from Etna’s fire.

575     Alcides grabs him, and sinks the tri-knotted club

Three or four times in the other man’s face.

He collapses and vomits smoke mingled with blood,

And hits the ground, dying, with his broad chest.

The victor sacrifices one bull to you, Jove,

580            And calls Evander and the country folk.

He set up an altar to himself called ‘Maxima’

In the city district named from cattle.

Evander’s mother does not shield the time’s approach

When earth would not need its Hercules.

585     As the lucky seer was the gods’ darling alive,

The goddess owns this day in Janus’ month.

JANUARY 13 (IDES) Nefastus Publicus

On the Ides, in great Jupiter’s temple, the pure priest

Offers a gelded sheep’s guts to the flames.

Every province was then restored to our people

590            And your grandfather named Augustus.

Read the waxen images lining noble halls,

No man has been assigned so great a name.

Africa calls her conqueror after herself; another

Attests victories in Isauria or Crete.

595      Numidia makes one man proud, Messana another,

Numantia’s city has marked a third;

Germany created for Drusus death and a name –

Ah, the pity of virtue so short-lived!

If Caesar were to seek names from those he vanquished,

600            He’d reap as many as the great world’s tribes.

Some men, made famous by one event, bear titles

From a grabbed torque or auxiliary raven.

Magnus, your name is the measurement of your deeds;

But yet your conqueror’s name was greater.

605      There is no level of name beyond the Fabii,

The house called ‘Maximus’ for its service.

But all these are distinguished by human honours;

His name is shared by Jupiter Supreme.

The Fathers call holy things ‘august’, they call temples

610            ‘August’, duly ordained by priestly hands.

‘Augury’, too, derives from the word’s root, and all

That Jupiter ‘augments’ with his power.

May he augment our leader’s rule, augment his years,

May his oaken garland protect your doors;

615     And with divine auspices may that great name’s heir

Assume the world’s weight with his father’s signs.

JANUARY 15 Carmentalia Nefastus Publicus

When Titan thrice looks back on the Ides now past,

Parrhasia’s goddess will again have rites.

Early Ausonian matrons rode in wagons (carpenta,

620            Named from Evander’s mother, too, I think).

The privilege is soon removed. All matrons refuse

To renew their ungrateful husbands’ stock.

To avoid giving birth, reckless and blind they stabbed

Their guts to expel the growing freight.

625     They say the Fathers censured their cruel daring

But yet restored the stolen honour,

And told them to repeat the Tegean Mother’s rites

On behalf now of boys and maidens.

It is unlawful to lug skins into the shrine

630            Lest the pure hearths be defiled by death.

If you love old rituals, attend the prayers;

You will hear names unknown to you before.

Porrima is appeased and Postverta, your sisters

Or fellow exiles, Maenalian goddess.

635     One chanted (it is thought) what was past or porro,

The other what would come later or post.

JANUARY 16 Nefastus Publicus

Gleaming Concordia, the next light enshrined you pure white

Where high Moneta lifts its soaring steps.

Now you have a fine view over the Latin mob;

640            Now consecrated hands have confirmed you.

Furius, conqueror of the Etruscan people,

Vowed the old temple and kept his vow.

The cause: the mob’s armed secession from the Fathers

And Rome itself fearful of its power.

645     The new cause is better: Germany spreads hair in homage

Under your auspices, revered leader.

Hence you offered this nation’s triumphal tribute

And enshrined the goddess whom you worship.

Your mother confirmed this with deeds and an altar,

650            She alone found worthy of great Jove’s bed.

JANUARY 17 Comitialis (later Nefastus Publicus)

After this, Phoebus, you will leave Capricornus

And course through the young water-bearer’s sign.

JANUARY 23 Comitialis

When the seventh rising sun plunges in the waves,

Lyra will now shine nowhere in the sky.

JANUARY 24 Comitialis

655    On the night after this star’s setting, the dazzling

Fire which nipples Leo’s breast will sink.

Three, four times I unrolled the times marked in the Fasti

And did not discover a Sowing Day,

When, sensing this, a Muse says: ‘This day’s appointed.

660            Why search the Fasti for moveable rites?

Though the day for the rite’s not fixed, the time is fixed:

When the field is fertile with scattered seed.’

Stand garlanded before the full mangers, young bulls;

Your toil will return with the balmy spring.

665    The countryman should hang up his veteran plough;

The cold ground shudders at every wound.

Bailiff, grant rest to the earth when the sowing is done;

Grant rest to the men who have tilled the land.

Let the district hold the feast: cleanse the district, farmers,

670            And give district hearths their annual cakes.

Appease the harvest mothers, Ceres and Tellus,

With their spelt and the flesh of a pregnant sow.

Ceres and Earth gaze on a common duty:

One causes crops, one provides their place.

675      You partners in toil, who reformed antiquity,

Replacing acorns with nutrient food,

Glut the covetous farmers with boundless harvests

So they reap reward fit for their tillage.

Grant the fragile seeds perpetual increase

680            And guard the new shoots from snow’s icy fire.

When we are sowing, open the sky with fair winds,

And douse lurking seeds with heaven’s rain.

And prevent ruinous hordes of noxious birds

From ravaging the ploughed fields of Ceres.

685      You, too, ants, be merciful to the planted grain;

There will be more loot after the harvest.

Meanwhile let the crop grow free of scabrous rust

And not pale in the sky’s foul weather.

And let it not shrivel and fail, or unduly plump

690            And die from its luxuriant riches.

And banish from the fields eye-blighting darnel

And sterile oat-straws surging from the tilth.

Let wheat and barley and the doubly fired spelt

Return with huge interest from the land.

695     These are my prayers for you, these are your prayers, farmers:

May both goddesses grant them fulfilment.

For a long time war gripped men: swords were more useful

Than ploughs, horses surpassed the tilling ox.

The hoe stood still, mattocks were turned into spears

700            And helmets crafted from the massy rake.

Thanks be to gods and to your house. For a long time

Wars have sprawled enchained at your feet.

Yoke the oxen, put the seed beneath the ploughed earth.

Peace suckles Ceres, Ceres child of Peace.

JANUARY 27 Comitialis

705     The sixth day before the next Kalends a temple

Was dedicated to Ledaean gods.

Brothers from a family of gods founded it

For the brother gods near Juturna’s pool.

JANUARY 30 Nefastus Publicus

Lean-spun song has led me to the Ara Pacis.

710            The day will be second from the month’s end.

Ring your coiffured hair with Actium’s laurels, Pax;

Be present, and gentle the whole world.

Let there be no enemies, no cause for triumph;

You’ll give our leaders more glory than war.

715     Let the soldier bear arms only to smother arms,

And fierce trumpets blast nothing but pomp.

Let the world near and far dread Aeneas’ people,

And any land unafraid of Rome love her.

Add your incense, priests, to the Pacific flames,

720     Let a white victim tumble with drenched brow.

That the house which procures peace possess it always,

Ask gods propitious to pious prayers.

But now the first part of my labour is finished,

And the little book concludes with its month.

Fasti 2

JANUS has ended. The year grows with my song:

Let Book Two advance with the second month.

Now, elegies, you first move with greater sails;

Late, I recall, you were a little work.

5        I myself had you as willing servants in love,

When my early youth played in its verses.

The same me sings of rites and times marked in the Fasti:

Who would believe the road from there led here?

This is my war service; we bear the arms we can,

10            My right hand is not without all function.

If I do not hurl spears with a muscular arm,

Or hold fast to the back of a war horse,

Or wear a helmet or buckle on a sharpened sword

(Anybody can handle these weapons),

15     We still follow your name, Caesar, with conscientious

Heart, and march forward through your titles.

Be present then, view my gift briefly with kindly eyes,

If there’s time spare from pacifying foes.

Rome’s Fathers called purifications februa;

20            And even now much attests the word’s sense.

Priests ask the King-Priest and the Flamen for wool,

For which the ancient word was februa.

The roasted spelt and salt which the lictor carries

To clean certain houses are called the same.

25      The same term denotes a pure tree’s severed bough

Whose leaves enshroud the chaste heads of priests.

I myself saw the Flaminica demand februa;

Her demand for Februa gets a pine twig.

In sum, anything which purified our bodies

30             Had this name with our unshaven forebears.

The month is so named from the Luperci’s atonement,

When they scour the whole ground with hide-strips;

Or since the ritual of tombs leaves the time pure,

When the days of the dead have departed.

35      Our elders believed that purgation could remove

All sinfulness and all cause of evil.

Greeks began the practice: they think purifying

The guilty peels off their impious acts.

Peleus absolved Actorides; Acastus absolved Peleus

40          From Phocus’ death with Haemonia’s stream.

The Phasian who rode the void on bridled serpents

Did not deserve simple Aegeus’ care.

Amphiareïdes told Naupactian Acheloüs

‘Absolve my sin’; and he absolved his sin.

45     Ah! simpletons, to think dismal crimes of murder

Can be washed away by river water.

So you will not be ignorant of the old sequence,

The first month belonged to Janus, as now.

What follows Janus was then the old year’s final month.

50          You, also, ended the rites, Terminus.

Janus’ month was the first, because the door is first;

The month sacred to the dead was the last.

It is believed that much later the Decemvirs

Coupled these widely separated times.

FEBRUARY 1 (KALENDS) Nefastus

55     At the month’s start, they say, near the Phrygian Mother,

Sospita was augmented with new shrines.

Where are the temples dedicated to the goddess

On these Kalends now? They collapsed from age.

That the rest not slide into similar ruin

60            Was our sacred leader’s prescient care,

Under whom no shrine experiences age.

Mankind is not enough: he obligates gods.

Builder of temples, holy rebuilder of temples,

I pray that the gods return your care.

65     May the celestials give you the years you gave them

And continue their guard before your house.

Today, too, nearby Alernus’ grove is crowded,

Where an alien Tiber seeks ocean waves.

Numa’s sanctuary and the Capitoline Thunderer

70            And Jove’s high hill receive a slaughtered sheep.

Often the enclouded sky drives heavy rains,

Or the earth lies canopied with snow.

FEBRUARY 2 Nefastus

When Titan next exits into Hesperia’s waves

And unhitches his jewelled purple team,

75     That night someone gazing at stars will ask: ‘Where is

Lyra today, which yesterday sparkled?’

While searching for Lyra, he will note Leo’s back

Suddenly sunk in the limpid waters.

FEBRUARY 3 Nefastus

Delphis, whom you lately saw encrusted with stars,

80           Will escape your view the following night.

He was either a lucky go-between in furtive love

Or ferried the Lesbian lyre and master.

What sea, what land is ignorant of Arion?

He enchained rushing water with song.

85     Often the wolf pursuing the lamb stopped at his voice,

Often the lamb fleeing the ravenous wolf.

Often the hound and the hare lay beneath the same shade,

The deer approached the lion on a rock,

The chattering crow sat at peace with Pallas’ bird,

90           And the hawk joined together with the dove.

Cynthia, they say, often swooned at your notes, sweet

Arion, as if they were her brother’s.

Arion’s name had filled the towns of Sicily,

Lyric sounds captured Ausonia’s shore.

95     Arion embarked a ship for home again,

Taking all the riches his art had won.

Perhaps, unlucky man, you feared the wind and waves,

But the ocean was safer than your ship.

For the pilot stood there with sword drawn, and the rest

100          Of the criminal crew were fully armed.

Why the sword? Steer the unsteady ship, sailor:

Your fingers should never clasp such gear.

Arion is pinched with terror: ‘I do not beg life.

Let me take my lyre and play a little.’

105      They give him leave and deride the delay. He takes

A chaplet, Phoebus, fit for your hair;

He wore a robe dipped twice in Tyrian purple.

The sounds plucked from the strings by his thumb

Were like the tearful strains of a swan, whose white

110        Brow is punctured by a cruel arrow.

At once he pitches fully dressed into the waves:

The broken water splashes the blue stern.

Then (beyond belief) they record that a dolphin

Arched its back to support a novel load.

115       He sits clutching his lyre and sings the price of passage,

And caresses ocean’s water with song.

Gods see pious acts. Jove took the dolphin to the stars

And assigned a constellation of nine.

FEBRUARY 5 (NONES) Nefastus Publicus

Now I wish for a thousand voices, Maeonides,

120            And your heart, which immortalized Achilles,

While we sing the sacred Nones in alternating song:

The highest honour is heaped on the Fasti.

Genius fails and the subject exceeds my strength:

I must sing of this day principally.

125     What maddened me to burden elegy with such

Weight? This belonged to the heroic foot.

Holy Father of the Fatherland, the plebs gave you

This name, the senate gave it and we knights.

History gave it first: you received your true names late,

130            You have long been Father of the World.

Jupiter’s name in high heaven is yours on earth:

You the father of men, he of the gods.

Romulus, defer. Guardian Caesar magnifies

Your walls: Remus could leap the ones you left.

135     Tatius, tiny Cures, Caenina knew of you;

His leadership has Romanized the sun.

You possessed a little scrap of conquered land;

All beneath high Jupiter is Caesar’s.

You rape; as leader he commands brides to be chaste.

140            Your grove harbours sin; he has repelled it.

Violence pleased you; under Caesar laws thrive.

You are named ‘dominus’, he ‘princeps’.

Remus indicts you; he pardoned his enemies.

Your father deified you, he his father.

145     Already Ida’s boy emerges to mid-belly

And pours streaming water nectar-mixed.

And look! Rejoice, if you shivered at Boreas;

A softer breeze rises from the Zephyrs.

FEBRUARY 10 Nefastus

Lucifer has lifted his fifth shimmering light

150            From ocean’s waves. The time will be first spring.

Do not be deceived. Frosty days remain, remain;

Departing winter left ample signs.

FEBRUARY 12 Nefastus

Let the third night come, and you will at once observe

That Ursa’s Guard has thrust out both his feet.

155     Callisto once belonged to the sacred circle

Of Hamadryads and huntress Diana.

She touched the goddess’ bow: ‘This bow I touch,’ she cried,

‘Be a witness to my virginity.’

Cynthia praised her, and said: ‘Keep the pledge you vowed

160         And you will be my companions’ princeps.’

She would have kept the pledge but for her prettiness.

She shunned mortals, Jupiter made her sin.

Phoebe returned from hunting scores of forest beasts,

As the sun occupied or passed midday.

165      When she reached the grove (a grove dark with dense ilex,

Around a deep fountain of cool water),

She said, ‘Let’s bathe here in the wood, Tegean virgin;’

The other reddened at virgin’s false ring.

She had instructed the nymphs too. The nymphs undress;

170            Callisto is shamed and suspiciously slow.

She stripped off her dress. Her womb’s obvious plumping

Betrays her with incriminating weight.

The goddess said to her: ‘Perjured Lycaonid,

Leave this virgin band, do not foul pure water.’

175     The moon’s horns had replenished its circle ten times:

The supposed virgin was now a mother.

Wounded Juno rages, and changes the girl’s shape.

Why do this? She was Jove’s unwilling victim.

When she sees her rival with a beast’s hideous face,

180            Juno snarls, ‘Go, sleep with that, Jupiter!’

A shaggy bear loped across the scrubby hillsides,

Who recently was loved by supreme Jove.

The bastard boy whom she conceived was now fifteen,

When the mother and son came face to face.

185     Indeed she halted, as if she knew him, frantic,

And growled. The growl was her parental speech.

The ignorant lad would have bedded his honed spike

In her, but both were whisked to homes above.

They glitter as adjacent stars: the one called Arctos leads;

190            Arctophylax seems to follow behind.

Saturnia still fumes and asks white Tethys’ waters

Not to bathe or touch Maenalian Arctos.

FEBRUARY 13 (IDES) Nefastus Publicus

On the Ides the altars of rural Faunus smoke,

Where the island splits the parted waters.

195    This was the day on which Veientine weapons

Killed three hundred and six Fabii.

One house undertook the city’s burden and defence;

One family offers and takes up arms.

Blue-blood soldiers march out from an identical camp;

200           Any one of them deserved to be leader.

The quickest way is through the right arch of the Porta

Carmentis. Don’t enter it; it is cursed.

Rumour reports three hundred Fabii went that way;

The gate is blameless, but still it is cursed.

205    Marching quickly, they reached the rushing Cremera

(Its turbid flow was due to winter rains)

And pitch their camp at the site. They unsheathe their swords

And fight their way through the Tyrrhenian force,

Like lions of a Libyan breed attacking

210            Cattle dotted over the wide ploughlands.

The enemy disperse and take ignoble wounds

In the back: earth reddens with Tuscan blood.

This is repeated often. When open victory’s

Denied, they plot ambush and hidden arms.

215   There was a plain; the plain’s ends were enclosed by hills

And a forest fit to hide mountain beasts.

In the middle they leave a few men and scattered herds;

The rest of the crowd lurk in the thickets.

Look, just as a torrent, bursting with rain water

220           Or snowdrifts melted by the Zephyr’s warmth,

Sweeps over fields and roads and does not confine,

As before, its waters to the banks,

Fabii fill the valley, fanning everywhere,

And flatten all they see without fear.

225   Where do you rush, great house? You’re wrong to trust the foe.

Naïve nobleness, watch for faithless spears!

Virtue falls to deceit: from all sides the foe leaps

Into open fields and holds every flank.

What can a few brave men do against such thousands?

230           What is left for them in such disaster?

Like a boar driven far from the woods by barking,

Who splays the quick dogs with its thunderous snout

But is soon killed, they do not perish unavenged,

But they inflict and take wounds by turn.

235   One day had dispatched all the Fabii to war;

One day had destroyed those dispatched to war.

But we may believe the gods themselves intended

The seeds to remain of Hercules’ race.

For a boy underage and still not ready for arms

240            Was alone left of the Fabian family,

Surely that you could one day be born, Maximus,

To restore the republic through delay.

FEBRUARY 14 Nefastus

Three star systems lie together: Corvus (Raven),

Anguis (Snake) and Crater (Bowl) between them.

245   On the Ides they are concealed; they rise the next night.

I shall tell you in song what joins these three.

Phoebus was once preparing Jove’s regular feast

(Our story will not delay us for long).

‘Go,’ he said, ‘my bird, so these rites are not delayed,

250            And fetch clear water from a running spring.’

The raven lifts the gilded bowl with its claws

And swoops high up on to paths of air.

There stood a fig tree crammed thickly with hard fruit.

The fruit is pecked; it was not ripe for picking.

255   The bird ignored its orders, and perched under the tree

(They say) until the figs slowly ripened.

Replete, it grabs a long water-snake with its black claws,

Returns to its master and tells these lies:

‘This caused my delay and controlled the running water:

260            This blocked both the fountain and my duty.’

‘Lies compound your sin,’ says Phoebus. ‘You dare to try

Verbal tricks upon the fate-speaking god.

Until succulent figs are hanging on the tree,

You will gulp no fountain’s cool waters.’

265   He spoke. As this ancient deed’s perennial sign, Anguis,

Bird and Crater flash joint constellations.

FEBRUARY 15 Lupercalia Nefastus Publicus

The third dawn after the Ides views naked Luperci;

And the rites of two-horned Faunus are held.

Tell me, Piërides, the origin of these rites,

270           The place they left for a home in Latium.

They say ancient Arcadians worshipped Pan,

God of flocks: he haunted Arcadia’s hills.

Pholoë will attest this and Stymphalian waves,

And Ladon running swiftly to the sea.

275   So, too, the pine ridges ringing Nonacris’ grove,

And tall Tricrene and Parrhasian snows.

Pan was god of herds, Pan was their god of mares

And won tribute for the safety of sheep.

Evander transferred his woodland deities here:

280           It’s now a city, then a city site.

Hence the god’s cult of imported Pelasgian rites:

The Flamen Dialis keeps their antique form.

Why then do they run, and why (since they run this way)

Disrobed – with their bodies naked, you ask?

285   The god likes to dash quickly across high hillsides

And he is the author of sudden flight.

The naked god tells his servants to go naked;

And clothes are not suitable for running.

Before Jove’s birth, they say, Arcadians occupied

290           The earth; that race was older than the moon.

Their life was that of beasts, consumed without purpose;

They were as yet an artless crowd and crude.

They used foliage for houses, grass for their crops;

Their nectar was water scooped with both hands.

295   No bull panted underneath the curving ploughshare;

No land was subject to the tiller’s rule.

No horse was yet used, every man carried himself;

The sheep paraded, clothed in their wool.

Under Jupiter’s sky their naked bodies hardened,

300            Inured to heavy rain and southern winds.

The unclothed, today, commemorate the old ways

And testify to ancient resources.

As to why Faunus fanatically shuns clothes,

We are handed an ancient, playful tale.

305   The young Tirynthian was strolling with his mistress;

Faunus spotted them both from a high ridge.

He saw and blazed. ‘Mountain deities,’ he exclaimed,

‘You are nothing to me; she’ll be my flame.’

As the Maeonian walked, her scented hair streamed

310            On her shoulders, her golden bosom gleamed.

Golden parasols repelled the warming sunlight,

But were held up by Herculean hands.

Now she reached Bacchus’ grove and Tmolus’ vineyard;

Dewy Hesperus rode his dusky horse.

315   She entered a cave tiled with tufa and native rock;

Outside the threshold was a babbling brook.

While servants prepare a banquet and wine to drink,

She dresses Alcides in her own clothes.

She gives him dainty, Gaetulian-purple frocks,

320            Gives him the stylish belt she’d just worn.

His belly exceeds the belt: he unclasps the frocks

So his massive hands can be inserted.

He shattered the bracelets uncrafted for his arms,

His huge feet split her tiny shoes open.

325   She in turn takes the heavy club and lion skin

And the smaller shafts stowed in their quiver.

They feasted like this, they went off to sleep like this,

And they lay apart in adjoining beds.

The cause: they were preparing to conduct at dawn

330            The pure rites of the vine’s inventor.

It was midnight. What does vicious lust not attempt?

Faunus reached the dewy cave through darkness.

When he sees attendants collapsed in sleep and wine,

He hopes the same sleep clutches their masters.

335   He enters. The rash adulterer staggers about,

Cautiously trailing his outstretched hands.

He arrived at his goal, the sleeping couches,

And would have been lucky the first time.

When he felt the tawny lion pelt spiked with hairs,

340          He panicked, checked his hand, and recoiled

In a jab of terror, as a traveller often

Flinches startled by the sight of a snake.

Then he fingers the soft clothing on the next couch,

And is deceived by the lying clue.

345   He hoists himself up and lies on the nearer bed;

His swollen groin was harder than horn.

He begins lifting the dress from its hem below;

Coarse legs bristled thickly with stubble.

As Faunus tried the rest, Tiryns’ hero rebuffed

350            Him at once: he tumbled from the great bed.

There’s a racket. The Maeonian calls her attendants,

And demands lights. Torches display the act.

After his heavy crash from the big bed he whimpers

And gets up gingerly from the hard ground.

355   Alcides laughs, and all who witnessed him sprawling;

The Lydian girl laughs at her lover.

Since clothes fooled him, the god hates deceptive clothing

And summons people naked to his rites.

Add Latin causes, my Muse, to the foreign ones,

360           And let my horse career in its own dust.

The goat was duly butchered to horn-hoofed Faunus,

A crowd came summoned to the meagre feast.

While the priests skewered the guts with willow spits

And dressed them, and the sun was in mid-course,

365   Romulus and his brother and the shepherd lads

Sported nude bodies on the sunlit plain.

They used poles and javelins and heavy stones

In a trial exhibition of strength.

A hill-top shepherd called: ‘Romulus and Remus!

370            Thieves rustle our cattle in the distant fields.’

No time to arm: they leave in different directions;

Remus found and recovered the plunder.

He returns and unskewers the hissing innards,

Saying, ‘Only the victor shall eat these.’

375   He acts on his words, the Fabii join him. Romulus

Returns foiled, and sees bare tables and bones.

He laughed – and felt pain that the Fabii and Remus

Could triumph, his Quintilii could not.

The manner of the event survives: they run stripped,

380            And that day’s success has enduring fame.

Perhaps you ask why that place is the ‘Lupercal’,

Or what causes the day’s allotted name.

The Vestal Silvia had brought heavenly seeds

To birth, while her uncle possessed the throne.

385   He orders the infants removed and killed in the stream.

What are you doing? One will be Romulus.

Reluctant servants fulfil their tearful orders;

They sob and take the twins to a lone spot.

Albula, named Tiber after Tiberinus drowned

390            In its waters, was then in winter flood.

Here you would see skiffs bobbing where forums are now,

And where your valley dips, Circus Maximus.

After reaching here (for they could not proceed

Any further), one or the other speaks:

395   ‘O, how alike they are! How pretty, both of them!

But he is the livelier of the two.

If features prove lineage and image never lies,

I suspect some god inhabits you both.

Yet if a deity authored your existence,

400          He would assist you in such a crisis.

Your mother would help, if she didn’t herself need help,

Made mother and childless on the same day.

Born together, to die together, go together

Beneath the waves.’ He stopped and put them down.

405   The twins wailed alike (you would think they understood);

The servants return home with sodden cheeks.

The scooped cradle holds the boys on the water’s skin.

Ah, the destiny propped by tiny planks!

The cradle drifts to a dark wood and gradually,

410           As the river languishes, grounds in mud.

There was a tree: traces remain, and what is now called

The Ruminal fig was Romulus fig.

A whelped she-wolf (marvel!) came to the abandoned twins.

Who’d believe the boys weren’t hurt by the beast?

415   Far from hurting, she even helps. A she-wolf suckles

Those whom kindred hands were braced to kill.

She stopped; her tail caresses the delicate babes,

And she shapes the two bodies with her tongue.

You could tell they were sons of Mars. They suck the teats

420            Fearlessly, and feed on milk unmeant for them.

The wolf named the place and the place the Luperci;

The nurse was well rewarded for her milk.

What stops Arcadia’s hill naming the Luperci?

Lycaean Faunus has Arcadian shrines.

425   Bride, what do you wait for? No potent drugs, no prayers,

No magic chant will make you a mother.

Endure the lash of the fertile hand: your father-in-law

Will soon have the grandsire’s name he covets.

For there was a day, when a wife’s oppressive lot

430            Was seldom to redeem her womb’s pledge.

‘What good is it to me,’ cried Romulus, ‘to have raped

Sabine women’ (this was during his reign),

‘If my injustice created war, not manpower.

Better to have had no daughters-in-law.’

435   Beneath the Esquiline hillside there was a grove,

Unaxed for years, named after great Juno.

On arriving here, both brides and husbands alike

Fell on bended knee in supplication,

When suddenly the forest jerked, treetops trembled,

440            And the goddess spoke marvels through her grove:

‘The sacred goat must penetrate Italy’s mothers.’

Her dubious words numb the terrified crowd.

There was an augur (his name vanished in the long years,

A recent exile from Etruscan soil);

445   He sacrifices a goat. The girls offered their backs,

As ordered, to be cut by strips of its hide.

The tenth moon renewed its horns; suddenly the husband

Was a father and the bride a mother.

Thanks to Lucina! You are named from lucus, ‘grove’,

450            Or because you begin life’s lux, its light.

Show mercy, I ask, kind Lucina, to pregnant girls,

And gently extract the womb’s ripe burden.

Let this day have dawned and confide in winds no more;

For this time’s breezes have ravaged all trust.

455   Blasts are inconstant; the wide door of Aeolus’

Dungeon flaps and is unbarred for six days.

Fickle Aquarius has tilted his urn and set;

Now welcome,Piscis, heaven’s horses.

They say that you and your brother (for your stars gleam

460            Together) ferried two gods on your backs.

Once Dione, in flight from terrible Typhon

(When Jupiter armed in heaven’s defence),

Reached the Euphrates with tiny Cupid in tow

And sat by the hem of Palestine’s stream.

465   Poplars and reeds dominated the tops of the banks;

Willows, too, offered hope of concealment.

While she hid, the wood roared with wind. She pales with fear,

And believes a hostile band approaches.

As she clutched son to breast, she cries: ‘To the rescue,

470          Nymphs, and bring help to two divinities.’

No delay; she leapt. Twin fish went underneath them;

For which, you see, the present stars are named.

Hence timid Syrians think it wrong to serve up

This species; they defile no mouths with fish.

FEBRUARY 17 Quirinalia Nefastus Publicus

475   The next dawn is empty. Quirinus names the third.

He has this name (it was Romulus before)

Either because ancient Sabines called a spear curis

(This war-hungry god speared himself starward),

Or the Quirites assigned the king their name,

480           Or because he had joined Cures to Rome.

For his father, the Lord of Arms, when he saw new walls

And the many wars fought by Romulus,

Said: ‘Jupiter, Roman power possesses strength;

It does not need the service of my kin.

485   Return son to father. Although one has perished,

The one left will stand for himself and Remus.

“There shall be one whom you lift to heaven’s blue,”

You told me: let Jupiter’s words prove right.’

Jupiter nodded assent. Both poles shivered

490            At his nod and Atlas felt heaven’s weight.

There is a place, the ancients called it the Goat’s Pit;

There, Romulus, you were giving folk justice.

The sun flees and looming stormclouds steal the sky;

Heavy rain tumbles in a downpour.

495   Thunder roars and the fire-bolts split the air. Men flee;

The king soared starward on his father’s steeds.

Grief followed; the Fathers were falsely charged with murder,

And that belief might have stuck in men’s minds.

But Proculus Julius was coming from Alba

500            Longa, the moon shone, no torch was needed,

When sudden movement on the left shook the hedgerows.

He jolted backward and his hair bristled.

Handsome, larger than life, resplendent in purple robe,

Appeared to be Romulus in mid-street,

505   And he said: ‘Forbid the Quirites to weep.

Their tears should not stain my divinity.

The pious should mob and placate new Quirinus

With incense, and till father’s arts of war.’

He ordered this and vanished in the vaporous breeze.

510            The people are summoned, the orders told.

Shrines are built to the god; a hill is named after him.

Fixed days repeat our fathers’ sacred rites.

Hear why this day is also called the Feast of Fools;

It is a trivial cause but fitting.

515     The ancient land possessed no expert farmers;

Pitiless wars were wasting active men.

There was more glory in the sword than the curved plough;

Neglected fields gave their owners little.

The men of old, however, sowed spelt, reaped spelt,

520            And gave cut spelt as Ceres’ first fruits.

Experience taught them to toast it in flames,

And great losses occurred through their mistakes.

For at times they swept black cinders instead of spelt,

Or their hovels were ravaged by fire.

525   Fornax, ‘Oven’, became a goddess. The jubilant

Farmers prayed to Oven to cure their grain.

Today the chief warden officially proclaims

Fornacalia to hold the unfixed rites.

The Forum is ringed by many hanging placards,

530            Where each ward is marked by a certain sign.

The fools of the people do not know their ward

And postpone sacrifice to the last day.

FEBRUARY 21 Feralia Fastus

Tombs, also, are honoured. Placate your fathers’ souls,

Bring tiny tributes to the erected pyres.

535   The dead desire little. They want piety,

Not rich gifts; deep Styx has no greedy gods.

A tile covered and arranged with wreaths is enough,

Sprinkled corn and a thrifty grain of salt,

And Ceres softened in wine and loose violets.

540            Leave them lying on a shard in mid-street.

I do not forbid larger gifts, but these appease wraiths.

Build hearths and add prayers and ritual words.

Aeneas, that fitting patron of piety, brought

This practice, just Latinus, to your land.

545   He offered regular gifts to his father’s Genius;

The people learnt their pious rites from this.

But once, while armed for battle and waging long wars,

They abandoned the Parentalia.

But not with impunity. That ill-omened act,

550           They report, charred Rome with suburban pyres.

I hardly believe it. Our ancestors, it is said,

Left their tombs in night’s silent hour and wailed.

The city streets and the broad grassland howled, they say,

With a hollow throng of shapeless souls.

555   After this, tombs regain their forgotten rites

And funeral monstrosities finish.

While all this happens, be patient, unmarried girls,

And let the pine torch await the pure days.

And, although your covetous mother finds you ripe,

560            Don’t comb your virgin hair with the bent spear.

Hide your torches, Hymenaeus, and shun black flames;

Other torches belong to dismal tombs.

Screen the gods, too, by shutting their temple doors;

No incense for altars, no fire for hearths.

565   Now the vaporous souls and entombed corpses

Wander, now spectres consume the food-gifts.

This only lasts until the Lucifers still left

In the month match the feet in my verses.

The day is called Feralia from ferunt, ‘bearing’

570            Death’s dues: it ends the placation of the dead.

Look how the old hag, sat among the girls, performs

Tacita’s rites (hardly taciturn herself):

Three fingers tuck three incense lumps under a door,

Where a tiny mouse built a hidden path.

575   The hag then fastens enchanted cords with dark lead,

And rolls seven black beans inside her mouth;

And she roasts on the fire the sewn head of a sprat

Smeared with pitch and spitted with a bronze rod.

She also drops in wine. What remains of the wine

580            She or her friends drink (although she drinks more).

‘We have tied hostile tongues and our enemies’ mouths,’

The hag shouts, departing, and exits drunk.

You will ask at once who the goddess Muta is.

Know what I learned from elders of yesterday.

585   Jove, besotted with limitless love for Juturna,

Suffered much that a great god should not bear.

She lurked among hazel thickets in the woodland,

Or sometimes leapt into her kindred waters.

He summons all the nymphs who dwelt in Latium

590            And hurls these words in the midst of their band:

‘Your sister spites herself and shuns the advantage

Of joining bodies with the highest god.

Think of us both: for what brings me immense pleasure

Will bring your sister immense profit.

595   When she bolts, restrain her at the edge of the bank

From plunging into the river’s waters.’

He spoke; all Tiberinid nymphs nodded and those

Tending your bedchamber, divine Ilia.

There was a Naiad, named Lara, but her old name

600          Was the first syllable delivered twice,

Given to match her fault. Though Almo often said,

‘Daughter, hold your tongue,’ she does not hold it.

On reaching her sister Juturna’s pool, she says,

‘Flee the banks,’ and reports Jupiter’s words.

605   She approached Juno, too, and declares, in pity

For wives: ‘Your man loves Naiad Juturna.’

Jupiter exploded, rips out the tongue she used

Indiscreetly, and summons Mercury:

‘Conduct her to the dead; that place suits the silent.

610           She shall be a nymph, nymph of the hell-pit.’

Jove’s orders are fulfilled. They passed into a grove.

They say she aroused her leader, the god.

He prepares to rape her. She pleads with looks, not words,

Her mute lips struggle vainly to speak.

615   She bulges, and bears the twins who guard the crossroads

And watch our city always: the Lares.

FEBRUARY 22 Caristia Comitialis

Dear relatives, cari, named the next day Caristia:

A crowd of kin visit their family gods.

It is sweet of course to turn from dead kin and tombs,

620          And direct one’s gaze toward the living,

And view what line remains after so many lost,

And enumerate the generations.

Only the innocent should come. Stay away, away,

Impious brother and cruel mother,

625   And ageing father’s son who counts his mother’s years,

And jealous in-law who spites her son’s bride.

No Tantalid brothers here or wife of Jason,

Or woman who gave the farmers burnt seeds,

Or Procne and her sister, or Tereus their joint foe,

630            Or all who augment their riches through sin.

Give family gods incense, good men (gentle Concordia,

They say, is specially present today),

And offer food-plates to nourish the cinctured

Lares as a token of sweet respect.

635   And now, when dampened night induces peaceful sleep,

Lift a large wine-cup in prayer and say:

‘Your health, and yours, too, Father of the Fatherland,

Caesar Most Good.’ Pour wine with the fine words.

FEBRUARY 23 Terminalia Nefastus Publicus

When night has passed, honour with traditional rites

640            The god whose mark partitions the fields.

Terminus, whether you are a stone or stump buried

In earth, your worship, too, is ancient.

Two landowners from opposite sides crown you,

And offer you two garlands and two cakes.

645   An altar is built. The rustic farm-wife lugs there

A cracked pot blazing with her warm hearth-fire.

The old man chops wood, assembles the pieces with skill,

And battles to stick branches in the stiff ground.

Then he arouses the first flames with dry bark.

650            A boy stands by, clutching wide baskets.

When the corn has been hurled three times into the fire,

A small daughter presents cut honeycombs.

Others clasp wine for separate libations to the flames;

A crowd in white watches with silent tongues.

655   Communal Terminus is doused with a slain lamb,

And does not whine when offered suckling pig.

The simple neighbourhood meets and celebrates the feast,

And chants your praises, holy Terminus:

‘You confine peoples and cities and great kingdoms;

660           All land would be disputed without you.

You seek no one’s favour, you are bribed by no gold,

You guard entrusted lands with pledge of law.

If in the past you had marked the Thyrean land,

Three hundred souls would not have dived to death

665   And “Othryades” be read on the mound of arms.

How much blood he bestowed on his country!

What happened with the new Capitol? The whole crowd

Of gods left and yielded their place to Jove.

Terminus, the ancients tell, was found in the shrine

670           And stayed, and shares great Jupiter’s temple.

Even now, so he sees nothing but stars above,

The temple roof contains a tiny hole.

Terminus, after this you lost the freedom to move.

Remain on guard where you have been posted,

675   And surrender nothing to a neighbour’s demands

Lest you seem to prefer mankind to Jove.

And whether you are hit with a plough or a rake,

Proclaim: “This land is yours, that is his.”’

There is a road which leads folk to Laurentine fields,

680          The realms once sought by the Dardan leader;

Its sixth stone from the city sees a woolly sheep’s guts

Being sacrificed, Terminus, to you.

For other nations the earth has fixed boundaries;

Rome’s city and the world are the same space.

FEBRUARY 24 Regifugium Nefastus

685   Now I must relate the flight of the king. The sixth day

Before the month’s end drew its name from this.

Tarquinius was last to rule the Roman race,

A man unjust but mighty in warfare.

He had captured some cities, demolished others,

690            And made Gabii his by foul tactics.

For the youngest of the three, Superbus’ true son,

Pierced the enemy lines in night’s silence.

They had bared their swords: ‘Kill,’ he says, ‘this unarmed man;

My brothers and my father Tarquinius

695   Would want it, who ripped my back with his cruel lash’

(So that he could say this, he had been flogged).

The moon was up: they eye the youth and sheathe their swords,

And examine his gouged back when he stripped.

They weep, too, and offer him joint command of the war;

700          Their ignorance draws his cunning assent.

Now in power, he sends a friend to ask his father

To show the way to destroy Gabii.

There was a tended garden of aromatic plants;

A stream of babbling water cut through it.

705   Here Tarquinius receives his son’s secret message,

And crops the tallest lilies with his staff.

When the agent returned and described the hacked lilies,

‘I recognize,’ the son says, ‘my sire’s orders.’

No delay; the Gabine principes are butchered;

710            Walls surrendered, naked of their leaders.

Look (unspeakable) a snake slithers from an altar

And rips the entrails from the dead flames.

Phoebus is consulted, this oracle pronounced:

‘The princeps kissing his mother will triumph.’

715   Everyone rushed to plant kisses on their mothers;

The ingenuous crowd misconstrued the god.

The wise Brutus was a dissembler of folly

To escape your traps, fearful Superbus.

Sprawled on his belly, he gave a kiss to Mother Earth;

720          He was thought to have stumbled and fallen.

Meanwhile Ardea is ringed by Roman standards,

And is suffering a long-drawn-out siege.

While there is time and the foe fears to engage,

The camp holidays, soldiers relax.

725   Young Tarquinius entertains his friends with food

And wine. He speaks among them, the king’s son:

‘While Ardea’s tedious war detains us, and stops us

Returning to our fathers’ gods in triumph,

Are the duties of the marriage bed being observed?

730            Are our wives as solicitous for us?’

Each praises his wife; passions augment the contest,

And tongue and heart flame with copious wine.

Collatia’s famous namesake rises and declares:

‘There is no need for words, believe the facts.

735   The night is still here. Let us mount and head for town.’

His words find favour, horses are bridled,

They carried their masters through. The men at once seek

The king’s palace; no one guarded the door.

Look, they discover the royal wives up late, necks draped

740          With garlands, and wine set up for drinking.

After this they quickly head for Lucretia,

At whose bedside were baskets and soft wool.

By a little light servants spun the allotted yarn;

She is speaking among them thinly voiced:

745   ‘You must send your master instantly (hurry now,

Hurry, girls) the cloak our hands created.

But what are you hearing (for you have more sources)?

How long do they report the war will last?

You will tumble in defeat; you resist your betters,

750            Wicked Ardea, who force our men away.

If only they would return! My man is reckless,

And rushes anywhere with his sword drawn.

My mind dissolves and I die, when I picture him

In battle: icy cold cases my heart.’

755   She finished in tears, and dropped the threads in her hand,

And she lowered her face to her lap.

The gestures suited: the tears graced her modesty,

Her face and mind were worthily matched.

‘Lose your fear, I’ve come,’ says her husband. She revived

760            And dangled from his neck, a sweet burden.

Meanwhile the young prince is ignited by the fires

Of passion, and rages in blind love’s grip.

He admires her beauty, her snowy complexion,

Her golden hair and her artless graces.

765   He admires her words, voice, incorruptible virtue:

Diminished hope increases his desire.

The bird who heralds daylight had already crowed

When the young men make their return to camp.

His dazed senses are consumed by her absent image;

770            Recollection makes her more attractive.

She sat, like this; she dressed, like this; she spun, like this;

Her hair lay, like this, tumbling on her neck.

This was her look, these her words, this her complexion,

This was her face, and this her graceful mouth.

775   As the ocean subsides after a mighty blast

But the wave from the dead wind keeps swelling,

Though the desired beauty’s presence was absent,

Love caused by that beauty’s presence remained.

He is blazing, and, goaded by immoral love,

780            Plots rape and fear on an innocent bed.

‘The outcome is unclear: we’ll dare the worst,’ he said;

‘She shall see. Fortune and god help the bold.

Our boldness took Gabii too.’ He spoke these words,

Buckled on his sword and mounted his horse.

785   The bronze door of Collatia welcomes the young man,

As the sun prepares to bury its face.

The enemy-guest penetrates Collatinus’ house;

He is welcomed kindly, bound by blood.

How the mind errs! The misfortunate prepares

790         Unknowingly a banquet for her foe.

He finished the meal: the time demands its sleep.

It was night; no light shone in all the house.

He rises and frees his sword from its golden sheath,

And enters your bedchamber, modest bride.

795   Mounting the bed, the king’s son declares, ‘I’ve my sword,

Lucretia; it’s Tarquinius speaking.’

From her nothing: she has neither voice nor power

Of speech, nor any thought in all her heart.

She quivers, like a tiny lamb caught far from the pens

800         When it lies under a vicious wolf.

What should she do? Fight? A woman will lose a fight.

Scream? In his hand was a sword to stop that.

Escape? His palms press urgently upon her breasts,

Breasts touched for the first time by foreign hands.

805   The enemy-lover applies prayers, bribes and threats:

His prayers, bribes and threats achieve nothing.

‘No use,’ he said; ‘I’ll kill and defame you, I’ll bear

Adulterous false witness to adultery.

I’ll murder a slave, with whom I’ll say you were caught.’

810            Fear conquered: the girl surrendered to fame.

Why gloat, victor? This victory will destroy you.

How much a single night cost your kingdom!

Now day had dawned. She sits with her hair dishevelled,

Like a mother due to visit her son’s pyre.

815   She summons her ageing father and faithful spouse

From the camp. Both arrived without delay.

They observe her state and ask the cause of her grief,

Whose funeral she prepares, what disaster struck.

She is silent a long time, and veils her face, in shame;

820            Her tears flow in a perennial stream.

Both father and husband console her tears; they beg

For a sign, and weep and quake with blind fear.

Three times she tried to speak, three times she stopped; she dared

A fourth time but did not lift her eyes.

825   ‘Shall we owe Tarquinius this too? Am I to speak,’

She asks, ‘To speak my wretched dishonour?’

She narrates what she can. The final part was left.

She sobbed, and her matronly cheeks flushed.

Father and husband pardon what she was forced to do.

830            ‘The pardon you give,’ she said, ‘I reject.’

No delay: she pierced her breast with hidden steel

And drops, gushing blood, at her father’s feet.

Even then, dying, she ensures her fall is seemly:

That was her anxiety as she dropped.

835   Look, there on her body, mourning their common loss,

Unashamed, lie her husband and father.

Brutus is present (courage at last belies his name),

Rips the knife stuck in her half-dead body,

And, lifting it high as it dripped her noble blood,

840            Delivered fearless words as his mouth snarled:

‘By this courageous and chaste blood I swear to you,

And by your spirit, which shall be my god,

Tarquinius and his exiled line shall pay for this.

I have cloaked my manhood long enough.’

845   She lay there and moved her lightless eyes at the words,

And seemed to stir her hair in approval.

The matron of male courage is borne to her last rites

And hauls tears and resentment with her.

The wound gapes empty. Brutus shouts for the Quirites

850            And retells the king’s untellable crimes.

Tarquinius and his line flee, a consul takes charge

For a year. This was monarchy’s last day.

Are we deceived – or has spring’s herald, the swallow,

Come, unafraid of returning winter?

855   Yet you’ll complain often, Procne, of too much haste;

Your coldness will delight husband Tereus.

FEBRUARY 27 Equirria Nefastus Publicus

There are two nights now remaining from the second month,

And Mars lashes his chariot’s swift team.

The day keeps its proper name, Equirria; the god

860           Himself views the races in his Campus.

You come by right, Gradivus: your time demands a place,

The month signalled by your name is present.

We have reached port, the book has ended with the month;

From here my bark will sail other waters.

Fasti 3

WAR-HUNGRY Mars, drop your shield and spear awhile.

Be present; loose lustrous hair from that helmet.

Perhaps even you ask what a poet’s doing with Mars.

I am singing the month named after you.

5        You see yourself Minerva’s hands waging feral war.

Is she any less free for liberal arts?

Follow Pallas’ model: discard your lance and relax;

You, too, will find something to do unarmed.

You were unarmed when Rome’s priestess captured you,

10              So you could give this city mighty seed.

Vestal Silvia one morning (what forbids my starting here?)

Was fetching water to wash the holy things.

She came to where the bank sloped softly with its path,

And removed the earthen jar from her head.

15        She sat listless on the ground, and welcomed breezes

With open breast and fixed her ruffled hair.

As she sat, shady willows and melodious birds

Bred sleep, and the water’s gentle murmur.

Seductive peace stole over her languid eyes;

20            Her hand becomes limp and slips from her chin.

Mars sees her, desires what he sees, takes what he desires;

Divine power made his rape unfelt.

Sleep departs, she lies freighted; there was now, of course,

In her guts the Roman city’s founder.

25       She rises limp, unaware why she rises limp.

She leans on a tree and performs these lines:

‘Please let what I saw in my dreams bring me profit

And luck. Or was it too vivid for a dream?

Troy’s fire blazed before me; the woollen band slid

30            From my hair and fell at the sacred hearth.

Two palm trees (a miraculous sight) sprang from there

Together. One of them was the taller,

And had roofed the entire globe with heavy branches,

Brushing the high stars with its head of leaves.

35       Look, my uncle wields an axe against them. I wince

At the warning and terror jerks my heart.

That bird of Mars, the woodpecker, and a she-wolf

Fight for the twin trunks; they save both palm trees.’

She spoke and lifted the full jar with feeble strength.

40            She had filled it while telling her vision.

Meanwhile Remus was growing, Quirinus was growing,

Her belly plumped with celestial weight.

Before the year could leave its completed course

Two star-signs remained for the shining god:

45     Silvia becomes a mother. Vesta’s image is said

To have shielded its eyes with virgin hands.

The goddess’ altar surely trembled as her servant

Gave birth; frightened flames sank beneath their ash.

When the mocker of justice, Amulius, learned this

50               (He’d grabbed his defeated brother’s power),

He ordered the twins drowned in the stream. The water

Shuns the crime; the boys are left on dry ground.

Who does not know that the infants grew on wild beast’s milk

And a woodpecker brought food for the foundlings?

55     I must not ignore you, Larentia, great nation’s nurse,

Nor your help, impoverished Faustulus.

Your glory will come when I tell the Larentalia;

Genial December has that festival.

Mars’ offspring had reached manhood in eighteen years;

60             Fresh beards now sprouted beneath golden hair.

All farmers and masters of herds sought and received

Their justice from the Ilian brothers,

Who often come home revelling in bandit blood

And return rustled cows to their fields.

65     When they heard their lineage, their father’s name fans

Desire: the fame of a few huts shames them.

Amulius falls skewered by Romulus’ sword;

The throne is restored to their old grandsire.

Walls are then founded; they were little indeed,

70            But Remus gained nothing from leaping them.

Now there was a city, where woods and pastures had been,

When the eternal city’s father said:

‘Arbiter of arms, from whose blood I am believed

To be born (for which I’ll give many proofs),

75     We’ll call the Roman year’s beginning after you.

The first month will stem from my father’s name.’

Word becomes fact. He calls the month by his father’s name.

This piety was said to delight the god.

And yet our ancestors worshipped Mars above all;

80            A war-hungry mob followed its feelings.

Sons of Cecrops worship Pallas, Minoan Crete

Diana, Hypsipyle’s land Volcanus;

Sparta and Pelopid Mycenae worship Juno,

And Maenalian fields pine-crowned Faunus.

85     Latium had to reverence Mars, the lord of arms;

Arms gave a feral race wealth and glory.

If you have leisure, examine non-Roman Fasti.

You will find there, too, a month named for Mars.

It was the third month for Albans, for Faliscans the fifth,

90            Sixth with your folk, land of Hernicia.

Aricians and Albans agree on time; so, too,

The topless walls from Telegonus’ hand.

For Laurentines it is fifth, fierce Aequiculi tenth,

For the crowd from Cures after the third.

95     And you follow your Sabine forebears, Paelignian

Soldier. The god is fourth for both peoples.

To defeat all these in the number game at least,

Romulus gave his blood-source the prime time.

The ancients did not have as many Kalends as now;

100          The year was abbreviated by two months.

Greece had not handed victors its vanquished arts

(It was an eloquent race but not strong).

The Roman art was displayed in expert combat:

Skill in spear-throwing was oratory.

105    Who then had marked the Hyades and Atlantean

Pleiades, or twin poles under the sky,

Or the two Bears, Sidonian-tracked Cynosura

And Helice, noted by Greek shipping?

Or that the brother surveys year long the signs

110          Which his sister’s horses pass in a month?

Stars careered freely and unobserved through the year;

Yet people agreed that gods existed.

They could not grasp the gliding ensigns of heaven,

But it was criminal to lose their own.

115     Their ensigns were hay; but hay had as much respect

As you now see your eagles enjoy.

A long pole carried hanging sheaves or manipli,

From which a ‘maniple’ of troops was named.

Therefore untutored minds still lacking in reason

120          Spent five-year cycles ten months too short.

A year was when the moon’s tenth circle returned.

This number was then held in high honour,

Either from the ten fingers we use for counting

Or the ten months a woman needs for birth,

125    Or because ten is the climax of our numbers,

After which there is a new beginning.

Hence Romulus split the hundred Fathers into rings

Of ten, and instituted ten spear troops,

And as many principes and javelin throwers

130           And horsemen, serving on the legal horse.

He bestowed the same divisions on the Titienses,

The so-called Ramnes, and the Luceres.

So he kept the familiar number for the year:

The time a grieving woman mourns her man.

135    To destroy any doubt that the Kalends of Mars

Once came first, study the following signs.

The Flamens’ laurel is now replaced after standing

All year, and fresh foliage is honoured.

The King-Priest’s door greens with Phoebus’ planted tree;

140            Your door does the same, Ancient Ward.

The Ilian hearth rids itself of faded laurel

So Vesta, too, can glitter with fresh leaves.

Add that a new fire is lit in her secret shrine,

They say, and the rekindled flame quickens.

145    No small proof to me that it was the year’s start

Is this month’s cult of Anna Perenna.

Ancient magistrates also took office today

Until your war, perfidious Carthage.

Finally, Quintilis was the fifth month after this,

150            And subsequent months are named from numbers.

First to feel the missing two months was Pompilius,

Escorted to Rome from his olive fields.

He learnt this from the Samian thinker of rebirth

Or from his own Egeria’s teaching.

155     But the times were still erratic, until Caesar

Included them among his many cares.

That god and author of such mighty progeny

Did not believe them beneath his duties,

And desired prescience of his promised heaven

160          Lest he reach homes unknown as god and stranger.

Tradition holds he set out in exact notation

The sun’s cycle in retracing its signs.

He attached ten times six days to the three hundred

And five, and the fifth part of a full day.

165    This is the year’s limit. A five-year cycle needs

An extra day compounded of the fractions.

MARCH 1 (KALENDS) Matronalia Nefastus Publicus

‘If poets are allowed to hear the gods’ secret advice,

As rumour clearly thinks we are allowed,

Tell me, Gradivus, since your service is men’s work,

170            Why matrons celebrate your festival?’

So I. So Mars addressed me, removing his helmet

(But his right hand still clutched a war-spear):

‘Now for the first time the god of arms is called

To works of peace and enters novel camps.

175     The project is painless. I enjoy loitering here,

To stop Minerva thinking it’s all hers.

Learn, industrious poet of the Latin days,

What you seek, and stamp my words in your mind.

Rome was small, if you’re interested in prime roots,

180           But yet in that smallness was hope – of this.

Walls already stood, cramped for the future citizens,

But believed then too spacious for their crowd.

If you desire to know what my son’s palace was,

Examine the house of reed and straw.

185    He would grasp the gift of peaceful sleep on stubble,

And yet he clambered starward from that bed.

Romans already had a name greater than their site,

But none had a father-in-law or wife.

Their rich neighbours spurned impoverished sons-in-law,

190           And my authorship of the line was questioned.

The life of cattle-sheds and sheep-feeding marred them,

And owning paltry fields of untilled soil.

Every bird and beast copulates with its mate;

A snake has a partner for procreation.

195     The right to wed is bestowed on distant peoples;

But no woman would marry a Roman.

I sulked, and gave you, Romulus, your father’s spirit.

“No more prayers,” I said; “Arms will grant your wish.”

‘Romulus prepares Consus’ feast. Consus will tell you

200           The rest, when he sings his rites on that day.

Rage swelled Cures and others ripped by the same pain;

Then fathers and sons-in-law first made war.

Women recently raped were entitled mothers,

And these family wars were dragging on.

205    The wives gather in Juno’s consecrated shrine;

There my daughter-in-law braced to say this:

“Fellow rape victims (for this is our common bond),

No longer can our pious duty lag.

The battle lines are drawn. Choose which side to ask

210            The gods to help: armed husbands or armed sires.

The choice is whether to be widows or orphans.

My advice will be brave and pious.”

She gave her advice; they obey, loosen their hair

And veil their sad bodies in funeral cloth.

215     Already battle lines were drawn for steel and death,

Trumpets were poised to signal attack,

When raped women step between fathers and husbands,

Clutching their love-sons to their breasts.

When they arrived midfield with hair clawed apart,

220           They dropped to the earth on bended knee.

And sweetly babbling grandsons, as if they knew,

Stretched tiny arms toward their grandsires.

Those who could shouted “grandfather”, sighted at last;

Those who barely could were forced to do so.

225     Weapons and wrath fall from men. Swords are discarded,

And fathers clasp the hands of sons-in-law

And embrace their lauded daughters. Grandfather hoists

Grandson on his shield: a shield’s sweeter use.

‘Hence the first day, my Kalends, is celebrated

230           By Oebalian mothers (it’s no light task),

Because, by boldly confronting the unsheathed blades,

They closed these wars of Mars with their tears.

Or since Ilia was happily a mother by me,

Mothers duly observe my day and rites.

235     Also frost-veiled winter now finally vanishes

And snows dissolve beneath the warming sun.

Leaves stripped by the cold now return to the trees,

The moistened bud plumps on the tender shoot,

And fertile grasses now find their secret paths

240           And soar from long entombment to the breeze.

Now fields are fertile, now is the hour herds breed,

Now birds prepare their nest-home on the bough.

Latin mothers rightly observe the fertile times;

Childbirth embraces soldiery and prayer.

245    Add the fact that, where the Roman king kept watch,

On the hill now named the Esquiline,

The Latin women, if I remember, founded

A public temple on this day to Juno.

Why waste time loading your mind with different causes?

250           Look, what you seek stands before your eyes.

My mother loves brides: my mother’s crowd packs my shrine.

This pious cause principally suits us.’

Bring flowers for the goddess: this goddess loves plants

In bloom. Ring heads with delicate flowers.

255    Shout: ‘You have given us the light, Lucina;’

Shout: ‘Be present for the prayers of birth.’

Pregnant women, untie your hair and pray to her

For gentle, unfettered delivery.

Who will tell me why the Salii carry Mars’

260            Heavenly arms and chant ‘Mamurius’?

Teach me, nymph, servant of Diana’s grove and pool;

Come, nymph, Numa’s wife, witness your deeds.

In Aricia’s valley, circled by a shady wood,

Is a lake, hallowed by an ancient cult.

265     Here Hippolytus hides, unfleshed by horses’ reins;

Hence no horses may enter the grove.

The long hedgerows are covered with hanging threads;

Many placards give thanks to the goddess.

Often a woman is granted her prayer, wreathes her brow

270           And bears shimmering torches from the city.

The grove is ruled by runaways with strong hands and feet,

Who later perish by their own example.

A pebbly rivulet spills down with shifting sounds:

I have often drunk from there in small sips.

275     Egeria supplies the water, the Camenae’s

Darling goddess, Numa’s wife and counsel.

At first the Quirites were too eager for war;

Numa tamed them with law and fear of gods.

Laws were made to cabin the power of the strong,

280           And ancient rites were observed exactly.

Barbarism is peeled off, justice surpasses arms,

And civil violence becomes shameful.

An altar’s sight induces recent brutes to offer

Wine and salted spelt on glowing hearths.

285     Look, the father of gods spurts red flames through the clouds,

And drains the heavens of torrential rain.

Never before had the fires hurtled so thickly.

The king quakes, and terror clutches the mob.

‘Do not panic,’ the goddess says. ‘You can appease

290           The thunderbolt and deflect fierce Jove’s wrath.

Picus and Faunus can tell you the rite of appeasement,

Each is a deity of Roman soil.

They won’t tell it without force: capture and bind them.’

And she revealed the trick of their capture.

295    A grove lay beneath the Aventine, black with shady oak:

An observer would proclaim it divine.

Its centre was grass, and a rill of perennial water

Flowed over a rock encased in green moss.

Faunus and Picus drank from it, all but alone.

300           King Numa comes here and kills a sheep

For the spring, sets out cupfuls of fragrant Bacchus,

And hides with his men deep in a cave.

The woodland spirits come as usual to the spring,

And slake their dry throats with copious wine.

305    Rest follows wine. Numa irrupts from the cold cave

And ties the sleepers’ hands tight with thongs.

When sleep departs, they fight hard to burst the thongs,

Which increase their grip as they struggle.

Then Numa: ‘Gods of groves, pardon what I have done,

310            If you know my mind is free of evil,

And reveal how the thunderbolt can be appeased.’

So Numa. So Faunus shaking his horns:

‘You ask great things – but things not lawful for you to learn

By our telling. Our godhead has its limits.

315    We are rustic gods and masters of high mountains;

The control of his house belongs to Jove.

You could never by yourself draw him from the sky;

But perhaps you might with our assistance.’

Faunus said this; Picus had the same opinion.

320           But remove the thongs from us,’ Picus says.

‘Jupiter will come, seduced by a powerful trick;

The foggy Styx will witness my promise.’

What they do when released from the trap, what spells they chant,

The trick which hauls Jupiter from on high,

325    Is unlawful for man to know. We’ll sing permitted songs

And what a poet’s pious mouth is allowed.

They ‘elicit’ you from heaven, Jove; hence posterity

Worships you now, too, as Elicius.

Men agree the Aventine forest top quivered

330           And the earth sank under Jupiter’s weight.

The king’s heart flutters; his entire body

Drained of blood and his shaggy hair spiked.

His wits returned: ‘King and father of the high gods,

Grant sure appeasement of the thunderbolt,

335    If we have touched your offerings with pure hands

And a pious tongue solicits this.’

The god nodded at his prayer but hid truth in dark

Riddles, and scared him with baffling speech:

‘Cut off a head,’ he said; ‘We shall obey,’ says the king;

340           ‘We’ll cut an onion, dug from my garden.’

Jove added, ‘A man’s;’ the other replied, ‘His hair.’

He demands a life; Numa says, ‘A fish’s.’

Jove laughed and said: ‘Expiate my weapons with these,

Mortal worthy to converse with the gods.

345    When Cynthius lifts his full circle tomorrow,

I shall give you sure tokens of empire.’

He spoke, and climbs the quaking sky with loud thunder

And leaves Numa to his adoration.

Numa returns jubilant and tells the Quirites

350           What happened. Their belief comes slow and hard.

‘I’ll surely be believed,’ he says, ‘if actions follow words.

Listen, all of you here, about tomorrow.

When Cynthius lifts his full circle from the earth,

Jupiter will give sure tokens of empire.’

355     They depart in doubt, the promises seem distant,

And belief depends on the coming day.

The earth was sodden with the dew of morning frost,

The people are present at the king’s door.

He appears and sits among them on a maple throne;

360           Countless men stand round him in silence.

The outer rim of Phoebus had scarcely risen;

Anxious hearts tremble with hope and fear.

He stood up, his head veiled with a snow-white mantle,

And lifted to the gods familiar hands.

365    He declared: ‘The time has come for the promised gift;

Add credence, Jupiter, to your vow.’

Even as he spoke, the sun raised its full circle

And a heavy crash came from heaven’s vault.

The god thundered three times in a cloudless sky and hurled

370           Three bolts (trust me – I speak marvels but facts).

The middle part of the heavens began to gape;

The crowd and its leader lifted their eyes.

Look, a shield is turning gently in the light breeze

And tumbles down. The people’s roar hits the stars.

375    The king picks up the gift after killing a heifer

Whose neck was unmolested by the yoke.

He calls the shield ancile, since all its sides are cut

And no ‘angle’ presents itself to sight.

Then, since he knows empire’s fate depends on this,

380           He hits upon a plan of great cunning.

He orders more shields embossed in the same shape

To baffle the eyes of treacherous thieves.

Mamurius (whether his character eclipsed

His craft is hard to say) finished the work.

385    Generous Numa said: ‘Request payment for your work.

If my word is good, your request won’t fail.’

He had just named the Salii from saltus, ‘dance’,

Giving them the arms with words for a hymn.

So Mamurius replied: ‘Pay me with glory.

390           Have my name resound as the hymn closes.’

Hence the priests pay the promised reward for a work

Of ancient times and shout ‘Mamurius’.

Woman, postpone the marriage you both long for:

A little delay has great advantage.

395    Weapons cause fights, fights do not suit married couples.

The signs improve, when weapons are locked up.

On these days, too, the cinctured wife of the peak-capped

Dialis needs to keep her hair uncombed.

MARCH 3 Comitialis

When the month’s third night has shifted her rising stars,

400           One of the two Pisces will drop from sight.

For there are two: one is neighbour to the South Wind,

One to the North. Each is named from the wind.

MARCH 5 Comitialis

When Tithonus’ wife drops dew from her saffron cheeks

And drives the time of the fifth morning,

405    The sign called Arctophylax or idle Boötes

Will submerge and escape your vision.

But Grape-Gatherer, Vindemitor, will not escape.

Its cause, too, takes a moment to teach.

Beardless Ampelos, they say, a nymph’s and satyr’s son,

410           Was loved by Bacchus on Ismarian hills.

He trusted him with a vine hanging from the leaves

Of an elm; it is now named for the boy.

The reckless youth fell picking gaudy grapes on a branch.

Liber lifted the lost boy to the stars.

MARCH 6 Nefastus Publicus

415    On the sixth day that Phoebus climbs steep Olympus

From Ocean and plucks the sky on winged horses,

All who have come to worship at chaste Vesta’s shrine,

Rejoice and place incense on Ilian hearths.

Caesar’s countless titles, which he preferred to earn,

420           Were increased by pontifical office.

Eternal Caesar’s godhead oversees eternal

Fires: you see empire’s tokens joined.

Gods of old Troy, your bearer’s most deserving prize,

Whose burden saved Aeneas from the foe,

425    A priest sprung from Aeneas handles kindred gods:

Guard, Vesta, the head of your kinsman.

You fires quicken with the care of his hallowed hand:

Live on deathless, I pray, leader and flame.

MARCH 7 (NONES) Fastus

The Nones of March are marked: they think Vedjovis’ shrine

430           By the two groves was dedicated then.

Romulus ringed his grove with massive stone and said:

‘Come here, whoever you are: you’ll be safe.’

O from what a lean beginning the Roman grew!

How unenviable was that ancient mob!

435    But so you are not baffled by the name’s strangeness,

Learn who that god is and why he’s so named.

He is the young Jupiter: examine his young face.

Then examine his hand: it holds no thunder.

Jove grabbed the thunderbolt when the Giants attacked

440           Heaven (initially he was unarmed).

Strange fires charred Ossa and Pelion atop

Ossa and Olympus rooted in earth.

A she-goat stands there, too: the Cretan nymphs, they say,

Fed Jove and the goat gave the infant milk.

445    Now I come to the name. Farmers call poorly grown

Spelt vegrandia, and small things vesca.

If that is the term’s sense, why should I not infer

Vedjovis’ shrine is that of little Jove?

Now when stars spangle the deep blue heavens, look up:

450           You’ll see the neck of the Gorgonian horse.

Men believe it sprang with its blood-spattered mane

From the butchered Medusa’s pregnant neck.

As it glided above the clouds and beneath the stars,

The sky was its earth and wings were its feet.

455    It had only just protested its strange bridling,

When its light hoof dug Aonia’s spring.

Now it enjoys the sky, which its wings sought before,

And gleams resplendent with five stars and ten.

MARCH 8 Fastus

The next night you’ll see Corona appear, the Crown

460           Of Cnossos’ girl: Theseus’ crime deified her.

She gave that ingrate the winding thread and gladly

Swapped her perjured husband for Bacchus.

Pleased with her marital fate, she asked: ‘Why did I sob

Like a country girl? His lies were my gain.’

465    Liber meanwhile conquered the coiffured Indians

And returned rich from the Orient world.

Among the captive girls of surpassing beauty

Was a princess whom Bacchus liked too much.

His loving wife wept and, as she paced the curving beach,

470           Delivered words like these, dishevelled:

Come, waves, listen again to identical sobs.

Come, sand, absorb again my weeping.

I recall my cry, “Perjured, perfidious Theseus!”

He left me. Bacchus incurs the same charge.

475    Now again I cry, “No woman should trust a man!”

My case is the same, the man’s name altered.

I wish my fate had proceeded as it started,

And at the present time I was nothing.

Why did you save me, Liber, as I faced my death

480           On lonely sands? I could have stopped my pain.

Love-light Bacchus and lighter than the leaves hugging

Your brow, Bacchus known only for my tears,

Have you the gall to parade a whore before me

And ruin our harmonious bed?

485    O, where is your vow? Where are your many oaths?

Pity me, how often must I say this?

You used to blame Theseus and would call him false.

That indictment makes your sin fouler.

No one should know this. I will burn with silent pain

490           Lest someone think I earned such deception.

I especially want it kept from Theseus

To prevent his delight in sharing guilt.

I suppose you prefer a fair whore to my darkness.

May my enemies have that complexion.

495    But what’s the point? You like her more for that blemish.

What are you doing? She defiles your embrace.

Bacchus, remain faithful and prefer no woman

To a wife’s love. I love a man forever.

The horns of a handsome bull captured my mother,

500           And your horns me. My love flatters, hers shames.

My loving should not hurt. You were not hurt, Bacchus,

When you admitted your flames for me.

It’s no miracle you burn me. You were born in fire,

It’s said, ripped from flames by your father’s hand.

505    I’m the woman to whom you kept promising heaven.

Ah, what gifts are mine in place of heaven!’

She spoke. Liber had long been listening to her words

Of complaint, as he followed behind her.

He embraces her and mops her tears with kisses,

510           And says: ‘Let us seek heaven’s heights together.

You have shared my bed and you will share my name.

You will be named Libera, when transformed.

I will create a monument of you and your crown,

Which Volcanus gave Venus and she gave you.’

515    He does what he said, and turns its nine gems to fires,

And the golden crown glitters with nine stars.

MARCH 14 Equirria Nefastus Publicus

When six circles have been lifted and as many sunk

By the rosy day’s brisk charioteer,

Watch the Equirria again on the Campus grass,

520            Where Tiber’s water arcs and tugs the bank.

But if the Campus is clasped by the river’s flood,

The dusty Caelian will take the horses.

MARCH 15 (IDES) Nefastus Publicus

On the Ides is the merry feast of Anna Perenna

Not far from your banks, alien Tiber.

525    The plebs arrive and scatter over the green grass

Drinking, and all recline beside their mates.

Some rough it under Jupiter’s sky, a few pitch tents,

Or fashion leafy cabins from branches.

Others erect poles to serve as rigid columns

530           And then stretch their togas over them.

They heat up with sun and wine, and pray for years

To match their cups and count all their drinks.

There you will find a man drinking Nestor’s years,

A woman changed to Sibyl by her cups.

535    There they sing whatever they learnt in the theatres

And wave lithe hands in time to the lyrics.

They drop the wine-bowl and join a primitive jig,

And the chic girl skips and tosses her hair.

They stagger, going home, a vulgar spectacle;

540           The crowd around them calls them ‘lucky’.

The procession met me just now (it seems worth telling):

A drunk old woman lugged a drunk old man.

But since rumour obscures who this goddess is,

My intention is to conceal no tale.

545    Pitiful Dido had burned with fire for Aeneas,

Burned on a pyre built for her death-fate.

Her ash was gathered, the tomb’s marble inscribed

Brief verses left by the dying woman:

Aeneas furnished the cause of death and the sword.

550           Dido fell to death using her own hand.

At once Numidians invade the defenceless realm

And Iarbas the Moor takes the captured palace.

He recalls his rejection and shouts: ‘Look at me,

Whom she often spurned, in Elissa’s bed!’

555    The Tyrians scatter where uncertainty drives them,

Like kingless bees swarming in confusion.

The third crop waited on the threshing floor, unstripped,

A third vintage had reached the hollow vats:

Anna is thrust from home and leaves her sister’s walls

560           With sobs, after the sister’s final rites.

The delicate ashes drink unguents mixed with tears

And accept the offered locks of her hair.

Three times she said, ‘Farewell!’, three times she pressed the ash

To her lips, and her sister seemed still there.

565    She finds a ship and fellow exiles, and sails full speed,

Staring back at the walls, her sister’s sweet work.

Near barren Cosyra is Melite’s lush isle,

Scourged by the waves of Libya’s sea.

She heads here, trusting the king’s old hospitality.

570           Battus was king there, a wealthy host.

After he had learned what happened to both sisters,

He declares: ‘This small bit of land is yours.’

And he would have observed a host’s duties fully,

But he feared Pygmalion’s mighty power.

575    The sun had twice reviewed its signs, the third year came,

And a new land is chosen for exile.

Her brother comes and threatens war. The king hates arms

And says: ‘We cannot fight; flee to safety.’

She flees as ordered, and trusts her ship to wind and waves;

580           Her brother was crueller than any sea.

By the fish-streams of pebbly Crathis is a small

District known locally as Camere.

She set her course here and was no further away

Than the distance reached by nine sling shots,

585    When the sails first slacken, poised on a dubious breeze.

‘Slice the waters with oars,’ the captain said.

While they prepare to furl the canvas with twisted ropes,

A violent south wind swipes the curved stern

And, while the pilot battles vainly, hoists it

590           Into open sea, and land flees from view.

Waves leap up and ocean churns from its deep abyss,

And the hull swallows the briny water.

Wind conquers art. The helmsman loses all control,

And he, too, is praying for salvation.

595    The Phoenician exile is tossed on swelling seas

And screens her streaming eyes with her dress.

Then she first called her sister Dido happy

And any woman whose corpse kissed the earth.

A huge blast hauled the ship to the Laurentine beach,

600            Where it sank engulfed, but all disembarked.

Pious Aeneas was now augmented by Latinus’

Realm and daughter, and had fused two nations.

On his dowry-shore he is with lone Achates,

Walking barefoot along a secret path,

605    When he sees Anna wandering and cannot believe

It’s her: ‘Why would she come to Latium’s fields?’

While Aeneas is rapt, Achates shouts, ‘It’s Anna!’

And she lifted up her face at the name.

Ah, what should she do? Run? Ask earth to swallow her?

610           Her poor sister’s fate dropped before her eyes.

Cytherea’s hero felt her distress and sobbed

These words, rocked by your memory, Elissa:

‘Anna, I swear by this land, which you once heard

Was granted me by a more prosperous fate,

615    And by my comrade-gods, who lately settled here:

They often criticized my delay.

I wasn’t afraid for her death; that fear was absent.

Ah, her bravery was beyond belief.

Do not retell it. I saw her body’s unjust wounds,

620           When I dared to enter Tartarus’ house.

But whether some purpose drove you to our beaches,

Or a god, enjoy my realm’s resources.

We know we owe you much, and Elissa something.

Your name and your sister’s make you welcome.’

625    She believed what he said (no other hope remained),

And told the story of her wanderings.

When she enters his house in Tyrian attire,

Aeneas begins (the crowd is silent):

‘I trust her to you, Lavinia, for piety’s sake,

630           Wife. When shipwrecked, I devoured her wealth.

She’s Tyrian born with a realm on Libya’s shore.

I beg you, love her like a dear sister.’

Lavinia promises all; her silent heart

Cabins an unreal wound and hides her fear.

635    Though she sees many gifts bestowed before her eyes,

She still thinks many are sent in secret.

She is unsure what to do; she rages with hate,

Plans to trap her and yearns to die avenged.

It was night. Dido appeared before her sister’s bed,

640           With her hair matted, and gushing blood.

‘Run!’, she said, ‘Don’t hesitate, run from this dismal house!’

At her words a breeze slammed the whining door.

Anna leaps up and drops quickly to the ground

Through a low window (fear made her fearless).

645    She races in her open robe, gripped by terror,

Like a doe panicked by the sound of wolves.

It’s believed horned Numicius raped her in waters

Of lust and then concealed her in his pool.

Meanwhile the Sidonian is sought amid great shouting

650           Across the fields: footprints and marks are seen.

The river’s bank is reached. On the bank were her tracks;

The guilty river kept its stream silent.

She seemed to speak: ‘I’m calm Numicius’ nymph. In this stream

Perennial I’m called Anna Perenna.’

655    They cheer at once and feast in the fields they scoured,

And copiously toast themselves and the day.

Some think Anna is the Moon with its annual round

Of months, or Themis, or Inachus’ cow.

You’ll find those who claim you are the nymph Azanis,

660           Anna, who gave Jupiter his first food.

This story, too, which I’ll relate, came to my ears,

And it is not too distant from the truth.

The plebeians of old, unprotected by tribunes,

Fled to the top of the Sacred Mountain.

665    Already the provisions they hauled with them

Had gone and Ceres fit for man’s eating.

There was an Anna born in Bovillae near Rome,

A poor old woman but a hard worker.

Her silvery hair was turbaned in a light cap,

670           As her quivering hands made country cakes.

Every morning she shared them among the people

Piping hot; the people loved her largesse.

When domestic peace returned, a statue was raised

To Perenna for aiding Rome’s distress.

675    It remains to say why girls chant obscenities;

For they gather and sing improper verses.

Anna had just been deified. Gradivus came

And drew her aside with the following:

‘Your festival’s in my month, I share my time with you;

680           A great desire of mine needs your help.

I am burning with love for Minerva, warrior

For warrior, and have long fed this wound.

We are gods of similar function; unite us.

This role suits you, gracious old woman.’

685    He spoke. She tricks the god with an empty promise,

And prolongs fool’s hope with dubious delays.

After constant pressure she says: ‘I’ve done your bidding.

She is yours. Your prayers barely prevailed.’

The lover trusts her and prepares the bedroom. Anna

690           Is led there, her face veiled like a new bride’s.

On the verge of a kiss Mars suddenly sees Anna.

First shame and then anger prick the fooled god.

The new goddess laughs at dear Minerva’s lover;

Nothing delighted Venus more than this.

695    And so old jokes and obscene verses are chanted;

They rejoice that Anna tricked the great god.

I was passing by the swords stuck in the princeps,

When Vesta addressed me from her chaste hearth:

‘Don’t hesitate to recall them: he was my priest,

700           Those sacrilegious hands struck at me.

I grabbed the man myself and left a bare likeness.

What fell by the sword was Caesar’s shadow.’

Installed in heaven, he’s seen Jove’s court and has a shrine

Consecrated in the great Forum.

705    But you who dared the unspeakable against the will

Of the gods and defiled his priestly head

Lie in merited death. Be witness, Philippi,

And you whose scattered bones blanch the soil.

Caesar’s task, pious duty, his primary schooling

710            Were to avenge his father with just arms.

MARCH 16 Fastus

When the next dawn refreshes the delicate grass,

The first part of Scorpios can be seen.

MARCH 17 Liberalia Agonalia Nefastus Publicus

The third day after the Ides celebrates Bacchus:

Bacchus, favour this poet singing your feast.

715    I will omit Semele (if Jove had not crammed her

With lightning, you’d have been a puny runt),

And how your father’s body filled the mother’s task

For your birth in due time as a boy.

The Sithonian and Scythian triumphs need an epic,

720           And your tribes’ defeat, spicy India.

A Theban mother’s vile trophy will meet silence

And you, Lycurgus, who stormed at your son.

Look, I would love to tell of sudden fish and Tyrrhene

Monsters, but it is not this section’s theme.

725    This section’s theme is to expound the causes why

The Vine-Planter calls people to his cakes.

Before your birth altars lacked suitable respect,

Liber, and grass could be found on cold hearths.

When Ganges and the whole East were crushed, they record,

730           You reserved the first fruits for great Jove.

You first offered cinnamon and captive incense

And the roasted flesh of triumphal bulls.

The inventor’s name gives ‘libations’ and liba,

The ‘cakes’ partly offered to sacred hearths.

735     The god receives cakes because he loves sweet juices,

And honey was found by Bacchus, they say.

He was leaving sandy Hebrus attended by satyrs

(Our tale is not displeasingly playful),

And had reached Rhodope and blooming Pangaea;

740            The hand-held cymbals of his companions clashed.

Look, the ringing gathers strange aerial things, bees,

Who trail the sounds of the tinkling brass.

Liber collects the swarm, shuts it in a hollow tree

And is rewarded by finding honey.

745   When the satyrs and the bald old man tasted it,

They ransacked every grove for yellow combs.

The old man hears the swarm buzzing in a rotted elm;

He spots the wax and pretends otherwise.

Sitting lazily on his donkey’s sunken back,

750             He guides it to the elm’s hollow bark.

He stood on the donkey, assisted by branches,

And probed hotly for honey stored in the trunk.

Thousands of hornets swarm. They jab his bald head

With stingers and freckle his pug-nosed face.

755    He falls headlong and is kicked by the donkey’s heel.

He shouts to his friends and implores their help.

The satyrs come running and laugh at their father’s

Bloated face; he limps from an injured knee.

The god also laughs and shows him how to smear mud;

760           He obeys and spreads dirt over his face.

Father Liber enjoys honey, and we rightly give

The finder bright honey poured on hot cakes.

Why a woman has charge of this is not obscure:

He incites bands of women with his wand.

765    Why an old woman, you ask? That age is more prone

To wine and it loves the teeming vine’s gift.

Why an ivy wreath? Bacchus loves the ivy most.

Why this, too, is so, takes no time to learn.

They say that, when his stepmother hunted for the boy,

Nymphs from Nysa screened the crib with its leaves.

770    I still have to find why boys receive the toga

Of liberty, bright Bacchus, on your day:

Either because you always look like a boy or youth,

And your age seems to lie between the two.

775   Or, because you are a father, fathers entrust

Their dear sons to your care and divinity.

Or, because you are Liber, the robe of liberty

And life’s liberal journey start with you.

Or because, when earlier men worked fields harder,

780            And a senator tilled his father’s land,

And a consul received his rods at the curved plough,

And it was no crime to have calloused hands,

Country folk visited the city then for the shows

(The gods were honoured, not people’s pastimes:

785   The grape’s inventor conducted on his own day

The shows now held with the torch-goddess).

Was it to surround the newcomer with a crowd

That it seemed the right day to give the toga?

Father, turn here your gentle head with horns appeased,

790           And grant my genius billowing sails.

The Argeï procession (they are identified

Later) is today, I think, or yesterday.

The Kite star Milvus turns down to Lycaonian

Arctos; on this night it comes into view.

795    If you want to know what bestowed heaven on that bird:

Saturnus was thrust from his realm by Jove.

In anger he stirs the mighty Titans to arms

And seeks the assistance owed by the Fates.

There was a shocking monster born of Mother Earth,

800           A bull, whose back half was a serpent.

Roaring Styx imprisoned it, warned by the three Fates,

In a black grove within a triple wall.

Whoever fed the bull’s guts to consuming flames

Was destined to defeat the eternal gods.

805    Briareus slays it with an adamantine axe

And prepares to feed the flames its innards.

Jupiter commands the birds to grab them; the kite

Brought them to him and reached the stars on merit.

MARCH 19 Quinquatrus Nefastus Publicus

One day intervenes and there is Minerva’s feast,

810            Titled from the conjunction of five days.

The first day lacks blood, no sword-fights are lawful.

The cause: Minerva was born on this day.

The next four days are celebrated on raked sand;

The war-hungry goddess loves the drawn sword.

815    Now make your prayers to Pallas, boys and gentle girls:

Skill depends on placating Pallas well.

After placating Pallas let the girls learn

To card wool and unload the full distaffs.

Pallas, too, teaches how to shuttle the standing warp

820           And to pack the straggling work with combs.

Worship her, cleaners of stained and damaged garments,

Worship her, workers of the bronze dye-vats.

No one will make good sandals against Pallas’ wish,

Though he outrank Tychius in skill.

825   Even if a craftsman surpass ancient Epeüs,

The anger of Pallas will maim him.

You, too, who remove sickness with Phoebus’ art,

Reserve the goddess a few of your fees.

And teachers, a class often cheated of your pay,

830          No rebuff (she attracts new pupils),

Nor from you engravers and encaustic painters

And sensualist masters of stone.

Hers are a thousand tasks: she must be goddess of song.

If I’m worthy, may she be my work’s friend.

835   Where the Caelian Hill descends from its summit

To the plain and the street is almost level,

You can see the small shrine of Minerva Capta,

Which the goddess received on her birthday.

The name’s cause is in doubt. We call shrewd genius

840          ‘Capital’, and the goddess has genius.

Or is it because they say she sprang motherless,

Shield and all, from her father’s caput, ‘head’?

Or because she was a ‘captive’ from crushed Falerii?

(An early inscription signifies this.)

845   Or because she has a law prescribing ‘capital’

Punishment for goods stolen from the place?

Whatever the reason for your title, Pallas,

Always guard our leaders with your aegis.

MARCH 23 Tubilustrium Nefastus Publicus

The fifth day requires the cleansing of blaring trumpets

850            And a sacrifice to the potent goddess.

Now you can raise your face to the sun and exclaim:

‘Yesterday he touched the fleece of Phrixus’ sheep.’

The seeds were burnt by the wicked stepmother’s trick

855            And no customary grain had sprouted.

A messenger visits the oracle to fetch

Delphi’s sure help for the barren earth.

Corrupt like the seed, he reports the oracle seeks

The deaths of Helle and young Phrixus.

People, time and Ino compelled a stubborn king

860           To endure the unspeakable orders.

Phrixus and his sister, headbands scarfing their brows,

Stand at the altars and wail their joint fate.

Their mother sees them as she hangs upon the air,

And hammers her naked breasts in shock.

865   She dives into the dragon-born city, enveloped

In clouds, and snatches her children away.

She provides a ram shimmering with gold for their escape:

It carries the two across the wide seas.

They say the girl’s left hand clutched the horn weakly,

870           When she named the water after herself.

Her brother almost died with her, as he tried to stop

Her falling and offered his outstretched hands.

He wept that he lost his partner in twin peril,

Unaware she had joined the blue god.

875    On reaching land, the ram becomes a star, but its wool

Of gold reaches the houses of Colchis.

MARCH 26 Comitialis

The third time Lucifer heralds the rising Dawn,

You will have daytime equal to the night.

MARCH 30 Comitialis

When the shepherd feeds and pens his kids four more times

880           And the grasslands whiten with four fresh dews,

Janus should be worshipped and gentle Concordia,

Salus Romana and the Ara Pacis.

MARCH 31 Comitialis

Luna rules the months. Luna closes this month’s time

With her worship on the Aventine Hill.

Fasti 4

‘GENTLE Mother of Twin Loves, favour me,’ I said;

And she turned her face back to the poet.

‘Why me?’ she says. ‘Surely you were singing greater themes.

Does that soft heart harbour an ancient wound?’

5        ‘Goddess,’ I replied, ‘you know the wound.’ She laughed,

And the sky burst cloudless around her.

‘Wounded or well,’ I asked, ‘have I ever left your standards?

You are my theme, my eternal opus.

We played the right games in my youth without offence;

10               Now our horses trample a greater plain.

Times and their causes, unearthed from ancient annals,

Stars sunk beneath earth and risen, I sing.

We have reached the fourth month, which honours you most;

Poet and month, Venus, you know are yours.’

15      She stirred, and lightly touched my brow and Times with Cytheran

Myrtle, saying, ‘Complete the work begun.’

We felt it; suddenly the days’ causes were clear.

While it’s allowed and winds blow, ship proceed.

If a part of the Fasti should touch you, Caesar,

20               You have in April something to protect.

You inherited this month from your line’s great image,

Adopted nobility makes it yours.

The Ilian father, when he inscribed the long year,

Saw this himself and restored your ancestry.

25     And as he assigned the first place to feral Mars,

Who was his birth’s immediate cause,

When he retrieved Venus’ distant family link,

He wanted her placed in the second month.

Researching his family’s source and the rolling ages

30              Led him eventually to kindred gods.

Could he really not know Dardanus was Atlantid

Electra’s son, that Electra slept with Jove?

His son was Ericthonius, whose offspring Tros sires

Assaracus, and Assaracus Capys.

35     Next was Anchises, with whom Venus was not averse

To holding the joint title of parent.

From them Aeneas was born: he proofed piety in flames,

Shouldering sacred emblems and sacred sire.

We have reached at last the lucky name of Iulus,

40              Where the Julian house meets Trojan forebears.

Hence came Postumus, who was born on sylvan heights

And called Silvius among Latin folk;

He sired you, Latinus. Alba succeeds Latinus;

Next in your title, Alba, is Epytus.

45      He gave to Capys a name derived from Troy,

And became, Calpetus, your grandfather.

And when Tiberinus possessed his father’s throne,

He drowned, it’s said, in a Tuscan whirlpool.

But he lived to see his son Agrippa and grandson

50              Remulus; they say lightning struck Remulus.

Aventinus came next (for whom the district is named

And the hill); then the throne passed to Proca,

Followed by Numitor, hard Amulius’ brother.

Ilia and Lausus were Numitor’s children.

55      Lausus falls to his uncle’s sword; Ilia attracts Mars,

And bears you, Quirinus, with twin Remus.

He always said that Venus and Mars were his parents,

And he deserved to have his word believed.

And, so that future generations would know this,

60              He gave his family gods successive times.

I divine that Venus’ month is named from the Greek.

The goddess was called after the sea’s foam.

Do not be surprised that something has a Greek name;

The Italian land was Greater Greece.

65      Evander came here with a fleet packed with his folk,

Alcides came, both of them Greek by birth.

(That stranger with the club fed his herd on Aventine

Grass, and a great god gulped the Albula.)

The Neritian general came: the Laestrygonians

70              Are proof, and the shore with Circe’s name.

Telegonus’ walls and those of watery Tibur

Already stood, built by Argolic hands.

Atrides’ fate drove Halaesus here, by whom

The Faliscan land thinks it was named.

75      Add Troy’s pacifist, Antenor, and Oenides,

Your son-in-law, Apulian Daunus.

Late from Ilium’s fires and after Antenor

Aeneas brought gods into our area.

He had a comrade Solimus from Phrygian Ida,

80              From whom the walls of Sulmo draw their name –

Cool Sulmo, my own fatherland, Germanicus.

Pity me, it is far from Scythic soil!

Therefore I, so far away – stop whining, Muse:

Sing no sacred rites with a grieving lyre.

85      Where does bile not enter? Some would begrudge you

This month’s honour and steal it, Venus.

For because spring opens all things now, cold’s binding

Sharpness goes, and the teeming earth unlocks,

They say the time of aperture gives us April,

90              Which gentle Venus seizes and claims.

She truly deserves to regulate the universe;

She has an empire matching any god’s.

She gives laws to heaven, earth and her native sea;

Her coming frames every species.

95      She created all gods (too numerous to count),

She bestowed the causes of trees and crops.

She united the crude hearts of humankind,

And instructed all to pair with a mate.

What creates every caste of bird but pleasure’s prod?

100            Cattle would not mate but for fickle love.

The ferocious ram locks horns with fellow rams,

But spares the brow of his cherished ewe.

The bull, who flurries every glade and grove,

Sheds his savagery to chase the heifer.

105    The same power preserves the wide ocean’s creatures

And crams the waters with countless fish.

It first stripped from man his savage habits, and bred

Elegance and personal hygiene.

A lover was the first, they say, to spurn the night

110            And sing a vigil-song before barred doors.

Rhetoric lay in persuading a stubborn girl,

Every man was orator for himself.

This goddess caused a thousand arts: sex-appeal,

They say, often unearthed the world’s secrets.

115    Would any dare to strip her of the second month’s

Prestige? Let us be far from such madness.

Though her power is worldwide and hymned in crowded shrines,

The goddess reigns supreme in our city.

Venus bore arms for your Troy, Roman, when she wailed

120            At her dainty hand wounded by a spear.

She defeated two celestials before Troy’s judge

(Ah, I’d prefer they forgot their loss!),

And was called Assaracus’ daughter for, of course,

Great Caesar’s future Julian lineage.

125    No other time accords with Venus more than spring.

In spring earth glistens, in spring fields unfold;

Then grasses shoot their blades through the bursting ground,

Then the vines bud on the plumping bark.

Beautiful Venus merits a beautiful time,

130            And is joined, as usual, with her Mars.

In spring she tells curved ships to cross her native seas

And no longer fear the threats of winter.

APRIL 1 (KALENDS) Veneralia Fastus

Yours are the goddess’ rites, Latin mothers and brides,

You, too, without the headband and long gown.

135    Remove the golden necklace from her marble neck,

Remove the jewels: bathe the goddess whole.

Dry her neck and return the golden necklace to it;

Then dress her with flowers and new roses.

She tells you, too, to bathe beneath the green myrtle,

140            And the cause of this (learn it!) is certain.

She was naked on a beach, drying her dripping hair,

When a randy band of satyrs saw her.

She noticed them and screened her body with myrtle.

This saved her; and she tells you to repeat it.

145    Now learn why you give incense to Fortuna Virilis

In a place sodden with cooling water.

That place welcomes all women stripped of their clothing

And views every flaw of naked bodies.

Fortuna Virilis vows to screen these flaws from men,

150            And answers prayers after a little incense.

Do not flinch at the poppy crushed in snowy milk

And the liquid honey squeezed from the comb.

When Venus was first led to her lusting husband,

She drank this. She was a wife thereafter.

155    Appease her with suppliant words. Her power secures

Beauty and character and noble fame.

Rome fell from chastity in our ancestors’ time.

You ancients consulted Cumae’s crone.

She orders a shrine to Venus. It was duly built,

160            And Venus henceforth named ‘Heart-Changer’.

Fairest, always view the Aeneadae with kindness,

And protect, goddess, your many daughters.

While I’m speaking, Scorpios with that lifted tail’s

Fearful tip plunges into green waters.

APRIL 2 Fastus

165    When the night has passed by and heaven first begins

To blush and birds warble touched by the dew,

And the sleepless traveller rests his half-burnt torch

And the farmer goes to his daily tasks,

The Pleiades will start relieving their sire’s shoulders.

170            Called seven, they are usually six,

Either because six of them entered a god’s embrace

(For they say that Sterope lay with Mars,

Alcyone and you, fair Celaeno, with Neptune,

Maia, Electra, Taygete with Jove –

175    The seventh, Merope, wed you, mortal Sisyphus,

She regrets it, and hides alone in shame),

Or because Electra could not bear the spectacle

Of Troy’s fall and blocked her eyes with her hands.

APRIL 4 Megalensia Ludi Comitialis

Let the heaven’s eternal axis turn three times

180            And Titan thrice hitch, thrice free his horses,

Then the Berecyntian flute’s curved horn will blow

And the Idaean Mother’s feast begin.

The eunuchs will parade and pound the hollow drums,

And their clashing bronze cymbals will ring.

185    She will ride on the soft necks of her acolytes,

Howled along the city’s major streets.

The stage roars, the shows call. Attend them, Quirites,

Let litigious Mars rest in his law-courts.

I have much to ask, but the strident cymbal’s clash

190            And the claw-pipe’s chilling noise scare me.

‘Give me, goddess, someone to interview.’ Cybele saw

Her erudite granddaughters and made them help.

‘Remember your orders, Helicon’s nurselings: disclose

Why the Great Goddess loves incessant din.’

195    So I. So Erato (Cytherea’s month fell

To her, since she is named from tender love):

‘Saturnus received this oracle: “Best of kings,

You shall be knocked from power by a son.”

Jabbed by fear, he devours his offspring as each

200           Was born, and entombs them in his bowels.

Rhea often complained of much pregnancy and no

Motherhood, and mourned her fertility.

Jove was born (trust antiquity’s testimony,

Do not disturb inherited belief);

205   A stone, concealed in cloth, settled in the god’s gullet;

So the father was fated to be tricked.

For a long time steep Ida booms its clanging noise

So the wordless infant may wail safely.

Shields or empty helmets are pounded with sticks,

210            The Curetes’ or Corybantes’ task.

The truth hid. The ancient event’s copied today:

Her acolytes shake brass and rumbling hides.

They hammer cymbals, not helmets, and drums, not shields;

The flute makes Phrygian tunes as before.’

215    She stopped. I started: ‘Why do fierce lions strangely

Submit their manes to her arcing yoke?’

I stopped. She started: ‘It’s thought she tamed their wildness.

Her own chariot testifies to this.’

‘But why is her head burdened with a turreted crown?

220            Or did she turret the primal cities?’

She nodded. ‘What causes the impulse to self-castrate?’

I was silent. The Piërid began:

‘A woodland Phrygian boy, the gorgeous Attis,

Conquered the towered goddess with pure love.

225    She wanted to keep him as her shrine’s guardian,

And said, “Desire to be a boy always.”

He promised what was asked and declared, “If I lie,

Let the Venus I cheat with be my last.”

He cheats, and in the nymph Sagaritis stops being

230            What he was: the goddess’ wrath punished him.

She slashes the tree and cuts the Naiad down.

The Naiad dies: her fate was the tree’s.

He goes mad, and imagines that the bedroom roof

Is falling and bolts to Dindymus’ heights.

235    He cries, “Away torches!”, “Away whips!”, and often

Swears the Palestine goddesses have him.

He even hacked his body with a jagged stone,

And dragged his long hair in squalid dirt,

Shouting, “I deserved it; my blood is the penalty.

240            Ah, death to the parts which have ruined me!”

“Ah, death to them!” he said, and cropped his groin’s weight.

Suddenly no signs of manhood remained.

His madness became a model: soft-skinned acolytes

Toss their hair and cut their worthless organs.’

245    So Aonian Camena eloquently answered

My request for the cause of that madness.

‘Tell me this, too, my work’s guide, where she came from.

Or has she always been in our city?’

‘The Mother always loved Dindymus and Cybele,

250            Ida’s pleasant springs and Ilium’s realm.

When Aeneas ferried Troy to Italy’s fields,

The goddess almost trailed his sacred ship,

But felt that fate did not demand her godhead yet

For Latium, and kept her usual haunts.

255    Later, when mighty Rome had seen five centuries

And reared her head above a mastered world,

A priest inspects the Euboean song’s fateful words.

They say the inspection yielded this:

“Your mother is missing. Find your mother, Roman.

260            Chaste hands must receive her when she comes.”

The dark oracle’s riddles baffle the Fathers:

What mother was missing? What place to search?

Paean is consulted. “Fetch the Mother of Gods,”

He says. “She can be found on Ida’s ridge.”

265    Leaders are sent. Attalus then held Phrygia’s sceptre;

He spurns the request of Ausonian men.

I’ll sing of marvels. The earth shook and rumbled long,

And the goddess uttered this from her shrine:

“I wanted this search. Do not delay; I want to go.

270            Rome is a worthy place for any god.”

Her voice jerked Attalus with fear. “Depart,” he said;

“You will still be ours: Phrygian men formed Rome.”

‘At once countless axes cut down the pine groves

Used for the pious Phrygian’s escape.

275    A thousand hands gather. A hollow ship painted

With burnt colours holds the Mother of Gods.

She is freighted through her son’s waters most safely,

And nears the long strait of Phrixus’ sister.

She passes wide Rhoeteum and Sigeum’s beaches,

280            Tenedos and Eëtion’s old realm.

The Cyclades receive her, with Lesbos left behind,

Then the waves breaking on Carystos’ shoals.

She passed the Icarian sea, where Icarus lost

His fallen wings and named the vast waters.

285    Then she leaves Crete to port, Pelops’ waves to starboard,

And heads for Venus’ sacred Cythera.

Next the Trinacrian sea, where Brontes, Steropes

And Acmonides dip the white iron.

She skirts Africa’s seas and glimpses Sardinia’s

290            Realm to port and reaches Ausonia.

‘She had arrived at the mouth where the Tiber

Splits seaward and swims more unconfined.

All the knights, the grave senate, mingling with the plebs,

Meet her at the mouth of the Tuscan stream.

295    With them parade mothers, daughters and wives, and those

Whose virginity serves the sacred hearth.

The men tire their arms pulling heartily on the rope;

The foreign ship barely breaks the waves.

The earth had long been dry, drought had charred the grass;

300            The loaded ship sat in muddy shoals.

All of those at the scene work more than their share

And encourage the strong rope-men with shouts.

The ship sits like an island fixed in mid-ocean;

Men stand dumbed by the portent, and quake.

305    Claudia Quinta traced her line to lofty Clausus,

And her beauty equalled her noble birth.

She was chaste, but not believed. Malicious gossip

Marred her, indicted on a false charge.

Culture and the display of differing hair-styles

310            Told against her, and retorts to old prigs.

Her clear conscience mocked rumour’s mendacity,

But we are a mob prone to credit sin.

As she advances from the line of chaste mothers

And her hands scoop the pure stream water,

315    She dabs her head thrice, thrice lifts her hands to heaven.

(All those watching consider her witless.)

She kneels, fixes her gaze on the divine image,

Undoes her hair and delivers these words:

“Gentle Mother, womb of the gods, accept the prayers

320            Of your suppliant, on one condition.

I’m called unchaste. If you condemn me, I’ll confess,

And forfeit life on a goddess’ verdict.

But if the charge is wrong, you will warrant my life

By action and follow chaste my chaste hands.”

325    So she spoke and with little effort pulled the rope.

I’ll speak of marvels, but the stage attests them.

The goddess is moved and follows her leader, follows

And lauds her. Sounds of joy rise starward.

‘They reach the bend in the river (the ancients called it

330            Tiber’s Hall), where it veers toward the left.

Night came: they tether the rope to an oak tree’s stump,

Eat, and yield their bodies to weightless sleep.

Light came: they untie the rope from the oak tree’s stump,

But first made a hearth and offered incense,

335    First crowned the ship and sacrificed a flawless

Heifer which knew no labour or sex.

There is a place where gliding Almo meets the Tiber,

Losing its smaller name in the great river.

Here a silver-haired priest, robed in purple, bathed

340            The Mistress and her emblems in Almo’s stream.

Her acolytes howl and the maddening flute blows,

And dainty hands pound the cowhide drums.

Claudia advances in a crowd, beaming joy,

Finally thought chaste on a goddess’ word.

345    The goddess rode enthroned in a cart through the Porta

Capena, her ox-team strewn with fresh flowers.

Nasica received her. Her shrine’s founder is unknown:

Augustus now, before him Metellus.’

Erato stopped. There is a pause for final questions.

350            ‘Tell me,’ I say, ‘Why she requests small change.’

‘People gave coppers, from which Metellus built her shrine.

The custom of giving change continues.’

I ask why men entertain each other more often

At this time and attend special banquets.

355    ‘Since Berecyntia did well in changing homes,

They seek the selfsame luck by changing homes.’

I had begun to ask why the Megalensia

Are our city’s first shows, when the goddess

Sensed it: ‘She bore the gods. They deferred to their parent,

360            And the Mother receives the first tribute.’

‘But why do we call the self-castrated “Galli”,

When the Gallic land is far from Phrygia?’

‘Between,’ she says, ‘green Cybele and high Celaenae

Runs a stream of bad water named Gallus.

365    Its taste causes madness. Keep away, if you want

A healthy mind. Its taste causes madness.’

‘Aren’t they ashamed,’ I said, ‘to place a herb salad

Before the Mistress? Or is there some cause?’

‘The ancients are said to have dieted on pure milk

370            And on herbs produced by the earth itself.

White cheeses,’ she says, ‘are mingled with pounded herbs,

So the primal goddess sees primal food.’

APRIL 5 (NONES) Ludi Nefastus

When Pallantis next gleams in heaven and stars flee

And Luna’s snow-white horses are unhitched,

375    If you say, ‘Today we enshrined on Quirinus’ hill

Fortuna Publica,’ you will be right.

APRIL 6 Ludi Nefastus Publicus

It was the third day of shows (I recall). An old man

Sitting next to me declared, as I watched:

‘This is the day when Caesar crushed on Libyan

380            Shores noble Juba’s perfidious force.

Caesar was my general, with whom I proudly served

As tribune. He bestowed my commission.

I got this seat in service; you got yours in peacetime

By holding office on the Board of Ten.’

385    Before we talked more, a sudden shower split us.

Hanging Libra dumped the heaven’s waters.

APRIL 9 Ludi Nefastus

But before the final day closes the shows,

Orion’s sword will sink in the ocean.

APRIL 10 Ludi in Circo Nefastus

When the next dawn gazes on victorious Rome

390            And the flight of stars gives way to Phoebus,

A crowd will pack the Circus with a parade of gods,

And wind-swift horses will seek the prize palm.

APRIL 12 Cerialia Ludi Nefastus

Next the Ceres Shows. Their cause requires no telling.

The goddess’ gift and service are clear.

395    The bread of primal man consisted of green plants,

Which the earth created unprovoked.

At times he plucked the living grass from the turf

Or feasted on a treetop’s juicy leaves.

Later acorns were found. The acorn made life good;

400            Hardy oak trees held sumptuous wealth.

Ceres was the first to improve man’s nutrition

By replacing acorns with better food.

She forced the bull to offer its neck to the yoke;

Uprooted soil then first glimpsed the sun.

405    Copper was prized, and iron ingots lurked concealed –

Ah! they should have been hidden for ever.

Ceres rejoices in peace; you should beg, farmers,

Perpetual peace and pacific leader.

You may honour the goddess with spelt and dancing salt

410            And grains of incense on ancient hearths.

If incense is missing, light some pitchy torches;

Little things, if pure, please good Ceres.

Remove your knives from the oxen, cassocked priests.

The ox should plough; sacrifice idle sows.

415    The neck suited to the yoke should not be pole-axed;

Let him live and often work the hard ground.

The context demands that I present The Virgin’s Rape.

You will learn some things and recognize more.

Jutting into the vast ocean with its three cliffs

420            Is Trinacris, named after its shape.

It is Ceres’ dear home. Its many cities include

Fertile Henna with its well-ploughed soil.

Cool-fresh Arethusa had called divine matrons

To a sacred feast; the blonde goddess came.

425    Her daughter and usual entourage of girls

Rambled barefoot across their meadows.

There is a place deep in a shady valley drenched

With spray from a tower of falling water.

All the colours owned by nature were in that spot;

430            The pied earth beamed with different flowers.

The daughter spied this and shouted: ‘Over here, friends.

Let us return with lapfuls of flowers.’

The worthless booty entices their girlish minds,

Their absorption makes the labour unfelt.

435    One girl fills baskets woven of pliant wicker,

Another loads her lap or loosened robe.

One picks marigolds, or spots the violet-beds;

Or clips the tops of poppies with her nail.

Some linger with you, hyacinth, and you, amaranth;

440            Some love thyme, corn poppy or clover.

They pile up roses and nameless flowers; their mistress

Gathers fragile saffron and white lilies.

Her passion for plucking gradually leads her away;

No attendant happened to follow her.

445    Her uncle sees her and swiftly abducts what he sees,

And bears her to his realm on black horses.

She screamed, ‘Oh, dearest mother, I’m being taken!’

And had ripped her frock apart at the breasts.

Meanwhile a path gapes open for Dis; his horses

450            Barely endure the foreign daylight.

Her band of servant friends, piled with flowers, call out,

‘Persephone, come and see your presents.’

When the shout meets silence, their howling fills the hills;

They hammer naked breasts with grieving hands.

455    Their lament stunned Ceres (she had just reached Henna).

No delay: ‘Ah! My daughter, where are you?’

She is swept away mindless, like (we are often told)

A Thracian Maenad with streaming hair.

As a cow bellows for the calf ripped from her udder

460            And ransacks every grove for her brood,

So the goddess roars out her pain and rushes

Pell-mell. She begins with your fields, Henna.

There she found the footprints of a girl and observed

The familiar tracks in the soil.

465    That day would have terminated her wandering,

If pigs had not disturbed the marks she found.

She races past Leontini and the river

Amenanus, then your banks, grassy Acis.

She passes Cyane and Anapus’ glassy springs

470            And you, Gela, whose whirlpools none enter.

She left Ortygia, Megara, Pantagias,

And where ocean meets the Symaethus stream,

And the Cyclops’ caverns scorched by fixed forges,

The place named after the curving sickle,

475    Himera, Didyme, Acragas, Tauromenum,

And Mylae’s lush pasture for sacred cows.

Next she reached Camerina, Thapsus, Helorian

Tempe, and where Eryx faces the Zephyr.

Now she scoured Pelorias and Lilybaeum,

480            Now Pachynus, the horn-tips of her land.

She fills everywhere she goes with pitiful

Wailing, like the bird grieving lost Itys.

And she shouts by turns, ‘Persephone!’ and ‘Daughter!’,

She shouts and screams each name in its turn.

485    But Persephone does not hear Ceres, the daughter

Her mother: each name dies in its turn.

And whether she saw shepherd or ploughman, the one

Question was, ‘Did any girl pass this way?’

Already the world has one colour and blackness

490            Roofs all, and watchdogs have grown silent.

Soaring Etna lies over huge Typhoeus’ mouth,

Whose gasping fires ignite the very earth.

She lights two pines there as her lamp; hence today, too,

A torch is offered at the rites of Ceres.

495    There is a cave, rough-formed of corroded pumice,

A place neither man nor beast may enter.

When she comes here, she bridles and hitches serpents

To her chariot, and roams the sea, dry.

She avoids Syrtes and you, Zanclaean Charybdis,

500            And you shipwreck monsters, dogs of Nisus,

And the wide Hadriatic and Corinth of twin seas.

So she reaches your harbour, Attic land.

Here first she sat, clutched by grief, on a shivering rock

Which Cecropids even today call ‘Sad’.

505    She stayed motionless for many days under Jove’s sky,

Enduring both the moonlight and the rain.

Each place has its fate: what is today called Ceres’

Eleusis was old man Celeus’ estate.

He was taking home acorns and berries shaken

510            From brambles, and dry wood to warm the hearth.

His tiny daughter was driving two goats from the hill,

And a baby son lay sick in a cot.

‘Mother!’ says the maid (the name ‘mother’ touched the goddess),

‘Why are you alone in a lonely place?’

515    The old man stopped and, despite his pressing load,

Offered her shelter in his humble cottage.

She declined. She was disguised as an old woman

Wearing a cap. When he pressed her, she said:

‘Go safely – and a father always! My daughter

520            Has vanished. How your lot surpasses mine!’

She spoke and, like a tear (for the gods do not weep),

A crystal drop slid on to her warm breast.

The maid and the old man are soft-hearted and weep

With her. The good old man spoke these words:

525    ‘May you find your vanished daughter safe, as you rise

And respect my little hovel’s shelter.’

The goddess replied, ‘Lead on, you know how to compel,’

And rises from the rock and follows him.

The old man leads on and tells her how his son is sick

530            And cannot sleep and lies awake in pain.

Outside the small house she plucks from the rustic soil

A delicate, soporific poppy.

Plucking it (they say) she tasted it forgetfully,

And, without knowing, dissolved her long fast.

535    And, because she ended her hunger at nightfall,

Initiates eat when the stars appear.

Crossing the threshold, she sees everything steeped

In tears: no hope remained for the boy’s health.

She greeted the mother (her name was Metanira),

540            And saw fit to place her mouth on the boy’s.

Pallor goes, they see sudden strength in the body:

Such vitality came from divine lips.

The entire house rejoiced, that is, mother, father

And daughter: the three were the entire house.

545    They quickly lay out a feast: curds dissolved in milk,

Apples, and golden honey in its combs.

Gentle Ceres abstains and offers you warm milk

To drink, child, with sleep-inducing poppies.

It was midnight and peaceful sleep’s silent hour.

550            She took Triptolemus into her lap,

And stroked him three times with her hand, uttered three spells,

Spells which a mortal voice may not repeat,

And buried the child’s body in the hearth’s living

Embers to purge his human dross with fire.

555    His foolishly loving mother wakes, crazily roars

‘What are you doing?’ and rips him from the fire.

The goddess said: ‘You’re not criminal, your action was.

Your motherly fear has cancelled my gift.

He will stay mortal, but will be the first to plough

560            And sow and reap rewards from the tilled soil.’

She spoke, and left wrapped in a cloud. She finds her serpents,

And flies up high in her winged chariot.

She leaves behind windswept Sunium, the safe harbour

Of Piraeus and the coastline on the right.

565    She enters the Aegean, views all the Cyclades,

Skirts the wild Ionian and Icarian,

Heads through Asia’s cities for the long Hellespont,

And roams along her varied route on high.

She spies Arabs gathering incense and Indians,

570            Libya, Meroë and the parched earth.

She visits the Hesperian Rhine, the Rhone, the Po,

And you, Tiber, great waters’ future sire.

Where am I going? Endless to name the lands roamed:

Ceres omitted no place in the world.

575    She roams the heaven, too, and accosts the stars free

Of limpid ocean near the chilly pole:

‘Parrhasian stars (you can know everything,

Since you never sink beneath ocean’s stream),

Show this wretched parent her daughter, Persephone.’

580            She spoke. Helice replies this to her:

‘Night is guiltless. Consult the Sun on the virgin’s rape.

He gazes far and wide on the day’s deeds.’

The Sun is approached. ‘Don’t waste time,’ he says. ‘You seek

The bride of Jove’s brother, the third realm’s queen.’

585    She moaned long within herself. Then she addressed

The Thunderer (deep sorrow engraved her face):

‘If you remember who fathered Proserpina,

Half this anxiety should be yours.

My scouring of the world simply made the outrage

590            Known: the rapist keeps the rewards of sin.

Persephone did not deserve a bandit husband;

No son-in-law is acquired this way.

If Gyges had won, what worse might I have suffered

As his slave, than now – with you ruling heaven?

595    Let him go unpunished, I’ll endure it unavenged,

If he returns her and repairs the past.’

Jove calms her and uses love to excuse the act,

And says, ‘He’s not a shameful son-in-law.

My rank is no greater. I hold court in the sky;

600            Another rules the sea, and one the void.

But if your heart will not alter and you resolve

To burst the bonds of contracted marriage,

Let us also test whether she maintained her fast.

If not, she is her husband’s wife in hell.’

605    The winged Herald visits Tartarus as ordered,

Returns quicker than hope, tells what he witnessed.

‘The ravished girl,’ he said, ‘broke her fast with three seeds

Buried in a pomegranate’s tough rind’

The grieving mother wept, as if the loss were new.

610            At length she recovered, but not easily.

She said: ‘Heaven is not my home either; order

The Taenarian dell to admit me, too.’

And she would have done this, if Jove had not arranged

That the daughter spend six months in heaven.

615    Then at last Ceres revived her own look and spirit,

And crowned her hair with chaplets of corn.

A bounteous harvest burst upon idle fields;

The barns barely held the heaps of wealth.

White suits Ceres; dress in white at Ceres’ feast.

620            This is not the time for shabby wool.

APRIL 13 (IDES) Ludi Nefastus Publicus

Jove grabs the Ides of April with the title ‘Victor’:

He was given a temple on this day.

On this day, too, unless I am deceived, Liberty

(So right for our people) began her Hall.

APRIL 14 Ludi Nefastus

625    The following day, head for safe harbour, sailor;

Hail will unite with the wind from the west.

Although that is so, Caesar – in this day’s hail –

Smashed the arms of Mutina with his troops.

APRIL 15 Fordicidia Ludi Nefastus Publicus

When the third day dawns after the Ides of Venus,

630            Priests, prepare to sacrifice a brood cow.

A ‘brood’ cow is in calf and is called ‘bounteous’

From ‘bearing’. ‘Birthing’, too, they think is from this.

The herd is now pregnant, seed impregnates the earth;

Teeming Tellus gets a teeming victim.

635    Cows crumple on Jupiter’s height; all thirty wards

Accept a cow, and drip with spattered blood.

When the acolytes have ripped the calves from the wombs

And dropped the sliced guts on the smoking hearths,

The eldest virgin cremates the calves in the fire

640            To cleanse folk with this ash on Pales’ day.

When Numa was king and no harvest answered toil,

The prayers of baffled farmers were futile.

At times winds from the north chilled and parched the year,

At times incessant rain made the land lush.

645    Ceres often tricked the master at the first sprouting,

And light straws spiked the beleaguered soil.

Cattle produced their young unformed before their time,

And the sheep often perished as they lambed.

There stood an ancient wood, long unspoiled by the axe,

650            Left sacred to the Maenalian god,

Who responded to quiet minds on silent nights.

Here King Numa sacrifices twin sheep.

The first falls to Faunus, the second to soothing Sleep;

Both fleeces are spread on the hard ground.

655    Twice Numa sprinkles his unshorn head with spring water,

Twice he garlands his temples with beech leaves.

He abstains from the Venus-act. No flesh may be set

On the table, no ring binds his fingers.

He lies his coarsely dressed body on the new fleeces

660            After the right words of prayer to the god.

Meanwhile Night approaches: a garland of poppies

Binds her peaceful brow, black dreams trail her.

Faunus is present. His hard hooves trample the fleeces,

As he delivers words from the bed’s right:

665    ‘Tellus must be appeased, King, with the death of two cows.

One heifer must sacrifice two lives.’

Terror jolts his sleep. Numa ponders his vision,

And replays the blind and riddling commands.

His wife, the grove’s darling, resolved the puzzle,

670            Saying: ‘You’re asked for a pregnant cow’s guts.’

A pregnant cow’s guts are offered. The year follows

More bounteous, and land and herd bear fruit.

Cytherea once commanded this day to rush,

And quickly sank its galloping horses,

675    So the next day’s triumph might more quickly name

The young Augustus as imperator.

APRIL 17 Ludi Nefastus

Now Lucifer looks back on the Ides for the fourth time.

This night the Hyades embrace Doris.

APRIL 19 Cerialia Ludi in Circo Nefastus Publicus

When the third day dawns after the Hyades’ flight,

680            The Circus partitions horses in stalls.

I must explain the reason why foxes are released

With blazing torches tied to their backs.

Carseoli’s land is cold, unfit for bearing

Olives, but its fields are suited for corn.

685    I headed this way for my Paelignian native fields

(They are small but exposed to constant rain).

I entered as usual an elderly friend’s house;

Phoebus had now unhitched his spent horses.

My friend narrated many stories to inform

690            My present work, including this one, too.

‘In this plain,’ he said, pointing, ‘a thrifty farmer’s wife

Owned a small plot with her hardy husband.

He worked his own ground, whether it called for a plough

Or curved sickle or for a two-pronged hoe.

695    She swept the farmhouse which stood on props, or placed

Eggs under a hen’s feathers for hatching,

Or collected the green mallows and white mushrooms,

Or heated the low hearth with cheerful fire.

Yet she kept her hands busy at the constant loom,

700            And armed her folk against the scowling frost.

Her son was at that early age of naughtiness,

And had added two years to his ten.

He traps a fox in a dell by a willow grove;

It had stolen a lot of farmyard birds.

705    He wrapped his captive in straw and hay, and set it

Alight; it fled from his fiery hands.

Wherever it fled, it torched fields clothed with crops;

A breeze fanned the strength of the fatal flames.

The deed has gone, memorials stay; today a law

710            Of Carseoli forbids naming the fox.

As atonement, the animal burns at Ceres’ feast

And dies in the way it destroyed the crops.’

APRIL 20 Nefastus

When Memnon’s saffron mother next arrives to view

The widening earth on rosy horses,

715    The sun abandons the wool-flock’s prince who traitored

Helle: in his path a greater victim.

Whether it is a cow or bull is not easy

To know: the front appears, the rear is hidden.

But whether this sign is a bull or a woman,

720            Juno objects to the rewards of love.

APRIL 21 Parilia Nefastus Publicus

Night is gone, dawn lifts. The Parilia calls me,

Not vainly – with gentle Pales’ favour.

Gentle Pales, favour my song of pastoral rites,

If I honour your deeds with my service.

725    Truly I have often brought handfuls of calf ash

And bean stalks burned for purification.

Truly I have jumped the triple row of flames

And felt sodden laurel’s dripping water.

The goddess is moved and favours the work. The ship

730            Leaves dock, my sails already have their winds.

Go, folk, seek fumigant from the virginal altar;

Vesta will give it, Vesta’s gift will cleanse.

The fumigant will be horse’s blood and calf ash;

The third thing is a hard bean’s empty stalk.

735    Shepherd, purify the sheep full-fed at early dusk.

First water the ground and sweep it with twigs,

Fix leaves and boughs to the sheep-pens for adornment,

And cover and deck the doors with long wreaths.

Make your pure sulphur emit its sky-blue smoke

740            And smoking sulphur sting the bleating sheep.

Burn rosemary and pine and the Sabine plants,

Let the torched laurel crackle in mid-hearth.

Have a basket of millet follow millet cakes:

The rural goddess enjoys this food best.

745    Bring her special food and milk-pail; cut up the food

And pray to woodland Pales with warm milk.

Say: ‘Take care alike of sheep and masters of sheep.

Let all harm be averted from my stalls.

If I used sacred pasture, sat by a sacred tree,

750            And my ignorant sheep browsed on graves;

If I entered a forbidden wood, and the nymphs

And half-goat god bolted from my sight;

If my knife has robbed a grove of a shady bough

To give ailing sheep a basket of leaves:

755    Forgive my offence. Do not fault me for sheltering

My flock from the hail in a rustic shrine,

Nor harm me for disturbing the pools. Pardon, nymphs,

Trampling hooves for muddying your stream.

Goddess, placate for us the springs and fountain spirits,

760            Placate the gods dispersed through every grove.

Keep from our sight the Dryads and Diana’s bath

And Faunus lying in the fields at noon.

Drive diseases away. Health to men and to herds,

Health to the guard dogs, that vigilant pack!

765    May I never drive home less than the morning’s count,

Or groan at wolf-torn fleeces in my hands.

Banish hateful hunger. May grass and leaves abound,

Water to wash the body and to drink.

May I milk full udders, my cheeses make money,

770            My wicker sieves pass the watery whey.

May the ram be lustful, his pregnant mate return

The seed, and lambs aplenty fill my pens.

May wool be produced, unabrasive to girls,

Soft and fit for the most dainty hands.

775    May my prayers be fulfilled, and let us make each year

Great cakes for Pales, the shepherds’ mistress.’

Placate the goddess with this. Utter this four times

Facing east and wash your hands with fresh dew.

It is then allowed to set a bowl for mixing

780            And drink snow-white milk and the purple must;

And later to hurl mighty limbs and speeding feet

Over fiery heaps of crackling straw.

I have explained the custom but not its origin.

Confusion casts doubt and baulks my efforts.

785    Consuming fire cleanses all and melts flaws in metal.

Is that why it purifies sheep and shepherd?

Or, because the contrary seeds of the universe

Are fire and ocean, two discordant gods,

Did our fathers join these elements and think it fit

790            To touch bodies with flames and splashing water?

Or, since they contain life’s cause, are lost by exiles,

Turn bride to wife, are these two thought important?

I hardly believe that some think Phaëthon’s referred to

And Deucalion’s excessive waters.

795    One group also says that sparks suddenly leapt out

When shepherds were pounding rock with rock.

The first of course died, the second was caught in straw.

Is the Parilia flame based on this?

Or did Aeneas’ piety cause this custom,

800            When fire offered safe passage in defeat?

Is it nearer the truth that, when Rome was founded,

They ordered the Lares to move house,

And, as the farmers changed their homes, they fired

Their rustic sheds and abandoned hovels,

805    And both flock and farmer vaulted through the flames?

Which happens now, too, on your birthday, Rome.

Chance gives the poet scope. The city’s birth has come.

Be present for your deeds, great Quirinus.

Already Numitor’s brother had been punished,

810            All the shepherd crowd were led by the twins.

The two agree to unite the peasants and build walls.

Who should construct the walls is disputed.

‘There is no need for any fight,’ said Romulus;

‘Birds are greatly trusted, let us try birds.’

815    They agree. One ascends the wooded Palatine’s cliff,

The other at dawn climbs Aventine’s peak.

Remus sees six birds, the other twelve in sequence.

The pact holds: Romulus controls the city.

A suitable day is picked to mark walls with a plough.

820            Pales’ rites approached. The work began then.

A ditch is dug to solid rock, earth’s fruits are thrown

To the bottom and soil fetched from nearby.

The ditch is refilled with dirt, an altar tops the fill,

And the new hearth enjoys its kindled fire.

825    The king grips the plough and marks the walls with a furrow;

A white cow and snowy bull bore the yoke.

The king said: ‘As I found the city, be present, Jove,

And Father Mavors and Mother Vesta.

Attend all gods whom it is pious to summon:

830            Let this work of mine rise with your auspices.

Grant it long years, dominion over mistress earth,

And the lordship of the East and the West.’

He prayed. Jove furnished omens with thunder on the left

And hurtled lightning from heaven’s left.

835    The augury is cheered. The citizens throw down

Foundations and soon a new wall stood.

Celer urges on the work, whom Romulus had called,

Saying, ‘Celer, your job is to prevent

Anyone from crossing the walls or the ploughed ditch.

840            Execute whoever dares to do this.’

Remus, unaware of this, mocked the lowly walls

And said, ‘Will these make a people secure?’

No delay; he leapt. Celer hits the fool with a spade;

He drops on to the hard ground, gushing blood.

845    When the king learnt this, he swallows the sobs welling

Inside and coffins the wound in his breast.

He rebuffs open tears and keeps his brave example,

Saying: ‘So may enemies cross my walls.’

Yet he grants funeral rites and no longer suspends

850            His weeping. Cloaked piety is patent.

He pressed last kisses on the lowered bier and said:

‘Farewell brother, removed against my will.’

He anointed the body for cremation; Faustulus

And Acca did the same, hair loosed in grief.

855    Then the (not yet named) Quirites wept for the youth;

Finally the lamented pyre was torched.

A city rises (who could then have believed it?)

To set its victor’s foot upon the earth.

Rule all things and ever subject to great Caesar,

860            And often possess many of that name;

And when you stand sublime within a mastered globe,

May your shoulders tower over everything.

APRIL 23 Vinalia Fastus

I’ve told Pales, likewise I’ll tell the Vinalia.

But a day intervenes between the two.

865    Street girls, celebrate the divinity of Venus;

Venus boosts the profits of working girls.

Request beauty and public favour with your incense,

Request seductive charm and playful words.

Give your mistress pleasing mint and her own myrtle

870            And wicker baskets covered in roses.

Now you should pack the temple near the Porta

Collina, named from Sicily’s mountain.

When Claudius retook Arethusan Syracuse

With arms and made you a captive, Eryx,

875    The undying Sibyl’s song made Venus migrate.

She chose to live in her offspring’s city.

Why, then, do they call the Vinalia Venus’ feast,

You ask, and why is this day Jupiter’s?

Turnus and Aeneas warred to become Latin

880            Amata’s son. Turnus begs Tuscan help.

Mezentius was famous and ferocious in arms,

Great on horseback but greater still on foot.

The Rutuli and Turnus try to win him over.

The Tuscan leader replies as follows:

885    ‘My courage comes at no small cost. Witness these wounds

And weapons, often sprayed with my blood.

If you seek my assistance, split a small reward

With me, the next vintage from your vats.

No need to delay. Yours is to give, mine to triumph.

890            How Aeneas would love your refusal!’

The Rutuli agreed. Mezentius armed himself;

Aeneas armed and addressed Jupiter:

‘The enemy vintage is vowed to the Tyrrhene king.

You’ll get the wine, Jove, from Latium’s vines.’

895    The better vow prevails. Mighty Mezentius falls

And hits the ground, as his heart protests.

The autumn had arrived, soiled with its trodden grapes.

Jove is deservedly paid the wine due.

Hence the day is called the Vinalia. Jove claims it,

900            And is glad to include it in his feasts.

APRIL 25 Robigalia Nefastus Publicus

When April has only six days remaining,

Springtime will be in mid-course, and your search

For the Ram of Athamantic Helle will fail.

The signs bring rain, and the Dog, Canis, rises.

905    On this day, as I returned to Rome from Nomentum,

A crowd in white obstructed me mid-street.

A Flamen marched to the grove of ancient Robigo

To give dog guts and sheep guts to the flames.

I accosted him at once to learn of the rite.

910            Your Flamen delivered these words, Quirinus:

‘Scaly Robigo, god of rust, spare Ceres’ grain;

Let silky blades quiver on the soil’s skin.

Let growing crops be nourished by a friendly sky

And stars, until they ripen for the scythe.

915    Your power is not slight. The lachrymose farmer

Counts as lost the corn which you have marked.

The damage done to Ceres from wind and rain,

Or from the burning white of marble frost,

Is far less than when Titan sears the sodden stalks.

920            That is the time of your anger, dread goddess.

Spare us, I pray, keep scabrous hands from the harvest.

Harm no crops. The power to harm is enough.

Do not grip the delicate corn, but hard iron,

And destroy what is destructive, first.

925    It is better to devour swords and lethal spears.

They have no use; the world practises peace.

Now let the hoe, hard fork and arcing plough shimmer;

They are the field’s wealth. Let neglect rust arms;

And let any attempt to unsheathe the sword

930            Feel the iron clogged from long disuse.

Do not violate Ceres: always let the farmer

Fulfil his pledges for your absence.’

He had spoken. His right hand held a loose-napped cloth,

Incense box and a saucer of wine.

935    On the hearth he offered incense, wine, sheep entrails

And (we saw them) a filthy dog’s vile guts.

To me: ‘You ask why a strange victim is sacrificed?’

I had asked. ‘Know the cause,’ says the Flamen.

‘There is a Dog called the Icarian. When its star shifts,

940            The charred earth thirsts and rushes the crop.

This dog is set on the altar in the Dog-Star’s place.

The event is caused simply by the name.’

APRIL 28 Floralia Ludi Nefastus Publicus

When Tithonia leaves Phrygian Assaracus’

Brother and thrice lights the measureless world,

945    A goddess comes wreathed in a thousand varied flowers:

The stage is used for more permissive play.

Flora’s worship extends to the Kalends of May.

I’ll resume then; a greater task now presses.

Grab the day, Vesta. Vesta was received on her kin’s

950            Doorstep; so the just Fathers decreed.

Phoebus owns a part, another went to Vesta,

He as a third possesses what is left.

Endure, Palatine laurels. May the oak-wreathed house

Endure. One house holds three eternal gods.

Fasti 5

YOU ask where I think the month of May got its name?

The cause is not clear enough to me.

Like a traveller, uncertain which way to go

When he sees paths in all directions,

5        I am ignorant where to turn, since different causes

May be cited and the abundance numbs.

Speak, tenants of Fount Aganippid Hippocrene,

Treasured signature of Medusa’s horse.

The deities disagreed. Polyhymnia began

10              First; the rest are silent and note her words.

‘After Chaos, when the world acquired three elements

And the whole structure shifted to new forms,

Earth subsided with its weight and dragged the oceans down,

But lightness lifted the heavens up high.

15      The sun, too, jumped out, not chained by gravity,

And the stars, and you horses of the moon.

The earth for a long time did not yield to heaven,

Nor stars to Phoebus. All rank was equal.

Often some brazen deity from the plebs lolled

20              On the throne you occupied, Saturnus,

None of the parvenu gods escorted Oceanus,

And Themis often received the last place,

Until Honour and kindly-faced fair Reverence

Put their bodies on the marriage bed.

25     From them Maiestas was born. The goddess enrolled

Her parents and was mighty on her birthday.

No delay, she sat on high in mid-Olympus,

A golden vision in a purple robe.

Shame and Fear were seated with her; you could see

30              That every god framed their looks on hers.

At once respect for rank invaded their minds;

Worth is rewarded, complacency flees.

This state of things in heaven endured for many years

Until fate knocked the eldest god from high.

35     Earth shot out savage sons, huge monsters, Giants,

Emboldened to strike Jupiter’s house.

She gave them a thousand hands and serpents for legs,

And said, “Take up arms against the great gods.”

They prepared a ramp of mountains to the highest stars

40             And harried mighty Jupiter in war.

Jupiter launched his lightning from heaven’s stronghold,

Toppling the weighty mass on its authors.

These weapons of the gods defended Maiestas well.

She survives and is worshipped ever since.

45      She sits by Jove, is Jove’s most loyal guardian,

Preserves Jove’s dread sceptre without force.

She visited earth, too: Romulus worshipped her,

Numa, others later, each in his time.

She clothes fathers and mothers with pious respect,

50              She accompanies boys and virgins;

She commends the rods and ivory chair of office,

She soars in triumph on festooned horses.’

Polyhymnia ended; Clio approved her words

And Thalia, the curving lyre’s mistress.

55      Urania takes over; all became silent,

And no voice can be heard except hers.

‘At one time there was great reverence for white hair,

And the wrinkles of old age were valued.

The young performed the work of Mars and lusty wars,

60              And were posted to protect their own gods.

Old age is more feeble and unfit to bear arms,

But often helped the fatherland with counsel.

The senate-house confined itself to senior years:

The senate’s name signifies maturity.

65      Elders gave the people laws, and specific bills

Defined the age for canvassing office.

The old were flanked by the young without resentment,

And walked on the inside with one companion.

Who would dare to speak obscenely before the old?

70              Longevity bestowed a censor’s rights.

Romulus saw this and called these choice souls “Fathers”,

And gave the new city’s business to them.

So I think that the maiores or elders gave

Their name to May with their own age in mind.

75      Numitor may have said, “Romulus, grant the elders

This month”, and his grandson could not resist.

Substantial proof of the intended honour

Is the next month, June, named for the juniors.’

Then, with ivy twining her neglected hair,

80              Calliope began, first of her group:

‘Titan Tethys was once married to Oceanus,

Whose translucent waters scarf the broad earth.

Their child Pleione couples with sky-lifting Atlas –

So the story is – and bears the Pleiads.

85      Of these, Maia surpassed (they say) the beauty

Of her sisters and lay with supreme Jove.

She bore, on the cypress-clad ridge of Cyllene,

One whose winged feet pluck paths of air.

Arcadians, rushing Ladon and tall Maenalus

90              Worship him: the land is thought prelunar.

The exile Evander came from Arcadia

To Latin fields, and ferried his gods here.

Where Rome is now, the world’s head, were trees and grassland,

A few cattle, an occasional hut.

95     On arrival, his prescient mother declares: “Stop!

These fields will be the place of empire.”

The Nonacrian hero obeys his prophet-mother

And stopped – the alien soil’s new guest.

He taught the tribes many sacred rites, but firstly

100            Those of horned Faunus and the wing-foot god.

The Luperci in loincloths serve you, half-goat Faunus,

When their hide-strips purify the packed streets.

You, inventor of the curving lyre and patron

Of thieves, gave the month your mother’s name.

105    This was not your first pious act. You gave the lyre,

It’s thought, seven strings, the Pleiads’ number.’

She, too, had ended; her faction roared their support.

What to do? All the parties are equal.

May the Piërides smile on me equally,

110            And I extol none of them more or less.

MAY 1 (KALENDS) Floralia Ludi Fastus (Nefastus Publicus)

Let the work rise from Jove. On the first night I can see

The star that serviced Jupiter’s cradle.

The rainy sign of Olenian Capella is born.

Heaven is her reward for giving milk.

115    Naiad Amalthea, famous on Cretan Ida,

Hid Jupiter, it is said, in the forest.

She possessed the lovely mother of two young goats,

A glorious sight among Dicte’s flocks,

With soaring horns curled round her back and an udder

120            Suitable for the nurse of Jupiter.

She gave the god milk, but snapped her horn on a tree

And was severed from half her loveliness.

The nymph picked the horn up, ringed it with fresh herbs,

And took it fruit-filled to Jupiter’s lips.

125    When he controlled the sky and sat on his father’s throne

And nothing surpassed unconquered Jove,

He made stars of the nurse and the nurse’s fruitful horn,

Which bears even now its mistress’ name.

May’s Kalends saw an altar made to Praestites

130            (‘Standguard’) Lares and the gods’ figurines.

Curius vowed them, but antiquity undoes much.

Longevity damages even stone.

But the cause for the name attached to them is this:

They stand guard over all things with their eyes.

135    They stand up for us, praeside over city walls,

They are ever praesent to assist us.

A dog made from the same stone stood before their feet.

And the cause of its standing with the Lar?

Each protects the house, each is loyal to the master;

140            The god loves crossroads, dogs love crossroads.

Both the Lar and Diana’s pack drive thieves away;

Lares watch at night, and dogs watch at night.

I tried to find the two statues of the twin gods,

Which the force of passing years had toppled.

145    Rome has a thousand Lares and our leader’s Genius.

They are his gift. Each ward tends the three gods.

Where am I drifting? The month of Augustus owns

That theme. Now I must sing the Bona Dea.

There is a natural knoll; it named the place called

150            The Rock. It is a good part of the hill.

Remus stood on it in vain, when you Palatine

Birds gave the first omens to his brother.

The Fathers erected a temple there, hostile

To men’s gaze, on a gently sloping ridge.

155    A descendant of the old Crassi dedicated it,

A virgin whose flesh had known no man.

Livia restored it, to imitate her husband

And in all respects to follow the man.

MAY 2 Floralia Ludi Fastus

When next Hyperion's daughter expels the stars

160            And lifts her rose lamp on the morning's horses,

Cold Argestes will caress the topmost ears of corn

And Calabria's waves unfurl white sails.

But when darkening twilight ushers in the night,

The whole flock of Hyades is revealed.

165     Taurus' face gleams with seven rays of fire, which Greek

Sailors call Hyades from their rain-word.

To some they were the nurses of Bacchus, to others

Granddaughters of Tethys and old Ocean.

Atlas did not shoulder the load of Olympus yet,

170            When lovely, eye-catching Hyas was born.

Oceanus' daughter, Aethra, bore him and the nymphs

In timely births, but Hyas was born first.

While his beard was fresh, stags trembled in terror

Before him, and the hare was welcome prey.

175     But when years matured his manhood, he bravely closed

With the shaggy lioness and the boar.

He sought the lair and brood of a whelped lioness

And was bloody prey to the Libyan beast.

His mother sobbed for Hyas, his sad sisters sobbed

180            And Atlas, whose neck would haul the world.

The sisters surpassed both parents in pious love

And won heaven. Their name is from Hyas.

‘Be present, mother of flowers, honoured with shows

And play. I postponed your role from last month.

185    You start in April and cross to the time of May:

One has you as it leaves, one as it comes.

Since the edges of these months are yours and defer

To you, either of them suits your praises.

The Circus continues and the theatre's lauded palm.

190            Let this song, too, join the Circus spectacle.

Teach me yourself who you are. Men's opinions deceive.

You will be the best source for your name.’

So I. So the goddess replied to my questions

(As she talks, her lips breathe spring roses):

195    ‘I was Chloris, who am now called Flora. Latin speech

Corrupted a Greek letter of my name.

I was Chloris, nymph of the happy fields, the homes

Of the blessed (you hear) in earlier times.

To describe my beauty would mar my modesty:

200            It found my mother a son-in-law god.

It was spring, I wandered; Zephyrus saw me, I left.

He pursues, I run: he was the stronger;

And Boreas gave his brother full rights of rape

By robbing Erectheus’ house of its prize.

205    But he makes good the rape by naming me his bride,

And I have no complaints about my marriage.

I enjoy perpetual spring: the year always shines,

Trees are leafing, the soil always fodders.

I have a fruitful garden in my dowered fields,

210    Fanned by breezes, fed by limpid fountains.

My husband filled it with well-bred flowers, saying:

“Have jurisdiction of the flower, goddess.”

I often wanted to number the colours displayed,

But could not: their abundance defied measure.

215    As soon as the dewy frost is cast from the leaves

And sunbeams warm the dappled blossom,

The Hours assemble, hitch up their coloured dresses

And collect these gifts of mine in light tubs.

Suddenly the Graces burst in, and weave chaplets

220            And crowns to entwine the hair of gods.

I first scattered new seed across countless nations;

Earth was formerly a single colour.

I first made a flower from Therapnean blood,

And its petal still inscribes the lament.

225    You, too, Narcissus, have a name in tended gardens,

Unhappy in your undivided self.

Why mention Crocus, Attis or Cinyras' son,

From whose wounds I made a tribute soar?

‘Mars also, you may not know, was formed by my arts.

230            I pray that Jove stays ignorant of this.

Holy Juno, when Minerva sprang unmothered,

Was hurt that Jove did not need her service.

She went to complain to Ocean of her husband’s deeds.

She stopped at our door, tired from the journey.

235    As soon as I saw her, I asked, “What’s brought you here,

Saturnia?” She reports where she’s going,

And cites the cause. I consoled her with friendly words:

“Words,” she declares, “cannot relieve my pain.

If Jove became a father without using a spouse

240            And possesses both titles by himself,

Why should I not expect a spouseless motherhood,

Chaste parturition, untouched by a man?

I’ll try every drug on the broad earth and empty

Ocean and the hollows of Tartarus.”

245    Her speech was in mid-course; my face was hesitant.

“You look, nymph, as though you can help,” she says.

Three times I wanted to help, three times my tongue stuck:

Jupiter’s anger caused massive fear.

“Please help me,” she said, “my source will be concealed;”

250            And the divine Styx testifies to this.

“A flower,” I said, “from the fields of Olenus

Will grant your wish. It’s unique to my gardens.

I was told: ‘Touch a barren cow; she’ll be a mother.’

I touched. No delay: she was a mother.”

255    I quickly plucked the clinging flower with my thumb.

Juno feels its touch and at the touch conceives.

She bulges, and enters Thrace and west Propontis,

And fulfils her wish: Mars was created.

Recalling my role in his birth, Mars said: “You, too,

260           Should have a place in Romulus’ city.”

‘Perhaps you think my rule is confined to dainty wreaths.

My divinity touches the fields, too.

If crops flower well, the threshing-floor churns wealth;

If the vines flower well, Bacchus flows;

265   If the olives flower well, the year shimmers

And the season fills with bursting fruit.

Once their bloom is damaged, vetches and beans die,

Your lentils die, too, alien Nile.

Wines also bloom, carefully stored in great cellars,

270           And film seals the surface of the vats.

Honey is my gift. I call winged honey-makers

To violets, clover and greying thyme.

[We do the same thing also, when in youthful years

Our spirits riot and the body glows.]’

275   As she spoke, I admired her mutely. ‘You’ve the right,’

She says, ‘to have any questions answered.’

‘Tell me, goddess,’ I asked, ‘the origin of the shows.’

I had hardly stopped. She replied to me:

‘The other modes of luxury did not yet flourish;

280           Riches lay in cattle or broad estates

(Hence the Latin words for wealthy and for money),

But already wealth was got illegally.

The custom grew of grazing the people’s pastures,

And it was long allowed to go unpunished.

285   The masses lacked champions to protect public land,

And the lazy alone grazed privately.

This licence was arraigned before the Publicii,

Aediles of the plebs. Courage failed before.

The people recovered their rights, the guilty were fined;

290            The champions’ public spirit was praised.

Part of the fine was given to me, and the victors

Began the new shows amid great applause.

Part of it financed a slope in a beetling cliff;

It’s now a useful road, named “Publicius”.’

295   I thought the shows were made annual. She denied it,

And added other words to her speech.

‘Honour pricks us, too. We love festivals and altars;

Celestials are a status-greedy bunch.

Sin often renders the gods hostile to a man;

300            A sweet victim pays for the offence.

I have often seen Jove, about to launch his bolts,

Restrain his hand when incense is offered.

But if we are neglected, the offence is punished

Massively, and anger exceeds just bounds.

305   Recall Thestiades: absent flames consumed him.

The cause: that Phoebe’s altar lacked fire.

Recall Tantalides: the same virgin goddess grabbed

His sails and twice avenged her slighted hearths.

Luckless Hippolytus, you wished you had worshipped

310            Dione when panicked horses split you.

Neglect and its punishment form a long story.

The Roman Fathers also passed me by.

What was I to do – to demonstrate my dismay

And to penalize their insult to me?

315   Distress let duty slip. I failed to guard the fields,

And I neglected my fruitful garden.

Lilies had fallen, you could see violets parched

And tendrils droop on the crimson saffron.

Zephyrus often said to me: “Do not ruin

320           Your dowry.” My dowry was now worthless.

The olives flowered; but wanton winds damaged them.

The crops flowered; hailstorms ruined the crops.

The vines offered hope; Auster blackens the sky

And sudden rain ravishes their leaves.

325    I did not want this; my anger is not cruel,

But I lacked the desire to protect.

The Fathers met and vowed an annual festival

To my godhead, if the year flowered well.

I acknowledged the vow. Consul Laenas and Consul

330           Postumius discharged the shows for me.’

I was about to inquire why these shows had

Greater lewdness and more permissive play,

But it came to me that this deity is no prig:

The gifts of the goddess frame our pleasures.

335   Drinkers encircle their brows with plaited crowns,

Burnished tables hide under rose showers.

Tipsy guests dance with linden wreaths in their hair,

As wine coaxes indiscretion and skill.

Tipsy lovers serenade a pretty girl’s hard door,

340           While delicate chains dress their scented hair.

No business is conducted with garlanded brows,

No one scarfed with flowers drinks pure water.

While no one mixed you, Acheloüs, with the grape,

Gathering roses lacked all attraction.

345   Bacchus loves flowers. Bacchus’ pleasure in the wreath

Can be known from the Ariadne star.

Light theatre suits her. Do not, believe me, do not

Rank her with tragic-booted goddesses.

Indeed the reason why a crowd of whores packs

350           These shows is not difficult to find.

She is neither one of the glum set nor a snob;

She wants her rites open to the plebs,

And warns us to use life’s beauty as it blooms.

The thorn is spurned when the rose has dropped.

355   And yet why, when white robes are worn at Ceres’ feast,

Do multi-coloured dresses best suit her?

Is it because ripe ears of corn blanch the harvest,

But flowers have every feature and hue?

She nodded and flowers spilled from her cascading hair,

360            Like roses scattered upon a table.

There still remained the lights, whose cause eluded me,

When she removed my bafflement with this:

‘Because the meadows light up with purple flowers,

Lights were believed to suit my festival;

365   Or because no flower or flame is dull in colour,

And the brightness of each attracts the eye;

Or because nocturnal licence best suits our joys.

The third cause is derived from the truth.’

‘A little matter remains to nose into,’ I said,

370            ‘If it is allowed.’ She said, ‘It is allowed.’

‘Why instead of Libyan lions are peaceful deer

And timorous rabbits netted for you?’

Her realm, she replied, was not forests but gardens

And fields, which no savage beast may enter.

375   She ended, and vanished in the vaporous breeze.

Her scent stayed; you’d know a goddess had been.

That the song of Naso may flower for all time,

Sprinkle, I beg, my heart with your gifts.

MAY 3 Floralia Ludi in Circo Comitialis

Before the fourth night Chiron will display his stars,

380            That hybrid man mixed with a tawny horse.

Mount Pelion of Haemonia faces south;

The summit greens with pines, the rest with oak.

Philyra’s son claimed it. There’s a cave of ancient rock,

Where, they record, the good old man resided.

385   He is believed to have detained in lyric song

The hands destined to send Hector to death.

Alcides arrived with his labours partly complete;

Little but the final tasks remained.

You would have seen by chance the two death-fates of Troy,

390           The Aeacides boy and Jupiter’s son.

Philyra’s hero welcomes the young man warmly,

And asks the cause of his coming. He’s told.

He gazes at the club and lion spoils, and says:

‘The man deserves the arms, the arms the man.’

395   Achilles’ hands could not resist the brazen impulse

To touch the shaggy skin and its bristles.

While the old man fingers the foul, poisoned shafts,

An arrow slips out and stabs his left foot.

Chiron groaned and hauled the iron from his flesh;

400           Alcides groans and Haemonia’s boy.

Chiron blends picked herbs from the Pagasean hills,

And soothes the wound with different treatments.

The corrupting poison swamped the treatments;

Disease penetrated bones and body.

405   The blood of Lerna’s Hydra and the centaur’s blood

Mingled, and gave no time for rescue.

Achilles stood tear-soaked, as if before his sire:

The dying Peleus would be mourned like this.

His loving hands often stroked Chiron’s frail hands

410           (Rewarding the teacher with values learnt).

He kissed him often, and said to him where he lay:

‘Live, I beg you; don’t leave me, dear father!’

The ninth day arrived, when you, righteous Chiron,

Encircled yourself with twice seven stars.

MAY 5 Comitialis

415   Curving Lyra would want to track him, but the path

Is not ready. The third night will be right.

MAY 6 Comitialis

In the sky, when we say the Nones dawn tomorrow,

Scorpios may be marked from its middle.

MAY 9 Lemuria Nefastus

When Hesperus shows his lovely face thrice after this

420            And routed stars defer three times to Phoebus,

Your ancient rite will be performed, Night Lemuria;

There will be offerings to the mute dead.

The year was shorter, pious purgations unknown,

And you did not lead the months, biformed Janus,

425   But dead ashes still had tribute and a grandson

Honoured a buried grandsire’s tomb.

The month was May, named after maiores or elders,

Which even now enacts the old custom.

When midnight is here and drops silence for sleep,

430            And you dogs and dappled birds are hushed,

The man who remembers the ancient rite and fears

The gods rises up (no shoes bind his feet),

And makes a thumb sign between his closed fingers

To avoid some ghostly wraith in the quiet.

435   When he has washed his hands clean with fountain water,

He turns around after taking black beans,

Glances away and throws, saying: ‘These I release;

I redeem me and mine with these beans.’

He says this nine times and does not look back; a ghost,

440            They think, collects them and trails unseen.

He touches the water again, bangs Temesan bronze,

And asks the ghost to depart his house.

When he has said nine times, ‘Leave, ancestral spirits!’

He looks back and thinks the pure rite done.

445   How the day got its title, the source of its name,

Eludes me. We need a god to find out.

Pleiad’s son, advise me, god of the potent rod;

You’ve often seen the court of Stygian Jove.

The Staff-Bearer came, invoked. Hear the cause of the name;

450           The cause was learned from the god himself.

When Romulus had entombed his brother’s spirit

And paid fatally brisk Remus his due,

Unhappy Faustulus and dishevelled Acca

Doused his deeply charred bones with their tears.

455   At early twilight they returned home, grieving,

And collapsed on the tough bed, as it was.

They dreamt Remus’ bloody ghost stood beside the bed

And uttered these words in a low murmur:

‘Here I am, the half and second part of your prayers.

460           Look what I am, and what I was before!

I who before, if I’d had birds that appoint kings,

Could have been the greatest of my people,

Am now an empty image from the pyre’s flames.

This flitting shape remains of that Remus!

465   Ah, where is my father Mars? If you spoke the truth

And he gave bestial teats to exposed babes,

A citizen’s reckless hand killed the man rescued

By a she-wolf. How much gentler she was!

Savage Celer, end your cruel life in gashes!

470           Sink, as I did, in earth, gushing blood!

My brother did not want this; his piety matches

Mine. He gave all he could – tears for my fate.

Implore him by your tears, by our common nurture,

To signal a day marked in my honour.’

475   As he asks, they yearn to embrace him and stretch out

Their arms. The spectre flees their grasping hands.

When the image vanished, taking their sleep with it,

Both report the brother’s words to the king.

Romulus complies, and names Remuria the day

480           On which buried kin receive their due.

Over a long time the rough letter became smooth

At the beginning of the whole name.

Soon they also called the silent souls lemures.

That is the word’s meaning and the term’s sense.

485   The ancients shut temples on those days, as you now

See them closed in the season of the dead.

The same times are unfit for a widow’s marriage

Or virgin’s. No girls who wed then live long.

For this reason, too, if proverbs interest you,

490            Folk say: Malicious girls marry in May.

The three feast-days occur in the same period,

But not on any consecutive days.

MAY 11 Lemuria Nefastus

You will wrongly look for Boeotian Orion now.

I should sing the cause of this constellation.

495   Jupiter and his brother who rules the broad sea

Were travelling the road with Mercury.

It was the time when yokes bring back the upturned plough

And stooping lambs milk their bursting ewes.

By chance an old farmer of a narrow plot, Hyrieus,

500            Spots them, as he stood by his little hut.

He said: ‘The way is long, but not the time left,

And my doorway is open to strangers.’

His look, too, strengthened his words, and he asked again.

They take his offer and hide their godhead.

505   They pass under the old man’s smoke-blacked, filthy roof;

A small fire glowed from yesterday’s log.

The man kneels and quickens the flames with his breath,

And then humps in kindling and splits it.

Pots stand there. The smaller one held beans, the other greens;

510            Each foams under the pressure of its lid.

While they wait, he serves red wine with a trembling hand;

The god of ocean receives the first cup.

When he drained it, he said: ‘Now serve the next drink –

To Jove.’ The man paled, on hearing ‘Jove’.

515   When his wits return, he sacrifices the ox which tilled

His poor soil, and roasts it on a great fire.

He produces wine laid up in his boyhood’s

Early years and stored in smoky jars.

No delay, they reclined on linen-covered couches

520           Of river sedge, but, even so, not high.

Now meat, now juice of Lyaeus lit the table;

The bowl was earthen red, the cups beech.

Jupiter’s words were: ‘Wish whatever you desire;

You shall have it all.’ The kind man’s words were:

525   ‘I had a dear wife, whom I knew in first youth’s flower.

Where is she now, you ask? Sealed in an urn.

I gave her an oath, with you as my witness.

“You alone,” I declared, “shall be my wife.”

I’ve kept my word, but my desire has changed. I want

530           To be, not a husband, but a father.’

All nodded; all stood by the hide of the ox.

I am ashamed to speak any further.

Then they blanketed the sodden spot with soil.

It was now ten months, and a boy was born.

535   Hyrieus calls him Urion from his mode of birth;

Then the first letter lost its ancient sound.

He grew huge. Delia made him her companion;

He guarded the goddess and he served her.

Imprudent words incite the anger of gods:

540           ‘There is no beast,’ he said, ‘I cannot beat.’

Tellus unleashed a scorpion. Its urge was to stab

The goddess of twins with its hooked stingers.

Orion blocked it. Latona joined him to the bright stars,

And said, ‘Receive your reward for service.’

MAY 12 Ludi Martis in Circo Nefastus Publicus

545   But why do Orion and the other stars quit

Heaven in haste, and night contract its course?

Why does bright day lift its beam from the clear ocean

So quickly behind Lucifer’s path?

Am I deceived? Do arms clank? No deceit. Arms did clank.

550            He comes and has displayed the signs of war.

Mars Ultor drops from heaven to view his honours

And temple in the Augustan Forum.

Both the god and the work are massive. Mars deserved

No other dwelling in his son’s city.

555   This temple merits trophies won from the Giants.

Here Gradivus aptly starts feral wars,

Whether impious foes provoke us from the East,

Or if any from the West must be tamed.

The Lord of Arms views the gables of the towering work,

560            Likes the unconquered goddesses at the top.

He views weapons of different shapes on the doors,

And the earth’s arms defeated by his troops.

Here he sees Aeneas bearing his burden of love

With many noble Julian ancestors;

565   There he sees the Ilian lugging a general’s arms

And glorious deeds under rows of men.

He gazes at the temple fringed with Augustus’ name,

And thinks the work greater when Caesar’s read.

The young man vowed it when he took up pious arms:

570            He needed to start this way as princeps.

With hands outstretched, a just soldiery on one side,

Conspirators on the other, he said:

‘If father, Vesta’s priest, authorizes my war

And I prepare to avenge both these gods,

575   Be present, Mars, and glut this steel with guilty blood,

And lend your support to the better cause.

You will be enshrined, if I win, and named Ultor.’

He vowed, and came exultant from the rout.

It is not enough that Mars earned the name just once;

580           He hunts the standards held by Parthia’s hand.

This was a race protected by horses, arrows, plains,

And fenced off by its circle of rivers.

The deaths of the Crassi gave spirit to the race,

When troops, standards and leader died as one.

585   Parthia held Rome’s standards, the glory of war,

An enemy hoisted the Roman eagle.

This shame would have lasted, if Caesar’s potent arms

Had not defended Ausonia’s wealth.

He peeled off the old scars, the decades of disgrace;

590           Recaptured standards recognized their own.

What profit now your arrows, fired as you fled,

Your terrain, your fast horses, Parthian?

You return the eagles and offer vanquished bows;

Now you possess no proofs of our shame.

595   The twice vengeful god received a shrine and title;

The merited honours discharge the vow.

Hold the festival Games in the Circus, Quirites:

The stage seems not to suit the manly god.

MAY 13 Lemuria Nefastus

You’ll sight the whole Pleiades and the sisters’ platoon,

600           When a single night remains before the Ides.

Then, no dubious sources tell me, summer begins,

And the time of balmy spring is ended.

MAY 14 Comitialis

Just before the Ides Taurus lifts his starry face.

A famous story underlies this sign.

605   Jupiter, as a bull, gave his back to the girl

From Tyre, and wore horns on his false brow.

Her right hand clutched the mane, her left tugged her frock;

Her very fear caused a fresh beauty.

Wind balloons her dress, wind blows her golden hair:

610            Sidonian, you compelled Jupiter’s gaze.

Often she pulled her girlish feet from the ocean

And flinched from the touch of leaping water;

Often the god dipped knowingly beneath the waves

To have her cling more tightly to his neck.

615   When they struck the shore, Jupiter stood upright

Stripped of his horns, transformed from bull to god.

The bull enters heaven; you, Sidonian, are crammed

By Jupiter, and earth’s third part has your name.

Others have said this sign is the Pharian heifer,

620            Made cow from human and goddess from cow.

Today also the Virgin hurls the straw dummies

Of earlier men from the oaken bridge.

The view that men were hurled to their death at sixty

Condemns our ancestors of wicked crime.

625   There is an old story that, when the land was called

Saturnian, fate-speaking Jove said this:

‘Sacrifice to the old sickle god by hurling

Two men’s bodies in the Tuscan waters.’

Till the Tirynthian entered these fields, the grim rite

630            Was held each year in the Leucadian way.

Hercules hurled straw Quirites into the water;

Fake bodies are tossed by his example.

Others believe that young men shoved frail seniors

From the gangways to control the voting.

635   Tiber, teach me the truth. Your banks pre-date the city;

You are able to know the rite’s origin.

Tiber lifted from mid-channel a head weighted

With reeds, parting his lips for these hoarse words:

‘I have seen this place wall-less, mere deserted grass,

640           Each of the banks pasturing scattered cows.

Then I Tiber, whom nations now know and fear,

Merited even the cattle’s contempt.

Arcadian Evander’s name is often mentioned;

That alien churned my waters with his oars.

645   Alcides came, too, escorted by Achaea’s crowd

(Albula, if I recall, was then my name).

The Pallantian hero welcomes the youth warmly,

And Cacus at last is duly punished.

The victor leaves with Erythea’s cattle prize;

650           But his companions will go no further.

A large part of them abandoned Argos when they came;

They lodge their Lar and hope on these hillsides.

Yet sweet desire for the fatherland often jabs them,

And a dying man entrusts this small task:

655   “Hurl me into the Tiber for Tiber’s waves to bear

My empty dust to Inachus’ shore.”

His heir dislikes the burial charge. They inter

The dead stranger in Ausonian soil,

And toss a straw dummy of the master in the Tiber

660           To return to its Greek home overseas.’

He says this much, and enters a dripping cave

Of live rock. You kept your course, light waters.

MAY 15 (IDES) Nefastus Publicus

Be present here, glorious grandson of Atlas,

Pleiad child of Jove on Arcadia’s hills,

665   Arbiter of peace and arms to the gods above

And below, traveller on winged feet,

Lover of the lyre’s strum, lover of wrestling oil,

Who instructed tongues in cultured speech.

The Fathers built a temple to you on the Ides

670            By the Circus. So this is your feast-day.

All professional sellers of merchandise

Offer you incense and demand profit.

A spring to Mercury lies by the Porta Capena;

If results are trusted, it is divine.

675   The salesman comes, tunic hitched, and draws water

Purely in a fumigated jar.

He soaks a laurel bough in this, and douses

Everything for sale with the soaked laurel.

He sprinkles his hair, too, with the dripping laurel,

680            And prays with a voice geared to lying:

‘Wash away the perjuries of the past,’ he says,

‘Wash away lying words of yesterday.

Whether I made you a witness or falsely invoked

Deaf Jupiter’s pointless divinity,

685   Or knowingly deceived another god or goddess,

Let swift southerlies dispel my wicked words;

And on the coming day allow new perjuries

And make the gods indifferent to my speech.

Just grant me profit, grant joy in the profit made,

690            And make cheating the buyer a pleasure.’

Mercury laughs from on high at such requests,

Recalling his theft of Ortygia’s cattle.

MAY 20 Comitialis

Reveal to me, I ask, for mine is a better prayer,

The time when Phoebus enters Gemini.

695   ‘When you see as many days left in the month,’ he says,

‘As the labours performed by Hercules.’

‘Tell me,’ I responded, ‘the cause of this star sign.’

The god’s eloquent lips supplied the cause:

‘The Tyndarid brothers, the horseman and the boxer,

700           Had raped and kidnapped Phoebe and her sister.

Idas and his brother go to war for their women,

To whom they were betrothed by Leucippus.

Love drives one group to recover, one to refuse;

The identical cause makes each pair fight.

705   The Oebalids could have outrun their pursuers,

But it seemed base to win by rapid flight.

There is a treeless place, a spot fit for battle.

They took their stand there: it’s named Aphidna.

Castor was stabbed in the chest by Lynceus’ sword,

710           And hit the ground wounded and surprised.

The avenger Pollux is there and spears Lynceus

Where the neck joins and presses the shoulders.

Idas attacked and was barely routed by Jove’s fire;

But they deny the lightning disarmed him.

715   The sublime heaven already opened for you,

Pollux, when you said: ‘Hear my words, father.

Divide between two the heaven reserved for me.

Half of the gift will exceed the whole.’

He spoke and ransomed his brother by rotating

720           Positions. Both stars assist troubled ships.

MAY 21 Agonalia Nefastus Publicus

Return to Janus to find what the Agonia is;

But it has a time here, too, in the Fasti.

MAY 22 Nefastus

The night after that day Erigone’s dog comes out.

The cause of the sign is given elsewhere.

MAY 23 Tubilustria Nefastus Publicus

725   Volcanus has the next day; it’s called the Tubilustria.

The trumpets he makes are ritually cleansed.

MAY 24 QRCF

The next place comes with four marks, which, read in order,

Denote a sacred rite or the king’s flight.

MAY 25 Comitialis

I will not omit you, Fortuna Publica

730           Of a master people, enshrined next day.

When Amphitrite’s rich waters welcome that day,

You’ll glimpse the beak of Jove’s pet golden bird.

MAY 26 Comitialis

The coming dawn will take Boötes from our sight,

And on the next day Hyas’ star appears.

Fasti 6

THIS month, too, has dubious causes for its name.

All will be listed. Pick the one you like.

I will sing facts, but some will call them fiction

And think no gods appear to mortal men.

5        There is a god inside us; his movement makes us glow,

His power owns the seeds of sacred thought.

For me above all it’s lawful to see a god’s face,

Since I’m a poet or sing sacred themes.

There is a grove thick with trees, a place apart

10              From all sound but the thump of water.

Here I was thinking through the origin of the month

Just begun, and focusing on its name.

Look, I saw goddesses, not those the professor

Of ploughing saw, as he trailed Ascra’s sheep,

15      Nor those that Priam’s son compared in the valleys

Of watery Ida; but yet there was one,

There was one of them, sister of her own husband,

She, I recognized, who stands on Jove’s hill.

I shivered and confessed my thoughts with mute pallor.

20              Then the goddess dissolved the fear she pricked.

She says: ‘O poet, builder of the Roman year,

Bold teller of greatness in little verse,

You crafted the right to see celestial gods

By building their festivals in your lines.

25     But so you’ll know and not be led by common error,

The name of June is derived from my name.

It is something to be Jove’s wife and Jove’s sister,

Baffled whom to boast of, brother or spouse.

If you study my descent, I first made Saturnus

30            A father, I was Saturnus’ first fate-child.

Rome was once called “Saturnian” after my father:

For him this land was closest to heaven.

If you value marriage, I’m called the Thunderer’s Spouse,

And my shrine adjoins Tarpeian Jove.

35     If a whore could give her name to the month of May,

Is this honour to be begrudged to us?

Why call me Regina, “Queen”, and princeps goddess,

Why place the golden sceptre in my hand?

Shall days or luces make a month and title me

40            “Lucina”, and I draw no month’s name?

Then I’d regret my promise to end my anger

At Electra’s line and Dardanus’ house.

(That anger was doubly caused: Ganymede’s rape hurt me,

And my loss before Ida’s judge of beauty.)

45     I’d regret not bolstering the battlements of Carthage,

Home to my chariot and my armour.

I’d regret ceding Sparta and Argos to Latium,

And my Mycenae and ancient Samos.

Add old Tatius and the Faliscans devoted

50              To Juno, whom I subjected to Rome.

But let there be no regrets. I love no nation more.

Here should be my cult, the shrine with my Jove.

Mavors himself told me: “I entrust these walls to you:

You will be mighty in your grandson’s city.”

55     Truth attends his words. A hundred altars worship us;

For me, this month’s honour equals any.

And yet Rome does not pay me this honour alone;

Her neighbours accord me the same respect.

Examine the Fasti of woodland Aricia,

60            The Laurentine folk and my Lanuvium:

You’ll find there a month for Juno. Examine Tibur

And the sacred walls of Praeneste’s goddess,

You will read a time for Juno. And Romulus

Did not found those cities. Rome was my grandson’s.’

65     Juno had ended. We looked back. Hercules’ wife

Stood there; life’s bloom shimmered in her face.

‘If my mother told me,’ she says, ‘to leave all heaven,

I would not stay against my mother’s will.

So now I will not fight her over this time’s name,

70            But coax and almost play petitioner.

I’d rather keep my rights of possession by pleading,

And perhaps my case might win your favour.

Mother owns the golden Capitol with her joint shrine,

And rightly holds the summit with Jove.

75     But my whole glory comes from a month’s origin;

I am anxious for my only honour.

Does it matter, Roman, that you gave Hercules’ wife

The month’s name, and posterity remembers?

This land owes me something, too, on my great husband’s

80            Account. He drove the captured cattle here,

Where Cacus found no defence in his father’s gift

Of flame and dyed Aventine dirt with blood.

I pass to more recent times. Romulus divided

The people by years into two sections:

85     One was readier to give counsel, one to fight,

One age advises war, one wages it.

So he decreed and marked the months with the same token:

June’s for juniors, the seniors’ month precedes.’

She spoke. They would have hotly disputed the claim

90            And cloaked family piety with wrath:

Concordia arrived, our kindly leader’s god and opus;

Apolline laurel twined her cascading hair.

When she had told of Tatius and strong Quirinus,

And how two realms and peoples united,

95     And the Lar of sons-in-law and fathers conjoined,

She says, ‘June is named from that conjunction.’

A triple cause was argued. Forgive me, goddesses;

My verdict should not settle this issue.

Depart as equals. Beauty’s judge destroyed Pergamum:

100            Two goddesses harm more than one assists.

JUNE 1 (KALENDS) Nefastus

The first day is yours, Carna. She is the hinge goddess:

Her power opens the shut, shuts the open.

Time obscures the tale of how she got her powers;

My poem will clarify things for you.

105    By the Tiber lies the ancient grove of Alernus;

Priests still offer sacrifice there today.

A nymph was born there (men of old called her Cranaë);

Many lovers pursued her, but in vain.

She scoured the fields and sent beasts flying with her spear,

110            And spread her knotted nets in the hollows.

She had no quiver, but they thought she was Phoebus’

Sister – she would not have shamed you, Phoebus.

A young man would declare words of love to her,

And her immediate reply would be:

115    ‘This place has too much light and the light causes shame.

Lead me to a secluded cave; I’ll come.’

He naïvely goes ahead; she stops in the bushes

And lurks, and can never be detected.

Janus had seen her. Clutched by desire at the sight,

120            He deployed soft words against her hardness.

The nymph, as usual, demands a more remote cave,

Trails at her leader’s heels and deserts him.

Fool! Janus observes what happens behind his back.

You fail; he sees your hideout behind him.

125     You fail, see, I told you: as you hide by that rock,

He grabs you in his arms and works his will.

‘For lying with me,’ he says, ‘take control of the hinge;

Have this prize for your lost virginity.’

So saying, he gave her a thorn which she could use

130            To drive dreadful harm from doors (it was white).

There are birds of prey. They did not cheat Phineus’ throat

Of food, but they are of the same lineage.

They have huge heads, goggling eyes, beaks carved for plunder;

Their feathers are cast with grey, their claws hooked.

135    They fly at night and target children still unweaned,

Snatch them from the crib and defile their bodies.

They are said to gorge on milk-fed flesh with their beaks

And to cram their throats with gulps of blood.

Screech-owl is their name; and the cause of the name

140           Is their hideous screeching at night.

Either they are born birds or become so by magic,

Turned by Marsian spells from crones to birds.

They entered Proca’s nursery. Proca was born there

Five days before – fresh prey for the birds.

145    They suck the infant’s breast with their greedy tongues;

And the poor boy wails and screams for help.

The nurse rushes in, frightened by the baby’s cry,

And discovers cheeks raked by steely claws.

What could she do? His face was the colour of leaves

150           Late in the year when early winter hits.

She goes to Cranaë and reports the matter. ‘Lose

Your fear,’ she said. ‘Your baby will be safe.’

She came to the crib. Both mother and father sobbed:

‘Stop your tears,’ she says, ‘I will heal him.’

155    She dabs each doorpost thrice with leaves of arbutus,

Marks the threshold thrice with leaves of arbutus,

Sprays the entrance with water (the water was drugged),

Grasps the raw entrails of a two-month sow,

And shouts: ‘Birds of the night, spare the boy’s innards.

160            A tiny victim falls for a tiny child.

Receive heart for heart, I beg you, and guts for guts.

We give you this life for the better one.’

After this offering, she puts the severed pieces

Outside, and forbids those present to look.

165    And she places the spray of whitethorn from Janus

Where a tiny window lit the room.

After this, they say, no birds defiled the cradle,

And the boy’s earlier colour returned.

But why is fat bacon eaten on these Kalends

170            And a mess of beans and hot spelt, you ask?

She is an ancient goddess and eats familiar food,

And does not indulge in imported dainties.

Fish still swam then unmolested by the people,

And oysters remained safe inside their shells.

175    Latium did not know the bird from rich Ionia

Or the one which delights in Pygmy blood.

Nothing in the peacock pleased beyond its feathers,

And human art trapped no beasts for export.

The sow was prized, the sow was butchered for men’s feasts;

180            Earth supplied only hard spelt and beans.

If you eat the two together on the sixth Kalends,

They say your bowels can suffer no harm.

Juno Moneta’s shrine, high on the hill, was built

Today, it’s said, to keep your vow, Camillus.

185    Before, it was Manlius’ house, who once repelled

Gallic weapons from Capitoline Jove.

Better for him, great gods, to have died in that fight,

Defending your throne, high Jupiter!

He lived to die condemned for aiming at the crown.

190            That is the fame longevity furnished.

The same day is the feast of Mars enshrined outside

The Porta Capena by the Covered Way.

You, too, Tempestas, we concede, earned a temple,

When Corsican seas almost sank the fleet.

195    These human monuments are clear. If you seek stars,

Great Jupiter’s clawed bird now rises.

JUNE 2 Fastus

Next day summons the Hyades, the horns on the brow

Of Taurus. Earth is drenched with heavy rain.

JUNE 3 Comitialis

When two mornings pass and Phoebus rises again

200           And the corn drips twice with the falling dew,

Bellona was consecrated in the Tuscan war,

It is said; her presence always helps Latium.

Appius built the shrine, who denied Pyrrhus peace;

His mind saw much, but his eyes were maimed.

205   The temple’s tiny square overviews the Circus,

And there is a small column of no small note,

From which a spear is launched to herald a war,

When we decide to fight a king and nation.

JUNE 4 Comitialis

Hercules Custos protects the Circus’ far side;

210            The god owes Euboean song this tribute.

The date of the tribute is the day before the Nones.

Check the plaque, Sulla sanctioned the work.

JUNE 5 (nones) NEFASTUS

I checked whether to give Sancus or Fidius

The Nones, or you, father Semo. Sancus says:

215    ‘Whichever of them you choose, I’ll have the tribute.

I bear three names: it was Cures’ wish.’

So the ancient Sabines bestowed a shrine on him,

Erecting it on the Quirinal ridge.

JUNE 6 Nefastus

I have a daughter (please let her outlast my years);

220            I’ll always be happy while she is safe.

When I wished to offer her to a son-in-law,

I sought good and dangerous times to wed.

Then I was shown that June after the sacred Ides

Benefits brides and benefits men.

225    The month’s first part was found hostile to marriage.

The Dialis’ holy wife informed me:

‘Till peaceful Tiber’s yellow waters haul seaward

The scourings from Ilian Vesta,

I’m not allowed to comb down my hair with clawing

230            Boxwood or to trim my nails with iron,

Or to touch my husband, although he is Jove’s priest

And given to me forever by law.
You, too, should not rush.

Your daughter will wed better,

When fiery Vesta gleams with a clean floor.’

JUNE 7 Ludi Piscatorii Nefastus

235    The third Phoebe after the Nones removes Lycaon,

They say, and Ursa fears nothing behind.

Then I remember viewing Games on the Campus grass,

And they were named yours, slithering Tiber.

It is the feast-day of men who handle dripping lines

240           And cover their bronze hooks with bits of food.

JUNE 8 Nefastus

Mens, ‘Mind’, has divinity, too. We see Mind’s temple,

Vowed in your war’s panic, faithless Punic.

You had renewed the war, Punic. All were dismayed

By the consul’s death, and feared Moorish hordes.

245   Terror had banished hope; the senate makes vows

To Mens and she responds with her favour.

The day on which the vows were paid to the goddess

Sees the Ides approach six days away.

JUNE 9 Vestalia Nefastus

Vesta, favour me. Our lips open in your service,

250            If we are allowed to approach your rites.

I was lost in prayer. I felt a divine presence

And the joyful ground glowed with purple light.

Indeed I did not see you (farewell poetic lies!);

No man may have gazed upon you, goddess.

255   My areas of ignorance and crippling mistakes

Became known to me without instruction.

Rome, they say, had held its fortieth Parilia ,

When the flame’s guardian goddess was enshrined.

It was the kindly king’s work, whose god-fearing mind

260           Surpassed any the Sabine land has bred.

The roofs of bronze you see today were then of straw,

And walls were woven from pliant wicker.

This little spot which contains the Hall of Vesta

Was unshaven Numa’s mighty court.

265    But the temple’s present shape existed before,

They say. A sound cause underlies its form.

Vesta equals Earth. Sleepless fire underlies both;

Earth and hearth denote their own fixity.

Earth is like a ball resting on no support,

270            A great weight hanging in the air beneath.

Its very rotation keeps the globe balanced;

There are no corners to press any part.

And, since it’s located in the centre of the world,

So that it touches no side more or less,

275    If it weren’t convex, it would be nearer to one part,

And the world would lack earth’s central weight.

Syracusan art has hung a globe in enclosed air,

A tiny model of the boundless world,

And there the earth is equidistant from the top

280           And bottom. This is caused by its round shape.

The temple looks the same. No corner protrudes in it,

And the dome protects it from rain showers.

Why, you ask, do virgin attendants serve the goddess?

I shall find the correct causes here, too.

285    Juno and Ceres, they recount, were born from Ops

By Saturnus’ seed. Vesta was the third.

The first two married, both gave birth, it’s reported;

One of the three stayed ignorant of men.

What is strange, if a virgin likes virgin attendants

290           And allows only chaste hands at her rites?

Understand Vesta as nothing but living flame;

You see no substances born from flame.

She is a virgin de iure , giving and taking

No seed, and loves virginity’s escorts.

295    For long I stupidly thought Vesta had statues;

I soon learned that the rotunda has none.

That temple encloses an undying fire

But no image of Vesta or of fire.

Earth stands by vital force. Vesta is named from vital

300            Standing; her Greek name may have the same cause.

The hearth is named from flames and since it heartens all;

But it was once at the front of the house.

Hence, too, I think, our word ‘vestibule’, and we preface

Prayers with Vesta, who holds the first place.

305    It was once the custom to sit on long benches

By the hearth and think the gods dined with you.

Today, too, when ancient Vacuna’s rites are held,

Men stand and sit before Vacuna’s hearths.

There survives to this time a piece of ancient custom:

310            A clean platter offers Vesta food.

Look, loaves of bread hang from garlanded donkeys,

And chains of flowers veil rough millstones.

Farmers formerly roasted only spelt in ovens

(Oven Goddess, Fornax, has her own rites).

315    The hearth baked the bread which was buried in its ash;

A chipped tile was laid on the warm floor.

Hence the baker respects the hearth and the hearth’s mistress

And the donkey turning the pumice millstones.

Should I omit or recount your shame, red Priapus?

320            It is a very playful, tiny tale.

Coroneted Cybele, with her crown of turrets,

Invites the eternal gods to her feast.

She invites, too, satyrs and nymphs, rural spirits;

Silenus is present, uninvited.

325    It’s not allowed and too long to narrate the gods’

Banquet: night was consumed with much wine.

Some blindly stroll shadowy Ida’s dells, or lie down

And rest their bodies in the soft grass.

Others play or are clasped by sleep; or link their arms

330           And thump the green earth in triple quick step.

Vesta lies down and takes a quiet, carefree nap,

Just as she was, her head pillowed by turf.

But the red saviour of gardens prowls for nymphs

And goddesses, and wanders back and forth.

335    He spots Vesta. It’s unclear if he thought she was a nymph

Or knew it was Vesta. He claims ignorance.

He conceives a vile hope and tries to steal upon her,

Walking on tiptoe, as his heart flutters.

By chance old Silenus had left the donkey

340           He came on by a gently burbling stream.

The long Hellespont’s god was getting started,

When it bellowed an untimely bray.

The goddess starts up, frightened by the noise. The whole crowd

Fly to her; the god flees through hostile hands.

345    Lampsacus slays this beast for Priapus, chanting:

‘We rightly give flames the informant’s guts.’

You remember, goddess, and necklace it with bread.

Work ceases; the idle mills are silent.

I’ll tell what Jupiter Pistor’s altar on Thunderer’s Hill

350           Means, more renowned for its name than cost.

The Capitol was squeezed by a ring of fierce Gauls;

The long siege had already brought famine.

Jupiter summoned the gods to his royal throne,

And tells Mars, ‘Begin!’ He reports at once:

355    ‘No one, I suppose, knows the state of their suffering

And my heartache must voice its complaint.

But, if you require a brief account of their pain

And shame: Rome lies beneath Alpine foe.

Is this to whom you promised world dominion,

360           Jove? To whom you would subject the earth?

When Rome pounded her neighbours and Etruscan arms,

Hope quickened. Now she’s exiled from her Lar.

We have seen aged, triumphal generals drop

In halls of bronze, draped in the toga picta.

365    We have seen the tokens of Ilian Vesta removed.

Clearly Romans believe some gods exist.

But, if they gazed back at the hill you inhabit

And your many homes clamped by the siege,

They would know that divine worship is futile

370           And anxious gifts of incense stillborn.

If only they had the chance to fight! Let them arm –

And let them tumble, if they cannot win.

Now they are shut on their hill, starving and afraid

Of the coward’s fate, besieged by barbarians.’

375    Then Venus, fair Quirinus with crook and purple robe,

And Vesta spoke up for their Latium.

Jove replied: ‘Concern for those walls is universal.

Gaul will pay the penalty with defeat.

Now make their dwindling corn appear plentiful,

380           Vesta, and do not desert your site.

Have the hollow mill grind all their uncrushed grain,

Hands soften it and hearth fires bake it.’

He ordered. The Saturnian virgin nodded

At her brother’s orders. It was midnight.

385    Toil had made the generals sleep. Jupiter scolds them

And delivers his will with holy lips:

‘Get up, and from the stronghold’s height into the foe

Hurl the resource you least desire to hurl.’

Sleep departs, and the strange riddle prods them to ask

390           What resource to release against their wish.

It seemed to be Ceres. They throw down Ceres’ gifts,

Which clatter on the helmets and long shields.

Hope of defeat by famine dies. The foe is routed

And a white altar built to Pistor Jove.

395    I happened to come back from Vesta’s feast by the path

Where Via Nova joins the Roman Forum:

I saw a barefoot lady come down toward me.

I was stunned to silence and I halted.

An old woman nearby saw me. She tells me to sit,

400           And says, in trembling tones, her head shaking:

‘Soaking swamps occupied this ground, where the forums

Are now. The stream’s overflow drenched the ditch.

Lake Curtius over there with its dry altars

Is now solid ground, but was first a lake.

405    Where the Velabrum ushers parades to the Circus

Was nothing but willows and hollow reed.

Often revellers, returning on the city’s waters,

Sang and attacked boatmen with drunken words.

The god who’s defined by different shapes had not yet

410           Been named for avert ing the river.

Here also was a grove thick with rushes and reeds,

And a marsh none would approach in shoes.

The pools have receded, the banks confine their waters,

The land is now dry; but the custom stays.’

415    She had explained the cause. ‘Farewell, dear old lady,’

I said; ‘may the rest of your life be gentle.’

I learned the rest long ago in my childhood years,

But should not pass it by because of that.

Dardanus’ descendant, Ilus, had just built new walls

420           (Ilus, still rich, had the wealth of Asia);

A heavenly statue of armed Minerva, it’s thought,

Dropped on the hills of Ilium’s city.

(I was curious to see it, and saw the temple and site.

That is what remains there; Rome has Pallas.)

425    They consult Smintheus. Darkly in his shady grove

He uttered these sounds with unlying lips:

‘Keep heaven’s goddess safe; you will keep the city safe.

She will take with her the seat of power.’

Ilus keeps her safely locked high on the citadel;

430           The charge passes to his heir Laomedon.

With Priam she was not safe. This was her own wish

After she had lost the beauty contest.

They say she was taken by Adrastus’ grandson

Or thieving Ulysses or Aeneas –

435    The culprit is unknown. She is Roman; her guard

Is Vesta, whose unfailing light views all.

Ah, how terrified the Fathers were when Vesta

Burned and was almost buried by her roof.

The holy fires were blazing with the fires of sin,

440           Flame mingled with flame, pious with profane.

Her dumbstruck attendants untied their hair and wept;

Fear itself had removed their bodies’ strength.

Metellus flies into their midst and in a great voice

Cries, ‘To the rescue! Tears are no help.

445    Take the tokens of fate in your virgin palms:

You require hands, not prayers, to grasp them.

O pity! Do you waver?’ He saw them waver

And collapse on to their knees in panic.

He scoops water and lifts his hands: ‘Forgive this man,

450           Holiness: I’ll go where no man may enter.

If this is a crime, let me be punished for the act

And Rome be absolved by my life’s forfeit.’

He spoke, and burst in. The abducted goddess approved,

And was saved by the service of her priest.

455    Now, under Caesar, you shine brightly, holy flames;

Now there will be – and is – fire on Ilian hearths.

No priestess will be said to profane her headband

While he leads, none will be buried alive.

So the unchaste die, interred in what they have defiled:

460           Tellus and Vesta are the same god.

Today Brutus named himself from Callaican foes

And dyed Hispanic dirt with their blood.

Clearly sadness is sometimes tangled with pleasure

Lest feast-days bring people untrammelled joy.

465    Crassus at the Euphrates today lost his eagles,

And son, and men, and was death’s final prize.

‘Why gloat, Parthian?’ the goddess asked. ‘The standards return.

An avenger will punish Crassus’ death.’

JUNE 10 Nefastus

When violets are stripped from the long-eared donkey

470           And the rough stones grind the crops of Ceres,

A sailor sitting on his deck remarks, ‘We’ll see Delphis,

When the day is routed and damp night lifts.’

JUNE 11 Matralia Nefastus (Publicus)

Phrygian Tithonus, you complain your bride departs,

And watchful Lucifer leaves the eastern waves.

475    Go, good mothers (the Matralia is your feast)

And give the Theban goddess golden cakes.

By the bridges and the great Circus is a busy square

Named after its statue of an ox.

There on this day, it is said, Servius’ sceptred hands

480           Gave Mother Matuta a holy shrine.

Who is the goddess? Why does she bar slave girls (she does!)

From her temple door and request hot cakes?

Bacchus of the ivy-clad, berried hair, if this house

Belongs to you, direct the poet’s work.

485    Jove’s compliance had burned Semele. Ino takes you,

Child, and suckles you with utmost care.

Juno ballooned at her rearing a whore-snatched son;

But his blood was that of Ino’s sister.

Furies and false visions hound Athamas: you fall,

490           Little Learchus, by your father’s hand.

The grieving mother entombed Learchus’ shade

And performed all rites due to piteous pyres.

After clawing her deathly hair, she, too, runs wild

And rips you, Melicertes, from your cot.

495    Confined to a small space, rebuffing twin straits,

Is a single land pounded by two seas.

She comes here frenzied, clutching her son, and hurls him

With her in the deep from a soaring crag.

Panope and her hundred sisters receive them

500           Unharmed, and glide them gently through their realm.

(Not yet) Leucothea, (not yet) the boy Palaemon

Reach the thick whirlpools at the Tiber’s mouth.

There was a grove (of Semele or Stimula – who knows?);

They say Ausonian Maenads lived there.

505    Ino asks them what race they are. She hears they are

Arcadians and Evander rules the place.

Saturnia, cloaking her godhead, pricks the Bacchantes

Of Latium with false, insidious words:

‘O so naïve, o so blind in all your hearts,

510           This stranger comes as no friend to our group.

She is a spy and aims to learn our sacred rites.

There is a sure way of punishing her.’

She had hardly finished; the Thyiads fill the breezes

With howling, as hair streams down their necks.

515    They lay hands on the boy and fight to wrench him away.

Ino invokes deities yet unknown:

‘Gods and men of the place, help a pitiful mother.’

Her cry hits the Aventine’s nearby rocks.

The Oetaean had herded his Hiberian cows

520           To the stream; he hears and runs to the voice.

Hercules’ arrival nudged the women’s threats

Of violence into base, female flight.

‘What do you want here,’ (he recognized her) ‘Bacchus’ aunt?

Or does the same god plague you and me?’

525    She tells some things. Her son’s presence stops her in part;

She is ashamed that madness made her sin.

Rumour, rapid as it is, flies on beating wings,

And your name, Ino, is on many lips.

It is said you entered Carmenta’s faithful house

530           As a guest, and ended your long famine.

Tradition claims Tegea’s priestess offered cakes

Rushed by hand and cooked on a hasty hearth.

Today, too, the goddess loves cakes at the Matralia;

Rustic kindness delights her more than art.

535    ‘Now,’ she says, ‘o seer, unseal the coming fates,

If it’s allowed. Crown my welcome with this.’

There is a small delay. The seer absorbs heaven’s power

And her whole breast bulges with her god.

At once you would hardly know her; she was so much

540           Holier and mightier than just now.

‘I’ll sing pure joy. Rejoice at your toil’s end, Ino,’

She said, ‘and always favour this people.

You’ll be a sea goddess; ocean, too, will take your son.

Assume different names in your waters.

545    The Greeks will call you Leucothea, we Matuta.

Your son will have complete control of ports:

Portunus to us, Palaemon in his own tongue.

Go, and, I ask you both, smile on this place.’

She nodded, a promise was made. They ended their toil

550           And renamed. He is a god, she a goddess.

You ask why she bars slave girls from entry? She hates them.

I’ll sing the source of that hate, if she lets me.

One of your female attendants, Cadmeïs,

Often enjoyed your husband’s embraces.

555    Evil Athamas loved her in secret. She revealed

That you gave the farmers roasted seeds.

You deny it of course, but it is locked in rumour.

This is why you hate a slave girl’s service.

No pious mother should pray to her for her child;

560           She seemed not the happiest of parents.

You will do better to give her another’s child;

She aided Bacchus more than her children.

Why rush?’ they say she asked you, Rutilius. ‘Consul,

When my day dawns, you’ll fall to Marsian foe.’

565    Results followed words, and the Tolenus river

Purpled, as the water mingled with blood.

The next year came. At the same rising of Pallantis,

Butchered Didius doubled the foe’s force.

The same day is yours, Fortuna, and the same founder

570           And site. Who lurks under those piled togas?

It is Servius, that’s agreed; but what causes him

To hide is disputed. I’m in doubt, too.

When the goddess was shy to confess her secret love

And ashamed to lie divine with mortal

575    (A great desire for the king seized and inflamed her,

And only with this man was she not blind),

She would enter his house at night by a small window,

From which the Porta Fenestella is named.

She now feels shame, and covers the features she loved,

580           And hides the king’s face with many togas.

Or is it truer that after Tullius’ funeral

The plebs were uncontrollably disturbed by the death

Of the kind leader, and grief grew before his statue,

Until a heap of togas concealed it?

585    A third cause needs to be sung at greater length.

We will, however, rein in our horses.

Tullia, whose marriage was the reward of sin,

Kept jabbing her husband with these words:

‘What’s the point of our good match (you killed my sister,

590           I killed your brother), if we lead pious lives?

My husband and your wife both deserved to live,

If we lack the courage for greater deeds.

I give you, as dowry, my father’s head and throne;

If you are a man, claim the dowry promised.

595    Sin is a kingly thing. Kill your father-in-law,

Grasp his throne, dye our hands in father’s blood.’

Pricked by such things, this unroyal man occupied

The high throne. Stunned people rush to arms.

Blood and death follow, feeble years lose. Superbus,

600           The son-in-law, steals the father’s sceptre.

Beneath the Esquiline, where his palace was, the king

Fell butchered, gushing blood on the hard ground.

His daughter rode in her carriage, high and bold,

Through the main streets to her father’s house.

605    When her driver saw the body, he stopped and wept

Profusely. She assaults him in these terms:

‘Will you go on, or pay piety’s bitter price?

Drive, I say, those stubborn wheels through his face.’

As proof, Vicus Sceleratus, ‘Sin Street’, is named

610           From her. The affair is forever branded.

She later dared to enter the memorial shrine

Of her sire. It is a strange but true tale.

There was a statue there of Tullius enthroned;

They say it placed a hand over its eyes,

615    And a voice was heard: ‘Cover my face lest it see

The unspeakable features of my daughter.’

A robe is supplied to shroud it. Fortuna forbids

The robe’s removal, and boomed from her temple:

‘The day on which Servius’ face is uncovered

620           Will be the first day modesty is lost.’

Refrain, ladies, from touching the forbidden robes

(It’s enough to intone your solemn prayers),

And let Roman garments always cover the head

Of one who was our city’s seventh king.

625    This temple burnt down, but the fire spared the statue;

Mulciber himself assisted his son.

For Tullius’ father was Volcanus, his mother

Lovely Ocresia from Corniculum.

After sacrifice, she was told by Tanaquil

630           To pour wine with her on the festive hearth.

There in the ashes was, or it seemed to be, the shape

Of man’s obscene part – more likely it was.

The slave is told to sit on the hearth. She conceives

Servius, whose family has heaven’s seed.

635    His father showed it by touching his head with feathers

Of fire and his hair blazed with flame-tips.

You, Concordia, too, were magnificently enshrined

By Livia, who pledged you to a dear husband.

Posterity, learn. Where the Porticus Liviae is now

640           Was once covered by a massive house.

That one house was a city’s labour, and occupied

Greater space than the walls of many towns.

It was levelled to the ground, not for someone’s attempt

At the throne, but for harmful luxury.

645    Caesar endured demolishing the vast building

And destroying his inherited wealth.

That is how censors should act and examples be set –

By a judge practising what he preaches.

JUNE 13 (IDES) Nefastus Publicus

The next day there is no mark to explain. On the Ides

650           Jupiter Invictus was enshrined.

I’m now ordered to describe the lesser Quinquatrus :

Be present for this task, blonde Minerva.

‘Why does a flautist wander all through the city?

What’s the meaning of the masks and long gown?’

655    So I. So Tritonia, downing her spear (I hope

I can repeat the learned goddess’ words):

‘In the times of your ancient forebears flautists played

Everywhere and always with great honour.

The flute was played in temples, it was played at shows,

660           The flute was played at tearful funerals.

Reward made the work sweet. Suddenly a time followed

Which fractured the practice of this loved art.

Moreover, an aedile restricted the performers

At a funeral procession to ten.

665    The flautists leave the city for exile and move

To Tibur (at one time Tibur was exile!).

The stage misses the hollow flute, altars miss it;

No dirges conduct the final bier.

There was a man worthy of any rank, who was

670           A slave at Tibur but had long been free.

He prepares a feast at his country house and invites

The music crowd. They come to the banquet.

It was night, and their eyes and brains swam with wine,

When a messenger came, as pre-arranged,

675    And said: “Why are you slow to break up the party?

Look, the master who freed you is coming.”

No delay; the party guests stir their limbs and totter

From the heavy wine; their feet lurch and slip.

“Get out!” shouted the host, and lifted the dawdlers

680           On to a cart. The cart was lined with rushes.

Time and movement and wine elicit sleep; the crowd

Of drunks think they’re returning to Tibur.

They entered Rome by the Esquiline. Next morning

The cart was in the middle of the Forum.

685    To fool the senate on their identity and number,

Plautius tells them to mask their faces,

Mixes them with others, and insists on long gowns,

So female flautists may swell the group.

This would screen their return and thwart their censure

690           For disobeying his colleague’s edicts.

The plan pleased. The Ides allow them to dress strangely

And sing playful words to ancient tunes.’

When she had instructed me, I said: ‘I still need

To learn why today is called Quinquatrus.’

695    ‘March,’ she says, ‘celebrates my festival of that name,

But this group, too, belongs to my inventions.

I first enabled the long flute to produce notes

Through spaced holes in perforated boxwood.

The sound pleased; but the limpid waters reflected

700           My face, and I glimpsed puffed virgin cheeks.

“Art is not worth this to me; farewell, my flute,” I said.

The bank receives my cast-off on its turf.

A satyr finds it and marvels at first, ignorant

Of its use. He learns that breath creates sound;

705    And, fingering the pipe, he blows and draws in air,

And now boasted of his art to the nymphs.

He challenges Phoebus, too. Phoebus won, he hung.

His flayed limbs separated from their skin.

710    I am the inventor and author of this form of song.

This is why that art observes our feast-days.’

JUNE 15 Fastus

The third night will come, when, Dodonid Thyone ,

You are seen on the brow of Agenor’s bull.

This is the day on which you send Vesta’s scourings

Seaward, Tiber, along Etruscan waters.

JUNE 16 Comitialis

715    If you trust the winds, spread canvas to the Zephyr,
Sailors.

Tomorrow he’ll favour your waters.

JUNE 17 – 18 Comitiales

When the Heliades’ father dips his rays in the waves

And the silent stars circle the twin poles,

Hyrieus’ son will lift his strong arms from earth;

720           The next night Delphis will be visible.

Indeed Delphis once saw the Volsci and Aequi

Routed in your fields, land of Algidus.

Afterward, Tubertus, you rode on snow-white horses,

Glorying in this triumph over neighbours.

JUNE 19 Comitialis

725    Now six days and as many remain from the month,

But yet add one more day to this number.

The sun leaves Gemini and the stars of Cancer blush;

Pallas’ worship starts on Aventine’s hill.

JUNE 20 Comitialis

Now, Laomedon, your son’s wife rises and expels

730           The night, and the wet frost flees the meadows.

Summanus, whoever he is, was enshrined, they say,

When you, Pyrrhus, cramped Rome with terror.

JUNE 21 Comitialis

When Galatea greets this day with her father’s waves

And the land brims with peaceful silence,

735    The youth blasted by ancestral bolts soars from earth

And flings his hands coiled with double snakes.

Phaedra’s love is famous; Theseus’ crime is famous:

That credulous man cursed his son to death.

The fatally pious youth headed for Troezen;

740           The bull’s chest splits the waves before it.

Shocked horses panic. Their master checks them vainly;

They drag him through flinty rocks and crags.

Hippolytus tumbled from the chariot, reins

Hampering limbs, his body shredded and raped

745    Unto death – while Diana howled indignation.

‘There’s no cause to grieve,’ Coronides says.

‘I’ll restore the pious youth to life, unwounded,

And the grisly fates will yield to my art.’

At once he takes some herbs from an ivory box.

750           They worked before on the ghost of Glaucus,

When an augur resorted to herbs he’d noticed,

And a serpent used the help of a serpent.

He daubed his breast three times, thrice spoke healing words.

The youth raised his drooping head from the ground.

755    The grove and recesses of Dictynna’s wood hide him:

He is Virbius of Aricia’s lake.

Clymenus and Clotho resent the threads of life

Respun and death’s royal rights diminished.

Jove feared the precedent and aimed his thunderbolt

760           At the man who employed excessive art.

Phoebus, you whined. He is a god; smile at your father,

Who, for your sake, undoes his prohibitions.

JUNE 22 Comitialis

Please do not, Caesar, despite your rush to conquer,

Move your standards, if auspices forbid.

765    Let Flaminius and the shores of Trasimene

Testify that just gods advise through birds.

If you ask the reckless time of that ancient loss,

It was the tenth day from the month’s closure.

JUNE 23 Comitialis

The next day improves. Masinissa defeats Syphax,

770           And Hasdrubal fell by his own weapon.

JUNE 24 Comitialis

Times slip away and we grow old in silent years;

Days escape, unrestrained by any bridle.

How quickly the honours of Fors Fortuna come;

June will be finished seven days from now.

775    Go, celebrate with joy the goddess Fors, Quirites;

The Tiber’s bank has her gift from the king.

Rush on down, some on foot, some in a speedy skiff,

And don’t be ashamed to return home drunk.

Garland yourselves, boats, and carry parties of the young,

780           And let wine be drunk aplenty mid-stream.

The plebs worship her, since her builder was plebeian,

It is said, and sceptred from low estate.

She suits slaves, too, since a slave girl’s son, Tullius,

Built the nearby shrines to the fickle goddess.

JUNE 25 Comitialis AND 26 Comitialis (Nefastus Publicus)

785    Look, a man returns from the shrine near the city

Unsober, and hurls these words to the stars:

‘Your belt hides now, and perhaps will hide tomorrow.

After that, Orion , I shall see it.’

790    But, if he had not been drunk, he would have declared

The time of solstice would be the same day.

JUNE 27–8 Comitiales

When Lucifer steals in, the Lares won a shrine,

Where skilful hands create many wreaths.

The same time is Stator’s, whose temple Romulus founded

Once by the face of the Palatine’s ridge.

JUNE 29 Fastus

795    When the days left in the month number the Parcae’s names,

Your purple robe was enshrined, Quirinus.

JUNE 30 Comitialis

Tomorrow’s time marks the birth of Julius’ Kalends:

Piërides, add the last touch to my task.

Tell, Piërides, who attached you to that man

800           Whose stepmother reluctantly yielded.

So I. So Clio: ‘You gaze at famed Philippus’

Monument, from whom chaste Marcia derives,

Marcia, who draws her name from priestly Ancus,

And whose beauty matches her lineage.

805   Her body and mind exactly correspond; in her

Join breeding and beauty and genius.

Do not think our praise of beauty a disgrace;

In this we praise the great goddesses, too.

Caesar’s aunt was once married to this man: O glory,

810           O woman worthy of the sacred house.’

So Clio sang, and the learned sisters agreed.

Alcides nodded and twanged his lyre.

Notes

References are to book and line numbers of Ovid’s Fasti unless otherwise indicated. Greek names of deities and heroes (i.e. Zeus instead of Jupiter, Heracles instead of Hercules) tend to be used where the glossed myth is Greek. For a table of the main Greek deities and heroes and their Roman counterparts, see the beginning of the Glossary.

Fasti 1: JANUARY

1.1–26. The proem to Fasti 1 and thus to the whole work was written in exile after the death of Augustus, to whom Ovid seems originally to have dedicated the work (Tr. 2.551–2). Even so, it is not addressed to the then emperor, Tiberius, but to his nephew and heir, Germanicus, who is thus the poem’s dedicatee. Compare Pont. 4.8.31ff.(AD 16), where Ovid directly appeals to Germanicus to assist his return from exile and promises payment in the form of carmen, poetry, the homage of one poet for another. See also the proem to Fasti 2, addressed to Augustus and thought by some to have been the original proem to the whole work.

1.3. Caesar Germanicus was the son of Drusus Claudius Nero, deceased brother of the emperor Tiberius. Tiberius had adopted Germanicus, his nephew, in AD 4, several years after the death of Drusus in Germany. In AD 13 Germanicus became commander-in-chief of Roman forces in Germany and Gaul, campaigning against the Germans until AD 17. Tiberius then appointed Germanicus as proconsul, his responsibilities focusing upon the eastern provinces. Germanicus died in Syria in AD 19 under suspicious circumstances. Because he was greatly endeared to the Roman populace, his death incited extensive public displays of grief and rioting. Germanicus was also (probably) the author of a translation of Aratus’ astronomical poem, Phainomena, one of the models for Ovid’s Fasti (see Introduction 4.II), and thus an especially appropriate dedicatee of the poem. His poetry is mentioned in lines 23–5 below.

1.7–8. The language here is reminiscent of Propertius 4.1.69.

1.9. In addition to the public festivals of Rome, private domestic festivals were also celebrated. On private and domestic cults, see ARR: 611–22.

1.10. That is, Augustus and Tiberius respectively.

1.13. Ovid here makes reference to the many temples whose restoration and construction were credited to Augustus. In Res Gestae 20.4 Augustus claims to have restored 82 temples of the city in the year 28 BC alone. See further, 2.59–66n.

1.20. Apollo (the ‘Claros god’) had an oracle and grove at Claros in Ionia (Asia Minor), an ancient site which acquired great divinatory importance between the third centuries BC and AD. Germanicus himself was said to have consulted the oracle in AD 18.

1.21–4. The poet here praises the forensic and literary skills of Germanicus, writer of Greek comedies and of epigrams, both Greek and Latin, and (probably) Aratea, a translation of Aratus’ Phainomena (see 1.3n.).

1.25–6. For the importance of this couplet to the issue of the political control of speech, see Introduction 5.VI.

1.27–30. When Romulus founded Rome, he set in place the ten-month calendar (304 days) of Alba Longa, his home city, according to the tradition which Ovid here invokes (see, inter alios, Plutarch Num. 18, Quaest. Rom. 19). Romulus assigned the first month of the year to Mars (see 3.87–96); to this calendar, Rome’s second king, Numa Pompilius, appended the two additional months of January and February, extending the year to 355 days.

1.33. The idea that human gestation requires ten months is known from other Roman sources, as is the notion of the nine-month pregnancy. Explanations of the discrepancy include inclusive and non-inclusive counting (so that 10 = 9 months) and distinguishing between lunar and solar months.

1.37. By ‘Quirinus’ Ovid refers here and elsewhere to Romulus and to the tradition which held that Romulus was transformed into Quirinus at the end of his earthly existence (see 2.481–6n.). Dumézil (ARR: 247) calls attention to the fact that, under the assimilatory influence of Greek Zeus and Ares, this tradition reunites the Roman deities of the old pre-Capitoline triad (Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus) as grandfather (Jupiter), father (Mars) and son (Romulus – Quirinus). The tradition further reports that the deified Romulus appeared and announced his transformation to one Proculus Julius, an ancestor of the family of Augustus (the Julian family) –obviously a late accretion, deposited after the rise of the Julian family to prominence. With this link forged between the Caesars and the founder of Rome, the Romulean Quirinus certainly gained ground, at the expense of the notion of a Sabine Quirinus.

1.39–40. Venus is the ‘line’s princeps’, since she is the mother (= Greek Aphrodite) of Aeneas, ancestor of Romulus and of the Julian family.

1.41. That is, May (Maius) for the maiores (‘elders’; see 5.73–4) and June (Iunius) for the iuvenes (‘young men’; compare 6.87–8).

1.43–4. An alternative tradition credited one of the Tarquins, the Etruscan kings of Rome, with lengthening the calendar to 12 months.

1.47. Do (‘I give’), dico (‘I deliver’) and addico (‘I award’) are the three words of the praetor used in conducting legal proceedings (see Varro Ling. 6.29–30).

1.47–54. See the discussion of these terms and days in the Introduction 3.III.

1.55. Ovid declares that all Italy’s (‘Ausonia’s’) Kalends are sacred to Juno. According to Macrobius (Sat. 1.15.18), on each Kalends a Pontifex Minor offers a sacrifice to Juno in the Curia Calabra upon the Capitoline, after calling (*caleo) the people to that place (according to Varro Ling. 6.27, the etymon for the term Kalendae). The Pontifex then declares to the people on which day the Nones will fall (the fifth or seventh day of the month), invoking Juno Covella. In the Regia, the king’s palace, the Rex Sacrorum’s wife offers a ewe lamb or a sow to Juno. The dedication of the Kalends, the beginning (birth) of the new month, to Juno probably reflects her position as goddess of birth (see ARR: 295).

1.56. The Ides, on the other hand, belong to Jupiter. It is the Flamen Dialis who makes the sacrifice of the white lamb.

1.59–62. An historical interpretation (see Livy 6.1.9–12) attributed the ‘blackness’ of the days immediately following the Kalends, Nones and Ides to various Roman military disasters that occurred after the taking of auspices (see 1.178–80n.) on those days. Wackernagel (1923–4) proposed the black days to have their origin in a much earlier, more Indo-European, form of the calendar, in which, as in Indo-Aryan calendars, and with a Celtic parallel, the days of the month following the full moon (which occurred on the Ides originally) are termed ‘dark’ (on the Indo-Aryan and Celtic calendars see R&R: 87–8).

1.63–4. The first month of the year bears the name of Janus, the god of beginnings (see 1.90n.). Macrobius (Sat. 1.9.16) states that Janus is in fact invoked on the Kalends of each and every month, being called Junonius (‘of Juno’). ‘A happy year for you’ refers most probably to AD 17, the year of Germanicus’ triumph (Syme 1978: 24; see also 1.285n.). It is perhaps the last dateable reference in Ovid’s works. The thesis of H-B (1994: 186) that Ovid alludes to ‘the first item on the Senate’s agenda’ for 1 January AD 15, viz. a decree awarding Germanicus the appropriate triumph, lacks plausibility both thematically and practically (in respect of the distant poet), and has found few supporters.

1.68. Ovid invokes Janus’ support for peaceful ends. Janus is commonly associated with peace and in this regard is at times closely linked with Quirinus (see 6.545–7n.); note in fact Ovid’s choice of the phrase ‘Quirinus’ folk’ in the following line.

1.70. Janus the key-bearing god (line 99) unlocks the temples on the first day of the new year (compare 1.121–4).

1.79. On January 1 the newly chosen consuls process to the Capitoline temple of Jupiter, followed by a parade of citizens. Here the senate holds its first session of the new year.

1.80. The reference is to white, the colour of festival days.

1.81. ‘Rods of office’ refers to the fasces, bundles of rods, usually surrounding an axe, which the lictors carried before a magistrate as a symbol of his authority, and ‘new purple’ is that which trims the togas of the consuls.

1.82. The ‘glinting ivory’ is that of the sella curulis –special chairs with curved, crossing legs (said to have been used originally in a chariot, currus) in which only the highest-ranking magistrates were allowed to sit.

1.85–6. On the identity of Rome and the world, see 2.684.

1.90. The sacrally more conservative Romans have preserved an Indo-European deity who has disappeared from the Greek pantheon. Janus (Latin Ianus), the god of beginnings and entrances, bears a name linked to the word for ‘archway’ (ianus) and ‘gate’ (ianua) –all derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *ei-, ‘to go’ (in the extended form *yah-); compare Sanskrit yēnam, ‘way’, and Old Irish áth, ‘ford’. Dumézil has seen in Janus a Roman vestige of the Indo-European ‘first gods’ –deities who are the first to be invoked in a ritual (see 1.171–2n.). He has further argued for particular similarities between Janus and the Scandinavian god Heimdallr, especially in the relationship which they each bear to their respective divine sovereign, Jupiter and Odin (see ARR: 332–3).

1.103–4. Though Greece may have no two-faced deity corresponding to Janus (line 90), Ovid still forges a link between the god of January and Greek myth, utilizing an etymological tradition attested also by Festus (p. 52M). In his Theogony, the Greek poet Hesiod (c. 700 bc) says that in the beginning of creation there first appeared Chaos (Th. 116) –a deity whose name is related to the verb khaskō, ‘to yawn, gape’. The Latin verb of the same meaning (and perhaps ultimately from the same Indo-European root) is hio (see Ernout-Meillet: 295). Via a sort of bludgeoning etymology, Ianus was reckoned by Ovid to be a derivative of hio.

1.121. In the Forum was located the small temple of Janus Geminus, housing only an image of the twin-faced god. When Rome was at peace, the doors of Janus’ Forum temple remained closed; during war, they stood open. There are varying interpretations in antiquity regarding the significance of the doors’ position relative to Roman peace. On the one hand, some contend that, when the doors are closed, peace and its guardian are shut away safely inside; others, however, hold that the closed doors hold back war, keeping it contained like a virus within a test tube. Ovid has it both ways. In lines 123–4, peace is released from the temple to stroll the highways, while war is held captive behind barred doors. In 1.279–82, however, it is peace that is locked inside.

1.127–8. According to Lydus (Mens. 4.2), on each Kalends cakes were offered to Janus, and he was thus known as ‘god of the cakes’ (see ARR: 330).

1.129–30. Ianus (Janus) is the ianitor (‘doorkeeper’; see lines 125–7) and as such his two faces are said to be called Patulcius, ‘Opener’, and Clusius, ‘Closer’. The titles are certainly to be linked to the important matter of the disposition of his temple’s doors (see 1.121n.), but more generally to his role as god of openings and, hence, closings (compare lines 117–18) (see ARR: 328–9).

1.136. ‘One the Lar’ –in other words, one side of the door faces inward; on the Lares, protecting spirits of the home, see 5.129–32n.

1.141–2. The Greek goddess Hecate had become by at least the fifth century BC an infernal deity who guarded the gates of Hades. Images of her were placed in front of homes and particularly at crossroads. She was commonly, though not universally, presented as having three faces, or three separate bodies, and, as Ovid suggests, each of these faced a different road at the triple intersection.

1.163–4. The Latin word for ‘winter’ used here (bruma, derived from brevis, ‘short’) is literally ‘shortest (day)’, that is the ‘winter solstice’ or, generalized, ‘midwinter’ –the time of the last day of the old, diminishing sun and the first of the new, growing sun. In the Julian calendar, the winter solstice actually falls on December 25 (see Pliny HN 18.221), and so prior to the first day of the new calendrical year. According to a view preserved by Varro (Ling. 6.8), the year runs from one winter solstice to the next.

1.171–2. One of the Indo-European ‘first gods’, such as Norse Heimdallr, Indic Agni (who may also be ‘last’) and Greek Hestia, Janus is the first among the Roman deities to be invoked in prayer and the first to whom sacrifice is offered (see ARR: 322–3, 332–3).

1.178–80. The Roman concern for omens is passionate, even obsessive, and the identifying of omens is but one component of a system of seeking and manipulating signs from the gods. A favourite method for divining the approval of the gods, or the lack thereof, was the auspicium (literally ‘watching of birds’). The conducting of auspices by either an augur, the divinatory priest or by any other person (as auspices were not limited to professional diviners) involved watching for birds, noting their flight, position, numbers, cries and feeding behaviour. The scope of the auspicium was generalized to include divinatory observation not only of birds, but of the sacred chickens, of the sky and yet other phenomena.

1.185–92. The Roman custom of giving gifts of sweets and coins on New Year’s Day is attested elsewhere. The intent is to offer a good omen on which an auspicious and profitable year will follow.

1.193–4. Following the Roman equation of Saturnus with Greek Cronus and Hesiod’s description of Cronus’ reign during a blessed age (Op. 111), Ovid’s rather cynical reference here is to the Golden Age of humanity.

1.199. Note that in Janus’ description of early Rome (lines 199–202), explicit reference is made to the three members of the pre-Capitoline triad. The ‘little hut’ refers to the Casa Romuli (Hut of Romulus), a primitive hut of wattle and daub on the Palatine near the Scalae Caci (Staircase of Cacus), believed to have been inhabited by Romulus.

1.201–2. Perhaps, though not necessarily, Ovid here refers to the small Capitoline temple of Jupiter Feretrius, reported to be still standing during the reign of Augustus. Rome’s first dedicated temple (see Livy 1.10), it was vowed by Romulus to Jupiter upon killing Acron, king of Caenina (see 2.135–6n.), and offering the slain king’s armour to the god. Such an offering is called the ritual of the spolia opima. According to Festus (p. 189M), the spolia opima are of three sorts –a primary type which is offered to Jupiter Feretrius, a secondary to Mars and a tertiary to ‘Janus Quirinus’, seemingly reflecting a trifunctional view of Roman society (see ARR: 166–8, 186; offerings said by Servius, Aen. 6.859, to have been accomplished only three times in the history of Rome). The temple housed a stone which was ritually tossed by the Fetialis (or with which he struck a sacrificial pig) when a treaty of peace was ratified; the Fetiales are the priests responsible for declaring war and making treaties. Jupiter Lapis is invoked on such occasions (see ARR: 179–80, 273–5, 590).

1.229–30. The coin referred to is the copper as.

1.233–6. The ‘sickle god’ is Greek Cronus, who emasculated his father, Uranus, with a sickle of adamant (see Hesiod Th. 176–82). As each of the children of Gaea and Uranus had been born, their father hatefully hid them away deep within earth, that is Gaea. Wearied of this burden, Gaea enlisted the aid of her youngest son Cronus and provided him with the sickle with which the deed was accomplished (Th. 154–75). The Romans equated Cronus with Saturnus, one of the gods of Titus Tatius, seen as an agricultural deity with a name popularly linked to Latin satus, ‘sowing’ (though his original character is uncertain), and as such the sickle is his appropriate symbol. Saturnus’ iconography commonly depicts him brandishing a sickle or a pruning-hook, and owing to his equation with Cronus and a confusion of the latter’s name with Greek khronos, ‘time’, his tool was sometimes identified as the blade with which Time reaps all in its path (see Macr. Sat. 1.8.9). As Greek Cronus had deposed Uranus, so he was to be ousted by his own son Zeus, hence Ovid’s reference to Roman Jupiter thrusting Saturnus from heaven’s throne. In a ship Saturnus came via the Tiber to Rome (see ARR: 271–2).

1.238. Another of Ovid’s etymologies; Saturnus is latent in that he is hiding from Jupiter.

1.245–8. The god of beginnings is historicized and identified as king of Latium in an early age. His residence was on the Janiculum Hill, said to bear the name of the god, located on the west bank of the Tiber. Various sources add that Janus had come from Greece, had married his sister and fathered two children (see ARR: 330–31).

1.249–50. During the Golden Age of humankind, Justice had lived upon earth and interacted freely and easily with humans. During the Silver Age, she remained, but became much more reclusive. With the coming of the Bronze Age and war, she abandoned earth and fled to heaven, where she is enshrined as the constellation Virgo (see Aratus Phain. 96–136; for Ovid’s description of the Ages of humankind, see Met. 1.89–150).

1.253–4. Janus’ affiliations with peace are once again emphasized; it was during this peaceful Golden Age of humanity that he ruled as king (see ARR: 265–6)

1.257–8. The poet rightly links Janus etymologically with the archways, iani. The temple mentioned is presumably that discussed above (see 1.121n.).

1.260–62. ‘Oebalian Tatius’ is Titus Tatius, the Sabine king against whom Romulus fought Rome’s first war (see 3.201–28). ‘Oebalian’ refers to the early Spartan king, Oebalus; the Sabines were said to have claimed descent from the Spartans. The ‘fickle keeper’ is the traitor Tarpeia. It was her lust for Sabine gold which moved her to treachery. She bargained to open the Capitoline citadel secretly to the Sabine warriors in exchange for what they wore on their left arms, that is their golden bracelets. Instead she was crushed to death by their shields, which they likewise carried on their left arms (see Livy 1.11.6–9). Dumézil has interpreted the gold-bearing Sabines, possessors of the means of Roman fertility, as third-function figures in the mythic history of Rome and recognized in Tarpeia a Roman reflex of an Indo-European feminine figure who supports the third function in the war it wages against the remainder of society (see 3.213–34n.). This Proto-Indo-European figure survives in Scandinavia as the Norse goddess Gullveig (literally ‘frenzy of gold’; see ARR: 66–76).

1.263–6. After taking the Capitoline citadel, Titus Tatius would next mount an attack on Romulus and the remainder of the Roman forces, positioned on the neighbouring Palatine Hill, separated from the Capitoline by the marshy plain which would in time become the Forum Romanum. ‘Saturnia’ is Juno (identified as the equivalent of Greek Hera, daughter of Cronus, who is equated with Roman Saturnus); she unbars the gate for the advancing Sabine horde because of her animosity towards Venus, ancestor of the Romans.

1.269–70. Janus assists in thwarting the attack of the Sabines by opening (in his characteristic fashion) underground springs. The Roman deity Fons, god of springs, had an altar on the Janiculum Hill, and came to be identified as son of Janus (see ARR: 388).

1.276. On sacrificial cakes offered to Janus, see lines 127–8. The cake here mentioned is called strues, said by Festus (p. 310M) to be shaped like joined fingers.

1.277. The reference is again to the closing of the doors of the temple of Janus Geminus during times of peace (see 1.121n.).

1.285. Tiberius awarded Germanicus a triumph, i.e. an official victory parade in Rome, on 26 May AD 17, for his campaigns against the Germans.

1.290–94. January 1 was the anniversary date of the dedication of two temples, both situated on the island of the Tiber. The son of Apollo and Coronis is Asclepius, Roman Aesculapius, a deity of healing. This temple was said to have been founded in response to a persistent plague of three years, following consultation of the Sibylline Books (293 bc; see 4.257–60n.). On the occasion, a sacred serpent from the god’s famed temple at Epidaurus was relocated to Rome (see Valerius Maximus 1.8.2). The second temple Ovid mentions is that of Jupiter (father of Apollo, father of Aesculapius), dedicated in 194 BC, also identified as belonging to Vedjovis (see 3.435–8n).

1.297–306. Ovid lauds the efforts of the ancient astronomers who mapped out the heavens. On the inclusion of astronomical observations in Ovid’s Fasti, see Introduction 4.V.

1.307–8. The poet refers to the Greek myth of the Aloadae, the gigantic Otus and Ephialtes. In their youth these sons of Poseidon (Roman Neptune) attempted to gain access to heaven by piling three mountains one on top of the other (the here-named Olympus, Ossa and Pelion) but were struck down by Zeus (Roman Jupiter).

1.311–14. The January 3 setting of the constellation of Cancer, the ‘Crab’, is in the morning, not the evening as Ovid here states.

1.315–16. The constellation of Lyra, the ‘Lyre’ (which actually rose in the morning in November) was imagined to have the shape of a tortoise shell –the raw material which Hermes used to manufacture the first lyre.

1.317–18. The observance of the Agonalia, or Agonia, also takes place on March 17, May 21 and December 11. The meaning of the term is uncertain, hence the plethora of possible etymologies offered by Ovid in the next several lines. On these days the Rex Sacrorum sacrificed a ram in the Regia. The first festival of the year rightly belongs to Janus (see ARR: 172–3, 330).

1.325–6. Agnalia as if from agna, ‘lamb’.

1.335–6. Ovid here derives victima, ‘victim’, from victor, and hostia, ‘sacrificed beast’ or ‘host’, from hostes, ‘enemies, hostiles’.

1.337–48. Ovid again summons memories of simplicity, of an earlier, idyllic time, free from excesses and opulence. Salted grain remained an important component of the Roman sacrifice; such a mixture, called mola salsa (and thus the victim is said to be immolated), was sprinkled over the back of each victim prior to sacrifice.

1.341. ‘Nard’ was a fragrant ointment highly prized in ancient Rome.

1.347–8. Plutarch (Num. 8.8) writes that in Numa’s day animal sacrifices were uncommon, grain being the chief offering.

1.349–53. Here, as in the Metamorphoses (15.111–13), Ovid identifies the pig as the first animal to be made a sacrifice, and the reason is that a sow angered Ceres by rooting up grain sprouts. Greek Demeter, with whom the Romans equated Ceres, received such an offering; her chief festival in Greece is that of the Thesmophoria, celebrated by women only and particularly marked by the sacrifice of pigs (see GR: 242–5). The motivation for the choice of Demeter’s victim is variously given –thus, that the pig destroys grain in the field, or that pigs were swallowed up by the earth when Demeter’s daughter was abducted by the god of the Underworld (see 4.417–620).

1.353–60. It was then the goat’s turn to fall victim to the sacrifice. The affronted deity is in this instance Bacchus, for the vegetation destroyed by the goat is the vine. In Rome, victims were not only sprinkled with salted grain, but were anointed with wine (line 358).

1.361. ‘Error’, Latin culpa, a word often translated ‘fault’ and used regularly by Ovid in his exilic poetry of his own ‘offences’ against Augustus, which do not yet rise to the level of ‘crime’, facinus, or scelus: see, e.g., Tr. 1.2.98, 1.3.38, 4.1.28.

1.362–4. Ovid finds the cause for the use of oxen as victims in the story of Aristaeus. Apollo loved the nymph named Cyrene, a hunter like himself and his sister Artemis (Roman Diana). Cyrene conceived a child with Apollo, the boy Aristaeus, who would grow up to be a master of rustic arts such as bee-keeping and olive-growing. He desired Eurydice, wife of Orpheus, and pursued her; in her fleeing from him, she stepped on a viper and died of its bite. In anger, Eurydice’s fellow Dryads caused Aristaeus’ bees to die. Ovid relates the story from this point. For the full and canonic version see Virgil Geo. 4.315–558, which Ovid in part rewrites. As an aside, it is interesting to note, within a context of trifunctional ideology, that Pindar (Pyth. 9.59–65) has the centaur Chiron predicting the birth of Aristaeus and saying that he will be known as Zeus, as ‘a pure Apollo’ (who possesses clear similarities to the Indo-Aryan warrior god Rudra), and as Hunter and Herdsman.

1.365. Cyrene is ‘sea-blue’ because she is a Naiad, a river-nymph, and lives in the waters of the Peneus.

1.367. Proteus is an ancient Greek sea deity (‘old man of the ocean’) –a seal herder and shape-shifter, famed for his wisdom.

1.372. The old sea god sleeps on shore among the seals as he rests from his herding. Homer (Od. 4.349–570) relates how he was similarly caught by Menelaus, also in need of information.

1.381–2. The poet finds the cause of the sheep becoming a sacrificial victim to lie in its consumption of sacred leaves.

1.385–6. Unlike Hesiod, but like Homer, Ovid here names the sun as Hyperion. Xenephon (Cyr. 8.3.24) and other Greek authors write of the Persians sacrificing horses to the sun. Well known is the aśvamedha, the horse sacrifice of their close relatives, the Indo-Aryans, analogues of which have been alleged among the Celts and Thracians. Rome is no stranger to this rite. As Dumézil and others have demonstrated, the Equus October, the October 15 horse sacrifice to Mars, remarkably parallels the aśvamedha (see ARR: 221–7), and both are certainly to be traced to a common early Indo-European ritual.

1.387–8. Iphigenia, the virgin daughter of the Greek King Agamemnon, was to be sacrificed at Aulis, where the Greek ships had gathered to sail against Troy. Agamemnon, leader of the expedition, had desecrated the grove of Artemis (Apollo’s twin, and equated with Roman Diana), killing a sacred deer. To atone for the sacrilege, he was required to sacrifice his oldest child, and until the sacrifice was made, the winds would be stilled, preventing the Greeks from sailing. According to some traditions, Artemis substituted a deer for Iphigenia at the moment of sacrifice and took the girl away to become her priestess in Tauris (see Euripides, Iphigenia among the Taurians). The cultic practice of sacrificing deer, and other wild beasts, to Artemis is attested in various Greek cities.

1.389–90. Trivia (Greek Trioditis), the goddess of the triple crossroads, is Hecate (see 1.141–2n.), though the name was also at times applied to Diana, owing to the sometime Greek identification of Hecate with Artemis (Hecate is in fact a feminine form of an epithet of Apollo, Hekatos, of uncertain sense).

1.391–2. The donkey is sacrificed to the god Priapus, guardian of the garden, though he also received victims of the more usual sort (compare 6.319–48). His ithyphallic image was commonly erected in a garden, or in a house. Priapus is associated with sexuality and fertility, as well as with good fortune, and, as in the story which follows, is usually treated humorously. His worship came to Rome from Greece, where his name is only first attested in the fourth century BC. It was said that he was a son of Aphrodite (Roman Venus), and that his genital deformity was inflicted on him by Hera, because of her dislike for his mother. Dionysus (Roman Bacchus), with whom Priapus is closely affiliated (as in the following lines), is sometimes identified as his father.

1.394. That is, every other winter.

1.399. Among the sylvan spirits of Greek myth are those beings called the silens. Like the satyrs, with whom they are closely identified by the sixth century BC, they are lecherous male creatures, part human, part animal. The earliest images of silens depict them as having elements of equine anatomy. By the fifth century, one of their number has emerged as a distinct figure with his own set of characteristic features; this is Silenus –a fat, bald-headed, jolly old man, having large ears and a pug nose. Though normally in a state of intoxication, he was famed for his wisdom and is even made the teacher of Dionysus (Roman Bacchus).

1.400. The image of Priapus, the garden scarecrow, was often painted red (see line 415).

1.412. The reference is to Pan (equated by the Romans with their native Faunus; see 3.291–2n.), who wore a wreath of pine.

1.435–6. In the Metamorphoses (9.340–62), Ovid says that the Naiad Lotis fled from Priapus and was transformed into the lotus tree.

1.439–40. Ovid refers to Priapus as the ‘Hellespont’s god’; the deity was especially worshipped in the region of Lampsacus, a colony of Phocaea on the eastern side of the Hellespont. At Lampsacus the donkey was offered to Priapus as his sacrificial victim.

1.445–8. The poet assigns the cause of the sacrifice of birds to their knowledge of the thoughts of the gods and revelation of those thoughts to humankind. The reference is of course to the practice of auspices (see 1.178–80n.).

1.451–2. ‘Idalian hearths’ are those of the Cypriot town of Idalium, known in antiquity for its practice of burning live doves in memory of Adonis, the lover of Aphrodite (Roman Venus) killed by a boar (see 4.869–70n.; 5.227–8n.). The goddess of love was closely associated with Cyprus and probably has her origin in Astarte, the Near Eastern fertility goddess worshipped by the Phoenicians of the island.

1.453–4. It was the sacred geese of Juno that were said to have awakened the Romans and saved the Capitol from a surprise night attack by the Gauls (390 BC). In spite of certain honours thus accorded to geese in Rome, the goose, says Ovid, still falls victim to the Egyptian goddess Isis. He here refers to the goddess as ‘Inachiotis’, i.e. Io, the daughter of Inachus (an Argive river god, although other traditions make her the daughter of a mortal), a priestess of Hera who in Greek myth was transformed into a cow after her amorous encounter with Zeus (so she would not be discovered by Hera according to Ovid Met. 1.583ff.). Io became identified with Isis who similarly had bovine characteristics.

1.455–6. The crested bird which offends Night is the cock, which announces the coming of the dawn.

1.457–8. The morning rising of Delphis, the ‘Dolphin’ constellation, in Ovid’s day was actually on December 31.

1.461. ‘Tithonus’ bride’ is the dawn goddess Aurora (Greek Eos). Homer (Od. 5.1) also uses the metaphor of the goddess leaving Tithonus’ bed to indicate the dawning of a new day.

1.462. This is the day of the Carmentalia, festival of the ‘Arcadian goddess’, Carmenta (or Carmentis), as is January 15. The early importance of the deity is revealed not only by her dual feast-days, but also by the assignment of one of the minor Flamens to her (the Flamen Carmentalis); by Ovid’s time, however, she has slipped to a position of little significance. Her name is clearly derived from the Latin word for song (or imprecation), carmen, and Dumézil (ARR: 392–3) has drawn attention to the similarity which she bears to the Indic deity, Vāc (‘speech’). Though an ancient Italian deity, Carmenta came to be identified as the mother (or wife) of Evander, the mythic Greek settler of the place which would become Rome. Evander, a native of Arcadia in the south of Greece, is said to have brought the alphabet to Italy, and Carmenta is credited with its creation. The goddess is a prophetess and comes to play the role of deity of childbirth (see 1.617–18). For the relevance of this narrative of exile to Ovid’s own exile, see Introduction 4.VII.

1.463–4. Turnus, the Italian rival of Aeneas, has a sister, the nymph Juturna (earlier Diuturna). January 11 is the anniversary of the dedication of her temple in the Campus Martius. She also has a pool in the Forum, close to the temple of Castor (later shared with his twin Pollux); she is herself associated with the Dioscuri (see 1.705–8n.). Juturna was worshipped particularly by those whose livelihood was associated with water (see ARR: 388, 412–13).

1.469–70. Inhabitants of the Greek region of Arcadia, according to popular legend, existed before the moon came into being (see 2.290–300). With regard to the avowed antiquity of the Arcadians, it is interesting to note that of all first-millennium-BC Greek dialects, Arcadian is the one (along with its sister Cypriot dialect) most similar to that of second-millennium Mycenaean Greeks. In Greek myth the eponymous ancestor of the Arcadians was Arcas, son of Zeus and the nymph Callisto (see 2.153–92).

1.472. Evander’s father was commonly identified as Hermes.

1.489–90. Cadmus was the son of Agenor, king of the Phoenician city of Tyre (or Sidon). Agenor sent each of his three sons in search of their sister Europa, abducted by Zeus (see 5.605–16n.), commanding them not to return without her. Among the people of Boeotia, where Cadmus eventually settled (having abandoned the search for Europa at the direction of Apollo), were the Aonians. Here and elsewhere, Ovid uses the name of this one people to denote all of Boeotia (see, for example, 4.245).

1.491. Tydeus was forced to flee his homeland of Calydonia, having killed his cousins for conspiring against his father Oeneus. Jason, the Greek hero who had gone in quest of the fabled Golden Fleece (see 3.853–76n.), sailed upon the ship Argo, which had put out from the port of Pagasae. The expedition was required in order for Jason to recover his rightful share of his father’s kingdom, taken away by his uncle Pelias.

1.500. Ovid frequently calls the Tiber ‘Tuscan waters’.

1.501. In the Campus Martius was a site called Tarentum at which was located an underground altar dedicated to Dis, ruler of the Underworld, and his bride Proserpina, Greek Persephone. Ovid relates the tale of Proserpina and Dis at 4.419–620 (see ARR: 444–5).

1.519–20. Carmenta foretells the coming of Aeneas and his Trojans, referring to them as ‘Dardanian’. Dardanus was a son of Zeus (Roman Jupiter) and ancestor of the Trojans. The prophetess predicts the war between Aeneas’ Trojans and the Latins; as the Trojans fought one war on account of Helen (the wife of the Greek King Menelaus, abducted by the Trojan prince Paris), so they will fight another on account of Lavinia (see 3.629n.).

1.521–2. ‘No humble avenger’ refers to Aeneas, whose vengeful killing of Turnus, the slayer of Evander’s son Pallas, ends Virgil’s Aeneid.

1.525. ‘Neptune’s Pergamum’ is a poetic reference to Troy. Homer knows the tradition that Poseidon (Roman Neptune) built the walls of Troy (Il. 7.452–3). Pergamum was an important city in north-western Asia Minor populated by an indigenous people and Greeks. From the early third to the late second centuries BC, Pergamum was ruled by the kings of the Attalid dynasty, who transformed it into a powerful kingdom. The last of these kings, Attalus III (138–133 BC), died childless and willed his kingdom to Rome.

1.528. When Aeneas escaped from Troy (Ilium), he brought with him those deities (‘Ilium’s gods’) called the Penates (see Dion. Ant. Rom. 1.67). Associated with the penus, the food storage area (though perhaps Penates is more closely akin to the notion ‘deep interior, centre’, as in penitus, ‘from far within’; see ARR: 353), these gods (di Penates) protected the Roman household. They appear to be associated with the hearth and to have been worshipped at meal time (see Servius Aen. 1.730). The Penates publici (the Penates of the Roman people) were believed to reside in the temple of Vesta (see Tacitus Ann. 15.41; on Vesta’s temple, see 6.265–6n.). The sacred flame which burned in that temple likewise came with Aeneas from Troy (see Virgil Aen. 2.297–8).

1.529–30. The ‘god himself’ whom Ovid causes the prophetess to refer to is Augustus.

1.533–4. ‘A god’s grandson and son’ refers to Tiberius, adopted son of the divine Augustus and grandson of the divine Julius Caesar. His ‘reluctance’ to become emperor is related by Tacitus (Ann. 1.11–13).

1.536. ‘Julia Augusta’ is Livia, the wife of Augustus. The name was bequeathed to her in Augustus’ will (Tacitus Ann. 1.8). Here, at the climax to Carmenta’s prophecy, Livia is raised from obedient imperial wife to imminent goddess, whose future divinity is as assured as Carmenta’s own.

1.543–58. Heracles (Roman Hercules), the ‘club-carrying hero’, was required to serve the Argive king, Eurystheus, for twelve years, in order to atone for the murder of his wife Megara and their children. During the period of servitude, Heracles was appointed and fulfilled Twelve Labours, one of which involved stealing the cattle of Geryon, a triple-bodied (or triple-headed) monster dwelling on the island of Erythea in the far west (see Apollodorus 2.5.10). Having successfully captured the animals, Heracles herds them across southern Europe towards Greece. En route, he visits the home of Evander (= ‘Good Man’ in Greek), whose house is called ‘Tegean’ after Tegea, a city of Arcadia, and during the night some of his cattle are stolen by Cacus (= Greek Kakos, ‘Bad Man’), a fire-breathing monster who resides in a cave of the Aventine (or Palatine), said to be a son of Volcanus (Mulciber). The story is told in Livy 1.7, Virgil Aen. 8.190–305, Prop. 4.9 and Dion. Ant. Rom.1.39–42.

1.559. ‘Jupiter’s son’ is Hercules (= Greek Heracles, Zeus’ son by the mortal woman Alcmena).

1.573–4. Typhoeus was the monstrous dragon defeated by Zeus –the final challenge to Zeus’ position as king of gods, according to Hesiod (Th. 823–35). Ovid elicits the tradition that the defeated Typhoeus was buried beneath Mount Etna and is the cause of its flames.

1.581–2. The altar called the Ara Maxima was found in the Forum Boarium (‘Cattle Market’). A variant tradition held that it was Evander who built the altar for Heracles. At the Ara Maxima a festival was celebrated annually on August 12, having a ritual of Greek type (see ARR: 435–7). Greek pottery recovered in the Forum Boarium dates from as early as the eighth century BC.

1.587–8. The Ides belong to Jupiter. Varro (see St Augustine De Civ. D. 7.9) says that while Janus has power over beginnings, Jupiter has power over the summits (summa). As he is the highest (summus) of Roman deities (line 608), so the apex of the month, its midpoint, is sacred to him, and on this day his priest, the Flamen Dialis, sacrifices to him in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus upon the summit of the Capitoline Hill (see ARR: 100, 181). In addition to the white lamb offered regularly on the Ides (see 1.56), Ovid here states that a gelded ram is sacrificed to Jupiter by his Flamen on January’s Ides. According to Macrobius (Sat. 1.16.30), the Flaminica, wife of the Flamen Dialis, sacrifices a ram to Jupiter on each of the nundinae in the Regia.

1.589–90. The poet speaks of the achievements of Octavian, in return for which he received the name Augustus; the remarks are directed towards Germanicus.

1.593–8. Allusion is made in these lines to various military leaders by the lands or people they subdued: Africa, Publius Cornelius Scipio, the elder and younger (called Africanus); the Isaurians of Asia Minor, Publius Servilius Vatia (called Isauricus); Crete, Quintus Caecilius Metellus (called Creticus); Numidia, Quintus Caecilius Metellus (not the same as the preceding, called Numidicus); Messana, Manius Valerius Maximus (called Messal(l)a); Numantia, Publius Cornelius Scipio, the younger (called Numantinus); Germany, Nero Claudius Drusus (called Germanicus), father of the Germanicus to whom Ovid dedicates this work at 1.3.

1.599–600. The reference is certainly to Augustus, though possible allusion to Julius Caesar as well cannot be excluded.

1.601–6. Reference to titles acquired in conquest continue: Titus Manlius called Torquatus for the golden torque which he took from a Celt whom he had killed; and Marcus Valerius Messalla, called Corvus because he was said to have been assisted in battle by a raven (corvus) which attacked his Gallic opponent. ‘Magnus’ is Pompey, and ‘Maximus’ Quintus Fabius: see Glossary.

1.607–13. Here the poet tries to forge a link between Augustus and Jupiter by invoking the religious sense of augustus and by etymologically tying the word to augurium (‘augury’) and auget (‘he augments’). In this case, unlike most, Ovid’s etymologizing is actually sound; all three words are likely derived from Proto-Indo-European *h_2eug-, ‘to increase’ (see ARR: 118–19). The analogy between Augustus and Jupiter is widespread in Ovid’s later writings (see, e.g., Met 15.858–60; Tr. 1.1.81, 3.1.35–8, 5.2.46); it develops earlier poetic representations of Augustus as Jove-like (see Virgil Geo. 4.560–61), or even as Jupiter’s vice-regent (see Horace Odes 1.12.49–60), into the image of Augustus as a Jupiter on earth. The oak crown which adorned Augustus’ house was (quite apart from its particular social meaning, see 1.614n.) a symbol of Jupiter (‘his oaken garland’, line 614), and is to be found, together with Jupiter’s eagle in the representation of Augustus as Jupiter-on-earth, on the large gem known as the Gemma Augustea, manufactured in the last years of Augustus’ principate. Augustus in Fasti is frequently represented as a god (see, e.g., 1.530, 3.421 and 4.954), as are (less frequently) other members of the present imperial family: Germanicus (1.5–6) and Livia (1.536). For other comparisons of Augustus to Jupiter in Fasti, see 1.650 and 2.131–2.

1.614. Among the various crowns bestowed by the Romans for acts of courage, the corona civica, made of oak leaves, was awarded for saving the life of a fellow soldier in combat. Augustus (RG 6.16–18) wrote of how his residence on the Palatine had doorposts decorated with laurel and a corona civica fastened above the door (see 4.953 and n.). The oak crown was also an emblem of Jupiter (see 1.607–13n.).

1.615–16. The reference is to Tiberius.

1.617–18. Ovid calls the sun ‘Titan’, as he was the son of Hyperion, one of the Titans, children of Gaea and Uranus (see Met. 4.192 –though earlier in Fasti Ovid identifies the sun as Hyperion: see 1.385–6 and n.). Counting inclusively, three days have passed since the Ides of January; the second day of the Carmentalia is now to be celebrated. When the celebration of a festival spanned two days, a hiatus of one or, as here, three days commonly separated the two. In this way, both days of the festival could begin on odd numbered days. The Romans considered odd numbered days to be lucky, even numbered to be unlucky. This alternation of lucky and unlucky days is highly reminiscent of periodicity displayed in Celtic and Indo-Aryan calendars (see R&R: 84–9).

1.619–20. The carpentum is a two-wheeled carriage; the word appears to be of Celtic origin (not derived from Carmenta, see Ernout-Meillet: 101).

1.621–8. The senate granted this vehicular privilege to the women of Rome when they contributed gold to assist Camillus in fulfilling a dedication vowed to Apollo; on which see lines 641–2. Livy (34.1–8) says that Roman women had been deprived of this right for a period during the second Punic War and for a time thereafter.

1.629–30. The prohibition against hides, remains of a dead creature, is not unique to the shrine of Carmenta (see Varro Ling. 7.84).

1.631–6. The epithets of Carmenta, ‘Porrima’ (also called ‘Prorsa’ and ‘Antevorta’) and ‘Postverta’ or ‘Postvorta’, came to be identified by some authors as names of distinct beings, as by Ovid in the present passage. He interprets the names as referring to the opposing faces of prophetic activity: ‘Porrima’ (which he rightly links with porro, ‘long ago’; line 635) is oriented towards the past, ‘Postvorta’ (‘turned to what comes after’) towards the future. The prophetic interpretation seems likely to be the original sense –as Carmenta is the ancient goddess of sacred song –but some authors interpret the epithets in the light of her affiliation with childbirth; thus Varro identifies ‘Prorsa’ with a normal head first birth, but ‘Postvorta’ with a breech birth (the child turned backwards).

1.637–40. Concordia, the goddess of peaceful agreement, received the vow of a temple in 367 BC from the dictator M. Furius Camillus. The occasion of the vow was the peaceful resolution of a rancorous political struggle between patricians and plebs. Situated in the north-west corner of the Forum, slightly elevated, Concordia’s temple stood beneath that of Juno Moneta, high upon the Capitoline (see 6.183–4).

1.641–2. Furius Camillus had conquered the great Etruscan city of Veii in 396 BC, the occasion of the dedication of gold to Apollo’s sanctuary at Delphi mentioned in 1.621–8n.

1.645–6. The temple of Concordia had been rebuilt by Tiberius, utilizing wealth acquired in his German conquests, and rededicated in AD 10. The address to Tiberius as ‘revered leader’ (line 646) and to Livia as his ‘mother’ (line 649) indicates that this passage was written after the death of Augustus (AD 14). The first temple of Concordia and the various rebuildings of it, Dumézil has insightfully noted, were situated in the vicinity of the Comitium (the place of public assembly), where was reconciled the legendary conflict between Romulus and Sabines (see 3.213–34 and n.), the first and third-function figures in the mythic history of Rome.

1.649–50. Tiberius’ mother is Livia, wife of (the now dead) Augustus, here denoted as ‘great Jove’ (see 1.607–13n.). Ovid uses similar language of Livia at Pont. 3.1.118. The altar which Livia dedicated to Concordia was in the Porticus Liviae. The latter was dedicated in 7 BC (see 6.639–48), but it is unlikely that the altar to Concordia was dedicated before the banishment of Augustus’ daughter Julia in 2 BC. See also 6.637–8. For the role of Concordia in the factional rivalries of the imperial house, see H-B 1994: 150–55, 162–72; also Introduction 5.VII.

1.651–2. Ovid here refers to the movement of the sun from the sign of Capricornus to that of the Water-Bearer, Aquarius.

1.653–4. The evening setting of the constellation Lyra is also dated by Ovid to February 2; see 2.75–6n.

1.657–62. Certain festivals are moveable, such as the Feriae Sementivae (‘Festival of Sowing’; see 1.671–6n.), and so are not marked in the calendar. The determination of the date of this rite is within the purview of the Pontifical College and is obviously dependent upon climatic conditions being favourable for the activity celebrated. The Pontifical College consisted not only of the Pontifices (originally three in number, eventually expanding to sixteen), the chief member of whom was the Pontifex Maximus, but also of the Rex Sacrorum and the Flamines Maiores (see Cicero Dom. 135; Har. Resp. 12). Under the umbrella of the college stood the Vestal Virgins, the Flamines Minores and the scribes called the Pontifices Minores. The Pontifical College was in charge of the calendar, not only determining the dates of moveable feasts but also undertaking periodic intercalation to bring the Roman lunar-based calendar into alignment with the solar year. This was done ineffectually and apparently with conscious manipulation for political ends; so much so that by 191 BC, the Roman calendar was almost four months ahead of the solar year. When Julius Caesar reformed the calendar in 46 BC, in order to harmonize the calendar with the solar year, the initial year of his calendar was required to have 15 months, consisting of 445 days (see Frazer 3.46–7; Michels 1967: 102–3). The Pontifices also served as keepers of sacred knowledge and exercised authority in matters of civil law such as adoption and inheritance (among yet numerous other functions). The name Pontifex means literally ‘bridge-builder’, and the Pontifices were affiliated with that bridge called the Pons Sublicius, said to be the oldest bridge in Rome, at which they supervised the observance of certain rites. This affiliation is quite probably secondary, however, and the name of the priest quite archaic, originating in the early Indo-European sense of *pont-, ‘way, path’.

1.663. The Roman practice of ritually adorning animals is attested by other authors and by Ovid elsewhere; see 5.52 (horses) and 6.311 (asses).

1.667–70. The annual feast celebrated by rural districts is the Paganalia, also a moveable rite. Tibullus (2.1.1–20) describes such a festival during which both humans and animals were to rest from their labours and prayers were offered for protection of grain and herds.

1.671–6. In these and the following lines, Ovid closely links the activities of the two third-function deities Ceres and Tellus (Earth); theirs is the Feriae Sementivae (‘Festival of Sowing’). This moveable feast (see 1.657–62n.) consisted of two days of celebration, one dedicated to Tellus followed seven days later by the second in honour of Ceres. During the festival, offerings are made of spelt and a pregnant sow (lines 671–2). Macrobius (Sat. 1.12.20) identifies the pregnant sow as earth’s usual victim, and Arnobius (Adv. Nat. 7.22) writes that the pregnant sow is sacrificed to Tellus; compare the massive sacrifice of pregnant cows made to her at the time of the Fordicidia in mid April (see 4.629–32n.), when the two goddesses will conspire yet again as teeming earth gives life to the new grain. Note also the offering of spelt prescribed for the Cerialia, festival of Ceres (see 4.409–10). The association of the two goddesses was reflected in the setting up of a statue of Ceres outside the temple of Tellus in Rome (see Pliny HN 34.15).

1.691. Among the Romans it was believed that eating darnel (a grass growing among grain crops) caused blurred vision (see Plautus Mil. 315–23).

1.697–704. The poet’s words of thanks for peace are addressed to the imperial house (‘your house’, i.e. the house of Germanicus, line 701). In line 704 Ovid draws the touted Pax Augusta together with the fecundity of the earth, invoking an ideology with roots anchored in the third function of Proto-Indo-European society (see 4.911–32n.). Much of Ovid’s language here is indebted to Virgil (esp. Geo. 1.507–8).

1.705–8. The anniversary of the Forum temple of Castor and Pollux, the sons of the Spartan queen Leda (hence ‘Ledaean gods’), falls on this date, according to Ovid. The divine twins (Gemini) or Dioscuri (‘Boys of Zeus’; see 5.699–700n.) appeared at Juturna’s pool (see 1.463–4n.) after the battle of Lake Regillus (499/6 BC), in which the Romans had defeated the Latin alliance formed against them after the expulsion of the Etruscan kings from Rome. It was said that Castor and Pollux had been seen in the ranks of the Roman cavalry, fighting against the Latins, and that in the heat of battle, a temple had been vowed to them by A. Postumius Albus, dictator. Ovid, however, appears to be referring not to the original dedication of the temple, but to its rebuilding by Tiberius in AD 6. Thus the founding ‘brothers from a family of gods’ are Tiberius and his deceased brother Drusus, whose names Tiberius had inscribed on the temple of the divine twins.

1.709. ‘Lean-spun song’ is a song of a Callimachean nature (aetiological, intellectually subtle, densely textured, finely crafted, etc.). The translation draws out the semiotics of carmen deduxit (literally ‘song has led me’, with the implication that it is carmen deductum, ‘lean-spun song’, which has done so; see Virgil Ecl. 6.5). See also Met. 1.4.

1.709–22. The Ara Pacis, ‘Altar of Peace’, is one of the pre-eminent monuments of Augustan Rome. Dedicated on the Campus Martius in 9 BC, the altar commemorated the return of Augustus from his campaigns in Spain and Gaul. However, the reference to ‘our leaders’ (line 714, probably Tiberius and Germanicus) and to ‘the house’ (line 721, i.e. the whole imperial house) suggests that the poet has Augustus’ successors too in mind here.

1.711–12. On 2 September 31 BC, Octavian (Augustus) defeated the forces of his rival Mark Antony at the naval battle of Actium, and with this event (and its ending of Rome’s civil wars), Ovid marks the coming of Pax, wearing ‘Actium’s laurels’.

Fasti 2: FEBRUARY

2.1–18. Elegiac verse had earlier served Ovid in what he here characterizes as more modest undertakings, Amores, Heroides, Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris, even suggesting the triviality of these works on love in comparison with the present weighty task to which his elegiac verse is now directed. In the process he alludes self-consciously to the aetiological elegies of his main Roman predecessor, Propertius (with 2.7 and 2.9 compare Prop. 4.1.69 and 4.135–7 respectively). On the genre issues raised here see Introduction 5.III. See also the proems to Books 3 and 4. Some scholars have suggested that, because this proem is dedicated to Augustus, it originally stood at the beginning of Fasti 1 and formed the original dedication of the work (see Tr. 2.551–2). Many reject this hypothesis. As the poem now stands, the proems to Fasti 1 and 2 are addressed to imperial, historical figures (Germanicus, Augustus); those to Fasti 3 and 4 are addressed to the gods most associated with Rome, Mars and Venus.

2.19–20. In these and the following lines Ovid offers his etymological analysis of February’s name, linking it with februa, a Latin term denoting ‘means of purification’. Varro (Ling. 6.34) agrees with Ovid concerning the name of the month, pointing out that in the month of February the Roman people are purified, and adds that februa is of Sabine origin. The ultimate etymology of the term is uncertain; Dumézil argued for its identification as a cognate of Sanskrit gandharva- (see ARR: 349, n. 33), male demigods, part human and part horse in anatomy. Aside from the uses here detailed by Ovid, the term occurs often in discussions of the rite of the Lupercalia (which Ovid treats in 2.267–474). Servius (Aen. 8.343) records that the goat hide (see lines 31–2) used in the rite was called februum in early days.

2.21–2. By ‘King-Priest’ Ovid refers to the Rex Sacrorum, a member of the Pontifical College (see 1.657–62n.), and the highest ranking of the priests according to Festus (p. 185M). In Ovid’s day, and much earlier, it is, however, the Pontifex Maximus who wields the greatest priestly power. The Rex Sacrorum is the priest who continued the sacred duties of the king with the demise of the Roman monarchy late in the sixth century BC. While a Pontifex Minor declares to the people on which day of the month the Nones will fall (see 1.55n.), it is the Rex Sacrorum who on the Nones announces the feriae publicae, festival days, which follow within the month (see Varro Ling. 6.28). No festivals occur between the Kalends and the Nones with the exception of the obscure Poplifugia of July 5 (about which practically nothing is known, but which appears to be in some way the populace’s analogue of the Regifugium; see 2.491–6n., 2.685–6n.; ARR: 562–3).

2.23–4. Reference is apparently made here to the practice of sweeping out a house after someone residing in it has died and been buried. The house was then purified with roasted spelt and salt.

2.25–6. Frazer (2: 284) speculates that by ‘pure tree’ Ovid may have meant an arbor felix, a ‘lucky tree’. The Pontifices distinguished trees as lucky or unlucky depending upon whether, in the first case, they produced white fruit or, in the second, dark fruit (see Macr. Sat. 3.20.2–3).

2.31–2. On the Luperci, see 2.267n.

2.33–4. ‘The days of the dead’, the Dies Ferales or Dies Parentales, began on February 13, the Ides, and extended through February 21. See Ovid’s discussion commencing at lines 533–4.

2.39–40. In the following lines Ovid rehearses Greek traditions of homicides which were ritually cleansed. Peleus, father of Achilles, had cleansed Patroclus, attendant and close companion of Achilles (here named Actorides, after his grandfather Actor), of blood guilt; as a boy, Patroclus had accidentally killed a playmate. Peleus himself was guilty of murder. Along with his brother Telamon, Peleus killed their half-brother Phocus out of jealousy for his athletic prowess. In the tradition cited here, Peleus was cleansed by Acastus, a son of Pelias (see 1.491n.). By ‘Haemonia’ Ovid refers to Thessaly (see 5.381), the region of northern Greece in which Acastus’ city of Iolcus was located.

2.41–2. ‘The Phasian’ is Medea, wife of the Greek hero Jason (see 1.491n.). He, however, would take another wife, Glauce (also called Creusa by Latin authors), whereupon Medea murdered both her own children, whom she had conceived with Jason, and his new bride. Escaping in a flying chariot drawn by dragons, Medea fled to Athens where she took refuge with and married King Aegeus.

2.43–4. Amphiareïdes (that is, ‘son of Amphiaraus’, a seer of Argos) is Alcmaeon, who killed his mother Eriphyle in order to avenge his father’s death, for which she was responsible. Alcmaeon was cleansed of his blood guilt by the river god Acheloüs.

2.47–54. The curious idea that the Decemviri, ‘Decemvirs’ (see 6.661–4n.) had reversed the calendrical positions of February (formerly the last month) and January (the first month), as Ovid seems to be suggesting, is otherwise unknown (see Michels 1967: 128–30). He further indicates that the final festival of the year was that of Terminus, god of boundaries (see 2.667–70n.), on February 23. While a rite of Terminus would appropriately mark the boundary of the old year, the final festivals of February in Ovid’s Fasti are the Regifugium on the 24th and the Equirria of the 27th. For Ovid the obscure Regifugium at least was added to the calendar only after the expulsion of the Etruscan kings (see 2.685–6n.), and so would not have been part of the ‘ancient’ timetable.

2.55–8. The ‘Phrygian Mother’ is Cybele (see 4.181–2n.), whose temple(s), says Ovid, once stood next to that of Juno Sospita, no longer remaining in his own day (apparently not the temple of this goddess which was located in the Forum Holitorium, ‘Vegetable Market’). Juno Sospita (‘Saviour’) was particularly worshipped in the Italian city of Lanuvium, where she was depicted as a militaristic figure, dressed in a goat-skin cape, armed with shield and spear. As Dumézil has pointed out, however, attributes of Juno Sospita at Lanuvium clearly extend beyond the realm of the martial. In several inscriptions dedications are made Iunoni Seispite Matri Reginae (ARR: 297–8), ‘to Juno Saviour Mother Queen’. Such a Juno clearly is linked with each of the three elements of early Indo-European society (the realms of war, fecundity and sovereignty respectively). The third-function aspect of Juno Sospita is further emphasized ritually at Lanuvium: at various times, maidens would bring barley cakes into a grove sacred to the goddess and acceptance of these offerings by serpents dwelling therein was interpreted as prognostication of a coming agricultural abundance (see Frazer 1: 296–7 for details). Dumézil has accordingly seen Juno as in origin one of those Indo-European goddesses which he has identified as trivalent (or multivalent), having analogues in Vedic Sarasvatī, Avestan Anāhitā and Scandinavian Frigg/Freya (bivalent). Like the last-named, the Juno of early Rome has preserved only aspects of the first and third function, being called Lucina (as goddess of childbirth; see 3.255–8) and Regina (see ARR: 300–303).

2.59–66. The poet again (see, e.g., 1.13) rehearses Augustus’ achievements as builder and rebuilder of sacred architecture. At Res Gestae 20.4 Augustus claims that in his sixth consulship (28 BC) he not only ‘restored eighty-two temples of the gods in the city on the authority of the senate’, but also that he ‘neglected none that required restoration at the time’ (nullo praetermisso quod eo tempore refici debebat). The focus here on the unrestored temple of Juno Sospita seems pointed. See Introduction 4.VI.

2.68. The phrase ‘alien [Latin advena ] Tiber’ alludes to the river’s origin, far from Rome, in north-east Etruria, near Arretium (modern Arezzo).

2.69–70. By ‘Numa’s sanctuary’, Ovid refers to the temple of Vesta (see 6.257–62n.). Augustus had dedicated a temple upon the Capitoline to Jupiter Tonans (Thunderer) after narrowly being missed by a lightning bolt while campaigning in Spain. On the Kalends sacrifices are made to Juno (see 1.55).

2.75–6. Ovid also assigns the evening setting of the constellation of Lyra, the Lyre, to January 23. Pliny (HN 18.235) cites a date of February 4. Lyra’s true setting in Ovid’s day was on February 9.

2.77–8. Leo is the constellation of the Lion of course, but which of its stars is identified by the phrase ‘Leo’s back’ is uncertain –perhaps that bright one which is seen as his heart (basiliscus). The morning (not evening) setting of this star was on February 6.

2.79–80. The constellation of Delphis, the Dolphin, had its evening setting on February 2.

2.81. The poet refers to two different Greek legends regarding the origin of the constellation of the Dolphin. According to one, Poseidon had proposed marriage to Amphitrite, often identified as one of the daughters of the old sea deity Nereus, but she fled in the face of his proposal. It was a dolphin who discovered her and persuaded her to return to the sea god. In gratitude, Poseidon placed the Dolphin in the sky.

2.82. The second tradition of the origin of the Dolphin constellation is rehearsed by Ovid in the following lines: the story of Arion of Lesbos and his lyre. In the Suda, an encyclopedia compiled in approximately the tenth century AD, Arion is identified as the founder of Greek tragedy. Nothing of his work has survived.

2.84–92. Claims for the magical power of poetry were common among the Augustan poets, especially Virgil (see, e.g., Ecl. 8.1–5). Orpheus was the regular paradigm of such power (see Virgil Ecl. 3.46; Geo. 4.471–84; Ovid Met. 10.40–44, 86–105). Here Arion is presented as having Orphic power over nature.

2.89. ‘Pallas’ is the Greek goddess Athena (Roman Minerva) and her bird is the owl. The origin of her name Pallas is obscure; one Greek tradition identifies it as the name of one of young Athena’s playmates (a daughter of the sea deity Triton), whom she killed during a quarrel (see Apollodorus 3.12.3).

2.121–2. Why the singing of February’s Nones is the highest honour in the Fasti is set out in lines 127–44. It was on this day that Augustus received the title Pater Patriae, ‘Father of the Fatherland’, in the year 2 BC. ‘Alternating song’ refers to the alternating length of the two lines (hexameter followed by pentameter) of his elegiac couplet.

2.125–6. Ovid continues to display anxiety at his choice of the trifling elegiac meter for such a weighty undertaking as singing the praises of Augustus, bemoaning his dismissal of the heroic hexameters of Homer. For the genre issue, see Introduction 5.

2.127–8. In almost these very words, Augustus writes of being awarded this honour in his Res Gestae (35.1): ‘In my thirteenth consulship the senate, the equestrian order and the whole people of Rome titled me Father of the Fatherland [Pater Patriae ].’ Furthermore the title was to be ‘inscribed in the vestibule of my house and in the Curia Julia and in the Forum Augustum beneath the chariot which had been put there in my honour by decree of the senate’.

2.131–2. See 1.607–13n.

2.133–44. The famous synkrisis, in which Ovid contrasts the pettiness of Romulus and magnificence of Augustus. For a discussion of this controversial episode, see Introduction 4.V and VII. On the walls of early Rome and the murder of Remus, see also 4.835–44 and 4.843–4n.

2.135–6. Cures was the city of Titus Tatius, king of the Sabines who made war on young Rome. During the Sabine War, Romulus attacked the Italian city of Caenina, killing Acron, its king (see 1.201–2n.).

2.139–40. Romulus’ ‘rape’ is the abduction of the Sabine women, which precipitated Rome’s first war (see 2.429–34 and n.; 3.199–228). Augustus was responsible for several pieces of legislation ostensibly aimed at curbing sexual impropriety. On Romulus harbouring criminals on the Capitoline (his ‘grove’), see 3.431–4.

2.142. Ovid distinguishes between Romulus as dominus (‘master’) and Augustus as princeps (‘first man’, ‘chief’). Dominus was an ancient term designating literally the master of the household (domus). With its nuances of ownership and control, dominus was rejected by Augustus (Suet. Aug. 53.1; Pliny Ep. 10) in favour of the politically more expedient princeps.

2.144. Mars deified his son Romulus, transforming him into Quirinus (see 1.37n.), and Augustus deified his (adopted) father Julius Caesar. Augustus alone cannot be credited with the deification of Caesar; Ovid is perhaps recalling the 300 Perusians whom Augustus had slaughtered as a sacrifice to the deified Caesar (Suet. Aug. 15). On Caesar’s apotheosis see also Metamorphoses 15.746ff., esp. 15.760–61: ‘Lest the latter (Augustus) be born of mortal seed, the former (Caesar) had to be made a god.’

2.145–6. ‘Ida’s boy’ is the prince Ganymede of Troy (close by Mount Ida), abducted by Zeus to be his wine-steward. Ganymede was sometimes identified with the constellation of Aquarius, the Water-Bearer. Neither the true nor the apparent rising of Aquarius occurs on this date (January 22 for the former, February 22 for the latter). For the effect of the juxtaposition here see Introduction 4.V.

2.149–50. Five mornings after the Nones finds the Morning Star (Lucifer) rising in spring (apparently having begun on February 9 for Ovid).

2.153–4. ‘Ursa’s Guard’ is the constellation called by the Greeks Arctophylax (the Bear-Keeper) or, alternatively, Boötes (the Ox-Herder; see 2.183–90n.). It rises in a reclining position; Ovid indicates that on February 11 both feet are visible.

2.155–6. In these and the following lines, Ovid relates the Greek tale of the Arcadian nymph Callisto, favourite attendant of Artemis (Diana) until she conceives a child by Zeus (see Met. 2.409–507). For the juxtaposition of this Jupiter narrative with the Pater Patriae passage, see Introduction 4.V.

2.173. Here Ovid has Diana address Callisto as ‘Lycaonid’, invoking the tradition that she was daughter of the Arcadian king, Lycaon. The king’s name appears to be built on the Greek word for wolf (lukos), and Lycaon was said to have been transformed into a wolf by Zeus. The cause of the transformation is given as the sacrifice of a child to Zeus Lycaeus by Lycaon, or the attempted feeding of human flesh to Zeus when Lycaon entertained the god in his home (so Ovid Met. 1.216–39).

2.177–82. Often Juno (Hera) visits her anger on those with whom her husband has been unfaithful. Callisto, his unwilling lover, is transformed into a bear –a fate reminiscent of her father’s own metamorphosis (see 2.173n.).

2.183–90. The son of Zeus and Callisto is Arcas, identified as the eponymous ancestor of the Arcadians. While hunting one day, Arcas encounters the bear who had been Callisto and prepares to kill her, not knowing her to be his mother. His father Zeus intervenes and places both son and mother among the stars as, respectively, Arctophylax (see 2.153–4n.) and Ursa Major (the Great Bear), or Megalē Arctos in Greek (for this account of the myth, see Ovid Met. 2.409–507). The Great Bear constellation was sometimes identified by the Greeks as a wagon, in which case the neighbouring Arctophylax was called Boötes, the Ox-Herder. In the old Roman tradition, the Great Bear constellation was identified as Septentriones, ‘Seven Ploughing-Oxen’.

2.191–2. ‘White Tethys’ waters’ is a reference to the ocean (the Titan Oceanus, consort of Tethys). The Great Bear (Arctos) is called Maenalian after Mount Maenalus in Arcadia, where, according to one tradition, Arcas was buried. In the northern hemisphere, Ursa Major moves around the North Star, never setting. This inability to set, observed as early as Homer (Il. 18.487–9, Od. 5.273–5), was said to be the consequence of the unending rage of Hera.

2.193–4. On the island of the Tiber stood a temple of the rustic deity Faunus (see 3.291–2n.), built with moneys collected from drovers who had violated the grazing limits placed on public pastures. The temple was dedicated on the Ides of February in 193 BC.

2.195–6. February 13 also marks the anniversary of the annihilation of the 306 Fabii, according to Ovid, though several ancient authorities date the event to July 18 (see, inter alios, Livy 6.1.11). In lines 198–242, Ovid relates the story of how the Fabii died in defence of the young Roman republic. The Etruscan city of Veii, located only 10 miles from Rome, was a constant military menace. In order to protect Rome against incursions by the Veientines, the family Fabii established an outpost along the Cremera, a stream which flows past Veii en route to the Tiber. In 477 BC, after holding the position for two years, the Fabii were ambushed by the Veientines and wiped out. Ovid’s favourable presentation of the Fabii may reflect his connection with Paullus Fabius Maximus, perhaps Ovid’s most powerful patron in Augustan Rome, whose death in AD 14 was bound up with the imperial house’s dynastic feuding. See 6.803–10n.

2.201–4. The Porta Carmentalis (so called as it stood close to the shrine of Carmenta at the base of the Capitoline), through which the unfortunate Fabian warriors had passed as they left Rome, would become known as the Porta Scelerata, the ‘wicked gate’. The superstition of avoiding the gate is otherwise attested; see Festus p. 285M.

2.238. The Fabii traced their ancestry to Hercules.

2.239–40. The poet here endorses the tradition recorded by Livy (2.50.11), that a single young boy of the Fabian family had remained in Rome, too young to fight, and through him the family had continued.

2.241–2. Reference is made to the dictator Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, known as Cunctator, the ‘Delayer’, for his deliberate strategy of avoiding open battle with Hannibal in favour of waging a campaign of attrition.

2.243–6. Anguis, more properly Hydra or ‘Water-Snake’, is a long constellation, stretching across the night sky, on which are positioned the Crater (Bowl) and Corvus (Raven).

2.249–50. The raven is associated with Apollo in several myths, and is again represented as his messenger in the story of Coronis, mother of Asclepius (see 1.290–94n.), and her unfaithfulness to Apollo (see Ovid Met. 2.531–632). The raven told Apollo of Coronis and her lover. Enraged, Apollo killed Coronis, but he afterward bitterly lamented her loss, and turned the raven from white (said to be its natural colour) to black for the role it had played in her death.

2.267. In the long entry for February 15, Ovid relates the ancient rites of the Luperci and various stories which purport to explain the origins of certain elements of those rites. The Luperci were members of a religious fraternity, or sodality, whose principal responsibility was celebration of the rites of February 15. The sodality was divided into two groups, each bearing the name of an ancient Roman family: the Luperci Fabiani and the Luperci Quinctiales. The former was said to have been established by Remus and the latter by Romulus. In 44 BC, Julius Caesar had added to the sodality a third, but short-lived, group, the Luperci Julii. In a cave at the base of the Palatine was located the sanctuary of the Luperci, the Lupercal, identified as the spot where the infant Romulus and Remus were nursed by a she-wolf (see lines 383–422). The name of the Luperci almost certainly contains the Latin word for ‘wolf’ (lupus), but the exact sense and etymology of the term is uncertain.

2.268. The Lupercalia, festival of the Luperci, is dedicated to the rustic deity Faunus (see 3.291–2n.). In Dumézil’s words, ‘Once a year, for one day, the balance between the ordered, explored, compartmented world and the savage, untamed world was upset, when Faunus took possession of everything’ (ARR: 346). Livy (1.5.2) states that the festival celebrated the deity Inuus. This obscure figure was, however, commonly equated with Faunus; the name Inuus was said by Servius (Aen. 6.775) and others to be derived from inire, ‘to penetrate’ (see 2.429–48n.), with reference to the deity’s sexual profligacy.

2.269. Ovid poses his question to the Muses, the goddesses of the arts and creative inspiration, called the Piërides as their home was said to be in the region of Pieria, close to Mount Olympus.

2.273–6. In these lines Ovid invokes several bits of the geography of Arcadia, home of Pan: Mount Pholoe, the Stymphalian lake, and the river Ladon are all located in northern Arcadia, as was the town of Nonacris. Tricrene is a mountain and Parrhasia a western region of Arcadia in which was located Mount Lycaeus.

2.279–81. The Romans equated Greek Pan with their own Faunus; hence Ovid credits Evander, the Arcadian who settled on the Palatine (see 1.462), with introducing the Lupercalia to Rome. ‘Pelasgian’ is a term used by Greek authors to designate the ancient, native population of the Aegean, and hence is applied to the Arcadians, said to be ‘older than the moon’ (see line 290).

2.282. The participation of the Flamen Dialis in the Lupercalia is not otherwise known. The fact that he was normally prohibited from having contact with both goats and dogs (see 2.283–4n.) renders the claim suspect.

2.283–4. A remarkable and central feature of the Lupercalia is the racing of the unclothed Luperci about the Palatine. Prior to the start of this marathon of exposure, goats were sacrificed, as well as a dog (suggestive of a connection with lupus). Two boys from noble families were brought into the presence of the sacrificing Luperci; certain of these touched the foreheads of the boys with a bloodied knife, and others washed off the blood with wool which had been soaked in milk (compare 2.21–2). The boys were then compelled to laugh. Some of the hides of the sacrificed goats were fashioned into loin coverings to be worn by the runners. A great feast was served up, and the run around the Palatine began. The racing Luperci carried strips of hide from the sacrificed goats with which they flagellated the crowds, doubtless spectators who had gathered for the occasion, especially striking women, who willingly stretched out their hands to receive the lashes of the Luperci. The purpose of the whipping was to instil fertility in Roman women (see 2.425–48 and nn.). Lydus (Mens. 4.25) adds that the rites brought fertility to the Roman crops; notice that in 2.32 Ovid himself speaks of the Luperci scouring ‘the whole ground with hide-strips’. The Lupercalia is not, however, only a fertility ritual but is centrally concerned with purification; the term februa, ‘means of purification’ (see 2.19–20n.), and its derivatives occur throughout descriptions of the festival. Servius (Aen. 8.343) states that februum was in fact the name given to the goat hide used by the Luperci (see ARR: 347–9). Suetonius reports that Augustus (obviously trying to clean up the rite in accordance with the ‘ethics’ of his legislative programme) forbade beardless youths from participating in the naked running (Aug. 31.4). Augustus himself mentions the rite as one to be revitalized (RG 4.2). See also Introduction 5.VI.

2.285–302. The nude (or almost) running of the Luperci is explained by reference to the similar practice of Pan and the ancient inhabitants of his region, Arcadia. In line 289 the poet may be alluding to the tradition which placed the birth of Zeus on Mount Lycaeus in western Arcadia.

2.303–4. Following upon the answer to his preceding query, the poet then turns to the question of why Pan (with whom Faunus is equated) goes about nude. He finds an answer in the tale of Pan’s lust for the Lydian queen Omphale, related in lines 2.305–58.

2.305. The ‘young Tirynthian’ is Heracles (Roman Hercules), so-called after the city of Tiryns in which he came to reside. Heracles had killed Iphitus, brother of the woman Iole whom Heracles desired but whom he was denied by her father Eurytus. As a consequence of the murder, Apollo’s Delphic oracle directed Heracles to be sold into slavery for one year (or three); he was purchased by Omphale, queen of Lydia (see Apollodorus 2.6.2–3).

2.309. The ‘Maeonian’ is Omphale. Various authorities assert that Lydia had once been called Maeonia; see, inter alios, Pliny HN 5.110.

2.318. While Heracles was Omphale’s slave, she dressed him in women’s clothing and assigned to him women’s chores.

2.320–26. Ovid not only presents Heracles as putting on feminine apparel, but has Omphale and Heracles exchanging clothes.

2.327–30. Abstinence from sexual intercourse prior to the beginning of a religious festival is a practice attested by various Greek and Roman authors.

2.359–60. Ovid now adds (lines 361–80) a tale from the mythic history of Rome to the reasons already adduced for the nude running of the Luperci.

2.377–8. Reference is made to the two groups of Luperci, the Luperci Fabiani and the Luperci Quinctiales, and the tradition that the former were founded by Remus, the latter by Romulus (see 2.267n.).

2.381–2. The attention which Ovid continues to lavish on explanation in his description of the Lupercalia must reveal both the strangeness and the importance of the rite for him. Next expounded (lines 383–422) is the origin of the name of the Lupercal, the Palatine sanctuary of the Luperci.

2.383–4. Numitor, the rightful king of Alba Longa, had been deposed by his brother Amulius. The evil brother killed the sons of Numitor and sent away his daughter, Rhea Silvia, to become a Vestal Virgin (an attendant of the goddess Vesta), intending to ensure that the girl would thus produce no offspring who might one day lay claim to the throne. Amulius’ plans were, however, to be waylaid by Mars, who came to Silvia and with her engendered twin sons, Romulus and Remus (the ‘heavenly seeds’ of line 383).

2.385–8. Amulius orders the infant twins to be set adrift in the Tiber, where certain death would seem to await them.

2.389–90. Varro (Ling. 5.30), among others, similarly records that the Tiber had once been called the Albula. Tiberinus, one of the kings of Alba Longa, had drowned in the river, and thereafter the river carried his name.

2.411–22. The raft in which the twin sons of Mars drifted was washed ashore beneath a fig tree, the ‘Ruminal fig’ (ficus Ruminalis), where a she-wolf found and nourished them with her milk. The affiliation of the fig tree and milk is neither unnatural nor otherwise unknown. The sap of the fig tree has a milky appearance. On the Nones of July, the Nonae Caprotinae (‘Goat Nones’, July 7), Roman women present a sacrifice to Juno Caprotina beneath a caprificus, a wild fig tree (literally ‘goat fig’), using the milky sap of the tree in their sacrificial offering (see Varro Ling. 6.18). The name of the Ruminal fig has been since antiquity associated with rumis, ruma, ‘nipple’, but perhaps more likely preserves an Etruscan pronunciation of the name of the city Rome, being maintained also in the divine names Jupiter Ruminus and Rumina, an obscure goddess to whom shepherds make offerings of milk (see ARR: 182; Frazer 2: 367–8). This fig tree had stood within the grotto of the Lupercal, but was later transplanted to the Forum, being magically relocated by the augur Attus Navius.

2.423–4. In line 421 Ovid has etymologically linked ‘Lupercal’ and ‘Luperci’ with lupus, ‘wolf’ (and almost certainly rightly so, regardless of whether or not the tradition of a wolf suckling Rome’s founders has any bearing on the name of the Luperci and their sanctuary). He now, none the less, looks to Greece for yet a second, or further, etymology. Greek Pan, equated by the Romans with Faunus, was native to Arcadia and had there a sanctuary on Mount Lycaeus. In lines 279–280, Ovid has already declared the Roman Lupercalia to have been imported from Arcadia by Evander. Greek Lycaeus appears to be derived from lukos ‘wolf’ (as Luperci from Latin lupus). Moreover, certain Roman authorities claim that the Greek ritual bearing the same name, the Lycaea, gave rise to the Lupercalia (see, for example, Livy 1.5.2). Ovid here appears to be endorsing these connections and suggesting that the Greek word for wolf is also the ultimate etymon of Luperci.

2.425–8. The poet refers to the goat-hide lashes of the racing Luperci and the fertility which they bring to Roman women (see 2.283–4n.). In the lines which follow Ovid offers an account of the origin of these peculiar rites.

2.429–48. Romulus, the founder of Rome, had populated his new city with criminals, offering sanctuary to all who were fleeing from justice (see 3.431–4). As most of Rome’s first citizens were thus male, Romulus had to scheme further to acquire wives. This he accomplished by abducting the young women of the Sabines, a neighbouring Italian people, while they were in Rome celebrating the festival of the summer Consuali a (August 21)–Romulus using the festivities to lure the women to Rome (see Livy 1.9). His actions plunged Rome into war with the Sabines (see 3.201–28), after which, according to Ovid, the abducted Sabine women were not able to conceive children. Seeking relief from this barren condition, the surprisingly devoted Sabine wives, together with their Roman husbands, go to pray in a grove at the foot of the Esquiline Hill which is sacred to Juno Lucina, the goddess of childbirth. Juno’s startling answer to their prayers is rightly understood only by an old Etruscan augur: the wives are to be ‘penetrated’ (inire; see 2.268n. on the deity Inuus) by lashes from a goat-skin whip. So was born the annual rite of the Lupercalia.

2.449–52. Juno Lucina, the goddess of childbirth, probably derives her name from the second of the etyma Ovid here proposes (lux ‘light’, line 450), as it is she who delivers the child into the light of the world. Aside from her role as Lucina and Caprotina (see 2.411–22n.), Dumézil (ARR: 294–5) notes that Roman Juno is also affiliated with the realm of fecundity through the Matronalia (see 3.233–4) and, more broadly, in the dedication to her of all Kalends, the birth of the new month (see 1.55n.; on Juno as a trivalent goddess, see 2.55–8n.). Juno Lucina is sometimes identified with Diana (see Catullus 34.13–14; Virgil Ecl. 4.10), helped by the latter’s conflation with the Greek Artemis who had appropriated the function of the birth goddess Ilithyia. It is Diana qua Lucina and Ilithyia, who figures prominently in the prayers and sacrifices of the Secular Games held by Augustus in 17 BC; see Horace CS 13–20, where she is invoked to support recent Augustan marital legislation.

2.457–8. Frazer (2: 390) observes that Ovid here alludes to the movement of the sun, ‘heaven’s horses’, from the sign of Aquarius to that of Piscis, the ‘Fish’ (see Columella Rust 11.2.20).

2.459–60. A single Fish constellation was identified by Mesopotamian astronomers. The Roman practice of distinguishing two Fish was acquired from the Greeks, with whom it was perhaps original.

2.461–2. Dione is a wife of Zeus; indeed her name is a feminine form of Zeu s (earlier *Dyeēus), suggestive of a relationship of great antiquity. The divine couple had a temple at Dodona, possibly the site of the oldest Greek oracle. Homer (Il. 5.370–71) knows Aphrodite as daughter of Dione and Zeus. For Hesiod (Th. 353), however, Dione is not Zeus’ consort, but one of the Oceanids, the nymph daughters of the Titans Oceanus and Tethys; and Aphrodite is offspring of Uranus (Th. 188–200). Ovid, different still, here identifies Dione as Aphrodite (Roman Venus). On Typhon, or Typhoeus, and his fight with Zeus, see 1.573–4n.

2.464–72. Bömer (2: 115) and Frazer (2: 390–93) must certainly be right in seeing a Near Eastern origin of the story of Venus in Palestine. According to a variant tradition recorded by Hyginus (Astr. 2.30), Venus herself is transformed into a fish rather than being rescued by fish. It should be noted, however, that the description of the Euphrates (which formed the political boundary between Syria and Mesopotamia) as ‘Palestine’s stream’ (line 464) is somewhat liberal topography on Ovid’s part.

2.473–4. The belief that Syrians abstained from eating fish is widely attested among Greek and Roman sources, and is linked by some authorities with a tradition about Astarte (the Near Eastern fertility goddess who is the probable source of Greek Aphrodite) turning herself into a fish (see Bömer 2: 115; Frazer 2: 392).

2.475–80. February 17 brings the festival of the god Quirinus. By Ovid’s day the early nature of the deity was poorly understood, though vestigially preserved through the conservatism of Roman ritual. Being concerned with origins, the etymologies presented in these lines naturally enough focus upon a Sabine Quirinus, though the Julian Quirinus (see 1.37n.) receives a courteous nod and much more follows (lines 481–511). The derivation of the god’s name from curis, ‘spear’, identified by Varro as Sabine, was widely endorsed in antiquity, and a proposed connection with Cures, the name of the Sabine town of Titus Tatius, is also noted by Festus (pp. 49M, 63M). Quirites is a term used to identify the Roman citizenry in its civil, nonmilitary functions. The Romans commonly perceived its origin to be in Cures (see, for example, Varro Ling. 6.68), interpreting it as the name taken by Romans after incorporation of the Sabine community within Rome (see 3.213–34n.). In all probability, Quirites is to be derived from an earlier *co-virites, ‘the collection of men (or people)’. Varro also advocates the etymological connection of Quirites and the divine name Quirinus (Ling. 5.73), and in doing so he is undoubtedly correct. Quirinus is a -no- derivative of a noun *co-virio-, ‘assemblage of men’ (see ARR: 160–61, 259).

2.481–6. Ovid has already made reference to Romulus deified as Quirinus (see the remarks at 1.37) and in the following lines sets out the account of Romulus’ apotheosis in some detail. The ‘Lord of Arms’ is Mars, Romulus’ father. Notice again the assemblage of Jupiter, Mars and Romulus/Quirinus (the pre-Capitoline triad) as grandfather, father and son.

2.487. Ovid here repeats the words of Mars to Jupiter at Met. 14.814, which itself quotes Ennius Annales 54 (Skutsch).

2.491–6. Romulus was said to have disappeared from earth during a thunderstorm at the place called the ‘Goat’s Pit’. The date traditionally assigned to the event is the Nones of July, that is the Nonae Caprotinae, the day on which the women of Rome sacrifice to Juno Caprotina beneath a wild fig tree; this further affiliation of Romulus with the fig can hardly be accidental (see 2.411–22n.). A variant tradition placed the king’s disappearance two days earlier, on the fifth of July, the day of the obscure ritual of the Poplifugia, the ‘Flight of the People’ (see 2.21–2n.). Ovid’s ‘Men flee’ in line 495 (an element of the scenario which is otherwise attested – see Plutarch Rom. 27.3.7) looks to be a transparent reference to a link between the Poplifugia and Romulus’ disappearance.

2.497–8. Spectacular disappearance during a violent thunderstorm was not the only account of the close of Romulus’ reign; a less regal end is also attested. Plutarch (Rom. 27.5), for example, writes that Romulus was murdered by senators, who then dismembered his body and secreted the parts to an unidentified place of burial.

2.499–510. The deified Romulus appears to one Proculus Julius, an ancestor of the Caesars (see 1.37n.). The Quirites, the Roman citizens as they are named in their peace-time activities (see 2.475–80n.), are commanded to prepare themselves in the ways of war (compare Livy 1.16.7); there is a ‘new Quirinus’ and he will lead them in conquest.

2.511–12. The ‘hill’ is the Quirinal, the most northerly of the seven hills of Rome, originally occupied by Sabines according to Roman tradition. On the hill stood a temple of Quirinus among much other important cultic architecture. The repeated ‘sacred rites’ are those of the Quirinalia, to which the poet gives indirect attention in the following lines.

2.513–14. On February 17 are celebrated both the Feast of Fools and the Quirinalia, the festival of Quirinus. Little information has survived concerning the Quirinalia, but the two rituals observed on this day appear to be one and the same – such is the understanding of Festus (pp. 254–5M, 316–17M), Plutarch (Quaest. Rom. 89) and Varro (Ling. 6.13), and no source contradicts this (see ARR: 156–61). Although the identity of the officiating priest(s) on this day is nowhere recorded, the Flamen Quirinalis is an obvious and probable candidate. Roman sources preserve a record of this ancient priest of Quirinus taking part in three rituals: the Larentalia (December 23), the summer Consualia (August 21) and the Robigalia (April 25). The two last-named, as Dumézil insightfully perceived, form a natural trio together with the Quirinalia; see 2.531–2n. The first also appears to pertain to the realm of Quirinus – clearly so – but does not share the especial common denominator binding the other three; on the Larentalia, see 3.55–8n.

2.520. The first fruits of the Roman grain harvest were offered to Ceres, and such offering had to be made before any part of the new grain could be consumed.

2.527–30. The population of Rome was divided into three tribes (see 3.121–34n.), each of which was further subdivided in ten curiae, ‘wards’, a partitioning traced to the time of Romulus. A person was born into a particular curia, though in origin the curiae may have been local units. Each of the thirty curiae was headed by an elected Curio, ‘Warden’, serving for life, and from among these thirty Curiones was chosen a single Curio Maximus. The duties of this priest included the determination of the date on which each curia would celebrate the Fornacalia, the moveable feast dedicated to Fornax, goddess of ovens. The dates so appointed would be posted on thirty placards displayed in the Forum. The Fornacalia, the festival of the roasting of grain, is traditionally said to have been established by Numa.

2.531–2. Those people who were remiss in observing the Fornacalia in their own curiae on the date determined by the Curio Maximus were given the opportunity to make up its observance on February 17 at the Stultorum Feriae, the ‘Feast of Fools’, the only rite known to have been observed on the day of the Quirinalia. Latin curiais most probably to be etymologized as co-viria, an ‘assemblage of men’ given Quirinus’ own etymology (from co-virio-no-; see 2.475–80n.), it is certainly no accident that the god’s festival is held in conjunction with a culticritual in which members of all the curiae are potentially involved: ‘Quirinus may be, not the god of each curia and of its curiales[‘members’], but the god of the whole curiate organization, of the people as a whole, regarded not as an indistinct moles[‘mass’], but in its fundamental divisions’ (ARR: 160–61). Dumézil noted (see ARR: 156–61) that each of three festivals with which Quirinus is affiliated, the Robigalia, the summer Consualia and the Quirinali a(see 2.513–14n.), is thus concerned with some phase in the life of the Roman grain crop. The Flamen Quirinalis conducts the rites of the Robigalia(April 25; see 4.905–8), intended to protect grain standing in the field from the scourge of the grain rust fungus. At the summer Consuali a(August 21; see 3.199–200n.), the Flamen Quirinalis and Vestals offer sacrifice to Consus, the deity of stored grain. On the day of the Quirinalia, the goddess of ovens is placated in the rite of the roasting of grain. Quirinus, the third-function member of the pre-Capitoline triad, in keeping with his affiliation with society’s goods-producers, is time and again present throughout the ritual life of the Roman grain crop. Quirinus, the god of the whole of society, differs conspicuously from the other two members of the triad, Jupiter and Mars, in that he, through his Flamen, co-operates with other deities in the ritual life of Rome (ARR: 160).

2.533–4. Ovid has already noted (lines 33–4) that between the Ides of February (the 13th) and February 21, the Dies Ferales or Dies Parentales, ‘the days of the dead’, are observed. Throughout this period of the Parentalia, private rites were conducted on behalf of deceased family members, particularly parents (or progenitors generally) to judge from the festival’s name. During this season magistrates did not wear their purple-bordered togas, temples were closed (line 563), fires were not kindled on the altars (line 564) and weddings did not take place (see lines 557–60). The Parentalia concluded with a public ritual conducted on the final day, the Feralia (line 569).

2.535–42. Simple offerings are brought to the tombs during the Parentalia–salted corn, bread (Ceres) soaked in wine and violets – to be consumed by wandering shades (lines 565–6). The use of salted corn to appease the dead and as an offering to the Penates is otherwise attested. Wine was commonly offered at Roman graves and gravestones were at times constructed with a receptacle for such a libation.

2.543–6. According to Virgil Aen. 5.42–103, Aeneas made offerings (which included wine and purple flowers) to his dead father Anchises, and this was intended to be the foundation of a future, annual rite.

2.550. ‘Suburban pyres’ in that the dead had to be buried and cremated outside the walls of Rome, as prescribed in the Twelve Tables (see 6.661–4n.).

2.557. During the time of the festival of the dead, it is better not to marry, warns the poet; compare 3.393–6; 5.487–90.

2.558–62. Leading the bride in the wedding procession to the groom’s home was a young boy, bearing a torch which had been lit at the hearth of the bride. A torch of white thorn is recommended, but pine is otherwise attested (see, inter alios, Catullus 41.15). In a curious nuptial rite, the bride’s hair was combed with a spear (the caelibaris hasta) which had pierced the body of a dead gladiator (see Festus p. 62M). There was no scarcity of speculation regarding the origin and significance of the ritual among Roman commentators. Hymenaeus (line 561) is the Greek god of marriage.

2.563–4. For a similar closing of the temples during a festival dedicated to the dead, see 5.485–6.

2.567–8. The poet’s reference is presumably to eleven days (the Lucifer, or morning star, being a day) as there are eleven feet in his elegiac couplet. The effect of the remark is to place the Feralia on February 18, whereas the correct date was February 21. Perhaps Ovid momentarily forgot that February had 28 and not 31 days (though it would seem unlikely).

2.571–82. The ‘old hag’ whose services have been procured for conducting this magical rite was drawn from the ranks of the professional diviners and magicians that existed outside the official cult. The goddess whose name Ovid invokes in connection with this rite of quieting ‘hostile tongues’ is Tacita (from tacitus, ‘silent’), equating her with Muta (from mutus, ‘mute’) in line 583. Tacita is also mentioned by Plutarch (Num. 8.6), who identifies her as one of the Muses. The story which Ovid tells of the goddess in the following lines (583–616), identifying her as one of the Tiber’s nymphs, is not otherwise known.

2.599–602. Originally, says the poet, the Naiad (water nymph) was named Lala. The intended sense of the name may simply be onomatopoeic, suggesting continuous babble (like a brook; compare Latin lallo, ‘to sing a lullaby’); or Ovid may be alluding to a supposed etymological connection with Greek laleo, ‘to talk, chatter’. Almo is a river, or here the god of the river, which feeds into the Tiber.

2.608–16. One of the functions of the Greek god of roads and journeys, Hermes, with whom the Romans equated Mercury, was the guiding of the dead to the realm of Hades. Ovid here identifies Mercury (representations of whom, called herms, the Greeks commonly erected at crossroads, and elsewhere) as father of the Lares ‘who guard the crossroads’, exploiting their common affiliation (see 5.129–32n.). Furthermore, drawing upon the phonetic similarity between Muta’s earlier name, Lara (line 599), and Latin Lares (and, for Dumézil ARR: 367, perhaps also having in mind a connection between the rites of Tacita [= Muta; 2.571–82] on this day of the dead and Latin larvae, ‘evil spirits’), Ovid identifies this goddess as the Mater Larum, Mother of the Lares. The Mater Larum was worshipped by the college of twelve priests known as the Fratres Arvales, ‘Arval Brethren’. In their sacred grove dedicated to the goddess Dea Dia, the Fratres Arvales offered sacrifice to the Mater Larum and to the Lares, two female sheep to the former and two male to the latter. On the Mater Larum, see Dumézil’s remarks at ARR: 341, n. 20. Images of the Lares, which were set up at Roman crossroads, often flanked an image of the Genius of Augustus. See 2.636–8n.

2.617–22. The day following the completion of the Parentalia is that of the Caristia, or the Cara Cognatio (‘dear blood-relations’), a harmonious gathering of the living members of a family for feasting.

2.623–30. Those who would disrupt the peace and quiet of the family banquet are to stay away. Ovid illustrates the point by rehearsing references to Greek mythic figures known for familial injury and villainy. The ‘Tantalid brothers’ are Tantalus’ feuding grandsons, Thyestes and Atreus, kings of Mycenae; and Tantalus himself was known for his contempt for the gods. Jason’s wife is Medea, who killed her children (see 2.41–2n.). The ‘woman who gave the farmers burnt seeds’ is the hateful stepmother Ino; see 3.853–76n. Procne’s sister is Philomela, and both are daughters of the Athenian king, Pandion. Tereus, king of Thrace and the husband of Procne, raped Philomela and cut out her tongue. Procne then avenged her sister by killing Itys, the son she had conceived with Tereus, cooking the body, and serving it to the father. See Met. 6.424–674.

2.631–4. On the goddess of peaceful agreement, Concordia, see 1.637–40; 1.645–6; 6.637–8. Offerings were made to the family Lares (see 5.129–32n.) on this day of feasting following the Feralia. This is, however, a commonly observed custom, not unique to the Caristia.

2.636–8. As the Lares are worshipped with offerings, so a cup is to be raised to Augustus. The parallelism of the successive references to the protectorate Lares and to Augustus is clear; Ovid likely alludes to the images of the Genius of Augustus which were enshrined together with images of Lares at Roman roadsides; see 5.129–32n.

2.639–42. February 23 sees the celebration of the festival of the god of boundaries, Terminus. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Ant. Rom. 2.74), the Greek historian of Roman antiquity and contemporary of Ovid, credited the establishment of the Terminalia to Numa, the Sabine king of Rome who brought order to Roman society. By Numa’s decree, all property owners marked the boundaries of their lands with stones, and these were deemed sacred to Jupiter Terminalis. If a farmer should plough up one of these sacred stones, he and the animal which had drawn the plough could be killed without blood guilt being impugned to the avenging party. The affiliation of Jupiter with Terminus recurs (see 2.667–70n.) and is likely of great antiquity.

2.643–58. In these lines Ovid describes a private ritual of Terminus observed on this day by owners of two adjoining fields. As here, bystanders were typically required to keep silent during the performance of religious rites.

2.663–6. Thyrea was a buffer region between the Greeks of Argos and of Sparta, both sides laying claim to the area. In c. 545 BC, 300 Argive warriors met an equal number of Spartans in a contest of arms to settle the dispute. The Greek historian Herodotus states (1.82) that the sole survivor of the Spartan contingent was Othryades. Rather than return home alone, he took his own life after piling up the shields of the fallen warriors and inscribing on this offering, in his own blood, a dedication to Zeus.

2.667–70. Roman tradition held that Terminus, along with Juventas, the goddess of the iuvenes (young men of military age; see 6.65–6n.), and many other deities had shrines on the Capitoline Hill which had to be removed to make room for the great temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. While most of the gods gave way, Terminus and Juventas refused to vacate; in the end, shrines for both were incorporated into the new temple. The family of a boy would make an offering to Juventas as he crossed the threshold of young manhood to become a iuvenis; the transition was marked by the youth putting on the toga libera, or toga virilis, in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Ovid identifies the occasion of the rite as the Liberalia of March 17 (see 3.771–88n.). When it is recalled that Latin terminus also means ‘end, point at which activity ceases’, it can be seen that there is a sense in which Juventas and Terminus both mark boundaries – the opposite boundaries of life. Indeed, the poet explicitly notes the participation of, on the one hand, an ‘old man’ and, on the other, ‘a boy’ and ‘small daughter’ in the private rites of the Terminalia (see lines 643–58). Dumézil (ARR: 200–203) argued that the affiliation of Juventas and Terminus with Jupiter was of much greater antiquity than the construction of the Capitoline temple (ascribed to the last of the Etruscan kings, Tarquinius Superbus), proposing that the Roman gods are to be equated respectively with the Indo-Aryan deities Aryaman and Bhaga, close affiliates of the preeminent first function god Mitra (an analogue of Jupiter’s legal aspect within Dumézil’s tripartite analytic framework). Aryaman is the god of Aryan society and of intimate friendship, while Bhaga’s responsibility is to see that all members of society receive their appropriate share of society’s goods (each god having Iranian equivalents). More likely, however, Juventas and Terminus simply replaced the warrior and agricultural representatives of the pre-Capitoline triad, Mars and Quirinus (see Woodard 2002: 85–6; Woodard 2005, passim; on the pre-Capitoline triad see 1.37n.; 2.531–2n.) With the construction of the Capitoline temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus the archaic Indo-European assemblage of chief deities – Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus – was supplanted by a new, Capitoline triad: Jupiter, Juno, Minerva (perhaps of Greek or Etruscan origin). The threesome Jupiter, Juventas, Terminus would then be present in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus as a ‘minor Capitoline triad’, a variant expression of the former pre-Capitoline triad (for other such variant expressions see 3.199–200n.; 5.183–8n.).

2.671–2. Sacrifices to Terminus had to be offered beneath open sky, thus a hole was left in the roof above his altar.

2.679–82. In these lines Ovid refers to the public rites of the Terminalia, conducted at the sixth milestone of the road called the Via Laurentina (running from Rome towards the sea). The site of the ritual was likely an ancient boundary between Rome and the Latin Laurentines. The ‘Dardan leader’ is Aeneas (see 1.519–20), who, first arriving in Italy, came ashore in the Laurentine region of King Latinus.

2.684. On the identity of Rome and the world, see 1.85–6.

2.685–6. On February 24 was observed the little understood festival of the Regifugium, ‘flight of the king’. The festival was under the patronage of Jupiter, as were the Terminalia of the preceding day (and only a few other festivals can be added to this list). According to Plutarch (Quaest. Rom. 63), the Rex Sacrorum offered a sacrifice in the Comitium and then immediately fled away. Little else is known about this puzzling rite. This paucity of information coupled with the seemingly bizarre nature of the celebration have predictably lent themselves to a variety of scholarly interpretations, perhaps none of which is completely satisfying. Dumézil seems to have hit upon a crucial point: ‘It will be noted, to judge by the second element, -fugi-, of these symmetrical compounds, that the rites of the mysterious Regifugium and Poplifugia implied a rupture of the political equilibrium, an irregularity, probably in order magically to prevent such a rupture’ (ARR: 562). These comments are offered as he calls attention to the ‘irregular’ placement of the Regifugium in the calendar – one of only two festival days (the other being the Equirria of March 14; see 3.517–22) which commence on an even (and thus unlucky) day (see 1.617–18n.). February was once the final month of the Roman year, and the association of year’s end with disorder is common cross-culturally. One is particularly reminded of the maniacal disorder which seizes the Celtic community on the last day of the year, the eve of Samain (Hallowe’en). Given the similar preservation of ancient Indo-European religious and mythic notions among the Celtic and Italic peoples, at the hands of the powerful priestly groups which were preserved in each community, we might well look for a common and perhaps deeply archaic origin of the Celtic and Roman unravelling of society at year’s end. For the Celts, the eve of Samain was clearly seen as a boundary between the old year and the new, as a seam, and more than that, as a seam which has ruptured. The placement of the Regifugium immediately after the Terminalia, the festival of the Boundary, which one might have expected to bring the old year to a close, may simply be a cultic expression of the seam which has ruptured, bringing disorder into the community, turning society on its head. With the passing of February (or of the Regifugium), order is restored, as it is among the Celts with the arrival of Samain, and the purifications of February (see 2.19–20n.) are brought to a climactic close.

2.687–8. Ovid links the Regifugium with the Roman expulsion of the Etruscan king, Tarquinius Superbus. This interpretation of the rite was common in classical antiquity, though not accepted by all, and is almost certainly a secondary explanation. Throughout much of the sixth century BC, Rome was ruled by the Etruscan Tarquins, according to Roman mythic history (preserved in the ‘annalistic tradition’). During the reign of Superbus, his son Sextus raped the young woman Lucretia, wife of Tarquinius Collatinus (a great-nephew of the first of the Tarquin kings, Tarquinius Priscus). Violated and disgraced, Lucretia took her own life. In response to her tragic death, the enraged Roman populace expelled the tyrannical Superbus and the Tarquin family. Ovid’s narrative here rewrites and alludes to the ‘canonical’ account of the event at Livy 1.53–60.

2.689–90. In the following lines Ovid relates the story of the capture of the Latin city of Gabii, through the cunning of Superbus’ son Sextus.

2.706. Superbus removes the ‘heads’ of the tallest flowers in a symbolic response to his son’s query.

2.711–20. Lucius Junius Brutus, a kinsman of Superbus, was said to have pretended to be an idiot in order to protect himself from the king. Superbus had sent two of his sons to Greece, along with the harmless Brutus, in order to consult the oracle of Apollo (Phoebus) at Delphi. The cause of the consultation had been the appearance of a snake in the king’s house, judged to be an ill omen and source of much consternation for Superbus. While at the oracle, the sons decided to inquire as to who would be Rome’s next ruler; the oracle replied, ‘the princeps (first man) kissing his mother’. The wise Brutus, who feigned stupidity, fell to the ground and kissed Mother Earth. Brutus would be instrumental in the expulsion of the Tarquins after the rape of Lucretia (see lines 837–52); he became one of Rome’s first two consuls.

2.721–2. Ovid now comes to the events surrounding the rape of Lucretia, setting the beginning of his tale in the siege of Ardea, a port city of Latium.

2.725. ‘Young Tarquinius’ is Sextus, son of Tarquinius Superbus.

2.733. Collatia was a town of Latium, some 10 miles (18 kilometres) from Rome. Its ‘famous namesake’ is Lucretia’s husband, Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, whose father had been governor of the town under Tarquinius Priscus, his uncle.

2.741–4. Ovid uses here in association with Lucretia a cluster of words often used elsewhere to define his elegiac poetry: ‘soft’ (mollis, 742), ‘little’ (exiguus, 743), ‘thinly’ (tenuis, 744).

2.761. The ‘young prince’ is Sextus, who will now leave camp for a second time and make his way to the house of Lucretia in Collatia.

2.799–800. The image of the lamb afraid of the wolf is used by Ovid of himself, terrified of the wrath of Augustus at Tristia 1.77–8.

2.833–4. Compare the similar self-conscious modesty of the dying Polyxena at Met. 13.479–80.

2.837. Brutus, the one who pretended to be an idiot (see 2.711–20n.), has a name which means ‘stupid’. Moved by the tragedy of Lucretia, he now sets aside his feigning.

2.843. ‘Exiled line’ may refer to the punishment of exile to come, but there may also be a reference to the alleged descent of the Tarquins from Demaratus of Corinth (father of Tarquinius Priscus), who was forced to flee that Greek city when the tyrant Cypselus came to power c. 657 BC.

2.849. On the use of ‘Quirites’ to designate the citizens of Rome, see 2.475–80n.

2.857–60. The final festival of February is the Equirria, at which horses were raced on the Campus Martius in honour of Mars. Curiously, the ritual is celebrated a second time on March 14. Mars possesses a cluster of rituals during this season when military campaigning begins and another in October as the warring season comes to an end (see ARR: 206).

2.861–2. Ovid alludes to the next month following, the month of the war god Mars, here named by his epithet ‘Gradivus’ (of uncertain origin: see Ernout-Meillet: 279).

Fasti 3: MARCH

3.1–10. The poet invokes Mars, father of Romulus and patron-god of Rome, whose name gave rise to March and whose temple dominated the newly built Forum of Augustus. The proem to Fasti 4 will invoke the other main deity directly associated with Rome – Venus, mother of Aeneas and divine ancestress of the Julian family.

3.5–8. On the martial and non-martial aspects of the goddess Minerva (equated with the Greek Pallas Athena), see 3.675–96n.

3.9–10. The Roman priestess who ‘captured’ Mars was Rhea Silvia, mother of the twins Romulus and Remus by Mars. To no avail, her uncle Amulius had caused her to become a Vestal Virgin to prevent her from bearing children (see 2.383–4n.). Ovid relates the story of her encounter with Mars in lines 11–40. For a discussion of this ‘foundation rape’, see Introduction 4.VII.

3.11–12. One of the daily responsibilities of the virgin priestesses of the goddess Vesta was to collect whatever water would be required for that day’s use. The sacred fire of Rome burned in Vesta’s temple, and as water is the natural enemy of fire, no water could be kept in the temple overnight. Indeed, the Vestals were required to monitor with utmost care the presence of water in the temple. Servius (Aen. 11.339) writes that the Vestals kept water in a container called a futile. With a large mouth but a small base, the unstable vessel was clearly designed to require that it be held at all times while it contained liquid. Water used in Vesta’s Roman temple was to be collected outside the Porta Capena (as the crow flies, well over half a mile [about 1000 metres] from the temple) at a spring in the Grove of Egeria. Ovid refers here, however, not to this spring but to that used by the Vestals of Alba Longa, where Silvia was in the goddess’s service.

3.21. With this representation of rape, compare 1.417, 2.307, 4.445, 5.201f., 6.119; see Introduction 4.VII.

3.27–38. As Silvia had slept, she dreamed of the conception by Mars and of the twin sons to whom she would give birth. ‘Troy’s fire’ is the sacred flame in Vesta’s temple, said to have been brought from Troy by Aeneas. The ‘woollen band’ is that worn by the Vestals in their hair as a symbol of their virginity. The two palm trees are Romulus (the taller, presaging Rome’s imperial expansion) and Remus, whom Amulius, her uncle, would attempt to kill (see 2.383–4 and lines 49–54 below). The exposed infants would be nourished by a she-wolf (see 2.411–22) and a woodpecker (see line 54). Sylvia’s dream here is a rewriting of the dream of Ilia (= Sylvia) in the first book of Ennius’ Annales.

3.45. On an image of Vesta standing in her temple, see 6.295–8.

3.49–54. Ovid has already written of Amulius and his unsuccessful attempt to destroy Rhea Silvia’s sons; see 2.383–4 and 2.411–22.

3.55–8. Faustulus the shepherd found the twin infants Romulus and Remus, and he and his wife Acca Larentia raised them as their own sons. There is, however, a completely separate tradition about the identity of this woman Larentia (or Larentina). Various Latin authors also know her as a prostitute who, following the instructions of Hercules, in whose temple she had spent the night, made the acquaintance of a quite wealthy man by the name of Tarrutius. She became his wife and, upon his death, the recipient of his entire estate, which she in turn willed to the people of Rome. Acca Larentia was remembered and honoured each year on December 23 in the funerary rites of the Larentalia, celebrated at the traditional site of her tomb. The diverse accounts of the rites suggest that multiple priests were involved, including the Pontifices and the Flamen Quirinalis; Plutarch (Rom. 4.3) also mentions a ‘priest of Mars’, by which he almost certainly refers to the Flamen of Quirinus. Acca (probably a hypocoristic for ‘mother’) Larentia is in both traditions, Dumézil (ARR: 269) notes, clearly situated within the realm of the third function – the realm of prosperity, wealth, sexual pleasure, shepherding, child-rearing; and, thus, the participation of the Flamen Quirinalis in her ritual is completely natural. She is probably to be equated with the deity Larunda, listed by Varro (Ling. 5.74) as one of the gods of Titus Tatius. Owing to phonetic similarity, though not identity, some scholars have associated Laērenti a with the Lares, even identifying her with the Mater Larum (mother of the Lares; on whom see 2.608–16n.).

3.62. ‘Ilian brothers’ are Romulus and Remus, sons of Rhea Silvia, also known as Ilia. The adjective also points to their descent from the heroes of Troy.

3.67–8. When Remus, having quarrelled with shepherds tending the flocks of Numitor, was dragged into the latter’s presence, Romulus came to his rescue. It soon became apparent, however, that the twin shepherd boys were Numitor’s lost grandsons. Romulus and Remus joined forces with their grandfather, overthrew Amulius and restored Numitor to the throne which was his by right.

3.69–70. Remus will taunt his brother Romulus by hopping over Rome’s new walls and will pay for the act with his life; see 4.843–4, 5.451–4 and also 2.143.

3.75–8. March, the month of Mars, had been the first month of Romulus’ ten-month year; see 1.27–30n., 1.39 and lines 99–100 below.

3.79–80. Ovid asserts that it was Mars who was particularly worshipped in Latium, aside from the matter of Romulus’ descent from him, and supports the claim in the lines which follow by calling attention to various peoples and the observation that they each have their own favoured deities.

3.81–2. Hypsipyle was a queen of the island of Lemnos, the place where Hephaestus (Roman Volcanus) landed when thrown from Olympus by Zeus, and the site of Hephaestus’ principal cult centre.

3.83–4. The poet refers to the Greek city of Mycenae as ‘Pelopid’, after Pelops, the eponymous hero of the Peloponnesian peninsula, and grandfather of Agamemnon, the great king of Mycenae. Ovid has already spoken of the Arcadian mountain Maenalus (see 2.191–2), and the Arcadian worship of Pan (see 2.271–2), equated with Roman Faunus. On the favoured cities of Hera (Roman Juno), see 6.47–8n.

3.87–96. Ovid rehearses the calendars of various Italic peoples having a month named for Mars and the position of that month in those Fasti. Though he is certainly accurate in observing that such a month was commonly found among Italic peoples, some of his remarks concerning the position of the month within the calendar appear to be at variance with the comments of other Latin authors.

3.107–8. The Little Bear constellation (Ursa Minor) was also called by the Greeks Cynosura, ‘Dog’s Tail’, and the Great Bear (Ursa Major; see 2.183–90) was also known as Helice. The Greeks are supposed to have navigated by the latter and the Phoenicians, here called ‘Sidonian’ (after Sidon, one of the chief Phoenician cities), by the former.

3.109–10. The ‘brother’ is Apollo and the ‘sister’ is Artemis (Roman Diana), whom Ovid associates with the sun and moon respectively. The ‘signs’ are those of the zodiac.

3.113–18. The ‘ensigns of heaven’ are the constellations; those of the Romans are their military standards. The tradition of Romulus’ warriors carrying standards of hay and wood is reported by Plutarch (Rom. 8.6).

3.119–20. Latin lustrum is used to denote a calendrical period of five years (or sometimes four), reminiscent of the five-year Celtic cycle depicted on the Gaulish Cologny Calendar. By Ovid’s reckoning, since a ten-month year is two months too short, ten months were lost in each lustrum.

3.121–34. As in Book 1 (lines 27–38), Ovid again speculates regarding the origin of the ten-month year, and adds observations regarding other divisions into ten. In line 127 he refers to the tradition that Romulus established a senate with one hundred senators and credits Rome’s first king with dividing the military field units into ten divisions. According to Livy (8.8.5–8), however, infantry lines were divided into fifteen maniples (see lines 117–18) in early Rome. Titienses, Ramnes and Luceres are the three ancient tribes of Rome, each of which was divided into ten units to create the thirty curiae (see 2.527–30n.).

3.135–6. In the following lines Ovid presents several pieces of evidence to support his claim that March was originally the first month of the year. Exactly the same documentation is adduced by Macrobius (Sat. 1.12.6).

3.137–40. On the first day of Mars’ month, the old New Year’s Day, fresh laurel is installed at various doors – those of the Flamens, of the Regia and of the Curiae Veteres, the ‘Ancient Wards’ (see below). The purpose of the laurel was likely to provide magical protection to those within the house, and this is claimed explicitly in the Latin work called the Geoponica (11.2), where we also read that a custom of laurel-renewing was in time transferred to January 1. The ‘Ancient Wards’ was the name given to a shrine in the Forum in which the priests known as Flamines Curiales officiated. There, says Varro, the priests ‘attend to divine affairs’ (Ling. 5.155). Servius (Aen. 8.361) identifies the building as Augustus’ birthplace.

3.141–4. Vesta’ stempleals oreceives fresh laurel on this day, and, as a part of the New Year’s new beginnings, the sacred flame of Vesta is ritually extinguished and rekindled. Yet again, a Celtic parallel presents itself. On the eve of Samain, the Celtic New Year, fires were rekindled on the hearths of Irish homes with flames from a common ceremonial fire. According to one tradition, Druids gathered at the village of Tlachtga on Samain eve and there lit a bonfire; all other fires in Ireland were then extinguished and relit from this flame (see R&R: 163). The second great seam in the Celtic year (see 2.685–6n.) was Beltaine, the mid-point of the year, observed on May 1 (see R&R: 89, 158, 193). On the eve of Beltaine, Druids similarly gathered at Uisnech, lighting fires, and household hearths were relit throughout Ireland; in the same way, Beltaine fires blazed throughout Wales and Scotland. The fires of Beltaine were generated by means of a fire-drill, just as the Vestals were required to produce the sacred flame of Rome by means of friction (see 6.291–2n.).

3.145–6. On the festival of Anna Perenna, see 3.523–4n.

3.147–8. Ovid’s claim that the magistrates formerly took office on March 1 is contradicted by Livy (see 3.6.1, 3.36.2–3, 4.37.3, 5.11.11).

3.149–50. Before Julius Caesar’s name was given to July and Augustus’ to August, the last six months of the Roman year were designated by terms derived from numerals: Quintilis (from quinque, ‘five’) for July, and Sextilis (from sex, ‘six’) for August, followed, of course, by September (from septem, ‘seven’), October (from octo, ‘eight’), November (from novem, ‘nine’) and December (from decem, ‘ten’). If these names reflect the numeric sequence of months within the year, then, Ovid observes, March must clearly have been the first month.

3.151–4. As Ovid has already noted (see 1.27–30), the addition of two months to the annual calendar was the contribution of Romulus’ successor, Numa Pompilius. Numa was a Sabine, those people who in the mythic history of Rome are associated with wealth and fecundity (though Numa has his own role to play in that history; see 3.277–84n.), and yet other Latin authors make mention of the Sabine olive. Ovid imagines two possible sources of inspiration for Numa’s lengthening of the year: the ‘Samian’, that is the Greek philosopher Pythagoras of Samos, whom some authorities identify as the teacher of Numa; or Egeria, the sagacious king’s divine wife, said to be the fountain of much of his wisdom (on whom, see 3.261–2n.).

3.155–66. By 46 BC, the calendar had become so out of synchronization with the solar year that festivals were being celebrated over three months ahead of the time that they would naturally occur. To remedy this once and for all, Julius Caesar, operating within his capacity as Pontifex Maximus, reformed the calendar by adding sufficient days to the shorter months to increase the total days of the year to 365. In addition, he abolished the old practice of periodically inserting an intercalary month after the Terminalia (February 23), and in its place substituted a single intercalary day to be inserted once every four years (not every five years as Ovid indicates in lines 165–6). The calendar of the reforming year (46 BC) was set aright by the addition of two extra months of 67 days in total, and by employing, for the last time, the intercalary month following the Terminalia.

3.169–70. The poet now turns his attention to the seemingly curious fact that the first day of the month of the god of war (Mars, here called Gradivus) is the day of the Matronalia, the festival of matrons. On the Matronalia, a day of great revelry, presents were given to the married women of Rome, and their husbands offered prayers for their well-being. These Roman matrons themselves visited the Esquiline temple of Juno Lucina and, in an odd turnabout of the normal order of things, prepared a meal for their slaves. The event appears to be something of a feminine version of the Saturnalia, the festival of Saturnus held on December 17. On the Saturnalia it was the Roman masters of the home who were the recipients of gifts, and a feast was prepared for their slaves, who were served before the masters (see ARR: 618).

3.175–6. As noted above, Minerva has both martial and nonmartial aspects, see line 681.

3.184. The reference is to the Casa Romuli; see 1.199n.

3.187–98. Romulus’ new city of Rome was predominantly male in gender, having been populated by criminals (see 2.429–48n.). In the following lines Ovid describes how Romulus abducted Sabine women to provide wives for Rome’s men and how their abduction brought war to Rome for the first time.

3.199–200. ‘Consus’ feast’, to which the Sabines were invited and at which their women were abducted, was the summer Consualia of August 21 (see 2.429–48n., 2.531–2n.). At an underground altar in the Circus Maximus, which had to be unearthed for the festival, the Flamen Quirinalis and the Vestals offered sacrifices to Consus, the god of stored grain. The subterranean positioning of the altar was perhaps intended to reflect the practice of storing grain beneath ground. Horse races and mule races were run in the Circus, but otherwise the Consualia appears to have been a day of rest for these animals, who were bedecked with flowers for the occasion. The affiliation of the deity’s festival with horses led to the eventual identification of Consus with the Greek god Poseidon (god of sea, earthquakes and horses), and thus with Neptune, whom the Romans had equated with Poseidon. At Consus’ underground altar were also honoured other agricultural deities, Seia, Segetia and Tutilina, about whom almost nothing is known. A second festival celebrating Consus was held on December 15 as winter began. Both the summer and winter Consualia were followed four days later by festivals in honour of the deity Ops, the goddess of abundant harvest: the Opiconsivia on August 25 and the Opalia of December 19. Both this deity’s role and the proximity of her festival to the Consualia – not once, but on two occasions – clearly reveals a close affiliation of Consus and Ops. Moreover, celebrated as Ops Consiva in her August festival, she is apparently the goddess of an abundant stored (condere) harvest and is thus drawn into the sphere of Consus. As Ops Consiva, she received the notable distinction of a chapel in the Regia (the locus of religious authority in republican Rome), which a particular priest (called sacerdos publicus, most probably the Pontifex Maximus) and the Vestal Virgins alone were permitted to enter. The main part of the Regia was composed of three sections, two of which are almost certainly the two chapels which the structure housed – one dedicated to Ops, the other to Mars. Various sacrifices are regularly offered within the Regia in conjunction with the realm of sovereignty: the Flaminica Dialis offers a ram to Jupiter on each of the nundinae, the Rex Sacrorum (the ‘Sacrificial King’) a ram to Janus at the Agonalia (see 1.317–18n.) and the Regina Sacrorum (the ‘Sacrificial Queen’) a sheep or pig to Juno on each Kalends. Dumézil has observed that these cultic activities coupled with the worship of Mars and Ops in the Regia reveal a variant expression of the pre-Capitoline triad: Jupiter, Mars, Ops (with Ops replacing Quirinus; see ARR: 172–4, 267; note also the presence of the goddess Flora in the third position: see 5.183–8n.; on the Consualia, see ARR: 156–8).

3.205–12. The Sabine daughters, equally Roman wives and mothers, meet in the temple of Juno (goddess of women and childbirth), and are addressed by Mars’ daughter-in-law – Romulus’ wife, that is. Elsewhere (Met. 14.829–51) Ovid names her as Hersilia.

3.213–34. The Sabine war comes to an end through the intervention of th e abducted women who run on to the battlefield with their infant children, and position themselves between the ranks of Roman husbands and Sabine fathers and brothers. Subsequently, the Sabine community is integrated with the Roman, and Titus Tatius becomes Romulus’ co-regent. Romulus’ war with the Sabines is in Dumézil’s view the historicized Roman reflex of a Proto-Indo-European myth about a conflict between the gods of sovereignty and power (first/second function) and the gods of fecundity (third function). In Scandinavia the ancient motif survived as the story of the war between the Æsir and the Vanir, in India as the conflict between Indra and the Asévins, to name but two parallel accounts preserved by other Indo-European peoples (see ARR: 66–76).

3.229–32. On the use of ‘Oebalian’ to denote the Sabines, see 1.260–62n.

3.245–8. Mars concludes his enumeration of causes for placing the Matronalia on his Kalends by invoking yet a fourth. It was on this day that the Esquiline temple of Juno Lucina (see 2.449–52) was dedicated. Ovid intends an etymological connection between ‘where the Roman king kept watch [Latin excubiae ]’ and Esquiline.

3.255–8. On the connection between Juno Lucina and light, see 2.449–52n. The sympathetic magic described by Ovid in lines 257–8 is widely attested cross-culturally (see Frazer 3: 60–61). Servius (Aen. 4.518) expands Ovid’s admonition, recording that a woman must untie all knots about her before she worships Juno Lucina.

3.259–60. In the song which they intone as they leap about the city, those priests of Mars called the Sain (see Introduction 2.IV and 3.809–10n.) sing of Mamurius Veturius. A lengthy accounting of the connection between the Salii and this craftsman unfolds in lines 261–392.

3.261–2. Ovid now calls upon the nymph Egeria, said to have been wife to Rome’s second king, Numa Pompilius. The nymph’s name is etymologized as a derivative of oiegero, ‘to bring forth (offspring)’, an etymology reflected in her association with the Arician grove of Diana, to which expectant mothers came to pray for an easy delivery. In the Metamorphoses (15.482–551), Ovid relates how, after the death of Numa, the grieving Egeria had fled to Diana’s grove in the vicinity of Aricia, a town at the western foot of the Alban hills. Diana took pity on Egeria, unable to be comforted, and transformed her into a spring.

3.265–6. Diana’s Arician grove, the most important of her sanctuaries, was believed to be inhabited by Virbius, a poorly known spirit; he came to be equated with Greek Hippolytus, son of the Athenian hero Theseus, who was killed by his own chariot horses (see 6.743–56). Horses were not allowed in Diana’s grove and this prohibition likely encouraged the identification of Hippolytus with Virbius.

3.267–70. Ovid writes of votive tablets hanging from the hedgerows in the grove. Numerous votive objects have been recovered at the site of the grove (near the present-day town of Nemi), including images of male and female reproductive organs and of women holding newly born children. Propertius (2.32.9–10) also writes of torch-bearing women processing to Diana’s sacred grove to offer thanksgiving.

3.271–2. Arician Diana was identified as Diana Nemorensis, from Latin nemus (‘grove’). An intriguing feature of her Arician grove was the presence there of an enigmatic priest called the Rex Nemorensis, the ‘King of the Grove’. This priestly office, it appears, was always filled by a fugitive slave and was taken by force. After signalling his intention to wrest the position from the current priest by breaking off a bough from a specially designated tree (popularly identified with the golden bough carried by Aeneas when he journeyed into the realm of the dead in search of his father Anchises; see Virgil Aen. 6.136–48, 201–11, 635–6), a challenger and the presiding Rex Nemorensis would engage in combat to the death; the victor acquired or retained the priesthood. The Greek geographer Strabo (5.3.12) reports that the Rex Nemorensis, ever vigilant for his life, was never without a sword. Dumézil has observed that the Rex Nemorensis is not Diana’s only affiliation with the conferring of sovereignty. There is, for example, the story told by Livy (1.45.3–7) of the heifer about which it had been prophesied that whoever should offer her to Diana would bring imperial power to his people. Before its Sabine owner could avail himself of the prophecy, a Roman priest intercepted the sacrifice on behalf of Rome. This association with sovereignty, the rapid succession of kings in her Arician grove, the etymological connection of her name with Latin dium (‘open sky’: and so having the same root as Jupiter) and her role as a virgin goddess of birth have, in combination, suggested to Dumézil that Diana is a Roman descendant of a Proto-Indo-European figure who manifests just such a matrix of associations. Parallels are to be found in the Norse celestial deity Heimdallr and the magnanimous mentor Bhima of the great Indian epic, the Mahabharat a (see ARR: 407–11).

3.275–6. On Egeria, see 3.261–2n. The Camenae are the nymphs of that spring by the Porta Capena from which the Vestals drew their water (see 3.11–12n.).

3.277–84. On the use of Quirites to designate the citizens of Rome, see 2.475–80n. Numa Pompilius, in stark contrast to his royal predecessor Romulus, was a king whose passion was peace and order. This Sabine ruler of Rome was credited with the institution of most of the city’s sacred offices and sacred rites. Dumézil has argued that within the mythic history of Rome, each of these two sharply contrasting sovereign figures, the first and second king of Rome, embodies a different aspect of the first function, thus corresponding on the human level to divine first-function pairs such as Vedic Mitra and Varuna. Romulus – fathered by Mars, miraculously saved and sustained by a she-wolf and woodpecker as an abandoned infant, endowed by Mars with a spirit for war (see lines 197–8), delivered from destruction by the intervention of Jupiter Stator (see 6.793–4n.), transformed amidst bolts of lightning into the god Quirinus – represents the magical aspect of the first function (like Varuna). Numa Pompilius, in contrast, modest sovereign without miraculous birth or death, bringing order, justice and right reverence for the gods to Rome, devoted to Fides (‘trust, guarantee, good faith’; see 6.213–18n.), represents the legal aspect of that function (like Mitra; see also MV: 47–64).

3.291–2. Faunus and Picus are both rustic Italian deities. Faunus lives in the woodlands; his is the voice of the sounds of the wild, and for this he is sometimes called Fatuus and Fatuclus. He can endow a herdsman’s flocks with fertility and is himself sexually unbounded (see 2.268n.). He may appear to country folk and sometimes brings troubling dreams. Picus is identified as the father of Faunus, and is himself assigned the position as son of Saturnus (all three are historicized as early kings of Latium). Like Faunus, he has prophetic abilities, as is revealed in the present passage. Told in the Metamorphoses (14.308–415), Ovid knows the story of how Picus had rejected the love of Circe (the enchantress of Homer’s Odyssey) and of how she, scorned, turned Picus into a woodpecker (Latin picus).

3.293–4. Faunus and Picus must be caught and bound before they will divulge the means of appeasement. While reminiscent of the captures of Proteus by Aristaeus and by Menelaus (see 1.367), the binding of Faunus and Picus is particularly similar to the story of Midas, the king of Phrygia who would be famed for his golden touch, and his trapping of Silenus, the wise woodland deity of Greek myth (see 1.399n.). Desiring to learn the secrets of life from Silenus, Midas mixed wine with the waters of a fountain where the old sylvan spirit was accustomed to drink, and captured him as he lay sleeping after quenching his thirst.

3.322. The Styx is the river which flows through the realm of Hades in Greek myth. Hesiod (Th. 782–806) describes how the Olympian deities swear their oaths by the water of the river, and how one who swears falsely falls comatosed and is separated from fellowship with the other gods. Herodotus (6.74) identifies Styx with a river of Arcadia (the region of Greece which is home to Pan, the Greek deity with whom Roman Faunus is equated; see 2.271–2) and records that the Arcadians swear oaths by its waters. The practice of swearing by water is likewise attested among the Indo-Aryans; Varuna, god of waters, is responsible for punishing oath breakers, at times by inflicting them with ‘water-belly’ (dropsy; see RV: 216–17).

3.327–8. Jupiter Elicius is perhaps so named because he calls down (Latin elicere) to earth the thunderbolt, or the rains; and Ovid clearly embraces this etymology, as his punning in line 327 reveals. Numa is said to have established the altar of Jupiter Elicius located on the Aventine Hill. Numa learned the rite of calling down thunderbolts; when Rome’s third king, Tullus Hostilius, a man far more like Romulus than Numa, attempted to perform this rite, he was himself incinerated.

3.333–44. Plutarch (Num. 15.4–5) writes of the expiation of a thunderbolt using onions, human hair and fish in his own day, and identifies the fish employed as a maena, a small fish such as a sprat.

3.373–92. The ancile was an oval shield which narrowed at the middle, roughly a figure-of-eight in shape, and is thus etymologized by Ovid (lines 377–8) as without angles (angulus) and with sides that are cut (recisus). This gift from Jupiter was a validation of Rome’s sovereignty. According to Servius (Aen. 7.188), the ancile would bring sovereignty to whoever possessed it; accordingly, the shield was replicated eleven times, at Numa’s decree, to minimize the chance of theft. The smith that manufactured the copies was one Mamurius Veturius, who wished to be compensated by having his name immortalized in the song which the Salii sing (the carmen saliare) as they leap about the city carrying the twelve shields (see 3.809–10n.). Their archaic hymn, portions of which are attested, ends with an invocation to Mamurius. Regarding Mamurius, his shields and his compensation, Dumézil (ARR: 591) has called attention to Vedic hymns in which the Rbhu, worker-gods, are named at the close and who are said to have been honoured because of marvellous objects which they crafted. Dumézil has also noted interesting parallels to the tradition of Jupiter’s pledge, the ancile, among other Indo-European peoples. The Scythians, for example, are recipients of talismans falling from the sky – a golden cultic cup, a warrior’s axe and a plough. For the Greeks, there are the stones of the Boeotian city of Orchomenos, identified as wisdom, valour and beauty. Each trio readily lends itself to a trifunctional view of society, and Dumézil proposes that this is also preserved in the Roman tradition by the specification of the Salii, bearers of the original shield and its copies, as in tutela Iovis Martis Quirini (‘in the charge of Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus’; see ARR: 166, 591).

3.393–6. On at least the Kalends of this the warrior god’s month, weddings are discouraged; in spite of the occurrence of the Matronalia on this day, the omen of arms does not bode well for a peaceful marriage. Frazer (3: 92–3) sees in the phrasing of line 395, arma movent pugnas (‘weapons cause fights’), an allusion to the ritual of the Salii, whose dancing is denoted by the expression movere ancilia (‘to move the ancilia’, i.e. their shields: Livy 37.33.6). Consequently, he proposes that weddings were disfavoured throughout the whole of March, as the dancing of the priests apparently continued for the entire month. Weddings were similarly considered best avoided in February during the festival of the dead (see 2.557), in May (see 5.487–90) and in the first fifteen days of June (see 6.221–5).

3.397–8. The poet here refers to the Flaminica Dialis, wife of the Flamen Dialis (whose priestly dress included a pointed cap, to which an olive twig was attached). On those same days of March when weddings were to be avoided, the Flaminica Dialis was not permitted to comb her hair. A similar collocation occurs in the first half of June (see 6.226–30 and n.).

3.399–402. On the Roman practice of identifying two Fish constellations, see 2.459–60n.

3.403–4. Tithonus’ wife is Greek Eos, goddess of the dawn, equated by the Romans with their own Aurora (see 1.461n.). Their son Memnon was king of Ethiopia. He allied his Ethiopian warriors with the Trojans and was victorious over many Greek opponents, but was in the end himself killed by Achilles. The dew is said to be Eos’ tears shed for her fallen son.

3.405–6. On the constellation Arctophylax (the Bear-Keeper) or Boötes (the Ox-Herder), see 2.153–4n.

3.407–8. Vindemitor, the Grape-Gatherer (Greek Trygeter), was so named because its rising in autumn coincided with the grape harvest.

3.409–10. Ampelos (Greek for ‘vine’) is also identified as a youth who was killedbyabull, where upon grieving Dionysus (Roman Bacchus)transformed him into a vine. Ismarus is a region of Thrace famed for its wines.

3.414. On the Roman equation of Liber with Bacchus, see 3.713–14n.

3.417–18. ‘Ilian hearths’ refers to the association of Vesta’s flame with Troy (Ilium); see 3.27–38n.

3.419–22. Beginning in 12 BC, Augustus occupied the office of Pontifex Maximus, as had Julius Caesar (see 3.155–66n.). Among the responsibilities of the Pontifex Maximus was the supervision of the Vestal Virgins, who in turn maintained Vesta’s eternal flame. In the event that Vesta’s flame was ever extinguished, the Vestals were beaten by the Pontifex Maximus. Before the time of Augustus the official residence of the Pontifex Maximus was the Domus Publica (Public House), attached to the Hall of Vesta where the Vestal Virgins lived, and his headquarters were in the Regia, located next to the temple of Vesta. After his election, Augustus moved the official residence and Vesta’s shrine to his house on the Palatine and exercised a direct priestly relationship to Vesta previously reserved for the Vestals themselves (see H-B 1994: 66–71, 99–100). See further, Introduction 4.VII.

3.422. ‘Empire’s tokens’ are Vesta’s flame and (probably) the Palladium, one of the ‘seven tokens of Roman imperium’ recognized by Varro and presumably moved to the new shrine of Vesta on the Palatine, both now united with the Pontifex Maximus, Augustus, as ‘tokens’ or ‘pledges’ of empire. Coins of the emperor Galba (ad 68) actually depict Vesta with the Palladium. See also 6.445.

3.423–4. The ‘gods of old Troy’ are the Penates, residents of Vesta’s temple (see 1.528n.) and including Vesta herself.

3.425–6. The ‘priest sprung from Aeneas’ is Augustus. He handles ‘kindred gods’, i.e. Vesta, because Vesta is thought of as one of the Penates or household gods brought by Aeneas from Troy and is now one of the ‘Caesarean Penates’ (Met. 15.864), and because Aeneas, ancestor of the Julian family, was the son of the Greek goddess Aphrodite (Roman Venus), who by one tradition (the one known to Homer: Il. 5.370–417), was daughter of Zeus (Roman Jupiter) and thus related to Hestia (Roman Vesta), Zeus’ sister (Hesiod Th. 453–4). See also 4.953n.

3.429–30. The ‘two groves’ between which stand the shrine of Vedjovis are located on the Capitoline; both groves and shrine are likewise mentioned in the March 7 entry of the Fasti Praenestini. Vedjovis also has a temple on the Tiber island (see 1.290–94n.).

3.431–4. Romulus populated his newly established city with criminals, offering them sanctuary within his Capitoline grove (see 2.139–40 and 2.429–52).

3.435–8. Vedjovis is – says the poet – a youthful Jupiter; in the ensuing lines he sets forth his evidence for this interpretation. The Julian family was affiliated with the cult of Vedjovis, and dedicated an altar to the deity in the town of Bovillae (about ten miles south-east of Rome on the Via Appia).

3.439–42. Regarding the Aloadae (‘the Giants’) and their attack on Heaven, see 1.307–8n.

3.443–4. In Vedjovis’ Capitoline temple stood a statue of the god. In one hand it is reported to have held arrows (and not thunderbolts; compare line 439), and next to the deity stood the image of a goat (Aulus Gellius 5.12.2). This goat, by Ovid’s interpretation, was intended to represent the animal which had provided milk for the baby Zeus (that is, the young Jupiter) while he was hidden from his father Cronus in a Cretan cave (see 5.111–14n.; 5.115–18n.).

3.445–8. The first syllable of the name Vedjovis is analysed by Ovid as containing a prefix meaning ‘small’, on the model of vegrandis and so forth. Vegrandis does contain a prefix ve-, but vegrandis itself means ‘small’, not the prefix; the prefix here indicates a deficiency, literally ‘not large’ (from grandis). The diminutive interpretation of ve- was not unique to Ovid in antiquity, nor was it the only interpretation. Aulus Gellius (5.12.8–10) also analyses the divine name as containing a prefix ve-, but assigns to it a meaning essentially like that in vegrandis. Thus Vedjovis is essentially an ‘un-Jupiter’. This interpretation seems to be naturally in keeping with the report that Vedjovis was an infernal deity (Martianus Capella 2.166).

3.449–58. The ‘Gorgonian horse’ is Pegasus, or, here, the constellation identified after him. When the Greek hero Perseus severed the head of Medusa, the Gorgon (a monstrous female creature who could turn a person to stone by her gaze), the winged horse Pegasus was ‘born’ from the stump of her neck, having been fathered by Poseidon (Roman Neptune). The flying horse would be bridled by another hero, Bellerophon, whom Pegasus assisted in the performance of various heroic deeds. ‘Aonia’s spring’, which Pegasus opened with his hoof, is Hippocrene on Mount Helicon in Boeotia, site of the sacred grove of the Muses (see 5.7–8). On the use of Aonia for Boeotia, see 1.489–90n.

3.459–64. ‘Cnossos’ girl’ is Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos of Crete, on which island was located the ancient city of Cnossos. When the Athenian hero Theseus was forced into the infamous maze of Minos, the Labyrinth, inhabited by the monstrous man-eating Minotaur (part bull, part man), Theseus took with him a ball of thread, provided by the love-struck Ariadne. This thread Theseus unwound as he made his way into the Labyrinth. After finding and killing the Minotaur, Theseus was able to retrace his steps and escape the maze by following the trail of thread. He fled Crete, taking with him Ariadne, only to abandon her on the island of Naxos or Dia. There the hapless girl was found by Dionysus (Roman Bacchus), who made her his wife. Ariadne’s wedding crown, the workmanship of the smith god Hephaestus (with whom the Romans equated Volcanus; see lines 513–16), was in time placed in the heavens by Dionysus as the constellation of the Crown (Corona Borealis), to which Ovid refers in lines 459 and 516. The story of Ariadne’s desertion by Theseus formed the centrepiece of Catullus 64, which Ovid self-consciously rewrote in Heroides 10 and to which he here again alludes.

3.465–8. On the Roman equation of Liber and Bacchus (Greek Dionysus), see 3.713–14n. In these lines Ovid alludes to Dionysus’ expedition to India. It was said that he had led there an army of his frenzied female followers and that, after conquering and ruling as king for many years, he had returned with spoils of war. Among his trophies, the poet writes, was an Indian princess, who threatened to leave Ariadne romantically stranded yet again.

3.499–500. Minos, Ariadne’s father, had prayed to Poseidon, asking for a bull which he could offer as a sacrifice. The sea god obliged, but Minos found the bull to be such a marvellous animal that he refused to sacrifice him. In retribution, Poseidon caused Pasiphaë, wife of Minos, to burn with lust for the bull, with which she would have intercourse. The monstrosity produced by this unholy union was the Minotaur (see 3.459–64n.; Apollodorus 3.1.3–4). Dionysus himself was at times likened to a bull and represented as having a bull’s horns, to which Ovid refers in line 500 (compare 3.789).

3.503–4. Dionysus (Roman Bacchus) was son of Zeus by a mortal woman named Semele. Having been tricked by Hera into persuading Zeus to reveal himself to her fully, the pregnant Semele was consumed by flames. From the incinerated mother, Zeus rescued his unborn son, sewed the foetus into his own thigh, and in time gave birth to the infant Dionysus (see Apollodorus 3.4.3).

3.511–12. Libera was an Italian goddess with whom Ovid here equates Ariadne, just as Dionysus is commonly identified with Libera’s male counterpart, Liber (see 3.713–14n.). The Romans more commonly equated Libera with Proserpina (Greek Persephone).

3.515–16. On the ‘crown’, see 3.459–64n.

3.517–22. Six days following the rising of the constellation of the Crown (by Ovid’s reckoning) comes the year’s second observance of the Equirria, the horse-racing festival of Mars held on the Campus Martius (the first having been held on February 27; see 2.857–60n.). The Equirria of March 14 is one of only two Roman festivals to begin on an even day (even days being unlucky; see 1.617–18n.). In the event that the Tiber river was swollen beyond its banks so that the Campus Martius was flooded, the race was to be held on the Caelian Hill (located south-east of the Palatine). Various calendars mark this day as the festival of Mamurius, the smith who crafted copies of the ancile for Numa (see lines 373–92). Lydus (Mens. 4.49) describes a rite of Mamurius which involved dressing a man in a goatskin and beating him with long rods (and which he dates to March 15). This, he writes, was done because after the smith had manufactured additional copies of the shield, ill fortune befell the Romans, leading them to beat Mamurius and drive him from the city. Dumézil has interpreted this ritual as the Roman instance of a cross-culturally common rite of driving away the old year, here designated Mamurius Veturius, meaning approximately the ‘old March’ by Dumézil’s interpretation (Varro Ling. 6.49 holds that Veturius is formed from vetus, ‘old’). March being the first month of the year in the old Roman calendar, the driving out of the old year occurred at the end of the first half of the month, the day before (or the day of) the Ides, so that the month is divided into an old and a new half (see ARR: 214–15), with the advent of the new being marked by the festival of Anna Perenna (see lines 523–4). The bifurcation of the month into two halves, old and new, is reminiscent of the similar monthly halvings, dark and light, characteristic of Indo-Aryan and Celtic calendars (see 1.59–62n.).

3.523–4. Ovid had early in this Book (lines 145–6) cited the festival of Anna Perenna as evidence that March had originally been the first month of the Roman year. This merry celebration with the drinking of cups of wine to equal one’s eventual years (see lines 531–4), occurring on the first full moon of the year, does appear likely to have been a New Year’s rite, and this is further reflected by the probable etymology of the deity’s name: Anna from annus, ‘year’, and Perenna, ‘through the year’ (Macr. Sat. 1.12.6). Martial (Ep. 4.64.16) knows of a sacred grove dedicated to her, lying between the Via Flaminia and the Via Salaria, perhaps the site of her festival. On ‘alien Tiber’, see 2.68n.

3.531–4. Nestor is the aged king of Pylos, one of the principal members of the Greek expedition against Troy. The Cumaean Sibyl was a prophetess of extreme old age; in the Metamorphoses (14.144–6), Ovid writes that when she was consulted by Aeneas she was then seven hundred years old and still had three hundred years left to live.

3.541–2. The ‘drunk old woman’ and the ‘drunk old man’ to whom Ovid draws attention are possibly to be identified with Anna Perenna and Mamurius Veturius respectively, or with revellers designated to play their roles in the festival procession – the New Year and the Old Year linked arm in arm, the New pulling along the Old (on this interpretation, see Frazer 3: 112).

3.549–550. Ovid here reuses the final two lines of Heroides 7 (195–6), Dido’s fictive letter to Aeneas.

3.555. Ovid uses ‘Tyrians’ to denote the people of Carthage, established as a colony of the Phoenician city of Tyre. According to Roman tradition, Dido, daughter of a king of Tyre, had founded Carthage.

3.556. ‘Kingless bees’: a common belief among the ancients was that the leader of the hive was a king bee. See Virgil Geo. 4.21ff.

3.559–60. Anna is the sister of Dido, and Ovid in the following lines rehearses the story of her flight from Carthage and the view that it is she who is to be identified with Anna Perenna. The extensive episode presents itself as a sequel to Virgil’s epic narrative.

3.574. Pygmalion, the brother of Anna and Dido and the king of the Phoenician city of Tyre, had murdered Dido’s husband. It was to escape Pygmalion that Dido and her companions had fled to North Africa (see Virgil Aen. 1.338–68).

3.595. The ‘Phoenician exile’ is Anna, whose home was the Phoenician city of Tyre (see 3.574n.).

3.599–603. The ‘Laurentine beach’ is near the city of Laurentum and the place where Aeneas himself had first entered Italy. The king of the region was Latinus, whose daughter, Lavinia, Aeneas had married. Hence the shore of the area is the ‘dowry-shore’ (line 603).

3.611. It is Aeneas whom the poet denotes by the phrase ‘Cytherea’s hero’. Aeneas was the son of Aphrodite (Roman Venus), often called ‘Cytherea’ after the island of Cythera, on which was located the most sacred of her sanctuaries. Hesiod (Th. 192–3) identifies Cythera as that land to which Aphrodite first came after her birth in the sea, before passing on to Cyprus, the island with which she is closely affiliated.

3.616. Aeneas refers to his ‘delay’ in Carthage, where he stayed as Queen Dido’s consort; see Virgil Aeneid 4.

3.620. ‘Tartarus’ house’ is the place of the dead. According to Hesiod (Th. 119), Tartarus is a being, one of the first to come into existence, but is also a place – found far underground, as far from earth as earth is from the sky (Th. 720–21). When Aeneas had journeyed to the world of the dead in search of his father, he had seen there the ghost of Dido (Virgil Aen. 6.450–76).

3.629. Lavinia is the daughter of Latinus, eponymous ancestor of the Latins. Aeneas desired to have her as his wife but Turnus, king of the Latin tribe of the Rutuli (and brother of Juturna; see 1.463–4n.), also lay claim to her affections. Their rivalry culminated in armed conflict, with Turnus leading a confederation of Latin tribes against Aeneas and his Trojans, who were allied with Etruscans and with Evander’s Arcadian colonists (see 1.462n.). Aeneas would triumph, slay Turnus and marry Lavinia.

3.647. It is by the stream Numicius that Aeneas himself will eventually be killed. Here the poet describes the god of the stream as horned, as river gods commonly are.

3.649. Just as Ovid has used ‘Tyrian’ to mean Carthaginian or Phoenician (see line 555), here he calls Anna the ‘Sidonian’, after Sidon, another of the chief cities of Phoenicia.

3.653–4. Ovid now makes explicit the conclusion to which he has been moving in his lengthy account of Anna, the sister of Dido – that it is she who became the goddess Anna Perenna, etymologically linking the latter’s name with the ‘stream perennial’. At least that is one possible identification; others follow.

3.657. In this and the following lines Ovid offers a veritable grab-bag of possible identities for Anna Perenna. In equating her with Luna, the moon (line 657), he again invokes indirect etymological support, and is likely accurate in suggesting a link between ‘Anna’ and Latin annus (as in ‘annual’).

3.658. ‘Inachus’ cow’ is Io, often assimilated to the Egyptian goddess Isis.

3.659–60. The reference is to the tradition that Zeus (Roman Jupiter) was born on Mount Lycaeus in Arcadia and was nourished by an Arcadian nymph Azanis.

3.661–4. In the account which follows, Ovid offers yet another possible identification of Anna Perenna associated, like some of those in lines 657–60, with the provision of nourishment. The setting for this story is the secession of the plebs to the Mons Sacer, a hill outside Rome. In 494 BC, the plebs, the common citizens of Rome as opposed to the affluent and powerful patricians, in an act of civil protest withdrew from the city en masse and took themselves to the Mons Sacer. This secession, a strategy which would be employed by the plebs at various times, was occasioned by food shortages and debt. The consul Menenius Lanatus is said to have successfully mediated an end to the crisis. The plebs organized themselves, established their own assembly, chose their own officers and instituted a cult of the divine triad – Ceres, Liber and Libera.

3.666. As elsewhere (see 2.535–42n.), Ovid uses the name of the goddess Ceres to denote ‘bread’.

3.667–74. Finally, Anna Perenna is also identified with an aged Anna of Bovillae (that town where the Julian family dedicated an altar to Vedjovis; see 3.435–8n.) who provided food for the famished plebs that had seceded to the Mons Sacer.

3.675–96. Noting Anna Perenna’s plebeian affiliations, Dumézil proposes that her mockery of Mars in this story suggests that the war god was not a deity of the plebs (see ARR: 212–13). Moreover, in spite of Ovid’s reference to Minerva as ‘warrior’ (line 682), Dumeézil sees in the goddess’s dependence upon Anna Perenna for nuptial rescue a Minerva who is fundamentally plebeian. Her martial character perhaps developed only secondarily, as she acquired an identification with the Greek Pallas Athena – deity of arts and crafts, like Minerva (compare 3.809–10n.), but also the arms-bearing protector of Athens (ARR: 305–6). According to Aulus Gellius (13.23.2), Mars has two wives: Nerio and Moles. Nerio’s name is descended from that Proto-Indo-European root for ‘man’ (the ‘valiant hero’ as opposed to merely the ‘human being’), which survives in various daughter languages, providing, for example, Greek anēr; and Nerio is the root’s only Latin reflex. Moles is simply the Latin word meaning ‘throng, mass’. Clearly, both of these ‘spouses’ belong properly to Mars’ realm, Nerio invoking the warrior hero and Moles the masses of war. Dumézil draws particular attention to the homologous equivalence of Mars:Moles:Nerio and Scandinavian Thor:Magni:Mothi. Magni and Mothi are both sons of the second-function deity Thor; Magni’s name is derived from a Norse word for ‘physical power’, Mothi’s from a word denoting the ‘madness’ of the warrior, thus being masculine, rather than feminine, abstractions of the same elements of war-making seen in Moles and Nerio (see ARR: 207). Minerva appears likely to have coalesced with Nerio. Thus, Dumézil points out, Minerva is one of the deities (together with Mars, Volcanus and a goddess Lua Mater) identified as receiving the offering of the battlefield spoils of the enemy, but this dedication was probably originally made to Mars’ spouse Nerio (see ARR: 209, 272, 305). In his discussion of the present Fasti text, Frazer (3:121–4) argues that Ovid has drawn upon a story originally about Mars’ marriage to Nerio, noting, among other pieces of documentary evidence, the close similarity between Ovid’s wording in his description of Mars’ love for Minerva and that of Martianus Capella’s description of the war god’s affection for Nerio.

3.697–702. The Ides of March is also the anniversary of the assassination of Julius Caesar, who on that day in 44 BC was stabbed to death at a meeting of the senate in the hall of Pompey’s Theatre. No extant Julio-Augustan calendar commemorates the event. Ovid makes Vesta refer to Caesar as ‘my priest’, as he had held the office of Pontifex Maximus. For the view, however, that the Pontifex Maximus has no direct priestly relationship with Vesta until Augustus’ assumption of the office in 12 BC and his movement of Vesta to the Palatine, see H-B 1994: 66–71, 99–100. See 3.419–22 and n. and Introduction 4.VII. On the semiotics of this passage, see Introduction 5.VI.

3.705–8. It was at Philippi in 42 BC that Octavian (Augustus) and Mark Antony defeated Cassius and Brutus, who had been leading figures in the plot to assassinate Julius Caesar. Both Cassius and Brutus committed suicide, and indeed practically all of Caesar’s assassins had been killed within three years of the murder, writes Caesar’s biographer Suetonius (Jul. 89).

3.709–10. The allusion to the Sibyl’s description of Aeneas’ forthcoming task at Virgil Aen. 6.129, accords with the analogy between Octavian/Augustus and Aeneas which is prominent in Augustan ideology and iconography. See 5.567–78n. and Introduction 4.VII.

3.711–12. Though Ovid seems clearly to refer to the morning rising of the constellation Scorpios in these lines, his contemporaries date its morning setting to this date (thus, Columella Rust. 11.2.30–31). Both, however, are inaccurate. On a possible resolution of the problem, see Böxmer 2: 315; Frazer 3: 131.

3.713–14. March 17 brings the celebration of the Liberalia, festival of the third-function male – female pair Liber – Libera, Italian deities of fertility. As revealed here, Liber became equated with the Roman god Bacchus (Greek Dionysus) and so was particularly associated with the fertility of the vine. On the Aventine Hill was founded in the period of the early republic(493 BC), following the secession of the plebs to the Mons Sacer (see 3.661–4n.), a temple dedicated to the plebeian threesome – Ceres, Liber and Libera. The source of the cult of the Aventine triad is uncertain. Greek triads consisting of Demeter (with whom the Romans equated Ceres), Persephone and a male deity have been proposed as probable sources, and some Greek influence does seem likely, but the appearance of the plebeian Aventine temple a few decades after the establishment of the Capitoline temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, and the installation in both the Capitoline and Aventine temples of a triad consisting of two female and one male deity, each having a sanctuary, would seem to suggest a conscious attempt on the part of the plebs to produce their own version of the Capitoline cult. Establishment of the Aventine triad would be only one more element in the plebeian struggle for equality which also produced a plebeian assembly, tribunes and aediles, and an archive of plebeian records (housed in the Aventine temple). Assimilation of the Aventine cult to the Greek worship of Demeter may have then intensified in the succeeding centuries (see ARR: 378–80). March 17 is also one of the dates on which was celebrated the Agonalia (see 1.317–18n.).

3.715–18. On the incineration of Semele and the birth of Dionysus from Zeus’ body, see 3.503–4n.

3.719–20. Bacchus apparently ‘defeated’ the Sithonians and Scythians in that they fell victim to his wine. On the god’s conquest of India, see 3.465–8n.

3.721–2. Ovid makes reference in these lines to two persecutors of Dionysus who came to a bitter end. The ‘Theban mother’ is Agave, who became a follower of Dionysus and in a crazed, ecstatic state – a condition typical of Dionysus’ worshippers – killed her son, Pentheus, king of Thebes, who had rejected the god (see Met. 3.701–33). ‘Vile trophy’ presumably refers to Pentheus’ head, which his mother ripped from his already mutilated body. Lycurgus was a king of Thrace who had attempted to kill Dionysus. Subsequently, Lycurgus went mad and murdered his own son with an axe, thinking him to be a vine (see Apollodorus 3.5.1).

3.723–4. In the Metamorphoses (3.597–691), Ovid tells the tale (known also from other sources) of how Dionysus was captured by Tyrrhenian sailors and how they were in turn inflicted with madness, so that they jumped overboard and were transformed into dolphins.

3.725–6. One of the characteristic elements of the feast of Liber, with whom Bacchus is completely identified, was the consumption of cakes which were sold on the street by old women (see Varro Ling.6.14). In the following lines Ovid turns to an explanation of the origin of the custom, characteristically invoking etymological connections.

3.729–30. On Dionysus’ conquest of India, see 3.465–8n.

3.732. Bulls were traditionally offered at the Roman triumph, the celebratory procession of a victorious Roman general.

3.733–4. Ovid etymologizes Latin libamina, ‘libations’, and liba, ‘cakes’, as derived from the divine name Liber. The former, and probably the latter, are actually linked to libo, ‘to pour a libation, to offer’, descended from Proto-Indo-European *lēi-, ‘to flow’, while the god’s name is traced to *leudh -, ‘to grow’.

3.736. The earliest known reference to Dionysus is found in a Mycenaean Greek tablet from the Cretan town of Chania (c. 1400 BC). The tablet records offerings of honey made to Dionysus and to Zeus.

3.737–9. The geographic references in these lines are to features of Thrace, a country particularly associated with Dionysus.

3.745. On satyrs, see 1.397 and Glossary. The ‘bald old man’ is Silenus, teacher of Dionysus and a member of his retinue; see 1.399n.

3.761–7. As noted above (see 3.725n.), on the day of the Liberalia celebrants purchased honey cakes in the streets from old women, and these ‘priestesses’ were garlanded with ivy. A portion of each cake sold was offered to Liber on portable hearths carried by the vendors.

3.768–70. Dionysus’ ‘stepmother’ is the wife of his father Zeus, that is Hera (Roman Juno). Hera had searched for the young Dionysus to take vengeance on him for Zeus’ infidelity, as she would do with so many of Zeus’ paramours and their offspring. The child Dionysus was cared for, and in this instance hidden by, the nymphs of Mount Nysa, a place of uncertain location.

3.771–88. On this day celebrating ancient deities of fertility, the white ‘toga of liberty’ (toga liber a or tog a virilis) is put on as a sign that a boy (usually at the age of fourteen) is now a iuvenis or young adult. The purple-edged tog a praetext a of childhood is put away and sacrifices are likely offered to Juventas (goddess of youth; see 2.667–70n.) in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Ovid here offers his speculations regarding the origin of the custom, again forging etymological links (lines 777–8). St Augustine, citing Varro ashis authority, identifies Liber and Libera as overseeing the ‘liberation’ of male and female seed respectively (De Civ . D . 4.11; 6.9), and writes disparagingly of the public worship of phallic images drawn along in wagons on the day of the Liberalia. In the town of Lavinium, an entire month is set aside for the worship of Liber, during which time the people continually speak obscenities (De Civ .D . 7.21). In Rome on the day of the Liberalia, images of male and female genitalia are dedicated to Liber and Libera respectively in their temple. The ‘torch-goddess’ of line 786 is Ceres, Greek Demeter that is, who searched for her abducted daughter Persephone with lit torches; and the games which Liber shares with her are those of the Cerialia of April 19 (see 4.679–80n.; also ARR: 378).

3.789. Regarding the horns of Dionysus, to which reference is here made, see 3.499–500n.

3.791–2. On the procession of the Argeï, see 5.621–2n.

3.793–4. Milvus, the Kite star, appears to have been no star at all, but an astronomical apparition founded upon an erroneous Roman reading of a Greek calendar making reference to the reappearance of the migratory kite on this day (see Frazer 3:141–52). Even so, Ovid offers an account in the following lines of its origin. ‘Lycaonian Arctos’ is the constellation Ursa Major, the bear (arctos is Greek for ‘bear’), Callisto set in the sky by Zeus (see 2.183–90n.). On Lycaon as father of Callisto, see 2.173n.

3.796–8. In Greek myth, Cronus (with whom the Romans equated their god Saturnus) had emasculated and overthrown his father Uranus (see 1.233–6n.), and in turn was ousted from his position of sovereignty by his own son Zeus (Roman Jove). In an effort to preserve Cronus’ kingship, the Titans (Cronus, his brothers and sisters) had gone to war with Zeus and his siblings, the former fighting from atop Mount Othrys and the latter from Mount Olympus. After ten years of warfare, the Olympian deities prevailed, with the critical assistance of those hundred-armed, fifty-headed creatures called the Hecatonchires (offspring of Gaea and Uranus, like the Titans; see Hesiod Th. 173–82, 617–721).

3.799–808. The story which Ovid relates to account for the so-called Kite star is strange. The bull-snake monster must be Typhoeus, or Typhon, a monstrous creature conceived and birthed by Gaea (the Earth) for the purpose of overthrowing Zeus, king of gods and mortals, after he had deposed Cronus and the Titans. Hesiod (Th. 820–68) describes Typhoeus as a serpent of one hundred heads, roaring like a bull and making many other dread noises. Zeus triumphs over this, the last of Gaea’s children, and casts him down into the depths of Tartarus, that same place where the Titans were imprisoned after their defeat and where the Hecatonchires were set as guards (Hesiod Th. 711–35). Briareus is one of Zeus’ allies, the Hecatonchires, but in the present passage, Ovid presents him as intending to usurp Zeus by sacrificing the bull-monster (compare the comments of Bömer 2: 198).

3.809–10. Minerva’s March festival, the greater Quinquatrus, evidences both aspects of her Roman personality, with gladiatorial games and the worshipful attention of workers (see 3.675–96n.). The name of the festival designated it as one which occurred five (Latin quinque) days after the Ides (counting in the Roman fashion); compare, for example, the name of the tenth day after the Ides, Decimatrus (from decem, ‘ten’), in the calendar of the city of Falerii. However, the sense of Quinquatrus was popularly reconstrued to mean that the duration of the festival was to be five days, as Ovid affirms in line 810. On this date, perhaps there were originally celebrated both festivals for Mars and for Minerva.

The Fasti Praenestini marks March 19 as a day on which those priests of Mars called the Salii danced in the Comitium; and on this day the twelve shields (ancilia; see 3.373–92n.) which the Salii carried were purified. These dancing priests, who derive their name from Latin salire, ‘to dance’, spend the days of March leaping about the city singing their ancient songs (the obscure Carmina Saliaria), dressed in military costume of an archaic type – embroidered tunic with belt of bronze, short cloak trimmed in purple, conical hat – wearing a sword, holding a spear in the right hand, the ancile in the left (see Dion. Ant. Rom. 2.70). The Salii total twenty-four in number, one set of twelve being called the Salii Palatini, a second twelve the Salii Collini or Agonales. Curiously, the Salii Palatini, who are dedicated to the war god Mars, were said to have been founded by Numa Pompilius, second king of Rome and champion of peace. The Salii Collini, on the other hand, appear to have been devoted to Quirinus, a deity affiliated with peace (see 4.911–32n.; 6.545–7n.), but were vowed and established by Tullus Hostilius, the war-making successor of Numa (see ARR: 276–7). The Salii play not only a role in the celebration of the Quinquatrus with its purification of their shields, but are active in the celebration of the October 19 festival called the Armilustrium, the purification of arms (see Frazer 3: 145–6). The two festivals in which the Salii take part therefore mark the beginning and end of the military season, and thus the transitions between peace and war, war and peace – the realms of Mars and Quirinus (see ARR: 276–7).

The Quinquatrus would then have been one of those several festivals of Mars which marked the onset of the army’s campaigning season (see 2.857–60n.). In addition, however, the Fasti Praenestini notes this to be the artificum dies (‘day of craftsmen’), placing it squarely within the realm of Minerva, as it is in Ovid’s description.

3.811–14. Gladiatorial combat was held during the celebration of the Quinquatrus, though not on the first day (which was probably originally the only day of the festival). The initial day of the five was said to be Minerva’s birthday, perhaps because it was on March 19 that her Aventine temple had been dedicated. As Dumeézil has suggested (ARR: 306, n. 25), this absence of bloodshed on the first day of the Quinquatrus is likely yet another relic of Minerva’s original non-martial nature.

3.815–34. The Quinquatrus, festival of Minerva, the goddess of crafts, is observed by many practitioners of the crafts – spinners and weavers, cleaners and dyers, shoe-makers, physicians, teachers, painters and sculptors, and others not named by Ovid (see ARR: 303–4, 622).

3.835–8. Minerva had not only a temple on the Aventine (see 3.811–14n.) and a sanctuary in the Capitoline temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (as a member of the Capitoline triad), but also a shrine on the Caelian Hill, which, like her Aventine temple, had been dedicated on this date.

3.839–46. The Caelian shrine of Minerva Capta, called the Minervium by Varro (Ling. 5.47), housed a statue of the goddess which had been captured from the city of Falerii when it fell to the Romans in 241 BC. Hence, among those etymologies which Ovid proposes for this cultic name of Minerva, one is certainly accurate – that of line 843. In lines 841–2, the poet refers to the birth of Greek Pallas Athena, daughter of Zeus and the nymph Metis. Zeus had learned from Gaea and Uranus that Metis was destined to bear a son who would usurp his father’s position as king of gods and mortals. To eliminate this future rival, Zeus disposed of Metis by swallowing her. When swallowed, however, she was pregnant with a daughter, Athena, who would be delivered from Zeus’ head through the application of an axe wielded by Hephaestus (though other deities are less frequently identified in this role), like Athena, a craftsman.

3.847–8. The aegis is a round vestment worn chiefly by Zeus and, especially after Homer, by Athena. Usually depicted as bearing the image of a gorgon and ringed with tassels, the aegis endows great power to the wearer. Images of Roman emperors are commonly portrayed with the aegis.

3.849–50. March 23 is the day of the Tubilustrium, the festival of ‘trumpet purification’. Again, the likely origin was one of a set of festival days dedicated to Mars which clustered around the beginning of the season of military campaigns (see 2.857–60n.), and the date is in fact marked in the Fasti Praenestini. For Ovid it is the final day of the Quinquatrus (see 3.809–10n.); and apparently it was a day affiliated with a ‘potent goddess’–though not originally Minerva. According to the Greek historian Lydus (Mens. 4.60), on March 23 were celebrated both a festival for Mars and a festival for the goddess Nerine, that is Nerio, wife of Mars, with whom Minerva came to be identified (see 3.675–96n.). The trumpets were purified with the sacrifice of a lamb (Festus pp. 352–3M) in the place called the Atrium Sutorium (Varro Ling. 6.14).

3.851–2. By ‘Phrixus’ sheep’ Ovid refers to the zodiac constellation of the Ram, or Aries, and so states here that on March 22 the sun had entered the sign of the Ram. The story of Phrixus and his sheep is rehearsed in the lines which follow.

3.853–76. There was a king of the Greek city of Orchomenus by the name of Athamas, whose wife Nephele had given birth to a son and a daughter, Phrixus and Helle. Upon the death of Nephele, Athamas remarried, taking as his wife Ino, sister of Semele (see 3.503–4n.). Ino hated the children of Nephele and contrived to kill them. Having persuaded the women of the region to roast the seed-corn for the following year’s crop, so that the crop did not grow and a famine came upon the land, she sent representatives to Apollo’s oracle at Delphi to discover a means by which the famine might be ended. Those who had consulted the oracle reported falsely, following Ino’s instructions, that relief from the famine would come only by the sacrifice of Phrixus and Helle. Before the moment of sacrifice, the children were rescued by their mother’s spirit, hovering in the sky (Nephele’s name means ‘cloud’), and placed upon a flying ram having a Golden Fleece. As the ram flew with them towards the region of Colchis, east of the Black Sea, Helle fell from the animal’s back into that part of the sea which would afterwards bear her name, the Hellespont. In Colchis, Phrixus sacrificed the ram to Zeus and its Golden Fleece was hung in a sacred grove, to become the object of Jason’s quest (see 1.491n.). Nephele honoured the ram by placing its likeness among the stars (see Apollodorus 1.9.1; Hyginus Astr. 2.20). Note that in the present passage, Ovid presents Athamas as the king of Thebes, ‘the dragon born city’–so called because its first citizens were warriors who sprang from dragon’s teeth which Cadmus (see 1.489–90n.) had sown in the ground.

3.877–8. Ovid identifies the Vernal Equinox as occurring three days after the Tubilustrium.

3.879–82. According to Dio Cassius (54.35.1), Augustus had procured statues for the three goddesses here named (10 BC): Concordia, the goddess of peaceful agreement (see 1.637–40, 1.645–6; 6.637–8), Salus, the goddess of safety and Pax, goddess of peace. Frazer (3: 158) observes that Ovid’s entreaty to worship the three on this date may suggest that the goddesses shared a temple and that March 30 was the anniversary of its dedication. Janus’ affiliation with peace and tranquillity has already been noted; see 1.68n.

3.883–4. The festival of Luna, goddess of the moon, was held on March 31. The Fasti Praenestini agrees with Ovid in identifying the Aventine as the place of celebration; both here and on the Palatine, Luna possessed temples. Her Palatine temple, according to Varro (Ling. 5.68), remained illuminated all through the night, and there she is worshipped as Noctiluca, ‘Night-Shiner’. Varro also identifies Luna as one of the gods of Titus Tatius (Ling. 5.74), though there is little evidence for an early Roman cult of Luna (see ARR: 170, 389, n. 29).

Fasti 4: APRIL

4.1–18. Ovid now addresses the goddess of the month of April, the goddess of love, Venus, with whom the Romans equated Greek Aphrodite. Her ‘Twin Loves’ are her sons Eros (‘Love’) and Anteros (‘Love Returned’), of whom Ovid wrote in his Amores (3.15.1) and Heroides (16.203). The poet’s request for Venus’ blessing not only picks up the invocation of Mars at the beginning of Fasti 3, but leads him to recapitulate the subject-matter of his poem (with 11–12 compare 1.1–2 and 1.7) and to write what is in essence a second preface, marking this moment as the mid-point of his work (compare the proem to Lucretius DRN 4). The reader is thus led to expect only three more books. There is also an important counterpoint between this proem and Ovid’s ‘farewell to elegy’ in Amores 3.15 (compare esp.Fasti 4.1, 4.10 with Amores 3.15.1, 3.15.18; see 4.9–10n.) Compare also Ars Amatoria 3.53–6 and Remedia Amoris 40.

4.3. The poet has already spoken of the loftiness of his present undertaking, in comparison to the pettiness of his earlier works on love (see 2.1–18 and n.). Here he places the deprecation on the lips of the goddess. For the genre issues, see Introduction 5.III.

4.9–10. The reference is to the ‘games’ of love/love-poetry (Amores,Heroides,Ars Amatoria, etc.), ‘right’ for Ovid’s youth, as opposed to the present ‘greater’ undertaking of Fasti. See 2.1–18n., and Introduction 5.III. ‘Without offence’ in the context of Ovid’s exile is ironic. It was Ars Amatoria, The Art of Love, which was part of the official reason for the exile. See Introduction 1.I. ‘Trample a greater plain’ echoes Amores 3.15.18.

4.11–12. Compare 1.1–2 and 1.7–8.

4.15–16. ‘My brow and Times’: Ovid puns on the Latin word,tempora, which means ‘brow’, ‘times’, and ‘Times’ (i.e., Ovid’s Fasti, referred to by its first word). For an analogous pun, see 6.771. On Aphrodite’s affiliation with the island of Cythera, see 3.611n. Aphrodite/Venus is closely linked with the myrtle; see 4.869–70 and n.

4.18. ‘While it’s allowed’ is another allusion to the proem to Fasti 1 (see 1.25).

4.19–22. The Julian family, of which Augustus was an adopted member, traced its ancestry through Aeneas to Venus, said to be Aeneas’ mother.

4.23–30. The ‘Ilian father’ is Romulus, whom Ovid credits with creation of the old Roman calendar of ten months, of which March (Mars’ month) was the first (see 1.27–30). Romulus is ‘Ilian’ because he is the son of Ilia (Rhea Silvia) and because his ancestor Aeneas came from Ilium (Troy), founded by Aeneas’ own forefather, Ilus.

4.31–6. Ovid in these lines traces the genealogy of Aeneas and, ultimately, Romulus, beginning with Jupiter. In Greek myth, Zeus (with whom the Romans equated Jupiter) is said to have fathered a son by Electra, daughter of the giant Atlas (and so one of the Pleiades; see lines 169–78). This son was Dardanus, founder of the city of Dardania, located on Mount Ida (in the vicinity of Troy), and ancestor of the kings of Troy. His eventual descendant, through the lineage here specified, is Anchises, to whom Aphrodite (Roman Venus) bears Aeneas.

4.37–8. When Aeneas escaped the flames of burning Troy, he brought with him the Penates (see 1.528n.), and on his back he carried his aged father, Anchises.

4.39–40. Iulus is another name for Ascanius, the son of Aeneas, who with his father escaped from Troy when it was sacked by the Greeks. The gens Iulia (‘Julian family’) traced its ancestry to him, as Ovid here notes, and beyond him to the Trojans.

4.41–2. Postumus, also called Silvius, is in turn the son of Ascanius (Iulus), according to the present lines. The etymological connection between the name Silvius and Latin silva (‘woods’) to which Ovid alludes is, however, central to a different tradition regarding the parentage and birth of Postumus. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Ant. Rom. 1.70), Postumus is the son of Aeneas and his Italian wife Lavinia (as he is for Virgil) and was born in a forest, to which Lavinia had fled for fear of Ascanius’ jealousy of his half-brother. Aulus Gellius (2.16.1–7) contends that the boy was called Postumus because he was born after the death of his father Aeneas.

4.43–4. Ascanius left Aeneas’ city of Lavinium to found and rule Alba Longa. After Ascanius, Silvius became king of that city and he was followed in turn by a series of kings (all said to have carried the name Silvius), enumerated in these and the following lines by Ovid, first of whom was Silvius’ son Latinus (not that king by the same name who is father of Aeneas’ wife, Lavinia). Greek and Roman authorities differ regarding the succession of kings in Alba Longa and the length of their reigns.

4.45. Capys was also the name of Anchises’ father (see line 34), hence a Trojan name.

4.47–8. On the drowning of Tiberinus, see 2.389–90.

4.49–50. Remulus is said to have claimed to be a god and as a consequence of this sacrilege to have been struck by lightning.

4.51–2. ‘Aventinus’ (‘Aventine’) was the name of the southernmost of Rome’s seven hills, located south-east of the Tiber, and also the name of the Augustan city district (Regio XIII) in which the hill was situated.

4.53–6. Concerning Amulius, Numitor and his daughter Rhea Silvia, mother of Romulus and Remus by Mars, see 2.383–4n. By ‘Quirinus’ Ovid here, as elsewhere, refers to Romulus (see 1.37n.).

4.57–60. With these lines Ovid returns to that point which he had made in beginning the discussion of Romulus’ genealogy (see lines 23–30): Romulus began his ten-month calendar with months named in honour of his divine forebears, Mars and Venus.

4.61–2. In antiquity, the month name April was sometimes analysed as being derived from Aphrodite (the name of the Greek deity with whom the Romans equated Venus), whose name in turn was said to have been formed from Greek aphros, ‘foam’. Hesiod knows the latter etymological equation: when Cronus emasculated his father Uranus (see 1.233–6n.), he flung his severed testicles into the sea, and as they floated foaming, Aphrodite was born from them (Th. 188–97). A second popular etymology for April in antiquity linked it to Latin aperio, ‘to open’, as it is in April when plants, putting forth their buds, open (see lines 85–90). The derivation from Aphrodite here promoted by the narrator was advanced by the antiquarians Fulvius and Junius but rejected by Varro (Ling. 6.33) and Cincius (Macr.Sat.1.12.12), who observed the absence of any significant festival to Venus in this month and supported the derivation from aperio (Macr.Sat. 1.12.14). See Introduction 4.VII.

4.63–4. In these and the following lines Ovid tries to promote his Greek etymology of April by invoking other instances of Greek words and personalities important in the history of Italy and Rome. Magna Graecia, ‘Greater Greece’, was the name given to that part of Italy which had been heavily colonized by the Greeks. The boundaries of Magna Graecia were not firmly set, but the term was commonly applied to the area stretching between Cumae and Tarentum.

4.65. Evander, whom Ovid has already discussed (see 1.462n.), led the early Arcadian Greeks who settled on the Palatine Hill.

4.69–70. The ‘shore with Circe’s name’ is Circeii in coastal Latium.

4.71–2. Telegonus is the son of Odysseus and Circe, and in Roman tradition, as Ovid has already noted (see 3.87–96), was identified as the founder of the city of Tusculum. The city of Tibur, modern Tivoli, was said to have been named after a Greek, Tiburnus, who, along with his two brothers, founded the city.

4.75–6. Antenor was a Trojan leader who had urged the return of Helen to the Greeks so that the war might be brought to a peaceful conclusion. For his peace-making efforts, though unsuccessful, his life was spared by the Greeks when Troy was sacked. Antenor left Troy for Italy, leading the Eneti, a people of Paphligonia, Trojan allies whose king had been killed during the war. Tradition holds that in Italy he founded the city of Patavium, modern Padua, and that the Eneti gave rise to the inhabitants of the surrounding region, the Veneti. Oenides is the Greek hero Diomedes (grandson of the Calydonian king, Oeneus; see 1.491n.). Returning home from the Trojan War, he discovered his wife Aegialea had been unfaithful to him; he thus left Greece and coming to Italy allied himself with Daunus, a king of northern Apulia, and married his daughter. Diomedes was credited with founding the Apulian city of Argyripa.

4.77–8. The gods brought by the Trojan Aeneas are the Penates; see 1.528n.

4.82–4. The ‘Scythic soil’ of which the poet writes in such doleful tones is the place of his exile, Tomis on the western shore of the Black Sea. For a discussion of this overt autobiographical moment see Introduction 5.V. ‘Grieving lyre’ (maesta lyra) is perhaps a reference to the exilic Tristia.

4.85–90. The poet here sets forth and berates the second of those etymologies of April which were current in antiquity (see 4.61–2n.)–that one which derives the name of the month not from Greek Aphrodite, but from Latin aperio, ‘to open’. In line 90 Ovid makes reference to the Roman legal custom of a creditor laying hands on a debtor as a symbolic demonstration of the debtor’s liability.

4.91–114. With this ‘Hymn to Venus’ compare Lucretius’famous invocation of the goddess at DRN 1.1–49 and Virgil’s proclamation of the power of amor at Geo. 3.242–83.

4.109–10. A clever reference to the erotic literary form known as the ‘paraclausithyron’ (song sung before the door of the beloved).

4.119–20. Ovid here refers to a well-known episode from the Iliad (5.330–431)–the wounding of Aphrodite (with whom the Romans equated Venus). It was Greek Diomedes who inflicted the wound, piercing Aphrodite’s hand with his spear as she was rescuing her son Aeneas, whom Diomedes was about to strike down. The account likely traces its roots to the Near East, bearing remarkable similarity to the romantic wounding of Ishtar by the Mesopotamian hero Gilgamesh (OR: 96–9), a scene from the epic which bears his name. Ishtar is the Mesopotamian equivalent of Phoenician Astarte, who is most probably the source of Greek Aphrodite.

4.121–2. The poet invokes yet another well-known episode in Aphrodite’s career – the so-called ‘Judgement of Paris’. At the wedding feast of Peleus and Thetis (parents of the Greek hero Achilles), Eris, the goddess of strife, threw on to the banqueting table an apple inscribed with the phrase ‘for the most beautiful’. Aphrodite, Athena and Hera were each certain that the apple was meant for her. In the end, the Trojan prince Paris is called upon to judge which of the three deities is in fact the most beautiful. Each of the goddesses offers Paris a bribe; it is Aphrodite’s which he finds most appealing: assistance in abducting Helen, the wife of the Spartan King Menelaus – the event which would precipitate the Trojan War. In that war Aphrodite will aid the Trojans, while her two rivals in beauty will assist the Greeks. On a tripartite interpretation of the ‘Judgement of Paris’, see ME: 581–6.

4.123–4. Assaracus is grandfather of Anchises (see lines 33–5), with whom Aphrodite/Venus conceived Aeneas, claimed as an ancestor by the Julian family.

4.129–30. Ovid here alludes to the joining of Mars’ month and Venus’ in the calendar, and to the Greek traditions of the love-making of Aphrodite (Roman Venus) and Ares (Roman Mars). Best known of their amorous escapades was that occasion on which they were snared in their loving by Hephaestus, husband of Aphrodite and brother of Ares, with an invisible net which the smith god had crafted for this very purpose. Among the offspring produced by Ares and Aphrodite, according to some traditions, is Eros, god of love. There is also a further allusion by Ovid: to the joining of Venus and Mars in the great temple of Mars Ultor in the Forum of Augustus. Both on the pediment of the temple and within the temple itself (in the apse at the rear) statues of Venus and Mars stood side by side promoting Augustus’ divine lineage. For the temple of Mars Ultor, see 5.545–8n.

4.133–4. According to the calendar of Philocalus (CIL 1: 262, 314), on this date was celebrated the Veneralia, festival of Venus. Ovid’s dual worshipful exhortation, directed not only to ‘Latin mothers and brides’, but also to those ‘without the headband and long gown’, in other words, prostitutes, is echoed in various sources. For example, Lydus (Mens. 4.65) writes that on April 1, women of standing worshipped Venus for peace and chastity, while those of lower rank, wreathed in myrtle (compare line 139), bathed in the men’s baths.

4.135–8. The practice of ritually bathing images of deities is otherwise attested, and Ovid himself writes of another such washing occurring only three days later, on April 4 (see lines 337–40). For Arnobius (Adv. Nat. 7.32), the custom is a practical exercise, necessitated by the ongoing deposit of grime upon the divine images. The statue whose cleansing the poet here describes was likely that one located in the temple of Venus of Eryx (Venus Erycina), situated outside the city walls by the Porta Collina (see lines 871–6). This temple’s extramural disposition (beyond the pomerium; see 4.819n.) was shared by temples of Volcanus, Ceres and Mars (Vitruvius 1.7.1). In the case of the passionate Venus, the location was required for the protection of adolescents and mothers (see ARR: 473).

4.139–44. See 4.133–4n. On Venus’ affiliation with the myrtle, see 4.869–70n.

4.145–50. The men’s baths are likely indicated here, with courtesans bathing in them on this day (see 4.133–4n.). Worship of the goddess Fortuna (‘Luck, Chance’) was said to have been introduced into Rome principally by Servius Tullius, next to last of the Roman kings, who, according to Plutarch (Quaest. Rom. 74) and Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Ant. Rom. 4.27.7), built a temple to the very goddess here mentioned, Fortuna Virilis (‘Man’s Fortune’). His devotion to the deity was said to have stemmed from his recognition of her hand in his rise from a lowly position to the monarchy. The goddess is the embodiment of the experience of fortune and, naturally enough, has many distinct avatars, some highly specific: Fortuna Virilis, Fortuna Muliebris (‘Woman’s Fortune’), Fortuna Publica (‘Public Fortune’; see lines 375–6), among others (see ARR: 39, 42). She was worshipped elsewhere in Italy with even higher standing than that which she enjoyed at Rome. Her most magnificent temple was that of Fortuna Primigenia at Praeneste, where she was invoked by women desiring to conceive children. At Praeneste, Fortuna Primigenia was identified as the daughter of Jupiter. Her epithet Primigenia, Dumézil argues, means not ‘first-born’, however, as it is commonly interpreted, but ‘primordial’. The incoherent attributes which Fortuna Primigenia would then bear – both a primordial being and a daughter of Jupiter – Dumézil finds suggestive of an archaic Indo-European origin, being reminiscent of Vedic dualities (see ARR: 55, n. 12). A Praenestine statue depicts this primordial deity, ‘daughter of Jupiter’, as nursing the infant Jupiter and Juno at her breasts. Fortuna possessed oracles at both Praeneste and at Antium, at which latter place she also enjoyed considerable prestige.

4.151–4. The ritual drinking of a mixture of poppies, milk and honey is not otherwise attested in conjunction with Roman Venus. With this, one may compare the association of Greek Demeter with the mixing of milk and honey (see Bömer 2: 217–18). By ‘her lusting husband’ is intended Mars.

4.157–60. The poet here refers to a macabre incident which occurred in 114 BC. Condemned of committing unchaste acts, certain Vestal Virgins were executed, as was the prescribed punishment for such an offence (the means of execution being live entombment in the place called the Campus Sceleratus). By ‘Cumae’s crone’, Ovid alludes to the Sibylline Books (see 4.257–60n.), which were on this occasion consulted to determine a means of expiation for the sacrilege (on the Cumaean Sibyl, see 3.531–4n.). The oracle instructed that four human victims were to be buried alive, two Greeks and two Gauls. This same horrific sacrifice is reported to have been offered at other times, the first, according to Plutarch (Marc. 3.4), being during the crisis which surrounded the threat of the Insubres (a people of Cisalpine Gaul) late in the third century BC. Regarding expiation for the sin of the Vestals, in addition to the Greco-Gallic sacrifice, a temple was to be dedicated to Venus Verticordia (‘Heart Changer’). See ARR: 449–50; Dumézil prefers a date of 216 BC for that sacrifice of the Greeks and Gauls occurring in conjunction with the execution of the Vestals.

4.163–4. Frazer (3: 195–6) contends that the setting of the constellation of Scorpios to which Ovid here refers must be the morning setting, but that in this entry the poet is almost a month too early (compare 5.417–18n.).

4.169–78. Ovid here presents two different accounts given in antiquity for the near invisibility of one of the seven stars which compose the constellation: it is Merope who hides her face because she, unlike her sisters, married a mortal, Sisyphus; or it is Electra, because she grieves for Troy, the city descended from her son Dardanus (see 4.31–6n.).

4.181–2. April 4 brings the celebration of the festival of the mother goddess Cybele, called the Idaean Mother as her worship came to Rome from Phrygia, the general region of Anatolia in which stood Mount Ida. She is the Magna Mater, the ‘Great Mother’, and her festival is called the Megalesia or Megalensia, from Greek megaleē, ‘great’ (Varro Ling. 6.15). The Ludi Megalenses, the games celebrated at the festival, instituted in 191 BC, were a central element of the occasion and included chariot races in the Circus Maximus, as well as theatrical performances (note line 187) presented before Cybele’s Palatine temple (and probably at various other sites in the city). The ‘Berecyntian flute’ is so-named for its cultic importation from Anatolia (home of the goddess), where lived the people called the Berecyntes; and Berecyntia is generally used as an epithet of Cybele.

4.183–4. Eunuchs, pounding drums, clashing cymbals, in addition to bellowing horns – all are elements of the riotous and cacophonous cult of Cybele, which the poet addresses in the following lines.

4.189–94. In the long passage which follows, Ovid resumes his interlocutory technique, and presents the background of various elements of the cult of Cybele, as if the discoveries which he imparts to his readers were being elicited from the Muses, Greek goddesses of the arts, daughters of Zeus and the Titan Mnemosyne. Because Rhea, the mother of Zeus, came to be associated with Cybele, Ovid can refer to the Muses as the granddaughters of Cybele.

4.195–6. The Muse named Erato takes up the first of the poet’s questions. As her name is derived from Greek eroōs (‘love’, ‘desire’), the reader is told that it is only appropriate for her to speak to the month of Venus, goddess of love (here called Cytherea after the island of Cythera; see 3.611n.).

4.197–206. Greek Cronus (with whom the Romans equated Saturnus) had emasculated his father Uranus and usurped his position of power (see 1.233–6n.). Subsequently, Gaea and Uranus would warn their son Cronus that a similar fate of deposition awaited him at the hands of one of his own offspring. Cronus thus circumspectly proceeded to swallow each of his first five children as his wife Rhea gave birth to them: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades and Poseidon. Pregnant yet again and weary of her husband’s odious gluttony, Rhea implored Gaea and Uranus to assist her in saving the sixth child from the fate of its siblings. Following their instructions, Rhea fled to the island of Crete shortly before giving birth; there Zeus was born, his grandmother Gaea took charge of him, and a stone wrapped in an infant’s robe was presented to Cronus, who hastily swallowed the bundle without first inspecting its contents (see Hesiod Th. 453–91).

4.207–10. On Crete, the infant Zeus was sheltered in a cave beneath a mountain – Mount Aegeum according to Hesiod (Th. 484), but others, like Ovid, identify the place as Mount Ida (of the same name as that Phrygian mountain with which Cybele is associated; see 4.181–2n.) or as Mount Dicte. To prevent Cronus from hearing the wailing of his sixth child hidden in that cave, armed guards, protectors of the baby, danced about, bashing weapons against their shields – guards whom Ovid here names as the Curetes and the Corybantes. The Curetes were identified as Cretan warrior figures, spirits of nature, and so male counterparts to the nymphs. In the tradition of the Anatolian city of Ephesus, the Curetes were also guardians of young Artemis and her brother Apollo (see Strabo 14.1.20). Also spirits of nature, the Corybantes were credited with protecting not only Zeus but the infant Dionysus as well, and are affiliated with the cult of Cybele.

4.211–14. Ovid thus concludes that the historical origin of the tumultuous worship of Cybele is to be located in the noisy dancing of the guards of infant Zeus, son of the Titan Rhea with whom Cybele is identified.

4.215–18. The goddess whose worship is so untamed is frequently depicted as accompanied by lions, and even rides in a chariot drawn by such beasts.

4.219–20. Cybele was often depicted wearing a crown topped by a turret.

4.221–2. Eunuch attendants called Galli (on the name, see 4.361–6 and n.) served the Phrygian goddess, and indeed castrated devotees were affiliated with the cults of various Anatolian goddesses, such as those of Artemis in Ephesus and Hecate in Lagina. Cybele’s eunuchs practised self-castration, utilizing a stone knife for the excision (see line 237). Only Phrygians could serve Cybele as her officiants – the practice was forbidden to Romans – and, as they paraded on the day of the Megalensia in Asian attire with faces painted white and hair perfumed (so St Augustine described those whom he saw in Carthage; see De Civ. D .7.26), they begged from onlookers and were showered with white roses. In line 222, as earlier (see 2.269), Ovid uses ‘Piërid’ for ‘Muse’.

4.223–4. As Ovid tells in the lines which follow, Attis was the lover of Cybele. The account presented here is a variant of that one which identifies Attis as the son of the androgynous figure named Agdistis (Pausanias 7.17.10–12)–the name given to Cybele in her cult at the Phrygian city of Pessinus writes Strabo (10.3.12). Agdistis was castrated, the deity’s severed testicles buried, and a tree – an almond – sprang from them. A certain nymph named Nana became pregnant by a blossom of the tree and gave birth to the infant Attis, with whom the now female Agdistis fell in love. She drove Attis to madness because of his love for another, and in his madness he castrated himself. At both Rome and Pessinus, the name Attis was applied to the priests of Cybele. Catullus’ treatment of Attis’ castration and devotion to Cybele in poem 63 is justly famous and forms a backdrop to Ovid’s narrative.

4.231–2. Ovid curiously speaks of Sagaritis as if she were a tree nymph, while calling her a Naiad – a water nymph – and Bömer (2: 227) and Frazer (3:224) have identified her name with that of the Phrygian river Sangarius or Sagaris. The nymph Nana, said to be mother of Attis (see 4.223–4n.), is herself named a daughter of the Sangarius. Hamadryads, tree nymphs, lived only as long as the tree which they inhabited.

4.236. By ‘Palestine goddesses’, Ovid apparently here denotes the Erinyes, female spirits who avenge wrongs committed, particularly against family members, tormenting the wrong-doer and bringing on madness (on the locale, see Bömer 2: 228). According to Hesiod (Th. 185), the Erinyes are daughters of Gaea, conceived when she was impregnated by the blood of Uranus at his emasculation (see 1.233–6n.).

4.245. As is commonly done, Ovid here equates the Greek Muses with the Roman Camenae, those nymphs of the spring by the Porta Capena, which provided the Vestal Virgins with a water source (see 3.11–12n.). Numa’s wife, Egeria, was one of the Camenae.

4.247–8. In lines 249–348 Ovid offers a lengthy account of the coming of Cybele to Rome. The official Roman importation of the Phrygian cult of Cybele occurred in 205 BC as the Carthaginian invader Hannibal tenaciously held out in Bruttium, in the south of Italy. The priests called the Decemviri (Decemvirs) consulted the Sibylline Books (see 4.257–60n.), following the prodigy of meteorites striking the earth, and the Books revealed that, if Cybele should be brought from Phrygia to Rome, the invader would be expelled (see Livy 29.20.4–6). Delegates were sent to the goddess’s cult centre at Pessinus (or to the Megalesion, Cybele’s temple near the walls of Pergamum; see Varro Ling. 6.15) and, through the intermediation of Attalus I, king of Pergamum (see 1.525n.), the goddess, in the form of a black stone (said to have been a meteorite), was handed over to the Roman envoys, who conducted it home in the company of a priest and priestess of the Idaean Mother, Cybele (see ARR: 484–6).

4.249–50. Dindymus and Ida are mountains of Asia Minor (see lines 181–2, 234). Cybele is here not the name of the goddess, but yet a third Anatolian mountain.

4.257–60. Ovid uses the phrase ‘Euboean song’ to denote the oracle read by the Decemviri in the Sibylline Books (see 4.247–8n.), as the Books were brought to Rome from Cumae in the south of Italy, a colony of the Euboean Greeks. It was the Cumaean Sibyl (see 3.531–4n.) who was credited with their introduction to Rome, and she was said to have so introduced them during the reign of the Tarquins. The traditional dating of the acquisition of the Sibylline Books to the period of Etruscan influence, however, perhaps suggests that they were actually of Etruscan origin, not Greek, and indeed such books were in use among the Etruscans (see ARR: 601–2). Tarquinius established the two-member priesthood of the Duumviri Sacris Faciundis, later expanded by eight to create the college of the Decemviri (and still later to a fifteen – the Quindecimviri, and then sixteen-member body), whose responsibility it was to care for and consult the Books (at the direction of the senate) when necessitated by the appearance of prodigies – lightning striking a sacred space, a rain of blood or flesh, an animal speaking, mysterious lights at night and a great many other such troubling phenomena which reveal the anger of a deity. From the Books’ oracular responses, the Decemviri would ascertain the appropriate means of expiation (procuratio) and the deities to whom expiation ought to be made (see ARR: 600–605). The Sibylline Books were kept in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill, where they were destroyed in the conflagration of 83 BC (see 4.951–2n.).

4.263–4. Paean is a name used both of Apollo, as here, and of his son Asclepius (see 1.290–94n.). In origin, however, Paean was an independent healing deity, who appears among the gods documented in the Linear B tablets of the Mycenaean Greeks of the second millennium BC. According to some ancient authorities (for example, Livy 29.11.1–6), after the reading of the Sibylline Books, Apollo’s oracle at Delphi was consulted by the Roman emissaries sent to Anatolia in search of Cybele, the Idaean Mother.

4.272–4. ‘Phrygian men’ is a reference to Aeneas and his Trojan ancestors (see 4.31–6n.). From the pine groves of Ida, Aeneas (‘the pious Phrygian’) had also harvested timber, and used it to build those ships in which he and his companions sailed away after the Greeks had overwhelmed their city of Troy.

4.277–90. Cybele inverts Ovid’s own journey from Italy to the Black Sea. See Introduction 4.VII.

4.278. Phrixus’ sister is Helle, and the strait named after her the Hellespont (see 3.853–76n.).

4.285–6. By ‘Pelops’ waves’, Ovid refers to the southern coast of the Peloponnese (on Pelops see 3.83–4n.). On Aphrodite (Roman Venus) and her sacred island of Cythera, see 3.611n.

4.291–304. According to Livy (29.14.12–13), the place at which the ship arrives, carrying the black stone which is the Phrygian goddess Cybele, is the Roman port of Ostia. The well-preserved remains of Ostia reveal it to have been a city of considerable cultic diversity; here was found a small temple dedicated to the Magna Mater, where she and Attis (see 4.223–4n.) were served by an Archigallus (a high priest; see 4.221–2n.). To the great dismay of the crowd of Romans who had come out to receive the Idaean Mother, writes Ovid, her ship sticks hard in the water and cannot be budged by the men ‘pulling heartily’ on the ship’s line – an apparent prodigy.

4.305–28. In Livy’s account (29.11, 14) of the bringing of Cybele to Rome, key roles in the event are played by the ‘best man’ and ‘most upright woman’ among the Romans. The former was identified as Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, the latter Claudia Quinta (see ARR: 485–7). Scipio, cousin of the celebrated Roman general Scipio Africanus, was entrusted with the honour and responsibility of boarding the ship, on which the goddess had been transported, in Ostia and receiving her (the stone) from her priests. The deity was then passed to Claudia Quinta, a member of the eminent Claudian family of Rome which traced its ancestry to a Sabine, Attus Clausus (line 305), together with other virtuous women who had come to Ostia to receive the goddess, and these carried the stone overland back to Rome. There the goddess was greeted with great celebration and deposited in the Palatine temple of the goddess of Victory. Ovid presents the figure of a Claudia whose reputation had been sullied according to rumour, but whom Cybele reveals to be a woman of greatest virtue by allowing the young woman to pull the ship free, effortlessly (lines 325–8). For the implications of this for Ovid’s own sullied reputation, see Introduction 4.VII.

4.329–36. Unlike Livy (see 4.305–28n.), Ovid perhaps understands the voyage by ship as continuing beyond Ostia to Rome. On this reading and the identification of the locale marked by the ‘bend in the river’, see Bömer 2: 236 and Frazer 3: 242–3.

4.337–40. When the black stone which embodied the goddess was installed in Rome, it was mounted in a silver statue of Cybele, serving as the deity’s face. Once a year this statue was removed from the goddess’s temple and transported in an ox-drawn wagon to the river Almo, where it was ritually washed by the purple-robed Archigallus (Cybele’s high priest; see 4.221–2n.). It is this ritual bath which Ovid here describes; but, while he suggests that the rite took place on April 4 as a part of the Megalensia, it is generally attested as one element in a festival of Cybele which was celebrated from March 22 to 27 (and preceded by a week of fasting). Frazer (3: 245–6) suggests that the lengthy March festival was instituted only after the completion of the Fasti; and indeed the festival is not fully documented until the appearance of the calendar of Philocalus in AD 354. The festival of March entailed such rites as the transporting of a pine tree, symbolizing Attis (see 4.223–4n.), to Cybele’s temple; bloodletting by the goddess’s priests; and the ecstatic celebration of a feast called the Hilaria. The festival was brought to a close on March 27 with the ritual washing of the image of the Mother goddess, a rite which St Augustine (De Civ. D. 2.4) notes was also observed in Carthage (among other places).

4.347–8. On P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica, the optimus (best man), see 4.305–28n. Upon reaching Rome in 204 BC, the goddess was housed in the temple of Victory on the Palatine as plans were begun for the construction of her own temple, completed in 191 BC. The original temple burned in 111 and was restored by one Metellus, says Ovid, perhaps Q. Caecilius Metellus Numidicus (see 1.593–8n.). A second restoration occurred under Augustus.

4.349–52. Erato is the Muse who is entertaining the poet’s queries (see 4.195–6n.). In conjunction with the giving of ‘coppers’ (the coins called asses), Frazer (3: 252–3) draws attention to the practice of begging from spectators which was observed by Cybele’s eunuch priests as they paraded (see 4.221–2n.).

4.353–6. One aspect of the Megalensia was the patrician custom of banqueting at one another’s homes on this day. Such banquets were called mutitationes, derived from Latin muto, ‘to exchange, change’. Ovid connects the practice with the change in Cybele’s place of residence, commemorated on the day of the Megalensia. The plebs will respond a few days later with their own banqueting custom, observed during the celebration of the festival of Ceres (see 4.393n.), which, however, antedates the festival of Cybele.

4.357–60. On the theatrical performances of this day, which must have involved, in part, a dramatic presentation of Claudia Quinta’s miraculous dislodging of Cybele’s mired ship (line 326), see 4.181–2n.

4.361–6. The etymology of the name of the eunuch priests of Cybele, the Galli, which Ovid here offers is not unique to him (see, inter alios, Festus p. 95M). The word is not to be connected with the European Celts of Gaul, advises the poet, but with a river which flows through Phrygia, home of the Idaean Mother, called the Gallus.

4.367–72. The herb and cheese salad, moretum, here described was simple peasant food. For the ingredients, see the poem called Moretum, attributed to Virgil.

4.373. By Pallantis or Pallantias (that is, daughter of Pallas, one of several figures in Greek myth with this name), Ovid denotes the goddess Dawn. For Hesiod (Th. 375–6), Pallas is one of the sons of the Titan Crius and his consort Eurybia (daughter of Pontus [‘Sea’] and Gaea) and is the husband of Styx (see 3.322n.), with whom he produces several children (Th. 383–8), none of whom is Eos (Dawn). However, Hesiod (Th. 378–82) tells of Pallas’ brother Astraius and how he took as his wife Eos, and how they produced children – the winds (Boreas, Zephyrus and Notus) and Eosphorus, the Morning Star.

4.375–6. The goddess Fortuna Publica (‘Public Fortune’) possessed a temple on the Quirinal dedicated on this day, one of three temples consecrated to this multifunctional deity on that hill. On Fortuna, see 4.145–50n.

4.377–86. This is the only Julian festival included in Fasti 1–6. The festivals of March 17 and 27 (and the anniversary of the announcement of the victory at Munda: April 21) are omitted. See Omissions from Fasti.

4.379–80. A reference to the battle of Thapsus (46 BC), where King Juba I of Numidia and Q. Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio were defeated by Julius Caesar.

4.384. The ‘Board of Ten’ with which Ovid was affiliated is that of the Decemviri, though not the priestly college to whose care the Sibylline Books were entrusted, the Decemviri Sacris Faciundis (see 4.247–8n.), but a ten-member panel charged with judging lawsuits, the Decemviri Stlitibus Iudicandis. Augustan rules regulated the assignment of seats in the theatre on the basis of military, civil and priestly service.

4.385–6. The morning setting of the constellation Libra occurred in early April and conventional meteorological wisdom held that the event was likely to be accompanied by inclement weather.

4.387–8. April 9 is the approximate date of the apparent evening setting of the constellation Orion (see Frazer 3: 261–2). For the true setting, see 5.493–4.

4.391–2. The great festival of the Magna Mater, Cybele, was concluded on this day by chariot races in the Circus Maximus, preceded by a procession of the gods (images of them) from the Capitoline Hill to the Circus.

4.393. On April 12 begins the Cerialia, the festival of Ceres which concludes on April 19. Ceres was an ancient Italic deity, possessing her own archaic priest, one of the twelve minor Flamens, the Flamen Cerialis. Though in time she became identified with the Greek goddess Demeter and was closely assimilated to her, in origin she was quite a distinct deity. Her name is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root * er-(‘to grow’), source of Latin creare, ‘to create’; crescere, ‘to grow’; and Greek koros, ‘son’, ‘boy’. The Salii sing of a male deity Cerus in one of their ancient songs (see Festus 122M), and this Cerus, meaning ‘Creator’, has been identified by some scholars as something of a divine consort of Ceres (thus Frazer 3: 263). Varro similarly records a reference in one of the hymns to a duonus Cerus (‘good Cerus’), but this appears to be a description of Janus (Ling. 7.26). Arguing from an Indo-Aryan parallel, Dumézil contends that cerus is to be understood as applied to Janus, characterizing him as ‘creator’–appropriate to the god of beginnings, and is thus not the name of a distinct male deity affiliated with Ceres (see ARR: 331, 375).

4.401–2. On Ceres and the replacing of acorns with better food, compare 1.675–6. For similar praise of Ceres as ‘the first to… ’, see Ovid Am. 3.10.11; Met. 5.341; and Virgil Geo. 1.147.

4.405–8. Iron ore should have been hidden forever, because from it weapons would be made. Compare the prayer of the Flamen Quirinalis (see lines 911–32).

4.409–10. The poet also specifies spelt as an offering made to Ceres and Tellus at the time of the Feriae Sementivae (see 1.671–6n.).

4.411. Ceres’ affiliation with torches was acquired through her equation with Greek Demeter; see 4.493–4n.

4.414. It is the ‘idle sow’ that is sacrificed to the goddess of grain, since, as Ovid has already declared, the sow angered Ceres by rooting up grain sprouts (see 1.349–53n.). Compare with the sacrifice of sows to Ceres the massive offering of pregnant cows to Tellus only three days later (see lines 629–72).

4.419–20. Trinacris is the island of Sicily. The name was said to be derived from Greek akra, ‘cape, point’, of which the island has three.

4.422. Henna, in the centre of Sicily, was commonly, though not universally, identified as the place of Persephone’s abduction. The author of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (16–18) situates the crime in a place called the fields of Nysa.

4.424. The ‘blonde goddess’ is Demeter, with hair yellow like ripe grain.

4.445–6. Persephone’s uncle is Hades or Pluto (from Greek ploutos, ‘wealth’), also called Dis by the Romans (from dis, ‘rich’; a Latin translation of Greek Pluto). Though Dis is brother of both Persephone’s mother, Demeter, and her father, Zeus, the Latin word used by Ovid, patruus, specifically denotes ‘paternal uncle’, typically a harsh figure, as opposed to the mother’s brother, the avunculus. According to a tradition preserved by Homer (Il. 15.187–93), the three sons of Cronus – Zeus, Poseidon and Hades – cast lots to determine their respective realms: the heavens went to Zeus, the seas to Poseidon, and the dark regions beneath the earth to Hades (the myth is likely of Mesopotamian origin; see OR: 89–91). For analogous ‘rapes’, see references at 3.21n.

4.473–4. The reference in line 473 must be to Mount Etna, where one tradition located the forge of the Cyclopes, workmen of Hephaestus say some, who hammer out thunderbolts for Zeus (see lines 287–8). The ‘place named after the curving sickle’ may be Messana, at the north-eastern tip of Sicily. The original name of the place had been Zancle, said to be derived from the Sicilian word meaning ‘sickle’ (see Bömer 2: 250–51; Frazer 3: 278–9).

4.482. The ‘bird’ of whom the poet writes is Procne, mourning the child Itys whom she has murdered; see 2.623–30n. and 2.855.

4.491–2. On Typhoeus as the source of Etna’s volcanic flames, see 1.573–4n.

4.493–4. Demeter (Roman Ceres) is closely associated with torches. In their iconography, she and Persephone (Proserpina) are commonly depicted as holding torches, ears of grain and poppies. At Eleusis, outside Athens, were celebrated each fall the Mysteries of Demeter, a chief element of which was a procession of devotees from Athens to Eleusis. At Eleusis, worshippers entered the structure called the Telesterion, where the secret rites of the cult were conducted by torchlight. In the Eleusinian cult of Demeter, after the Hierophantes (the High Priest) the next most important priest was the Dadouchos (the ‘Torchbearer’).

4.499–500. The ‘shipwreck monsters, dogs of Nisus’ refer to Scylla, a hideous six-headed monster who lived in a cave across the straits of Messina from the whirlpool Charybdis, and fed upon large marine creatures and sailors that passed by her cave. She was said to have yelped like a puppy, and in Greek art her heads are sometimes represented as those of dogs. This monster is occasionally, as here, confused with (or assimilated to) Scylla, daughter of Nisus, mythic king of the Greek city of Megara, whom she betrayed to Minos, king of Crete.

4.503–4. The stone to which Ovid gives the name ‘Sad’ was called by the Greeks Agelastos, ‘Laughless’, located by the Parthenion well in Eleusis, site of the encounter which now follows in Ovid’s account, and of the most important cult of Demeter; see 4.493–4n.

4.507–8. According to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (94–7) and other subsequent accounts of the tale of Demeter and her search for Persephone, Celeus, the one who offers hospitality to the grain goddess in Eleusis, is the king of that place, rather than an old man of meagre means, as Ovid has it.

4.531–4. Demeter is commonly presented in Greek art as holding poppies, as well as ears of grain.

4.535–6. The story of Demeter’s search for Persephone appears to reflect cultic elements of the Eleusinian Mysteries (see 4.493–4n.). The procession of devotees from Athens which took place on the 19th day of the Greek month of Boedromion, was probably preceded by a fast on the previous day; from the present passage, it is thought that the fasting of the worshippers ended on the evening of the 19th when the stars appeared. In that night (properly that of the 20th, the new day being marked by the stars’appearance), initiates were brought into the fold of the Mysteries through an initiation ceremony conducted by torchlight in the great hall of the Telesterion. Much of the limited information which has survived concerning the secret rites of initiation into the Mysteries is provided by early Christian writers. According to Clement of Alexandria (Protr. 2.21.2), an initiate into the Mysteries had to drink of the kukeoōn, a drink made from barley, flavoured with pennyroyal (see GR: 285–7).

4.577–80. The ‘Parrhasian stars’ are those of the constellation Ursa Major (the Great Bear)–a constellation which never sets in the sky of the northern hemisphere, but moves continually around the North Star; see 2.191–2n. As elsewhere, Ovid uses the name of Parrhasia, one region of Arcadia, in the sense ‘Arcadian’ (see 1.478). For the Arcadian connection of Ursa Major, see 2.183–90n. Helice is yet another name for the constellation (see 3.107–8).

4.583–4. In the Metamorphoses (5.487–508), it is not the sun, but Arethusa (see line 423) whom Ovid makes the informant of Persephone’s capture by Pluto.

4.593–4. Gyges was one of the Hecatonchires, the hundred-armed creatures who according to Hesiod (Th. 617–23, 713–21) took Zeus’ side in the war against the Titans. In the present passage, as earlier, Ovid curiously speaks as though they were Zeus’ adversaries (see 3.799–808n.).

4.599–600. For the division of sovereignty among the three sons of Cronus, see 4.445–6n.

4.603–4. Frazer (3: 302–4) notes that in Egyptian belief, the soul which consumes food while en route to the land of the dead can never return to the world of the living; he offers typological parallels from various cultures.

4.605. The ‘winged Herald’ is Hermes (with whom the Romans equated Mercury), the gods’ messenger.

4.607–8. In the Metamorphoses (5.529–38), Ovid tells how Persephone wandered into the garden of Pluto, and out of hunger, picked and ate of a pomegranate. According to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (370–74), however, it was Hades’ doing – tricking the girl into eating a pomegranate seed himself. Pomegranates similarly played a cultic role in the Mysteries of Demeter at Eleusis. Porphyry (Abst. 4.16) writes that those initiated into the Mysteries were prohibited from eating pomegranates; while Clement of Alexandria (Protr. 2.19) reveals that a similar prohibition obtained during the celebration of the Thesmophoria (see 1.349–53n.).

4.613–14. Ovid deviates from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (441–7), in which Zeus decrees that Persephone will spend three months of each year as Hades’ consort, and nine months with the gods; he is not, however, the only Latin author to embrace this variant tradition.

4.619–20. White is generally the colour of Roman festival occasions (as at 1.80). It appears that white is the colour of the horses prescribed for celebrating the festival of Demeter and Persephone in Syracuse (Pindar Ol. 6.95).

4.621–2. The poet refers to the dedication of a temple to Jupiter Victor in 295 BC by Quintus Fabius Maximus Rullianus at the battle of Sentinum, where he defeated an allied force of Celts, Samnites and Etruscans.

4.623–4. The Atrium Libertatis (‘Hall of Liberty’), which apparently stood in the vicinity of the Forum, served various functions throughout its history, including providing headquarters for the censors (magistrates charged with the taking of a census, among other duties). In the time of Augustus it had become Rome’s first public library under the direction of Gaius Asinius Pollio, who built the collection with spoils acquired in war with the Parthini of Illyria. The possible confusion which Ovid allows in line 623 may have been actual, and perhaps the structure dedicated on the Ides of April was the temple of Libertas located on the Aventine Hill. Frazer observes that the dedication of the Atrium Libertatis, not being a religious structure, would likely not be marked in the calendars which Ovid used in writing the Fasti (see Frazer 3: 314–15; Bömer 2: 261–2).

4.627. The Caesar of whom Ovid writes in this line is Augustus, who in 43 BC (when still ‘Octavian’) played a role in defeating the army of Antony at Mutina (modern Modena). According to the Fasti Praenestini the battle took place on April 15. See further, 4.673–6n.

4.629–32. April 15 brings the ritual of the Fordicidia (from forda, ‘in calf’), when throughout Rome, in each curia (see 2.527–30n.) and on the Capitoline Hill (line 635), pregnant cows are sacrificed to Tellus (Earth). That Tellus and Ceres are closely linked is clearly revealed by the association of each with agricultural fecundity and the proximity of their festivals – indeed the Fordicidia is embedded within the eight days of the Cerialian festivities, falling at the mid point. Ovid has already made their affiliation explicitly clear: ‘Ceres and Earth gaze on a common duty: One causes crops, one provides their place’ (see 1.673–4 and 1.671–6n.). In lines 631–2, the poet attempts to make an etymological connection between Latin forda (‘brood cow’), ferre (‘to bear’), fecundus (‘bounteous’) and fetus (‘birthing’).

4.633–4. Compare the sacrifice of a pregnant sow at the time of the Feriae Sementivae, the sowing feasts dedicated to Tellus and Ceres (see 1.671–6n.). Commenting on Tellus’ festival, which he calls the Fordicalia, the Greek historian Lydus (Mens. 4.72) identifies the recipient of the sacrificed cows as Demeter, Roman Ceres (usually, however, in his description of the Feriae Sementivae Lydus uses the Greek theonym ‘Demeter’ to name Tellus: Mens. 3.9). Like her sacrificial victims, Tellus is now teeming with life: as is often the case, the sacrifice is suggestive of the deity to which sacrifice is made.

4.635–40. Dumézil (ARR: 372–3) has noted that the sacrifice of pregnant cows is cross-culturally a highly uncommon rite. A striking parallel is, however, attested in Vedic India where two pregnant cows are offered to Earth and to the Maruts. Maruts are storm gods who, in the case of this Ritual (aṣṭēpadiī, ‘the eight-footed [cow]’), are identified as members of the third function of divine society. The ritual proceeds thus: the cows are slaughtered, a priest removes the embryos and the appropriate sacrificial portions of the cows are then burned, being offered to Earth. The embryos, which by Vedic prescription are not acceptable sacrifices (not yet being properly formed), are then utilized in a supplemental ritual: covered in charcoal they are presented to the Maruts. The structure of the Roman ritual here described by Ovid is almost identical: the cow is killed, the embryo removed, the cow’s entrails are then burned, being offered to Tellus (Earth), and the embryo is incinerated and set aside for use in the coming ritual of Pales (an agrarian deity).

4.641. From lines 641 to 672, Ovid presents an account of the origin of the Fordicidia, set in the time of Numa Pompilius, second king of Rome. As Frazer (3: 317) observes, the foundation story clearly reveals that the sacrificial rites of the Roman festival were intended to imbue herds and fields with fertility.

4.650. The ‘Maenalian’, i.e. Arcadian, god is Pan, whom the Romans equate with Faunus, a god of prophetic ability (see 3.291–2n.).

4.669. Numa’s wife and frequent provider of sage advice is the nymph Egeria, whose grove stood outside the Porta Capena (see 3.11–12n.).

4.673–6. Cytherea (i.e. Venus, ancestor of Augustus and the Julian family) hastens the coming of the next day, April 16, the date on which Augustus (then Octavian) was first awarded the title imperator–for his part in the defeat of Antony’s forces at Mutina in 43 BC. The outlawed Antony, unmentioned here, had been besieging Decimus Brutus at Mutina. Antony was drawn off, but the consuls Hirtius and Pansa, whom Octavian had been sent to help, died in or immediately after the battle, leaving Octavian alone to receive the army’s victory salutatio on the next day. The ‘young Augustus’ is one translation of the Latin phrase in line 676, Augusto iuveni, which also means (without the capitalization) ‘the august young man’.

4.677–8. Ovid identifies April 17 as the date on which the Hyades star-group (see 5.163–8n.) sets, dipping into the sea, or, in the poet’s words, ‘embracing Doris’, wife of the old sea god Nereus.

4.679–80. The Cerialia comes to a close with the Circus Games of April 19. As Ovid’s words of line 680 hint, chariot races were run on this day in the Circus Maximus (replaced by gladiatorial games in 42 BC, according to Dio Cassius 47.40.6). Frazer (3: 325–6) compares the annual athletic contests (which include horse races) held at Eleusis in honour of Demeter, suggesting that at Rome, as at Eleusis, the games were intended to promote the yield of the grain crop. On competitions held at Greek sanctuaries and festivals generally, see GR: 105–7.

4.681–2. In the lines which follow, Ovid explains the bizarre spectacle of April 19, involving the setting of foxes ablaze in the Circus, as annual compensation to Ceres for a grain crop once destroyed by a fox set alight by a mischievous child.

4.685. Ovid was a native of Sulmo (modern Sulmona) in the territory of the Paeligni (see 3.87–96). Sulmo lay east of Carseoli, which was about midway between Sulmo and Rome.

4.713–14. Ovid here describes Eos (Roman Aurora), the dawn goddess and mother of Memnon, as ‘saffron’ and the horses who draw her chariot as ‘rosy’. For Homer she is often ‘rosy-fingered Eos’ and ‘saffron-robed’. In Rig Veda 1.92.15, the chariot horses of Usas (Indo-Aryan ‘Dawn’, whose name is cognate with that of Greek Eos and Latin Aurora) are described as ‘red-gold’ (see RV: 180).

4.715–16. On Helle and her fall from the flying ram, see 3.853–76n. This day, Ovid is saying, the sun moves from the sign of Aries (the Ram) into that of Taurus (the Bull; see the following lines).

4.717–20. Ovid will return to the matter of the constellation Taurus, its origin and its gender; see 5.603–4n. Regardless of the account of the constellation accepted, Juno, Greek Hera, is angry, because its presence in heaven is bound up with the infidelity of Zeus.

4.721–2. The Parilia of April 21 is celebrated in honour of ‘gentle Pales’, a pastoral deity, to secure forgiveness and protection for herders, and health and fecundity for their flocks. For Ovid, as for Virgil, Tibullus and others, Pales is a goddess, though a variant tradition identified the deity as male. The latter is a minority report, however, and, argues Dumézil (ARR: 380–81), arose by equation of Pales with an Etruscan pastoral god. A second festival of Pales was celebrated on July 7, at which time offerings appear to have been made to two different deities, each called Pales – apparently one being the Pales of the smaller livestock, the other the Pales of the larger animals (see ARR: 381–3). The spring and summer rituals are celebrated in the two months in which domesticated animals were bred – sheep in April, but both sheep and cattle in July (see Columella Rust. 6.2, 7.3); thus the spring festival concerns only the Pales of the smaller animals, the summer both the deities of the smaller and the larger livestock. Varro (Ling. 6.15) calls the goddess’s festival the Palilia (as one would expect it should be). The liquid dissimilation of the type involved in the change of Palilia to Parilia is extremely common in Latin and cross-linguistically. Frazer conjectures a possible affiliation of Pales with the goddess of the Palatine Hill, Palatua (apparently on the basis of phonetic similarity). Little is known of this deity, but she is clearly of great antiquity as she possesses her own archaic priest, one of the minor Flamens, the Flamen Palatualis. Dumézil (ARR: 384) has cautiously suggested a possible etymological link between the divine names Pales and Viśpalaā, the latter naming a Vedic deity with third-function affiliations (like Pales), whose name is interpreted as ‘*Palā of the viŝ’ (vaiāya being the name of the third function of Vedic society).

4.731–4. Among the various rituals of the Parilia, Ovid alludes to one which involves the use of a fumigant, thrown into a fire (see lines 739–42), producing a smoke which drifts into contact with the flocks. The ingredients of the fumigant are three: horse’s blood, calf ash and the empty stalks of hard beans. The ashes of calves are of course those procured by the Vestal Virgins at the time of the Fordicidia, six days earlier (see lines 635–40); indeed, it is the Vestals who manufacture and dispense the fumigant for Pales’ rite. The equine and bovine ingredients are perhaps intended to endow the flocks with the vitality of these powerful species; Dumézil (ARR: 383–4) suggests that the operative aspect of the bean stalks may be their emptiness, noting Indic parallels, and that they are thus utilized sympathetically to instil an absence of infirmity. It has been assumed by some investigators that the horse-blood constituent was obtained on October 15 at the sacrifice of the Equus October (on which rite, see 1.385–6n.); this would seem to be manifestly unlikely, however. Horse blood would certainly not have been a rare commodity in Rome.

4.739–40. The poet here specifies an additional ingredient used in the generation of Parilian smoke – sulphur. The ritual use of burning sulphur for purification is well attested among Romans and Greeks.

4.741–2. Ovid has written already of the ritual burning of the herba Sabina, a type of juniper, and of the crackling of laurel on the hearth (in a simpler time of Roman history, before the introduction of exotic spices and incense; see 1.343–4). According to Tibullus (2.5.81–4), the crackling of burning laurel is a favourable omen of an abundant grain crop.

4.743–6. Dumézil has called attention to Pales’ offerings of milk and millet – no meat, uncharacteristic of the gods – and compared this to the ritual appetite of Pusan, the Vedic deity of livestock who is offered groats (ARR: 554).

4.752. The ‘half-goat god’ is Faunus.

4.761–2. In the Metamorphoses (3.143–252), Ovid tells the story of the young hunter Actaeon who accidentally came upon the goddess Artemis (Roman Diana) as she was bathing with her nymph attendants. The goddess, startled and livid, doused Actaeon with spring water, whereupon he began to be transformed into a deer. The transformation completed, Actaeon was hunted down and killed by his own hounds. It was at noon, says Ovid, that Actaeon rested from his hunting and wandered into the cave where Artemis bathed. Theocritus (Id. 1.15) reports that Greek shepherds refrain from playing their pipes at noon, less they disturb Pan (with whom the Romans equate Faunus) while he naps.

4.779–80. The concoction prepared by mixing milk and must, Latin sapa, was called burranica, said to be derived from burrum, an old word for ‘red’ according to Festus (p. 31M), after the colour of the solution. Sapa is fresh wine which has been concentrated by boiling.

4.781–2. As Ovid has already indicated, the ritual of the Parilia involved leaping over fire – three fires says the poet in line 727; in line 805 he will add that not only the herder but also the herds pass through the flames. The notion of the ‘three fires’, reflecting the tripartition of society, is well developed as a ritual apparatus in the Vedas and the Brahmana. Dumézil has argued that the doctrine of the three fires is of Proto-Indo-European origin and is preserved not only in India but in Rome as well. The Vedic doctrine of the three fires is, he contends, duplicated in Rome by Vesta’s temple, the altars of the city’s quadrangular temples and the temple of Volcanus without the pomerium (4.819n.); see 6.281–2n.

4.787–90. It is not fire alone but also its polar opposite, water, that plays a role in the rites of the Parilia, as Ovid has noted in passing in preceding lines (see 728, 736 and 778). Now he entertains why it is that these contrasting elements are joined in this ritual. ‘Two discordant gods’ are fire and ocean, he observes. The intent of this observation is made clear in the Metamorphoses (1.430–37) where, when considering the origin of life, he wrote that heat and moisture, though discordant, unite as the creative force which has generated all things.

4.791–2. Roman exiles (of which Ovid was one) and brides are sharply contrasted with regard to these essential, primeval elements of fire and water. When a person went into exile, an aqua et igni interdictio (denial of fire and water) was pronounced against that person, rendering the exile an outlaw liable to be executed if an attempt was made to return from exile. On the other hand, a Roman bride, when she reaches the threshold of her husband’s home, must touch fire and water (Varro Ling. 5.61; Plutarch Quaest. Rom. 1). Varro links this custom with the procreative force of fire and water and the union of man (fire) and wife (water) in marriage.

4.799–800. That is, Aeneas safely escaped the flames of Troy.

4.801–6. By ‘the Lares to move house’, the poet simply means that the people moved to new homes, the Lares being protecting spirits of the home (see 5.129–32n.). The tradition which Ovid invokes in these lines is recorded by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. According to the chronicler of Roman Antiquities (see 1.88), on the day when Romulus moved his followers to the site of his future city, they burned their old houses, leaping through the flames to purify themselves. This, says Dionysius, was the origin of the Parilia. Thus the festival of Pales came to be seen as a kind of birthday party for Rome, and, by the second century AD, would be called the Romaia.

4.809–10. On the overthrow of Amulius by Numitor, Romulus and Remus, see 3.67–8 and n.

4.813–18. The brothers Romulus and Remus agree to divine the gods’ choice of a ruler for Rome by observing the flight of birds (Romulus watching from the Palatine, Remus from the Aventine), the augural practice known as auspicium, on which see 1.178–80n.

4.819. The Roman ritual of ploughing to which Ovid here refers was conducted when a new city was founded. A furrow was ploughed which marked off the boundaries of the city and delimited a sacred border, the pomerium, beyond which auspices (see 1.178–80n.) could not be taken. For this ritual, Etruscan in origin writes Varro (Ling. 5.143), a bronze ploughshare was used, and a team of two white bovines – a bull harnessed on the right and a cow on the left – pulled the plough (for additional particulars of the ritual, see Frazer 3: 379–82). On the augural procedures required at the foundation of a city, see Fantham 1998: 244–5.

4.821–2. The depositing into the ditch of the earth’s fruits was meant to provide Rome with an auspicious beginning; Festus (p. 258M) tells us as much, if Ovid’s trench is to be identified with his Roma Quadrata (a square, walled structure on the Palatine; see Frazer 3: 386). The matter of adding soil to the ditch is amplified by Plutarch (Rom. 11.1–4), who says that the people who relocated to Rome at its foundation tossed in soil from the places whence they came – to facilitate a harmonious mixing of those people no doubt. For Plutarch, Ovid’s trench (fossa) is to be equated with the mundus, a circular pit said to represent the centre of Rome, and recognized as an entrance to the Underworld. Only on three days of the year was it open – August 24 (following the Volcanalia;see 5.725–6), October 5 and November 8–days on which marriages could not take place, battles could not be fought, public business could not be conducted.

4.828. While Romulus can straightforwardly address Mavors (= Mars) as ‘father’, he can call Vesta ‘mother’, as Rhea Silvia, his biological mother, was an attendant of Vesta (see 2.383–4n.). Beyond which, the goddess is at times addressed as ‘Mother Vesta’.

4.833–4. Jupiter accepts Romulus’ prayer and demonstrates his approval by thunder. For the Romans, unlike the Greeks, left was the auspicious side.

4.843–4. Remus envies his brother’s position of sovereignty. Mockingly he vaults over the new walls of Romulus’ city and pays for the act with his life. The tradition that it was the guard and foreman Celer who killed Remus is otherwise attested, for example by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Ant. Rom. 1.87.4). Frequently, however, Romulus himself is identified as the murderer (so Livy 1.7.2). For a discussion of this issue, see Introduction 4.VII.

4.848. A reformulation of the remark of Livy’s Romulus after he had killed his brother: ‘So may anyone else cross my walls’ (Livy 1.7.2).

4.852. An allusion to Catullus’ famous farewell to his brother: Catullus 68.92, 101.6 and 10.

4.863–4. On April 23 is celebrated the spring wine festival, the Vinalia Priora, the time for making an offering of the new wine (calpar) to Jupiter. A second festival follows in summer as the grape harvest approaches – the Vinalia Rustica of August 19, when prayers are offered to Jupiter for an absence of damaging weather. According to Varro (Ling. 6.16), the Flamen Dialis announces the beginning of the harvest, and, after sacrificing a lamb to Jupiter but before offering its entrails to him, the Flamen himself picks the first cluster of the new vintage. This sequence of wine festivals is expanded by the Meditrinalia of October 11, a festival of healing effected by pouring a mixed offering of old and new wine (Varro Ling. 6.21). Varro’s comments on the last-named festival have been construed to mean that the officiating priest was the Flamen Martialis. Dumézil has rejected this interpretation and countered that Varro only reports that it was Flaccus, the Flamen Martialis, who was the source of his information (see ARR: 155, n. 13). Were it the case that the Flamen Martialis did officiate at the Meditrinalia, there would then be a curious but interesting affiliation of the warrior god Mars with the activity of healing, very much reminiscent of Indo-Aryan Rudra (the eponymous deity of the class of warrior gods), of whom the Vedic worshipper can simultaneously pray: ‘By those most healing medicines that you give, Rudra, I would attain a hundred winters’; and, ‘Let the weapon [the bow] of Rudra veer from us; let the great malevolence of the dreaded god go past us.’ (RV 2.33.2 and 14).

4.865–8. On the worship of Venus by prostitutes at the time of the Veneralia, see lines 134–8.

4.869–70. Greek Aphrodite, with whom the Romans equated Venus, was associated with both myrtle and roses in myth. Her lover Adonis was born from a tree, a myrtle or, more commonly, a myrrh; and from the blood draining from his dying body (see 1.451–2; 5.227–8), roses or anemones were created. As Aphrodite sped to his side when he lay dying, she ran across white roses, whose thorns pierced her feet, dying the flowers red.

4.871–6. The date of the spring Vinalia is also the anniversary of the Capitoline temple of Venus Erycina, whose cult had its origin in that of Aphrodite of Mount Eryx in Sicily. During the first Punic War, Roman forces occupied Eryx, a settlement of the Sicilian people called the Elymi (friendly to Rome), and there raised a fortress (249 BC). The Carthaginians took the town in 244 BC, but were unable to dislodge the Roman defenders from either the fortress or the temple of Aphrodite, which they continued to occupy until war’s end (241 BC). Elymi, like Romans, believed themselves to be of Trojan descent, and during this period of occupation the Romans came to emphasize the two peoples’ common roots and to identify closely Roman Venus with Erycinian Aphrodite. In the year 217 BC, when Rome was again at war with Carthage, the invader Hannibal delivered a crushing blow at the battle of Lake Trasimene, where 15,000 Roman soldiers were struck down and thousands more captured. In the grip of the disaster, the Roman senate directed the Decemviri to consult the Sibylline Books (see 4.257–60n.); the response came that, among other propitiatory measures which were to be taken, temples were to be built to Venus Erycina and to the deity Mens (see 6.241–8n.) on the Capitoline Hill, the event to which Ovid alludes in lines 875–6 (and the temple was not vowed when Marcus Claudius Marcellus captured Syracuse in 213–212 BC, as Ovid suggests in lines 873–4). This cult of Venus Erycina imported to the Capitoline lacked, however, certain Sicilian elements, such as the practice of temple prostitution. In lines 871–2, however, Ovid refers not to the Capitoline temple of Venus Erycina, but to her temple situated by the Porta Collina. Dedicated in 181 BC (also on April 23), the Colline temple housed a cult truer to the Sicilian and so was of necessity situated without the city walls (that is, outside the pomerium; see 4.135–8n., 4.819n. and ARR: 454, 471–3).

4.877–8. But this is not a festival of the love goddess, says Varro: ‘this day belongs to Jupiter, not Venus’ (Ling. 6.16); and Macrobius agrees (Sat. 1.4.6; though Varro appears at least to link the name of the festival with ‘Venus’; see Ling. 6.20 and compare Rust. 1.1.6). Clearly both the Vinalia Priora of spring and the Vinalia Rustica of summer are concerned principally with Jupiter. But it is not an abundant grape yield (an agrarian activity) which is the sovereign god’s central object of interest, as some investigators have supposed, argues Dumézil (ARR: 183–6); it is the fermented product which the grape provides. In this, Jupiter agrees with other Indo-European deities of sovereignty and power who desire intoxicating substances – Indo-Aryan Indra who craves the soma offering, and Norse Odin with his excesses of mead.

4.879–80. In the lines 879–98 the poet recites the myth which explains why it is that the Vinalia belong to Jupiter – a tale which reveals the deity’s pleasure in acquiring the offering of wine (see lines 877–8). ‘To become Latin Amata’s son’ = to marry Lavinia, Amata’s daughter.

4.904. Sirius, the Dog-Star, rose in the morning in early August. Ovid’s reference here undoubtedly ought to be to its evening setting, which occurred in his day at about this time of year (see Bömer 2: 335; Frazer 3: 404–5).

4.907. In the following lines Ovid describes the annual sacrifice made to appease the deity of grain rust in the festival of the Robigalia. The gender of the deity was a matter of disagreement in antiquity. For Ovid the spirit is female, Robigo; Columella (Rust. 10.342) and St Augustine (De Civ. D. 4.21), among others, are in agreement with him in this matter. Varro (Ling. 6.16), Verrius Flaccus (CIL 1: 236, 316) and others still, however, identify the deity as male, Robigus. This rite of April 25 is known from various Italian calendars; according to that of Praeneste, it is celebrated at the fifth milestone of the Via Claudia, not the road that one would expect Ovid to take on a return trip to Rome from Nomentum, as it runs in a north-westerly direction. The Flamen who officiates is the Flamen Quirinalis. Regarding the presence of the priest of Quirinus at this festival and its relevance for understanding Quirinus as a third-function deity associated with Roman grain, see 2.513–14n. and 2.531–2n.

4.908. According to Columella (Rust. 10.342–3), the sacrificial dog was a nursing puppy. Dogs were also sacrificed in Rome, appropriately enough, in conjunction with the appearance of Sirius, the Dog-Star. There is some evidence that this sacrifice, the Sacrum Canarium, occurring at a moveable festival, did not actually coincide with the rising of Sirius (which occurred in early August; see 4.904n.), but was made in late spring (Pliny HN 18.14, speaks of a rite called the Augurium Canarium taking place before the ears of corn have come out of the husk)–thus, at about the same time as the Robigalia (see Frazer 3: 408). The Sacrum Canarium, offered to protect the grain crop from the withering heat of a Roman summer, was performed in the vicinity of the Porta Catularia, ‘Puppy Gate’.

4.911–32. In these lines Ovid rehearses the words spoken by the Flamen Qurinalis in his performance of the ritual. Notice that the prayer of Quirinus’ priest calls for peace and a destruction of implements of war – hardly appropriate words for this Flamen, if Quirinus were a god of war, but much in keeping with the tranquil figures of the third function – preserved particularly well in Norse and Indo-Aryan tradition. Thus, the third-function deities of the Norse, the Vanir, and especially Njord, their principal member, are lauded for their affiliations with peace and tranquillity. And Tacitus (Germ. 40.3–4), in describing a Germanic goddess Nerthus (undoubtedly a feminine equivalent to Scandinavian Njord), says that her periodic journey through the countryside was the only time in which peace reigned (see ARR: 257–9).

4.937. The rites of the Lupercalia also included a dog sacrifice; see 2.283–4n.

4.939–40. The poet here refers to the Dog-Star as ‘Icarian’. Icarius was a native of Attica who, unlike some (see 3.721–2n.), welcomed the arrival of Dionysus (Roman Bacchus). The god repaid Icarius by teaching him the art of wine-making. Those with whom Icarius shared the product of his new knowledge, however, under its alcoholic effects, killed him. The dead Icarius was discovered by his daughter Erigone with the assistance of her dog Maera; the animal was in time raised to the heavens and transformed into a star for his faithfulness. The Romans linked the rising of Sirius to the onset of hot, wilting summer weather.

4.941–2. Regarding the time of the appearance of the Dog-Star, see 4.904n. On the Augurium Canarium, see 4.908n.

4.943. ‘Phrygian Assaracus’ brother’ is Tithonus.

4.945–6. This day, April 28, marks the beginning of the six-day festival of Flora, the goddess of flowering crops and plants; see 5.183–8n. In about 240 BC, the Decemviri were charged with consulting the Sibylline Books (see 4.257–60n.) in the wake of a disastrous crop failure. The oracle revealed that a temple should be built for the goddess Flora and games should be held in her honour (becoming an annual event in 173 BC). In part, the Ludi Florales consisted of mimetic performances, known for their sexual frankness, to which the poet makes allusion in line 946 and to which he returns in Book 5. For Ovid’s strong affinity with Flora, see 5.375–8 and n.

4.949–50. Vesta’s ‘kin’ is Augustus, whom Ovid has already identified in this way; see 3.425–6 and n. Augustus, occupying the office of Pontifex Maximus in 12 BC, did not establish quarters in the residence (the Domus Publica) of the Pontifex, but installed Vesta in his own residence on the Palatine (see 3.419–22 and n.). The Fasti Praenestini records that on this date a shrine was there dedicated to Vesta, and that the senate (the ‘Fathers’: line 950) decreed April 28 to be a public holiday. See also Met. 15.864, where Vesta is described as one of ‘Caesar’s household gods’ (Caesarei penates).

4.951–2. Apollo (Phoebus) had already received a temple from Augustus on the Palatine, dedicated in 28 BC. After the Sibylline Books had been destroyed in the fire which burned the Capitol in 83 BC (see 4.257–60n.), a new collection of Books was assembled, and these, in time, were deposited in this Palatine temple of Apollo.

4.953. The ‘Palatine laurels’ are those which decorate the doorposts of Augustus’ home on the Palatine, on which were also fixed a civic wreath or crown of oak-leaves (see 1.614n.). Both the laurels and the crown of oak were awarded to Augustus by ‘the Senate and People of Rome’ in 27 BC (RG 34.2). The ‘three eternal gods’ are Vesta, Apollo and Augustus. On Augustus’ appropriation of Vesta and Apollo, see Met. 15. 864–5 and Introduction 4.VII.

Fasti 5: MAY

5.1–8. Ovid has already given voice to the view that May (Maius) takes its name from Latin maiores, ‘elders’ (see 1.41) and he will confirm this later in the book (lines 427–8). The narrator, however, now expresses uncertainty in the matter and refers the ‘problem’ to the normally authoritative Muses (lines 7–8). On the collapse of the narrator’s authority here, see Introduction 4.VIII.

5.9. Polyhymnia, the Muse of heroic hymns and pantomime, advocates the view that the month of May, Latin Maius, was named after a deity Maiestas (‘Majesty’). Piso (in Macr. Sat. 1.12.18) knows her as the wife of Volcanus, thus suggesting a link with Maia Volcani (see 5.85–6n.). On the disagreement of the Muses, contrast 6.811. See Introduction 4.VIII.

5.11. The Muses had also instructed Hesiod in the origin of the world, revealing to him that at the beginning there existed only a great void, Chaos (Th. 114–16; see 1.103–4n.).

5.16. The Moon, like the Sun and Dawn, journeys through the sky in a horse-drawn chariot.

5.34. On the vanquishing of Cronus (Roman Saturnus) by Zeus (Roman Jupiter), see 3.796–8n.; 4.197–206n.

5.35–42. Hesiod (Th. 185–7) writes that when Gaea was impregnated by the blood of castrated Uranus (see 1.233–6n.), not only did she conceive the Erinyes (see 4.236n.), but also great Giants, clothed in armour and brandishing spears (as well as the nymphs of the ash tree, the Meliae). After the defeat of the Titans (see 3.796–8n.), and before the fight with Typhoeus (see 3.799–808n.), Gaea (Earth) released the Giants to attack Zeus and the other gods. A desperate war (the Gigantomachy) to unseat the new king of heaven followed, but in the end the Olympian deities, with the aid of Heracles, triumphed. Compare the attack of the Aloadae (1.307–8n.).

5.51. On the ‘rods and ivory chair’, see 1.81n. and 1.82n.

5.73–4. Like Urania, Varro (Ling. 6.33) believed that the month of Maius (‘May’) was named for the maiores, ‘elders’–though Censorinus DN 22.9, claims that Varro held Maius to be from Maia (see 5.85–6n.) and Iunius (June) from Juno (see 6.26).

5.77–8. On the etymological connection of the name of the sixth month (Iunius) with ‘junior’, see 6.87–8 and n.

5.81–4. Tethys and her consort Oceanus, both Titans, produced the 3,000 ocean nymphs, the Oceanids, of whom Pleione is one. Her daughters by Atlas are the seven Pleiades (see 4.169–78).

5.85–6. In Greek myth, one of the daughters of Atlas and Pleione was Maia, who with Zeus conceived the child Hermes (equated by the Romans with their Mercury). Ovid has here tacitly identified Maia, mother of Hermes, with a distinct Roman deity by the same name. Roman Maia was affiliated with Volcanus (Maia Volcani), and received from his priest, the Flamen Volcanalis, the sacrifice of a pregnant sow on May 1. With a name traced to the Proto-Indo-European root *meg- (‘great’), she is in origin *Mag-ya-, literally ‘the great one’. On May 15, the day of the festival of Mercury (see 5.663–8n.), a second sacrifice is offered to her, reflecting the same assimilation to Greek Maia as Ovid here endorses. Of the three competing etymologies which Ovid places in the mouths of the Muses, Calliope’s – connecting Maius with Maia (see lines 103–4)–is likely the most probable; though as noted, Maiestas is perhaps a variant identification of the same divine being (see 5.9n.).

5.87–8. Mount Cyllene in Arcadia was commonly identified as the birthplace of Hermes, who, as messenger deity, wears winged sandals.

5.89–90. For Arcadia as older than the moon, see 1.469–70n.

5.91–6. On Arcadian Evander and his mother Carmenta, pre-Roman settlers on the Palatine, see 1.462n.

5.99–100. The ‘rites… of horned Faunus’ are those of the Lupercalia; see 2.268n., 2.279–81n. Hermes, Roman Mercury, is the ‘wing-foot god’; see lines 87–8.

5.101–2. For the Luperci and their unclothed, whipping race about the Palatine, see 2.267n. and 2.283–4n. respectively.

5.103–4. According to the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (39–61), this son of Zeus and Maia invented the lyre, crafting it from a tortoiseshell on the day of his birth. His association with thieves is already attested in the Hymn, where he is credited with thieving cattle from Apollo, also on the day of his birth (compare Fasti 5.691–2); and where Apollo acknowledges Hermes to be ‘prince of thieves’ (line 292).

5.111–14. In these and the following lines Ovid tells the tale of the goat who nursed baby Zeus, hidden from his father in a Cretan cave (see 4.207–10n.). The She-Goat, Capella, is the brightest star in the constellation Auriga (the Charioteer), and one of the brightest in the sky. In line 113 Ovid describes the She-Goat as Olenian – possibly a reference to Olenus, son of Hephaestus, whose daughters nursed Zeus, according to Hyginus (Astr. 2.13). For other interpretations and the date of the rising of the star, see Frazer 4: 11–12.

5.115–18. More commonly, ‘Amalthea’ is the name given to the goat which provided milk for the infant Zeus. Ovid, however, identifies her as a Naiad, a water nymph, who cared for the goat. According to one tradition, Zeus’ birthplace was Mount Ida in central Crete (as endorsed by Ovid at 4.207). Another, however, names Mount Dicte in eastern Crete as the site. The poet draws both into the present account.

5.123–4. Ovid here elicits the tradition of the Cornucopia, the ‘Horn of Plenty’, capable of filling itself with food and beverage at the whim of its owner. In the Metamorphoses (9.87–8), Ovid writes of such a horn, but identifies it with one broken from the head of the river god Acheloüs, during his struggle with Heracles for the hand of the woman Deianira.

5.127–8. The poet may be referring both to Capella (see 5.111–14n.) and to the constellation Capricornus (literally ‘Goat’s Horn’).

5.129–32. It was on the Kalends of May, writes Ovid, that an altar had been dedicated to the Lares Praestites (regarding the location of which see Bömer 2: 300–301). While the reading of line 131 is uncertain, Ovid’s intent seems clearly to link the Lares with Titus Tatius (the Sabine king who ruled with Romulus; see 3.213–34n.), or at least generally with the Sabines. Cures was the Sabine city of Titus Tatius: ‘Curius’ may simply name the king himself; if the alternate reading Curibus (‘at Cures’) is accepted, Ovid is taking note of an altar to the Lares Praestites which once stood in that Sabine capital. The Sabine connection with the Lares is made plain by Varro (Ling. 5.74), who includes the Lares in that list of deities to whom Titus Tatius dedicated altars in Rome. The Lares, much like the Penates (see 1.528n.), were charged with protecting the Roman household (Lar Familiaris), and were worshipped in homes at the hearth. Their association with crossroads (at which images of the Lares were set up) may suggest an agrarian origin (and would be in keeping with the Sabine affiliation, given the third-function orientation of the ‘gods of Titus Tatius’), though scholarly disagreement continues regarding the original nature of these deities, who are alternatively interpreted as ancestor spirits (the two interpretations are not of necessity mutually exclusive). Beyond the matter of crossroads, the Lares are petitioned for help in a prayer of the Fratres Arvales (on whom see 2.608–16n.), priests whose rites are intended to bring fecundity to the fields (Varro Ling. 5.85)–being invoked by the name Lases, an older form preserved from a time prior to the rhotacism (changing to r) of Latin s occurring between vowels. Tibullus (1.1.19–24) speaks of the Lares as being agri custodes, ‘protectors of the land’, to whom prayers are offered for a bountiful harvest and vintage. The Compitalia (from Latin compitum, ‘crossroads’) was a moveable festival held each year soon after the Saturnalia (see 3.169–70n.), dedicated to the Lares. On this day, each family is to bring an offering of cakes to the Lares, and to hang at the crossroad shrines of the Lares, or at the door of the house, a puppet for each member of the household and a ball for each slave. Such tokens were said to have provided purification or protection from ghostly powers. Dumézil has seen in the rites of the Compitalia a kind of census-taking by household, and then within households (counting both free and slave), alluding to a similar Vedic ritual (see ARR: 342–3). Making provision for both free and slave in the Compitalia rite is in keeping with the role of the Lar Familiaris as protector of all members of the household, free and slave (and slaves in fact played an active part in the celebration of the Compitalia, reminiscent of their involvement in the Saturnalia). Lares were not, however, confined to hearth and crossroads; but every place, every plot of space – rural, urban, even marine – where human activity is found has its own Lares (see ARR: 93–4, 341).

5.133–4. Lares are guardians not only of Roman households, but also of Rome itself – the latter being the purview of those Lares here described, the Lares Praestites (compare the Penates Publici; see 1.528n.). The Umbrians of Iguvium know a deity Prestota who is supplicated to guard the city from evil and to turn evil against an enemy (see ARR: 245).

5.135–6. With functional fidelity but etymological licence, Ovid connects Praestites (‘guardians’, i.e. ‘ones standing before’) with stant (‘they stand’) plus praesunt (‘they preside over’, line 135) and with praesentes (‘present’, line 136).

5.137–42. The Lares Praestites were depicted as spear-carrying young men with a canine companion (see Plutarch Quaest. Rom. 51).

5.143. In image the Lares Praestites became identified with the Dioscuri (see Frazer 4: 14), as did the Penates Publici (see ARR: 355).

5.146. An official called the Magister Vici was responsible for overseeing the cult of the Lares Compitales in each ward (vicus) of Rome, with four such officials chosen within each vicus. In the shrine of the local cult were set up two images of Lares on either side of an image of the Genius of Augustus. At Augustus’ direction, these three divine statues were to be decorated with flowers twice yearly.

5.148. The goddess Bona Dea (the ‘Good Goddess’) was an Italian deity whose Roman temple, dedicated on May 1, stood on the Aventine Hill, as Ovid notes in the lines which follow. She appears to have been greatly influenced by the Greek goddess Damia, a fertility goddess who is herself quite similar to Demeter. The priestess of Bona Dea is called the Damiatrix, according to Festus (p. 68M). Though inscriptional evidence reveals that Bona Dea was worshipped by both women and men, her cult was noted for a secret nocturnal rite conducted once a year in the home of a high-ranking magistrate, from which all men were excluded. In addition to worshippers, present were the Vestal Virgins, who assisted in the ritual.

5.149–52. When the twin sons of Mars sought to determine who should be Rome’s first king by observing birds in flight (auspicium), Romulus watched from the Palatine, Remus from the Aventine; see 4.813–18, where it is Remus to whom birds first appear, but Romulus sees twelve against Remus’ six.

5.153–4. According to Macrobius (Sat. 1.12.26), men were prohibited from entering the Aventine temple of Bona Dea.

5.155–6. Cicero (Dom. 136) writes of a Vestal Virgin named Licinia, daughter of Gaius Licinius Crassus, tribune in 145 BC, and granddaughter of the consul of 168 BC. She dedicated a shrine at the Aventine Rock in 123 BC. Her dedication was later declared invalid, and in 114 BC she was tried on a charge of incest and executed. For a discussion of this complex passage, see H-B 1994: 135–45.

5.159–60. Hesiod (Th. 371–4) says that three children were born to the Titans Hyperion and Theia: Helios (the Sun), Selene (the Moon), and Eos (the Dawn, Roman Aurora) to whom Ovid here refers. The chariot in which she courses through the sky is drawn by two horses, as is that of her sister Selene (or by oxen in the case of the latter); while Helios has a team of four. Earlier Ovid wrote of Dawn’s chariot horses as ‘rosy’ (see 4.713–14n.).

5.161. Argestes is the chilly north-west wind. In the Metamorphoses (1.108), when describing the distant Golden Age of humankind, Ovid writes of how in an unending spring, Zephyrus, the west wind, would softly caress the flowers.

5.163–8. The Hyades is a star-group situated within the constellation Taurus. Ovid identifies seven members; some counted only five (the group actually consists of hundreds of stars). As Ovid suggests in line 166, Hyades was commonly interpreted as meaning the ‘Rainers’ (from Greek huoō, ‘to rain’), and this naming was attributed to its evening rising and setting in rainy seasons. The Roman name for the star-group was Suculae, ‘Piglets’, as if Hyades were from Greek hus, ‘pig’. The poet alludes to two different accounts of the Hyades’ origin: they are either nymphs who cared for the young Dionysus and were rewarded by being lifted to the heavens, or the sisters of Hyas, whose story is told in the lines which follow. While Ovid dates the evening rising of the Hyades to May 2, it is the star-group’s morning rising which occurs on this day according to Columella (Rust. 11.2.39) and Pliny (HN 18.338). May 3 is actually the date of the true evening setting.

5.169–82. Before Zeus had burdened Atlas with the heavens (see 4.169–78), the giant had fathered a son, Hyas, and daughters with Aethra, herself a daughter of the Titans Oceanus and Tethys (compare Pleione and her children by Atlas, the Pleiades). Hyas was a mighty hunter (compare Orion, who pursued the Pleiades; also at 4.169–78), but eventually fell prey himself (to a lion, as Ovid has it here, or to some other beast); his grieving sisters were rewarded for their great love for him by being placed among the stars.

5.183–8. The Floralia, festival of the goddess Flora, had begun on April 28 but Ovid has postponed addressing it until May 2, its next to last day. Worshipped by other Italic peoples and named by Varro (Ling. 5.74) among the ‘gods of Titus Tatius’ (one of the Sabine months bears her name–mensis Flusaris), Flora is the protectress of flowering crops and plants (see lines 261–72). Supplying the third member of a variant pre-Capitoline triad (i.e. Jupiter, Mars, Flora), she appears to have been associated with early chariot races (see ARR: 270). According to a late tradition, the Floralia were celebrated in return for the goddess bequeathing a large sum of money to the Roman people – money which Flora had acquired by selling her affections (much the same story as the one told of Larentia; see 3.55–8n.). Though the tradition is late, as Dumézil has pointed out (ARR: 270–71), the association of sensual pleasures with the fecundity of the third function is typically Indo-European, and so in keeping with the character of the goddess. That Flora is an ancient Roman deity is further confirmed by her possession of a Flamen, the Flamen Florialis, and her inclusion among those gods to whom the Fratres Arvales (see 2.608–16n.) offer sacrifices in their sacred grove.

5.189–90. The games of the Floralia were held in the Circus Maximus, in the vicinity of which stood Flora’s temple – that one which the Sibylline Books had directed should be built for the goddess (see 4.945–6n.). The ‘lauded palm’ refers to the palm branches awarded to the winners of the games.

5.193–8. Ovid attempts to make sense of Flora’s presence in the Roman pantheon by appealing to the Greeks, linking her to the Greek divinity Chloris by way of Roman phonetic clumsiness. Both names do have Indo-European ancestry, but are from different roots: Chloris stems from the same source as English yellow, while Flora is cognate with bloom (and Latin flos, ‘flower’, from which Flora is derived, is, of course, the source of English flower). The ‘homes of the blessed’ are the Elysian Fields, found at the ends of the earth, blissful home in the afterlife of a fortunate subset of humanity.

5.203–4. Boreas, the north wind, had set the example of bride-abduction for his brother Zephyrus by kidnapping Oreithyia, daughter of the legendary king of Athens, Erec(h)theus.

5.217–20. The Horae or ‘Hours’ are commonly found in the company of the Graces or Charities.

5.223–4. The flower which was made from ‘Therapnean blood’ was the hyacinth, Therapnae being a town little more than a mile from Sparta. Hyacinthus, the flower’s namesake, hailed from Amyclae, also close by Sparta; he was a favourite of Apollo, who accidentally killed the young man with a discus throw (see Met. 10.162–219). According to some, Zephyrus (or Boreas) was the cause of the wayward discus, as he envied Hyacinthus’ devotion to Apollo. From Hyacinthus’ blood grew a flower (a lily, rather than that flower now commonly called hyacinth), and on its petals were inscribed the Greek letters AI AI, that is ‘alas, alas’ (a naturally occurring pattern on the plant’s petals).

5.225–6. Narcissus was the son of the river god Cephissus and the nymph Liriope – a young man of uncommon beauty, who himself found no beauty in another, until he saw his own reflection in a pool. Tragically infatuated with his own image but unable to embrace and love the being behind the image, he wasted away in frustration and anxiety, to be transformed into a flower after his death (see Met. 3.402–510).

5.227–8. In the Metamorphoses (4.283–4), the poet likewise raises the name of Crocus, and that of his lover Similax, only immediately to dismiss the telling of the tale of how they were changed into flowers. Attis, the lover of Cybele, castrated himself in madness (see 4.223–24n.), and from the blood of his wound as it soaked into the ground, violets grew. On March 22, the Day of Violets (and the first day of the March celebration of Cybele; see 4.337–40n.), a pine tree decorated with violets was brought to the temple of Cybele. Cinyras, legendary king of the Cypriot city of Paphos, is commonly identified as the father of Adonis, the lover of Aphrodite who was killed while hunting boar, and from whose blood the anemone or rose was born (see 4.869–70n.).

5.229–30. In the lines which follow, Ovid weaves together the Italian goddess Flora and Greek themes about Zeus, Hera and the generation of their children, to record a tradition not otherwise attested in antiquity (see Bömer 2: 307). Ares (Roman Mars) is regularly identified as son of both Zeus and Hera; though Hesiod, immediately after noting the birth of Athena from Zeus (Th. 924–6), invokes the tradition that Hephaestus (equated by the Romans with Volcanus) was conceived by Hera alone (Th. 927–9).

5.231. On the Greek myth of the birth of Athena (with whom the Romans equate Minerva) from her father’s head, see 3.839–46n.

5.236. On the use of ‘Saturnia’ to name Juno, see 1.263–6n.

5.244. On Tartarus, place of the dead, see 3.620n.

5.250. It is the river Styx by which the Greek deities swear; see 3.322n.

5.251–2. Of the several Greek towns called Olenus, perhaps the one intended by Ovid is Olenus in Achaea, site of a sanctuary of the healing deity Asclepius; see Bömer 2: 308.

5.257. Ares, the god of the war, like Dionysus, is said to have his origin in Thrace, reflecting the notion of Thrace as a wild place, on the edge of (Greek) society. The Propontis is the sea which bridges the Black Sea and the Aegean, lying on the south-east coast of Thrace.

5.261–2. Italian Flora is in fact principally a deity of flowering crops, particularly grains; see St Augustine De Civ. D. 4.8.

5.273–4. These lines are deleted by most editors.

5.277. The ludi of the Floralia included mimetic performances of a particularly bawdy and obscene nature. Valerius Maximus (2.10.8) writes of Cato (Uticensis) and how he exited from the theatre in disgust at the performances. See also Martial Ep. 1, Preface.

5.280–81. The Latin words for ‘wealthy’ and ‘money’ which Ovid here cites are locuples and pecunia respectively. Both the latter, pecunia, and the word for ‘cattle’, pecus, are derived from a common Proto-Indo-European root *peku-, denoting ‘moveable property’ (also the source of English fee). On the other hand, locuples is a compound originally meaning ‘rich in lands [loci ]’, with the second element (-ples) tracing its descent to Proto-Indo-European *pelh1-, ‘to fill’ (ancestor of the English gloss as well).

5.283. The ‘people’s pastures’, that is the public pasture-land, could be utilized by private farmers for grazing their flocks and herds in exchange for payment of a tax. The number of animals grazed, however, was limited to 100 cattle and 500 sheep, according to the Lex Licinia of 367 BC. Ovid here refers to an abuse of the restrictions on public grazing (see Appian BC 1.1.8).

5.287–8. It was the magistrates called plebeian aediles (chiefly charged with overseeing the plebeian cults of Ceres and Diana) who were responsible for enforcing the laws governing the use of public pasture-lands. The Publicii were the aediles Lucius and Manlius Publicius.

5.291–2. Fines collected by the plebeian aediles for the violation of grazing laws were also used to finance the games of the Cerialia (Livy 10.23.13) and to construct the Tiber island temple of Faunus (see 2.193–4n.).

5.293–4. The Publician Slope (Clivus Publicius), also built with grazing fines by the aediles (see Varro Ling. 5.158), was a road which ran up the Aventine Hill, the location of the plebeian temple of Ceres, Liber and Libera and the plebeian aediles’ headquarters (see 3.713–14n.). Livy (10.47.4) notes that such fines were used by the aediles to pave the road leading to Bovillae (see 3.435–8n.).

5.295. It was only in 173 BC that the games of the Floralia became annual; see 4.945–6n.

5.305–6. In lines 305–10 the poet rehearses well-known instances of sacrificial lapses in Greek myth, and the divine wrath which they evoked. Thestiades is the Greek hero Meleager, so-called after his mother’s father Thestius, legendary king of the city of Pleuron in Aetolia. Soon after Meleager’s birth, Althaea, his mother, was confronted by the Fates, who told her that the child would live only until fire should completely destroy a brand which at that moment burned on the hearth. Althaea immediately extinguished the brand and hid it away. Years later, Meleager, grown to be a great champion, took part in a hunt for a ferocious boar which was ravaging the countryside of Calydon, the Aetolian city ruled by Meleager’s father Oeneus. After the boar was slain, a fight broke out between Meleager and his mother’s brothers (members of the hunting party) over possession of the animal’s hide, and Meleager killed his uncles. When word of their deaths reached Althaea, possessed by rage, she threw into a fire the brand so long kept safe, and as the flames consumed the brand, Meleager’s life was burned away. The boar which had been the source of his downfall was no ordinary beast, but a creature sent by Artemis to afflict the realm of Oeneus. Meleager’s father had overlooked a harvest sacrifice which should have been offered to the hunter goddess (whom Ovid here calls Phoebe: see 2.163; for the tale of Meleager, see Met. 8.270–525).

5.307–8. ‘Tantalides’ is Agamemnon, leader of the Greek expedition against Troy (and a great-grandson of Tantalus; see 2.623–30n.). Ovid here alludes to the doldrums of Aulis and the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia (required by Artemis for a sacrilege committed against her), and the deer substituted in Iphigenia’s place; see 1.387–8n.

5.309–10. Hippolytus is the son of Theseus, torn apart when he was dragged from his chariot by his panic-stricken horses; Ovid tells the story in Book 6 (see 6.743–56). Devoted to Artemis, Hippolytus ignored Aphrodite – a neglect which was the ultimate cause of his death. Here, as earlier, Ovid identifies Aphrodite with the goddess Dione (see 2.461–2n.).

5.312. Regarding the establishment of the Floralia (238 BC) at the direction of the Sibylline Books, see 4.945–6n. Though her festival may not have been celebrated before this date, there is clear evidence of Flora’s antiquity among the Roman people; see 5.183–8n.

5.327–8. Institution of the Floralia was the expiation (procuratio) specified by the Sibylline Books (see 4.945–6n.), consulted in response to the prodigy of agricultural disaster which Ovid has poetically recounted in lines 315–26. On the consultation of the Books generally, see 4.257–60n.

5.329–30. Marcus Popillius Laenas and Lucius Postumius Albinus were consuls in 173 BC when it was determined that the games of the Floralia should be celebrated yearly (see 4.945–6n.).

5.331–4. On the particularly lewd and burlesque nature of the mimetic performances of the Floralia, which Ovid speaks of here and in the lines which follow, see also 5.277n. We have already noted that a late tradition linked Flora with the motif of the prostitute who bestows a fortune on the Roman people, and pointed out that sensual pleasure belongs to the realm of the Indo-European third function (the element of agricultural fecundity); see 5.183–8n.

5.343. That is, ‘while no one mixed water with wine’.

5.345–6. The ‘Ariadne star’ is the constellation of the Crown (Corona Borealis; see 3.459–64n.), here depicted by the poet as a wreath rather than a jewelled crown as in Fasti 3.513–16; see also Met. 8.176–82.

5.355–8. Ceres, deity of grain, and Flora, deity of flowering crops, are functionally and socially closely aligned; yet during the Cerialia the dress of the celebrants is white (the customary colour for festivals; see 4.619–20n.), but multicoloured for the Floralia. Ovid has Flora confirm his suspicion that Ceres’ colour is white in imitation of the appearance of the ears of ripe grain, but the flowering goddess is celebrated with many colours because of the magnificent variety of floral coloration.

5.361–8. The mimetic performances of the Floralia, or at least some of them, must have been held at night, requiring that both the theatre and the walkways used by the exiting crowd (see Dio Cassius 58.19.1–2) be illuminated with lamps.

5.371–4. The hunting of animals for public entertainment (venationes) became increasingly popular in Rome from the early second century BC. Such spectacles were commonly held in the Forum during the republic, later in amphitheatres. Without identifying the particular beasts involved, Martial (Ep. 8.67.4) notes that animals were hunted as a part of the Ludi Florales.

5.375–8. Ovid here provides a context for exploring the semiotics of his name (‘Naso’ = approximately ‘Nosy’) and thus his close affinity with Flora. On which see further, Introduction 4.VII and 5.V.

5.379–80. By ‘Chiron’ and ‘his stars’, Ovid denotes the constellation Centaurus, whose evening rising he dates to May 3 (in agreement with Columella Rust. 1.2.39).

5.385–6. Among the pupils of Chiron was the hero Achilles, who would slay the Trojan prince Hector before the walls of Troy.

5.389–90. The ‘Aeacides boy’ is Achilles, Aeacus being the hero’s grandfather; while ‘Jupiter’s son’ is Hercules/Heracles (see 1.559n.). Both are said to be ‘death-fates of Troy’. The Greek priest Calchas had prophesied that Troy would not fall unless Achilles joined the Greek expedition against that place; and in an earlier time, Heracles had led an army against Troy and killed the Trojan king, Laomedon, who had reneged on an agreement to give Heracles certain divine horses which he owned.

5.397–8. Heracles’ arrows are perpetually poisoned. Among the Twelve Labours which had been set for Heracles by his master Eurystheus was the destruction of the multi-headed swamp serpent called the Lernaean Hydra. After killing this offspring of Typhoeus (see 1.573–4n.; 3.799–808n.) and Echidna (monstrous half-woman, half-snake), Heracles dipped the point of each of his arrows in the worm’s blood, indelibly coating them with poison (see Apollodorus 2.5.2).

5.400. ‘Haemonia’s boy’ is Achilles. Peleus, Achilles’ father, was king of Phthia in Thessaly (once called Haemonia, see line 381).

5.401. Thessaly was known in antiquity for its healing plants.

5.405. On the Lernaean Hydra, see 5.397–8n.

5.413–14. The number of stars thought to comprise Centaurus, a large constellation in the southern sky, varied considerably from author to author in antiquity. Ovid’s fourteen is low.

5.415–16. Columella (Rust. 11.2.36) dates the evening rising of the constellation of Lyra to April 23, and in doing so comes closer to the mark (April 22 for the true rising) than Ovid. ‘Him’ (line 415) refers to Chiron, i.e. Centaurus.

5.417–18. It is this day, May 6, to which Columella (Rust. 11.2.39) assigns the morning setting of the middle star in the constellation Scorpios, and so Ovid’s less precise observation ought likely to be understood. Both authors appear to be at error; see Frazer 5: 35–6; Bömer 2: 315.

5.421–2. On May 9, 11 and 13 were celebrated the Lemuria, on which days were placated the lemures–ancestral shades who leave their tombs to return to their former homes. As with other festivals which are properly observed over more than a single day – the Carmentalia of January 11 and 15 (see 1.462, 1.617–18); the Lucaria of July 19 and 21 (a lucus or ‘grove’ festival’)–the festival days are not contiguous, but are separated by an odd number of intervening days (1 or 3). The intent of such a staggered schedule is to observe festivals only on odd-numbered, and hence auspicious, days; on the avoidance (though not total) of even-dayed festivals, see 1.617–18n.

5.423–6. The poet refers tacitly to the other period dedicated to the dead in the Roman calendar, the Dies Parentales of February 13 to 21, with its culminating festival of the Feralia. But since the year once consisted of only ten months (see 1.27–30n.), lacking not only Janus’ month (January), but also February, the month of purifications, the Lemuria, he suggests, was formerly the only festival for the dead.

5.427. Regarding an etymological connection of Maius (‘May’) and maiores (‘elders’), see 5.73–4 (and also 1.41).

5.432. With feet unbound a member of the household rises at midnight to appease and ward off the ancestral shades who have returned. The requirement that feet are not to be bound is akin to other ritual prohibitions on bodily constriction, such as that one noted in 3.255–8, admonishing women in labour to unbind their hair so that their wombs will be easily unbound. Among those constraints which governed the Flamen Dialis was a proscription of the presence of knots in his clothing and the wearing of (unbroken) rings (see the comments of Frazer 4: 46–7).

5.433–4. The gesture which is called in Italian la fica (‘the fig’; and so-known in English by the late sixteenth century, though rarely now) is the one described here by Ovid – clenched fist with the thumb protruding between two fingers – and is still used in Europe to protect against the evil eye and as an obscene gesture (see Bömer 2: 317; Frazer 4: 47).

5.436–40. The use of black beans thrown with face turned aside (in conjunction with the formulae uttered nine times) in order to dispel the ancestral shades and protect the living members of the household seems a curious one. The rite is otherwise attested, however (see, inter alios, Festus p. 87M), and yet other cultic affiliations of the bean are known; thus, for example, the Flamen Dialis must avoid all contact with beans (just as he must also avoid all contact with the dead). Pliny (HN 18.118–19) says beans are offered to the dead because their souls are found within beans.

5.441. Temesa was a south Italian city noted for its copper mines (see Strabo 6.1.5). The sacred and ritual use of copper and (its alloy) bronze implements was common among the Romans (see Macr. Sat. 5.19.11). These were undoubtedly the materials of choice because, owing to the metal’s antiquity, their use had become frozen in archaic ritual context. In addition to the bronze ploughshare used to mark off the pomerium (see 4.819n.), for example, the sacrificial attire of the Flamens was fastened by bronze fibulae; and the hair of priests was to be cropped only with bronze cutting tools. When it was necessary to bring iron tools into the sacred grove of the Fratres Arvales, sacrifices of a pig and a lamb were required for propitiation. The noise of clanging metal was used among both Romans and Greeks to drive away malevolent spirits (see Bömer 2: 318).

5.445–50. Yet again the poet evokes a deity for a question and answer session, to illuminate hidden origins. On this occasion the nod goes to the ‘Pleiad’s son’, Hermes (on Maia and her sister Pleiades, see 4.169–78; 5.85–6n.), the psychopomp, conductor of the dead to the realm of Hades. The ‘potent rod’ is one of the attributes of the Greek messenger deity (with whom the Romans equate Mercury), his caduceus–the staff carried by Greek heralds as a symbol of their office (and so in line 449, the god is called Caducifer, ‘Staff-Bearer’). Hermes’ caduceus was said to have the power of conferring sleep. By ‘Stygian Jove’, that is Jupiter of the Styx (the river of Hades; see 3.322n.), is meant Pluto.

5.451–4. On Remus’ hasty defiance of his brother’s new city walls and his subsequent murder, see 4.843–4.

5.461. Romulus and Remus had sought to determine the divine choice for Rome’s first king by auspicium, divination through the observation of birds (see 1.178–80n.; 4.813–18).

5.466–70. It was a she-wolf that had saved the infant Romulus and Remus, nursing them with her milk when they had been abandoned by their evil uncle Amulius (see 2.411–22). Celer is Romulus’ foreman, who according to the account at 4.843–4 struck down Remus. On the significance of this alternative account of Remus’ death, see Introduction 4.VII.

5.479–82. The poet now reaches the climax of Hermes’ narration: the May festival of the dead, the Lemuria, was established as a memorial to the murdered brother of Rome’s first king, and so was called the Remuria. The type of subsequent sound change postulated by Ovid is, remarkably enough, an extremely common one cross-linguistically: the dissimilation of the initial liquid in a sequence of two liquids, i.e.[r…r…] becoming [l…r…]. This is exactly the change seen, for example in Latin peregrinus evolving into later pelegrinus (English pilgrim); the same change but in reverse direction occurred in early *Floraria becoming Floralia. In his commentary on Horace (Epist. 2.2.209), Pomponius Porphyrio makes the same connection of Remus and the Lemuria, but a festival called Remuria is not otherwise in evidence; and the etymology here rehearsed is certainly one constructed secondarily.

5.483–4. The Lemuria take their name from the lemures, the ancestral shades who visit their former homes during this festival; more generally the term is used to denote the restless spirits of the dead. The terminology of the spirits of the dead is imprecise. Dúmezil (ARR: 367–8) would see a distinction between lemures and larvae (see 2.608–16n.), demonic spirits that terrify and possess, bringing madness; though Festus (p. 87M) describes the visitors of the Lemuria as larvae, as does Nonius Marcellus (1.197). A three-way distinction exists for Apuleius (De Deo Soc. 15) between lemures, larvae and manes, though Ovid uses the last-named term in the present discussion to denote the lemures (as in line 422, tacitis manibus, ‘to the mute dead’). Manes is likely derived from early Latin manus, ‘good’, and used originally of the great host of the dead, as in Cicero Leg. 2.9.22. Noting the conjunction of manes with the term divi parentes (from parens, ‘parent, ancestor’; compare the Parentalia; 2.533–6), Dumézil (ARR: 365) alludes to a Vedic term, Pitárah (from pitar, ‘father’) similarly used. So, for example, in Rig Veda 10.14, a hymn concerned principally with Yama, the king of the dead, verse 2 reads: ‘Yama was the first to find the way for us, this pasture that shall not be taken away. Where our ancient Fathers passed beyond, there everyone who is born follows, each on his own path.’

5.485–6. The temple doors were also shut on the day of the celebration of the Feralia, the February festival of the dead: see 2.563–4.

5.487–90. Moreover, as weddings are discouraged during the Lemuria, indeed throughout its month of May (see, inter alios, Plutarch Quaest. Rom. 86), Ovid has likewise cautioned brides not to marry during the February festival of the dead; see 2.557–8.

5.491–2. On the three days of the Lemuria, see 5.421–2n.

5.493–4. Ovid apparently again alludes to the evening setting of Orion as he had on April 9 (see 4.387–8). The double reference seems to reflect the apparent and true settings of the constellation, in April and May respectively; see Frazer 4: 57; Bömer 2: 321.

5.495–6. ‘Jupiter and his brother [Neptune]’ in the Greek myth of the birth of Orion which the poet now recites are of course Zeus and Poseidon, as Mercury is Hermes. A quite different story of the great hunter’s birth identifies him as a son of Poseidon and Euryale. For the positioning of this story before the celebration of the temple of Mars Ultor, see Introduction 4.V.

5.515–22. Dumézil (ARR: 182–3) has proposed that Ovid’s retelling of the story of the Greek Hyrieus and his divine visitors is informed by elements of an agrarian Roman ritual. Twice a year, before the sowing of spring and winter crops, Roman farmers would offer to Jupiter Dapalis a meal (daps) of roasted meat and wine. Dumézil sees the farmer’s hospitality as part of a gift-exchange, anticipating – though making no bold request (at least not in Cato’s account of the ritual, Agr. 132)–that the sky god will reciprocate by sending beneficial rains.

5.531–6. The divine act of which Ovid is ashamed to speak further is urination. According to the Greek tradition to which the poet here alludes, the three gods urinated upon the ox hide, buried it, and from it ten months later was born Urion, with a name said to be derived from Greek ourein, ‘to urinate’ (Latin urina, ‘urine’), and which was later changed to Orion (see Bömer 2: 322).

5.537–8. Delia is the Greek goddess Artemis (Roman Diana), born on the island of Delos. Several versions of the death of Orion have survived from antiquity, most of which, unlike that one told by Ovid in the lines which follow, name Artemis herself as the one responsible for the killing of the giant hunter.

5.539–44. According to Eratosthenes (Cat. 32), Orion’s boast of his prowess as a hunter of all beasts so enraged Earth that she sent a great scorpion to kill him. Ovid has the gigantic scorpion attacking Leto (called Latona by the Romans), mother of the twins Artemis and Apollo, and Orion sacrificing himself to protect her. Like the hunter, the scorpion was placed among the stars, where Orion’s constellation endlessly flees from that of the beast, Scorpios.

5.545–8. May 12 marks the anniversary of the dedication of the temple of Mars Ultor. As with April 16, the date on which Augustus was declared imperator (see 4.673–6), Ovid writes of time being accelerated to hurry along the arrival of such an auspicious day.

5.549–50. Ovid’s reference is perhaps to the hastae Martis, the ‘spears of Mars’, which were housed in Mars’ chapel in the Regia (see 3.199–200n.), though their spontaneous shaking was usually interpreted as a prodigy. Upon observing such movement of the spears, the Pontifex Maximus would report to the Senate, who would see that the appropriate propitiatory sacrifices were offered (see Aulus Gellius 4.6; on an occasion on which sacrifices were designated for Jupiter, Mars and Robigus, see ARR: 174, n. 43). Prior to inaugurating a military campaign, a Roman general would enter Mars’ chapel in the Regia, shake first the shields which hung there, and then the lance held by a statue of Mars, proclaiming Mars, vigila! (‘Mars, awake!’; see Servius Aen. 8.3, 7.603).

5.551–2. According to Dio Cassius (60.5.3), however, the temple of Mars Ultor, ‘Mars the Avenger’, the magnificent and opulent structure dominating the Forum of Augustus consecrated in 2 BC, was dedicated on August 1, not May 12, and on that day games were held annually in commemoration of the dedication. Simpson 1977, however, convincingly contends for Ovid’s dating of the dedication of the Forum temple. Prior to this period the war deity’s temples had been required to be located outside the pomerium (see 4.135–8n.), protecting the city from the armed threat of the enemy without (see ARR: 206, 320). The Augustan Forum temple may have been preceded by a small temple to Mars Ultor on the Capitoline built in 20 BC, but many now reject this. The lavish games of 2 BC included gladiatorial combat and the hunting of 260 lions in the Circus Maximus and of 36 crocodiles in the Circus Flaminius, flooded for the occasion (see Dio Cassius 55.10.6–8).

5.561–2. Ovid may refer to actual captured enemy arms and standards, which were to be housed in the temple of Mars Ultor (see Dio Cassius 55.10.2–4).

5.563–6. The Forum of Augustus was filled with statues of illustrious figures from Rome’s past, bearing dedications, some of which have survived, carved into their bases. The two which Ovid names individually, those of Aeneas (carrying his father, Anchises; see 4.37–8) and of Romulus (here called the Ilian; see 4.23–30n.), stood in the two large semicircular exedrae found on the eastern and western borders of the Forum, on either side of the temple. Judging from a Pompeiian copy of the inscription engraved on the base of the statue of Romulus, the ‘general’s arms’ of line 565 may refer to the spolia opima, the armour of Acron, king of Caenina, which Romulus had offered to Jupiter Feretrius (see 1.201–2n.).

5.567–78. Though the temple of Mars Ultor in the Augustan Forum was dedicated only in 2 BC, it is said here to have been vowed by the young Octavian (Augustus) at Philippi (see 3.705–8), if he should be successful in avenging the murder of his adopted father Julius Caesar. Octavian’s words are made to recall those of his ancestor Aeneas, as he avenges Pallas’ death at the end of Virgil’s Aeneid (compare Fasti 5.575 with Aen. 12.950: ‘exacts payment with guilty blood’). ‘Vesta’s priest’ in line 573 is Julius Caesar (Augustus’ ‘father’), who in 63 BC had become Pontifex Maximus, supervisor of the Vestals (see 3.155–66n., 3.419–22n., 3.697–702n.). But for the view that the Pontifex Maximus only acquired a direct priestly relationship with Vesta with Augustus’ assumption of the office, see H-B 1994: 67–71, 99–100. See also 3.697–702n. For a discussion of Ovidian semiotics in this passage, see Introduction 4.VII.

5.570. Ovid puns on princeps meaning ‘first man’ or ‘chief’ (principium = ‘beginning’).

5.574. ‘Both these gods’, that is, Julius Caesar and Vesta.

5.579–80. Ovid’s attention now turns from the avenging of Julius Caesar’s murder to the avenging of the Parthian capture of Roman standards.

5.581–2. The Parthians were an Indo-European people living south-east of the Caspian Sea, speakers of a Middle Iranian language, who began their rise to power in the mid third century BC. They were famed for their horse-breeding, producing a distinctive stock which grazed on the alfalfa of the Iranian plateau. Of equal fame were the Parthian armoured cavalry, with both rider and horse cloaked in mail, and the Parthian mounted archers. Parthian territory expanded rapidly under Mithridates I and II in the second century BC; and Mithridates II probably controlled the Silk Road trade links with China.

5.583–6. Mithridates II, king of Parthia, was succeeded by Orodes II, during whose reign the consul Marcus Licinius Crassus, accompanied by his son Publius Licinius Crassus, led an expedition against the Parthians in 53 BC. At Carrhae in northern Mesopotamia, the Crassi met a Parthian force of armoured cavalry and horse-archers; Crassus’ army was cut down by the Parthian archers, and both father and son died in battle. This fiasco at the hands of eastern barbarians, attended as it was by the loss of the military standards, was felt and remembered by Rome as an unspeakable catastrophe and humiliation.

5.589–90. The call for war with Parthia to avenge Rome’s losses had become a recurring poetic theme in the years prior to the recovery of the standards. Their recovery, however, was effected by peaceful rather than bellicose means. In 20 BC, Augustus negotiated a return of the standards by Phraates, then king of Parthia, though Roman coins illustrate the event as if the Parthians had been subdued in battle. Augustus similarly had the surrender so depicted on the breastplate of his Prima Porta statue, and Dio Cassius (54.8.2) writes of Augustus receiving the standards as if they were spoils of war. The standards were first deposited on the Capitoline Hill (probably in the temple of Jupiter rather than a small temple to Mars Ultor hypothesized by some scholars – see 5.551–2n.) and subsequently transferred to the temple of Mars Ultor in the Forum of Augustus.

5.591–2. A tactic employed by Parthian horse-archers was to feign retreat, then stop and shoot at those in pursuit.

5.593–4. ‘Eagles’ is a reference to the returned military standards. Legionary standards were eagles of silver and gold, decorated with wreathes.

5.599–602. In dating the morning rising of the Pleiades (see 4.169–78) to May 13, Ovid is in close agreement (May 10) with both Columella (Rust. 11.2.40) and Pliny (HN 18.248), though the morning rising actually occurred two weeks later (May 28). Julius Caesar in his calendar likewise dates the first day of summer by the appearance of the Pleiades (May 9 for Caesar).

5.603–4. The constellation of the Hyades is set in the face of Taurus, the Bull constellation (see 5.163–8n.), and it is almost certainly the rising of the Hyades to which Ovid here refers, though he uses the constellation’s morning appearance as an entreée to the telling of the ensuing story of Europa’s abduction by Zeus, in the guise of a bull. The Hyades’ true morning rising was May 16, its apparent rising June 9.

5.605–16. The ‘Sidonian’ (lines 610, 617) is Europa, daughter of the Phoenician ruler Agenor (or Phoenix, according to Homer Il. 14.321), said to be king of the city of Tyre or of Sidon. Ovid here uses Sidonian simply to mean ‘Phoenician’, as he does elsewhere (see 3.107–8, 3.649), calling Europa at the same time ‘the girl from Tyre’ (lines 605–6). Similarly, in his telling of the story in the Metamorphoses (2.863–75), he writes of Jupiter journeying to Sidon, but refers to Europa’s companions as ‘Tyrian’. From the present account, Ovid omits that initial part of this Greek tale on which he focuses in the Metamorphoses version – Zeus (Roman Jupiter) spied the lovely, young Phoenician princess one day; desiring her, he took upon himself the form of a magnificent white bull and lumbered down the beach on which she was strolling with friends; enchanted by the great beast and fear giving way to wonder, Europa climbed upon its back, whereupon Zeus, the bull, waded (or dashed, say some) into the sea and proceeded to swim away towards Crete, Europa clinging helplessly to his back.

5.617–18. Coming ashore on Crete with his Phoenician prize, Zeus engendered three sons within Europa’s womb: Rhadamanthys, who would become one of the judges of the dead; Sarpedon, a future king of Lycia; and Minos, the fabled king of Crete (see 3.459–64n., 3.499–500n.).

5.619–20. The ‘Pharian heifer’ is Io, changed into a cow by Zeus so she might escape Hera’s notice, later identified with the Egyptian goddess Isis; see 1.453–4n.; 3.658n. Pharos is an island at the mouth of the Nile; and Pharian is frequently used by Latin poets to denote ‘Egyptian’. Ovid has already alluded to the uncertainty of the gender of Taurus (4.717–18); Eratosthenes (Cat. 14) and Hyginus (Astr. 2.21) identified the constellation as a heifer – Io raised to the heavens.

5.621–2. May 14 brings the strange ritual of the Argeï (or May 15, according to Dion. Ant. Rom. 1.38.3). The origin of this is shrouded in darkness, though the name is likely derived from Greek Argeïoi (‘Argive’, inhabitants of Argos), as it was so interpreted in antiquity, for example, by Varro (Ling. 7.44). On this day, the Pontifices and certain magistrates carried straw effigies of men to the sacred wooden bridge, the Pons Sublicius, the oldest bridge in the city (Dion. Ant. Rom. 1.37.3); there the Vestal Virgins threw the straw men from the bridge into the waters of the Tiber (Festus p. 15M). The number of dummies reported to have been used in the rite varies slightly between sources: Dionysius of Halicarnassus writes of thirty (Ant. Rom. 1.37.3), Varro of twenty-seven (Ling. 7.44). The latter count receives support (if self-servingly) from Varro’s description (Ling. 5.45) of the shrines of the Argeï–said to be twenty-seven in number, distributed equally among four sections of Rome (the text requires emendation, but the reading is probable). It is to these shrines that a procession was held on March 16 or 17 (which Ovid briefly and with uncertainty mentions: see 3.791–2), presumably for the purpose of depositing in those shrines the effigies until the arrival of May 14 and the rite of the Argeï. According to Aulus Gellius (10.15.30), during the time of the procession, the Flaminica Dialis was not permitted to groom her hair (compare 3.397–8).

5.623–4. Here and in the lines following, the poet explores various explanations for the origin of the bizarre rites. In antiquity, as in modern times, opinions have differed as to whether the ritual was in its inception one of actual human sacrifice (see 4.157–60n.) or only of the offering of effigies. Sexagenarios de ponte (Sexagenarians from the bridge) is a Roman adage to which Ovid alludes in these lines (see Festus p. 334M). According to some, the proverb had its origins in the early fourth century BC, when Rome had been captured by the Gauls; to stretch limited food resources those sixty years old and older were ‘terminated’ by being drowned in the Tiber. A rather more innocuous context for the phrase’s origin is mentioned later by Ovid (see 633–45n.).

5.625–8. Ovid has already referred to the coming of the deposed Saturnus to Rome via the Tiber (the ‘Tuscan waters’ of line 628) and his affiliation with the sickle; see 1.233–6n. The words here attributed to Jupiter, that is Zeus, were reported to have been uttered at his oracle in Dodona (see 2.461–2n.). The entire oracle is cited in slightly variant forms by both Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Ant. Rom. 1.19.3) and Macrobius (Sat. 1.7.28): when the Pelasgians (see 2.279–81n.; Homer refers to the Pelasgian Zeus of Dodona in Iliad 16.233) would arrive in Italy, they were to send an offering to Phoebus Apollo, heads to Zeus (or Hades, according to Macrobius), and a human victim to Cronus, equated by the Romans with Saturnus.

5.629–32. The ‘Tirynthian’ is Heracles, Roman Hercules (see 2.305n.). ‘Leucadian’ refers to the island of Leucas in the Ionian Sea and the annual practice of tossing a criminal into the sea from its 2000-foot-high (600 m.) limestone cliffs (see Strabo 10.1.9). The view that it was Hercules who tamed a Tiber ritual of human sacrifice by throwing straw effigies into the river is likewise espoused, inter alios, by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Ant. Rom. 1.37).

5.633–4. The poet returns to the proverb behind lines 623–4: Sexagenarios de ponte (Sexagenarians from the bridge). Varro (cited by Nonius Marcellus, p. 523M) places the original intent of the saying within the context of younger men attempting to safeguard their own political agenda by excluding elders from the voting areas, which were accessed by elevated walkways.

5.635–8. For a definitive answer to his query, Ovid again calls upon a god – this time, the deity of the Tiber river, Tiberinus Pater (on whom, see 2.389–90n.).

5.645. For Hercules’ (‘Alcides’) stay with Evander, see 1.543–58.

5.647. The ‘Pallantian hero’ is Evander, who is said to have come from the Arcadian city of Pallantium and to have given this name to his settlement on the Palatine Hill, and which name, by folk etymology, was then identified as the source of Latin Palatium (‘Palatine’; see, inter alios, Virgil Aen. 8.54).

5.648. On Hercules’ fight with the monstrous cattle thief Cacus, see 1.543–58n.

5.649. Erythea is the island on which lived the triple-bodied Geryon, from whom Heracles had taken the cattle which he was driving home to Tiryns when he passed through Evander’s city; see 1.543–58n.

5.650–60. The Argeï, Varro writes (Ling. 5.45), were the principal members among those Greeks (from Argos) who came to Rome with Heracles. ‘Inachus’ shore’ (line 656) refers to Argos, and is so used after Inachus, the Argive river god (see 1.453–4n.). On the relevance of this episode to the exiled Ovid, see Introduction 4.VII.

5.663–8. The Ides of May is the festival day of Mercury. The opening and closing lines of this day’s entry make reference to aspects of the mythology of Greek Hermes, with whom the Romans associated their god Mercury, but the heart of the passage (lines 669–90) reveals the fundamental nature of the Roman deity, god of merchants. Greek Hermes is son of Zeus, and Maia, one of the Pleiades, who are daughters of Atlas (see 4.169–78; on Roman Maia, see 5.85–6n.). Hermes as messenger god (see 5.445–50n.) and inventor of the lyre (see 1.315–16n.; 5.103–4n.) has already received attention in the Fasti. Among his other attributes, those here noted are his role as god of athletes and his eventual association with education and learning.

5.669–90. Mercury is the god of merchants, and on this day Rome’s merchants observe a ritual designed to bring forgiveness and profit. The spring by the Porta Capena in which both seller and wares were washed is not otherwise known (see ARR: 440).

5.691–2. ‘Ortygia’s cattle’ are those which Hermes, on the first day of his life, stole from Apollo (see 5.103–4n.); Apollo’s birthplace was the island of Delos, earlier called Ortygia.

5.693–6. Gemini is the constellation of the Twins, in the following lines identified as the Dioscuri, that is the twin boys of Zeus, Castor and Pollux (see 5.699–700n.). Among the Greeks and Romans such an identification of Gemini was common, though others are attested: for example, some recognized in the constellation Heracles and Apollo; others Amphion and Zethus, twin sons of Zeus and Antiope. The designation of the constellation as twin figures is of Mesopotamian origin. Hercules’ labours number twelve; on which, see 1.543–58n.

5.699–700. Phoebe and her sister, Hilaeira, are the daughters of Leucippus (a commonly occurring name in Greek myth, literally ‘white horse man’). The ‘Tyndarid brothers’ are the twins Castor, the horseman, and Pollux, the boxer (Greek Polydeuces), called ‘Tyndarids’ after King Tyndareus. Like their appellation ‘Dioscuri’ (literally ‘Boys of Zeus’), this label is not fully legitimate. The mother of the twins is the Spartan queen Leda, also mother of Helen, for whom the Greeks sailed to Troy, and of Clytemnestra, wife of Agamemnon, leader of the Greek expedition to that place. One of the boys, Castor, is said to be Leda’s son by her husband Tyndareus; the other ‘twin’ was fathered by Zeus (see Apollodorus 3.10.6). Thus Castor and Pollux form a contrasting pair, the first mortal, the second immortal.

5.701–6. Idas and his brother, Lynceus, are sons of the Messenian king, Aphareus, himself brother to both Tyndareus and Leucippus. The daughters of Leucippus had been promised to Idas and Lynceus, but were abducted by the Dioscuri and taken for their own. Ovid here refers to Castor and Pollux as the Oebalids, after Oebalus, father of Tyndareus (according to one tradition).

5.707–8. The two sets of brothers fight to the death over the abducted daughters of Leucippus. Ovid here places the scene of combat in Aphidna, a site in Attica where Helen was kept after her abduction by the Athenian hero Theseus, and from where she was rescued by her brothers Castor and Pollux. A locale in Laconia or Messenia would be expected (thus Pausanias 3.13.1, 4.3.1; Apollodorus 3.11.2).

5.713–14. In Ovid’s telling of the fight, Pollux, son of Zeus (Roman Jupiter), is saved from Idas by his father’s intervention; in this (though not in the details of combat) Ovid is in agreement with Apollodorus (3.11.2; several variant accounts are attested).

5.715–19. The son of immortal Zeus, Pollux, implored his father to allow him to share his own immortality with his fallen brother Castor, son of the mortal Tyndareus. Zeus responded to the prayer by granting to the twins a single immortal life between them, which they share in an alternating fashion, the particular nature of which varies between sources – they alternate in living every other day (Homer Od. 11.301–4); both have a subterranean existence at Therapnae (in the vicinity of Sparta) one day, and with the gods of Olympus the next (Pindar Pyth. 11.61–4), among still other interpretations.

5.720. St Elmo’s fire, electrical discharges occurring, especially, about the higher portions of a ship during storms, was identified in antiquity with the presence of the Dioscuri, who were generally believed to protect mariners. In this and various other ways the Dioscuri show a remarkable similarity to the divine twins of Vedic India, the Aévins, who are famed for their rescuing activities, one of the most celebrated of which is their saving of the drowning man Bhujyu (see, for example, Rig Veda 1.116). As Castor and Pollux are the Dioscuri (‘the Boys of Zeus’), so the Aśvins are called the ‘Sons of Dyaus’ (Dyaus is the Vedic deity descended from the Proto-Indo-European sky god *Dyeēus, also ancestor of Zeus), though it appears that only one of the Aśvins is actually a son of Dyaus, the other the son of a mortal (as with the Dioscuri). Both sets of divine twins are associated with horses (the name Aśvin is derived from the Sanskrit word for horse, aśva). One of the Aśvins is identified with the Morning Star, the other with the Evening Star; a similar identification seems likely for Castor and Pollux (see Servius Aen. 6.121; Hyginus Astr. 2.22; Fab. 80; along with comments of Frazer 4: 116–18). For discussion of the similarities shared by the Dioscuri and the Aśvins, see Nagy 1990: 255–9.

5.721–2. On the Agonia or Agonalia, see 1.317–18n.

5.723–4. ‘Erigone’s dog’ (Maera, that is; for the story see 4.939–40n.) denotes the Dog-Star, Sirius, which actually rose in the morning on July 19 (apparent rising on August 2).

5.725–6. This is the second of the Tubilustria (festivals of trumpet purification) appearing in Ovid’s Fasti; for the Tubilustrium of March 23, see 3.849–50n. The day is also so noted in several calendars: the Fasti Caeretani, Venusini, Esquilini and Maffeiani. Also in the Fasti Venusini and in the Fasti Amiternini May 23 is marked as a festival of Volcanus. The March 23 Tubilustrium appears to be one of a cluster of festivals in late February and March associated with Mars and the opening of the campaigning season of the army. Trumpet purification is not the only matter in which Mars and Volcanus share membership in a small subset. Thus, according to Livy (30.6.9; 45.33.2), those deities to whom it is proper to dedicate the spoils of a defeated enemy are Mars, Volcanus, Lua Mater and Minerva (that is Nerio, see 3.675–96n.). When a Roman commander has performed a devotio, vowing himself sacrificially and his enemy to Tellus and to the di manes (see 5.483–4n.; or to some other Underworld deities), it appears to be usually Volcanus to whom his weapons are surrendered. By a requirement said to be of Etruscan origin, the temples of four deities were to be situated outside the pomerium (see 4.819n.): those of Venus, Ceres, Mars and Volcanus (see 4.135–8n.). Volcanus’ temples are said to be so placed because of the great danger which fire poses to the city (see Vitruvius 1.7.1), and it is fire with which Volcanus is closely associated. Dumézil suggests that his presence beyond the walls may also be for a purpose akin to Mars’–to turn his threatening nature outwards, towards the enemy, and Dumézil compares with extramural Volcanus the Vedic dakināgni (see 6.281–2n.), the fire which guards the sacred border (see ARR: 313–14, 320). On August 23 will be celebrated the Volcanalia, at which offerings are made to various deities in addition to Volcanus – to Quirinus, Ops Opifera, Juturna and nymphs (see ARR: 321). Volcanus is clearly an archaic Roman god, as attested by his possession of a Flamen, the Flamen Volcanalis. Varro (Ling. 5.74) includes him in the ensemble of the gods of Titus Tatius. This latter designation and the set of deities invoked at the Volcanalia clearly draw Volcanus into conjunction with the third function; Dumézil sees this affiliation grounded in the fear of the destruction of the grain crop by fire, particularly pronounced during the season of the Volcanalia (see ARR: 321).

5.727–8. The ‘four marks’ of which the poet writes are spelled out in various calendars as Q.R.C.F.; in the Fasti Maffeiani appears the fuller designation Q.REX.C.F. These notations are marked not only for this day, May 24, but also for March 24–the days following each of the two Tubilustria. A confusion regarding the meaning of the abbreviation, which Ovid himself here airs, is explicitly addressed by Festus (p. 278M), who dismisses the notion that it refers to the ‘king’s flight’, the Regifugium, which takes place on February 24 (see 2.685–6n.), as does Verrius Flaccus in a comment on this day in the Fasti Praenestini. On the testimony of Varro (Ling. 6.31), with whom Festus is in agreement (p. 259M), the proper reading is Quando Rex Comitiavit Fas, and refers to the arrival of the Rex Sacrorum at the Comitium and his pronouncement of the appropriate sacrificial formulas, an occurrence that marks a fundamental change in the nature of the day, which, having begun as nefastus, now becomes fastus. Such days are called dies fissi (Servius Aen. 6.37), and in the course of the year, they number three: the two marked Q.R.C.F., March 24 and May 24, and the day marked Q.S.D.F., June 15 (see 6.713–14n.).

5.729–30. On the goddess Fortuna Publica and her three temples, see 4.375–6n. (April 5). The third temple was dedicated on November 13.

5.732. Ovid dates to May 25 the evening rising of the constellation Aquila (the Eagle); the apparent rising was actually May 24.

5.733. Boötes is the constellation of the Ox-Herder (see 2.153–4n.); its true morning setting occurred on May 28, its apparent setting on June 10. Ovid has already noted the morning setting of this constellation, on March 5 (see 3.405–6), and will do so yet again on June 7 (see 6.235–6). Somewhat similarly, Columella assigns the morning setting of Boötes to two different dates: May 22/23 (Rust. 11.2.43) and June 7 (Rust. 11.2.45).

5.734. On Hyas and his sisters, the Hyades, see 5.163–8n., 5.169–82n. Ovid has already noted the morning rising of the star-group on May 14 (lines 603–4; cf. 163–8) and will do so again on June 2 (see 6.197–8) and June 15 (see 6.711–12).

Fasti 6: JUNE

6.1.–8. Although Ovid has already affirmed that June (Iunius) owes its name to iuvenes (‘young men’; see 1.41), he allows that there is disagreement concerning the proper etymology of the name, just as with the etymology of May (5.1–8), and will solicit the testimony of three goddesses in this regard, inviting his readers to weigh the evidence for themselves and resolve the dispute as they see fit. For the significance of this disintegration of narrative authority, see Introduction 4.VIII.

6.5–8. Ovid attributes poetic inspiration to a divine presence within (compare 6.538), a thought which is repeated in several of his works (see, for example, Ars 3.548–50) and sometimes flatly denied (Ars 1.25–30).

6.13–14. The ‘professor of ploughing’ is the Greek poet Hesiod (who in his Works and Days gives instructions for ploughing and other agricultural activities), a native of the village of Ascra on Mount Helicon – that mountain on which was found the sacred grove of the Muses. It is these Muses who are the goddesses that Hesiod encountered as he grazed his sheep (line 14; see Th. 22–35).

6.15–16. ‘Priam’s son’ is Paris, the Trojan prince. For the story of the ‘Judgement of Paris’, how he was asked to decide which of three goddesses is most beautiful, Aphrodite, Athena or Hera, see 4.121–2n. ‘Ida’ in line 16 is a reference to Mount Ida in Anatolia, where Paris was pasturing his sheep when Hermes conducted the three deities into his presence.

6.17–20. The poet has begun his story of the naming of June by making plain that the three goddesses who have appeared to him bringing instruction in this matter are not the same three as those met by Hesiod and Paris. Yet, there is one member of the latter threesome who is among those who will give etymological guidance to Ovid, he now allows. She is Juno, sister and wife of Jupiter (by way of the Roman equation of Juno with Greek Hera and Jupiter with Zeus), she who occupies a position on the Capitol, ‘Jove’s hill’–a reference perhaps to Juno’s shrine within the Capitoline temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, or to the temple of Juno Moneta upon the Capitoline heights (see 6.183–4n.).

6.21. ‘Builder’ translates the Latin conditor, which connotes both a poetic composer and a founder or builder of cities. The analogy with famed conditores such as Aeneas and Augustus seems overt. For Augustus as conditor, see 2.63.

6.22. The poet has earlier lamented the frailty of his elegiac meter in the face of such a daunting task as chronicling the Roman sacred year and lauding the works of Augustus (see 2.3–8, 2.125–6).

6.29–30. According to Homer (II. 4.59) also, Greek Hera, with whom the Romans identified Juno, was the first-born child of Cronus, equated with Saturnus by the Romans. Hesiod (Th. 454), however, lists her as the third and youngest of Cronus’ daughters.

6.31–2. On the coming of Saturnus to pre-Romulean Rome, see 1.233–6.

6.34. The poet uses ‘Tarpeian’ to denote ‘Capitoline’; on the traitor Tarpeia and the Capitoline Hill, see 1.79; 1.260–62n. Here Juno undoubtedly refers to her shrine within the Capitoline temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (compare 6.17–20n.).

6.35–6. Ovid here makes Juno invoke that etymology of May which links the month’s name to the deity Maia, and in so doing continues his identification of Roman Maia (Maia Volcani) with the Greek daughter of Atlas by the same name, seen in 5.85–6. Greek Maia was mother of Hermes by Zeus, and Juno’s deprecation of her is symptomatic of Hera’s vengeful hatred of Zeus’ lovers and their offspring.

6.37. Juno Regina (the ‘Queen’) possessed a temple and cult on the Aventine, established after the Romans had coaxed this deity out of the Etruscan city of Veii in 396 BC. The ritual by which this was effected is that of evocatio, the persuading of a diety to abandon an enemy city for Rome, by promises of temples and cult (see ARR: 425–7; RR: 34–5, 132–4). Ending a reported ten-year siege of Veii, Rome took the city after Camillus (on whom, see 1.641–2) had evoked Juno Regina, the city’s chief deity (Livy 5.21.3–22); the temple which he vowed was dedicated in 392 BC. Juno was also identified as Regina in conjunction with her shrine in the Capitoline temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, an identification which was certainly augmented by her equation with Greek Hera, wife of Zeus, king of the gods. Augustus, the princeps, following an oracle which the Quindecimviri read in the Sibylline Books (consulted at Augustus’ prompting), celebrated the Secular Games in 17 BC–sacrifices and theatrical performances which had been observed by 249 BC but reputed to be older, held at the completion of each saeculum (a period held to be equivalent to the longest human life span, set at 100 years during the republic). During the games of 17 BC, Augustus and his son-in-law Marcus Agrippa offered sacrifices and prayers to Juno Regina (see ILS 5050).

6.39–40. Lux (plural luces) is a Latin word for ‘light, daylight’, but may be used, as here, to mean ‘day’. Ovid, through the mouth of Juno, suggests an etymological link between luces and her name Juno Lucina (associated with the deity’s attribute as goddess of childbirth). The link has been forged already; see 2.449–52n.

6.41–2. Dardanus is ancestor of the Trojans, and himself a son of Zeus by the Pleiad Electra (see 4.31–6). Juno’s – that is Hera’s – anger was again spiked by Zeus’ infidelity. On the quieting of the goddess’s hatred of the Trojan line, see Virgil Aen. 12.791–842.

6.43–4. To the fathering of Dardanus, the goddess adds two additional causes of her contempt for the Trojans: Zeus’ abduction of Ganymede (see 2.145–6n.), and her loss to Aphrodite in the ‘Judgement of Paris’ (see 4.121–2n.).

6.45–6. According to Virgil (Aen. 1.12–18), Juno was devoted to Carthage above all other places; and he affirms that in that North African city, her chariot and weapons are to be found. The chief goddess of Carthage, Tanit, came to be equated by the Romans with Jupiter’s wife, being identified as Juno Caelestis (see ARR: 463–5, 680–81).

6.47–8. According to Homer (II. 4.51–2), Hera was most devoted to the Greek cities of Sparta, Argos and Mycenae. Her two chief cultic centres were located at her sanctuary lying between Argos and Mycenae, and on the island of Samos (see GR: 131).

6.49–50. In the Faliscan city of Falerii existed a cult dedicated to Juno Quiritis or Curritis, where she was served in a sacred grove by her priest, the Pontifex Sacrarius. At Tibur she was called Juno Curitis and at Beneventum, Juno Quiritis. The etymology of these variant forms is in doubt; in antiquity links with curia (each of the divisions of Rome; see 2.527–30n.), currus (‘chariot’) and curis (‘spear’) were conjectured. It was the Sabine Titus Tatius (line 49), writes Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Ant. Rom. 2.50.3), who brought the worship of Juno Curitis to Rome (see ARR: 296–7).

6.53–4. Mars is father of Romulus, founder of Rome, and, by assimilation to the Greek pantheon, son of Juno (as Ares is son of Hera). On Mars and his protection of Rome’s walls, see 5.551–2n.

6.59–63. According to Macrobius (Sat. 1.12.30), June was called Junonius (of Juno) at Aricia and Praeneste, and Festus attests Junonalis and Junonius (p. 103M). On Juno Sospita and her worship at Lanuvium, see 2.55–8n.

6.65–6. The second of the three goddesses will now testify regarding the etymology of June. Hercules’ (Greek Heracles) wife is Hebe, goddess of youth and cupbearer to the Olympian deities, with whom the Romans equated Juventas (see Livy 21.62.9). Juventas was (like Concordia, see 6.91–2n., and of course Juno) a deity particularly close to the Augustan household. Augustus introduced and reintroduced many institutions associated with the young, and restored the temple of Juventas near the Circus Maximus (RG 19.2).

6.67–8. Juventas can call Juno her mother by way of her assimilation to Greek Hebe, who is daughter of Zeus and Hera.

6.73–4. Hebe/Juventas refers to Juno’s shrine in the Capitoline temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.

6.75–8. The name of the goddess Juventas is Latin iuventas, ‘youth’, made proper, and is etymologically related to iuvenes, ‘young men’, which the poet soon will propose, in the words of the goddess, to be the source of the month name June; see lines 87–8.

6.79–82. On Hercules’ capture of the cattle of Geryon, his cattle drive through Evander’s Rome and his killing of the fire-monster Cacus, son of Volcanus, see 1.543–78.

6.83–6. Macrobius (Sat. 1.12.16) cites Fulvius Nobilior as noting in his commentary on the calendar (early second century BC) that Romulus had divided the Roman people into two groups, seniors and juniors – the seniors to counsel, the juniors to fight.

6.87–8. Ovid has already expressed the view that May (Maius) was named for the maiores (‘seniors’; see 1.41; 5.73–4, 5.427), and June (Iunius) for the iuvenes (‘young men, juniors’; see 1.41; 5.77–8), and thus June is etymologically linked to Juventas, see lines 75–8. In this view, he is not alone: Fulvius Nobilior espouses the same notion (see 6.83–6n.), as does Varro (Ling. 6.33, citing Fulvius; compare, however, 5.73–4n.), and yet others.

6.91–2. Concordia is the goddess of peaceful agreement (see 1.637–40; 1.645–6; 6.637–8). The ‘kindly leader’ is often taken to be Augustus, to whom ‘Apolline laurel’ is especially suitable (see 4.953n.); but Concordia was also of particular importance to Tiberius, who restored her temple in the Roman Forum and whom (together with his mother Livia) Ovid at 1.645–50 associates tellingly with the goddess. See Introduction 5.VII.

6.93–5. The tale of Tatius and Quirinus, that is Romulus (see 1.37n.), is the story of the peaceful resolution of the war between young Rome and the Sabines, and the integration of the Roman and Sabine communities (see 3.213–34n.). On the Lares, protectors of the household and the Roman state, see 5.129–32n., 5.133–4n. Varro (Ling. 5.74) lists the Lares among those gods which the Sabine Tatius introduced into Rome.

6.96. Concordia asserts that June takes its name from Latin iunctus, ‘joined’, referring to the uniting of the Roman and Sabine communities.

6.99–100. ‘Pergamum’ is a reference to Troy (see 1.525n.), destroyed by the Greeks ultimately as a consequence of Paris’ ill-fated decision to pronounce Aphrodite to be the most beautiful of the goddesses (see 4.121–2n.).

6.101–2. June’s Kalends brings the day dedicated to Carna. In these lines and those which follow (103–82), Ovid once again employs his free-handed etymological method to provide an account of the deity’s background, equating her with a nymph Cranaë (line 107) and at the same time identifying her with the goddess of hinges, Cardea (line 101). Carna’s name must, however, certainly be derived from Latin caro, carnis, ‘flesh’ (both animal and vegetable), in keeping with her true role, which in fact underlies the poet’s account of the healing of the child Proca, whose flesh had fallen prey to ‘birds of the night’ (lines 131–68). Macrobius (Sat. 1.12.32–3) identifies her as the deity who protects the vital organs and states that she is celebrated with a soup of beans and bacon, which foods give greatest strength to the body. Ovid here agrees not only with the menu (lines 169–70), but with the therapeutic advantage which it confers (lines 181–2). Perhaps Carna’s day should be seen as occupying the final position in the string of festivals associated with agricultural fecundity, just as the final element of agricultural production is the assimilation of foods into the flesh and well-being of the body. Dumézil has called attention to the similarity between Carna and her role and the Vedic deity Pitué (‘Food’; Rig Veda 1.187), who likewise oversees the synthetic transformation of agricultural products into flesh (see ARR: 385–7).

6.105–6. On the obscure deity Alernus, see 2.67–8 and Glossary.

6.107. The name of the nymph Cranaë is not otherwise known.

6.111–12. Phoebus is Apollo; his sister is Diana (Greek Artemis).

6.127–30. By phonetic similarity, Ovid has equated Cranaë and Cardea, goddess of hinges (having a name derived from Latin cardo, ‘hinge’). Her special attribute is here aptly granted by the god of the door. Concerning the whitethorn which Janus gave, see 6.165–8n.

6.131–2. Phineus was a legendary soothsayer and king of Thrace and the ‘birds’ who harassed him were the Harpies (the ‘Snatchers’), the two (sometimes more) daughters of an obscure figure Thaumas and the Oceanid Electra, and sisters of Iris, the messenger goddess and deity of the rainbow. In their iconography, the Harpies are commonly depicted as birds with female human heads. Because Phineus had angered the gods, these caused the Harpies to snatch away his food, or pollute it, before he could eat (see Apollodorus 1.9.21).

6.133–40. The vampire creatures of which Ovid writes, as he underscores, are not Harpies but Striges (line 139, literally ‘screech-owls’; Petronius, 63.4, 8, knows them as Strigae, howling vampires who attack children).

6.141–2. The ‘Marsians’ or Marsi were a people of central Italy, whose chief city was Marruvium. Famed for their magic in antiquity, the Marsi were particularly noted for their purported immunity from snake bites and their ability to heal miraculously others bitten by snakes. At Lacus Fucinus in the Marsian region was a grove sacred to the Italian goddess of healing named Angitia or Anagtia, also worshipped at Sulmo, Ovid’s home town.

6.143–4. Proca is the king of Alba Longa who precedes Numitor; see 4.52.

6.155–6. The particular ritual use of arbutus (strawberry tree) leaves here described is not otherwise known (Bömer 2: 345). However, the anointing of doorposts with leaves to provide protection to those within is attested in the ancient Near East (see W&W 1990: 649–50).

6.165–8. Frazer (4: 142–3) notes the widespread use in both ancient and modern Europe of whitethorn (hawthorn) to protect households and property against supernatural intruders.

6.169–70. The Kalends of June is called Kalendae Fabariae, the ‘Bean Kalends’, according to Macrobius (Sat. 1.12.33). Regarding the meal of bacon and bean soup which is prescribed for this day, see 6.101–2n.

6.171–2. The poet returns to the theme of the simple life of early Rome which contrasts with the affluence of his own day; compare 1.193–226.

6.175–6. The ‘bird from rich Ionia’ is the attagen, a kind of partridge, probably the francolin or hazel-hen (see Bömer 2: 346; Frazer 4: 146); that bird which ‘delights in Pygmy blood’ is the crane. The motif of warfare between cranes and Pygmies is attested as early as Homer (Il. 3.3–6).

6.181–2. As Procne’s entrails were saved from the Striges, so the simple fare of the Kalendae Fabariae sustains the bowels of Carna’s celebrants; see 6.101–2n.

6.183–4. The temple of Juno Moneta, high upon the summit of the Capitoline, was vowed by L. Furius Camillus in 345 BC during a pitched battle with the Aurunci, an Italic people of the west coast of central Italy. Cicero (Div. 1.45.101) explains the name Moneta as derived from Latin monere (‘to warn’), recounting the story of an admonition which was reported to have been heard coming from her temple during an earthquake, instructing that the propitiatory sacrifice of a pregnant sow be offered to her.

6.191–2. The temple of Mars beyond the Porta Capena was located on the Via Appia, the great road which ran south from Rome. It stood between the second and third milestones from the city. June I is the anniversary of its dedication early in the fourth century BC, having been vowed by T. Quinctius, a Duumvir (4.257–60n.), during the Gallic invasion of Rome. The June I dedication is confirmed by a note in the Fasti Antiates Maiores, the only surviving calendar of the republic. The covering of the Via Appia to which Ovid here alludes is not otherwise known (see Bömer 2: 347; Frazer 4: 149).

6.193–4. Ovid refers to the temple of Tempestates (‘Tempests’), standing also in the vicinity of the Porta Capena. The temple was dedicated by Lucius Cornelius Scipio in thanksgiving for the delivery of his fleet from a storm off the Corsican coast. According to the Fasti Antiates Maiores, the temple was dedicated on December 23.

6.195–6. ‘Jupiter’s clawed bird’ is the constellation Aquila (the ‘Eagle’). Columella (Rust. 11.2.45) dates its evening rising to June 2; one day earlier than its true evening rising on June 3 (for the apparent evening rising, see 5.732n.).

6.197–8. On the morning rising of the star-group Hyades, set in the face of the constellation Taurus, see 5.734n.

6.201–2. Bellona is the Roman goddess of war (with a name derived from Latin bellum, ‘war’). As with Mars, her temple was located outside the pomerium (see 4.819n.; 5.551–2n.), being situated on the Campus Martius near the Circus Flaminius. Here the Senate met to consider requests of victorious generals who wished to be awarded a triumph. Emissaries from foreign states, whom the Senate determined ought not be admitted within the city, were received here. The dedication of Bellona’s temple on this day is noted in the Fasti Venusini.

6.203–4. Bellona’s temple had been vowed by Appius Claudius Caecus (the ‘Blind’) during a battle against a combined force of Etruscan and Samnite warriors early in the third century BC. In 280 BC, the Romans were defeated in battle at Heraclea (west of the heel of Italy) by Pyrrhus of Epirus. Claudius, now an old man and blind, appeared before the Senate as it deliberated on a treaty of peace put forward by Pyrrhus, and persuasively argued that the treaty be rejected.

6.205–8. The ‘Circus’ is the Circus Flaminius; see 6.201–2n. In the early days of Rome, war had been declared by a Fetialis (see 1.201–2n.) heaving a spear on to the territory of the enemy. As Roman territory expanded and her enemies became more distant, the seeming impracticality of continuing the custom was resolved by arbitrarily designating a plot of ground in the vicinity of the temple of Bellona as hostile territory, and making the war-declaring spear-throw into this area. The toss was made over the ‘small column’ (line 206), the Columna Bellica, which symbolized the boundary between Rome and the hostile territory (see Festus p .33M; Servius Aen.9.53).

6.209. That the temple of Hercules Magnus Custos (the ‘Great Guardian’) was dedicated on June 4, as Ovid seems to suggest, is supported by a note in the Fasti Venusini. The ‘Circus’ far side’ should be the west side of the Circus Flaminius (see Bömer 2: 349).

6.210. By ‘Euboean song’, Ovid denotes an oracle of the Sibylline Books; see 4.257–60n.

6.212. The temple’s date of construction is uncertain; the mention of Sulla’s plaque may be an attribution to him of its building or of its restoration (see Bömer 2: 349; Frazer 4: 156).

6.213–18. The deity Semo Sancus (or Sanctus, perhaps by folk etymology from Latin sanctus, ‘sacred’), equated with Dius Fidius and at times identified by the quadronomial Semo Sancus Dius Fidius, is a figure whose origin and precise early nature are blurred. Ovid’s attribution of the deity to the Sabines (Cures, in line 216, was the Sabine city of Numa Pompilius, second king of Rome) is seconded by various authors (see, inter alios, Prop. 4.9.74; St Augustine De Civ. D. 18.19; Dion. Ant. Rom. 2.49.2). According to Lydus (Mens. 4.90), sancus is the Sabine word for ‘sky’; regardless of the accuracy of Lydus’ etymology, Dius Fidius seems clearly linked with the sky. He is a god by whom oaths are sworn, as is Jupiter (like Indic Varuna; see 3.322n.), and such oaths (me Dius Fidius) must be sworn under the open sky; consequently, the god’s temple was constructed with a hole in the roof, thus Varro Ling. 5.66. Varro also observes (citing Lucius Aelius, an influential Roman scholar whose works have not survived) that Dius Fidius is the son of Diovis (the early form of Jupiter’s name), just as ‘Castor, the Dioscurus’ (see 5.720n.), is the son of Greek Zeus. Latin Dius undoubtedly shares an eventual etymological connection with Ju-piter (earlier *Diove Pater, that is ‘Jove the Father’; ultimately from Proto-Indo-European*deiw–, ‘to shine’), though the primitive relationship of the two deities is unclear – whether the two possessed distinct identities within the realm of the divine first function which partially overlapped and/or merged, or whether Dius Fidius spun off from the character of Jupiter to become a separate deity (see ARR: 180). The name Fidius is related to Latin fides, ‘trust, guarantee, good faith’, which is itself personified as the goddess Fides. Though the deification of an abstraction (in typical primitive Indo-European style; see ARR: 198), Fides appears to be a Roman deity of great antiquity as evidenced by an archaic sacrificial rite performed for her annually. Each year the Flamens, presumably the three Flamines Maiores, rode to the chapel of Fides in a covered chariot drawn by two horses, and there offered a sacrifice with their right hands wrapped in a white cloth up to the fingers (see Livy 1.21.4; Servius Aen. 1.292). A similar ritual is attested among the Umbrians of Iguvium, where a priest sacrifices three sucking-pigs to the deity Fisus Sancius while having upon his right hand a cloth (Umbrian mandraclo) folded double (see Poultney 1959: 252–3; beyond this ritual similarity, the occurrence of the Umbrian divine name Fisus Sancius is suggestive of an early date for the identification of Dius Fidius and Semo Sancus which is seen in Rome). This Roman goddess Fides appears as the favourite deity of Numa Pompilius, Sabine successor to Romulus, who established the above described sacrificial rite, promoted her worship and built a temple to Fides Publica (‘Public Faith’; see Dion. Ant. Rom. 2.75.2–4). The particular affiliation of Fides with Numa (and Fides with Dius Fidius) and the connections of Romulus with Jupiter at crucial moments in his life – Jupiter, god of the sky who gives the signs of the auspices designating Romulus as king (see 4.813–18), who sends thunder to approve the foundation of Romulus’ new city (see 4.833–4); Jupiter Feretrius (see 1.201–2n.) and Jupiter Stator (see 6.793–4n.)–coupled with the distinct first-function aspects portrayed by Numa (legal) and Romulus (magical) in the mythic history of Rome (see 3.277–84n.), have suggested to Dumézil that early Dius Fidius and Jupiter may perhaps have been separate deities, embodying the same aspectual distinction of legal and magical on the divine level (like Mitra and Varuna), of which the characters of Numa and Romulus in the history of Rome are then reflections (see ARR: 198–9). Dius Fidius’ temple on the Quirinal (line 218) was dedicated on this day in 466 BC, though said to have been built by Tarquinius Superbus, the last king of Rome (see Dion. Ant. Rom. 9.60.8).

6.219. Ovid was married three times, and his only child was a daughter (probably by his second wife). She was absent in Libya (North Africa) on the night that he was banished (Tr. 1.3.19–20).

6.221–5. Until Vesta’s temple has been cleansed (see 6.713–14n.), weddings are best avoided in the month of June. Ovid has already noted several other periods during which marriage should not be initiated: during the February festival of the dead (see 2.557); on the Kalends of March, and perhaps throughout the entire month (see 3.393–6n.); and during the month of May (see 5.487–90).

6.226–30. On the cleaning of Vesta’s temple (lines 227–8), see 6.713–14n. Ovid has earlier noted that the Flaminica Dialis, wife of the Flamen Dialis (priest of Jupiter), must abstain from combing her hair during the March period of wedding avoidance (see 3.397–8); the same constraint bound her during the procession of the ArgeÏ (see 5.621–2n.). Vesta can be called ‘Ilian’ (line 228) because her temple, through the Penates, and the sacred flame are linked to Troy (Ilium), see 1.528n.

6.231–2. The Flamen Dialis was not permitted to divorce the Flaminica. In the event of her death, the Flamen was compelled to leave priestly service.

6.235–6. ‘Phoebe’ denotes the moon. The poet here uses Lycaon metaphorically in reference to the constellation of Lycaon’s grandson Arcas, son of Callisto (see 2.183–90n.), daughter of Lycaon (see 2.173n.), that is, the constellation Arctophylax, the ‘Bear-Keeper’ (or Boötes; see 2.153–4). Ursa,the ‘Bear’, is Ursa Major (see 2.183–90n.). Ovid refers to the morning setting of Arcas’ constellation, a setting which he has noted on two earlier dates; see 5.733n.

6.237–40. June 7 brings the day of the Ludi Piscatorii (the ‘Fishers’ Games’), celebrated by those who made their living fishing and diving in the Tiber ( CIL 6: 1872). According to Festus (p. 238M), the games were celebrated trans Tiberim (‘beyond the Tiber’), while Ovid places them on the Campus Martius (where Volcanus possessed a temple). Festus adds that the Praetor Urbanus celebrated the games, and that the catch of the fishermen was taken to the Area Volcani (the area of the Forum in which was located the shrine of Volcanus, the Volcanal), where the fish were sacrificed to Volcanus (p. 345L^2). Because Varro (Ling. 6.20) writes that on the day of the Volcanalia, August 23 (see 5.725–6n.), worshippers throw animals into the fire as vicarious sacrifices, it is commonly held that the fish offered during the Ludi Piscatorii were similarly tossed into flame (though see ARR: 320, n. 121; Bömer 2: 352). Dumézil notes that this destructive relationship evidenced between Volcanus and fish is paralleled in India in the case of the fire god Agni (see ARR: 321).

6.241–8. On the disaster of the battle of Lake Trasimene during the second Punic War and the subsequent dedication of temples to Mens and Venus Erycina, at the direction of the Sibylline Books, see 4.871–6n. Often called Mens Bona (‘Good Mind’), the goddess is the deification of the abstract quality of sound judgement (in typical Roman, but also Indo-European, style; compare Avestan Vohu Manah, ‘Good Mind’). The Capitoline temple of Mens was dedicated in 215 BC (as was that of Venus Erycina), and apparently restored in 115 BC by the consul Marcus Aemilius Scaurus (see Plutarch De Fort. Rom. 5).

6.249–50. In the lengthy entry for June 9 Ovid treats various aspects of Vesta, her cult and her temple, beginning by declaring that this is the day of the sacred rites of Vesta, the Vestalia (which he names in line 395). The date of the festival is attested in numerous calendars and by Lydus (Mens. 4.94). According to Festus (p. 250M), taken together with the dates cited in the calendar of Philocalus ( CIL 1: 266), the temple of Vesta was publicly opened between June 7 and June 15 (the day of its purification), so that women could visit the inner chamber (penus; see 1.528n.) of the temple.

6.257–62. The Parilia of April 21 was identified as the anniversary of Rome’s founding by Romulus (see 4.801–6n.). As the traditional date assigned to that event is 753 BC, Ovid would here place the construction of Vesta’s temple in 713, when the Sabine Numa Pompilius was king (the ‘kindly king’ of line 259). The view was not universally embraced, according to Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Ant. Rom. 2.65); some credited Romulus with building Vesta’s temple, having brought her cult from his home city of Alba Longa. Ovid has already written of the rustic nature of the architecture and furnishings of early Rome; see 3.179–86.

6.263. The ‘Hall’ or Atrium of Vesta is the residence of the attendants of the goddess, the Vestal Virgins, located south-east of Vesta’s temple. The Roman Vestals were said to have numbered four originally, but later, still in the era of the monarchy, were increased to six (see Dion. Ant. Rom. 2.67.1, 3.67.2; Plutarch Num. 10.1). Drawn from patrician families, the Vestals began their service between the ages of six and ten, serving for thirty years. Their sacred duties centred upon the tending of the sacred flame of Rome which burned in the temple of Vesta and the preparation of various cultic materials. Chief among these latter was the mola salsa (‘salted meal’), which was sprinkled upon sacrificial victims prior to their immolation (see 1.337–48n.). In the preparation of this sacred mixture, a muries (‘brine’) was made by crushing salt in a mortar, placing the crushed salt in an earthen pot, covering it with gypsum and baking it. The Vestals then cut the baked salt into pieces using an iron saw, and dissolved these bits in spring water (see Festus p. 158M). The resulting brine was mixed with spelt, which had been gathered from the fields by three Vestals between May 7 and 14 (the Nones and Ides respectively), roasted and pounded; thus was produced the mola salsa (see Bömer 2: 22–3; Frazer 4: 175–6 for discussion and references). As noted earlier, also manufactured by the Vestals was the fumigant used in the rites of Pales (see 4.731–4n.).

The Vestal Virgins were placed beneath the supervision of the Pontifex Maximus, and were considered no longer to be under the authority of their fathers. Though virgins, their dress was that of a matron, in part perhaps that of a bride. This ambiguous setting is further reflected by the Vestals being granted certain privileges normally reserved for men, such as the right to give testimony and to will their belongings (see ARR: 586–7; also RR 1: 52–3). Though probably not in origin the wives or daughters of kings in very early Rome, as has been sometimes claimed (see Frazer 4: 182–3), the Vestals do seem to have had a certain close affiliation with the king: thus, to name but two pieces of evidence, they are said annually to have approached the king and confronted him, saying, Vigilasne, rex? Vigila! (‘Are you wakeful, king? Be wakeful!’; see Servius Aen. 10.228); and they were permitted, along with the king and three major Flamens, to ride in a wagon to the celebration of sacred rites (CIL 6: 121; for further discussion, see ARR: 110–11, 585–6). In this regard, Dumézil has called attention to the tradition of the Welsh king, Math, whose life was sustained as long as his feet rested in a virgin’s lap.

Vestal Virgins were not unique to Rome. Vesta possessed attendants at Alba Longa, one of whom, by Roman tradition, was Rhea Silvia, mother of Romulus and Remus; see 2.383–4n. Diana Nemorensis of Aricia (see 3.271–2n.) was also at times called Vesta (ILS 3243), and she was perhaps served in her grove by Vestal Virgins, as suggested by the discovery of the remains of a bust of a Vestal. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Ant. Rom. 2.66.1), the office of the Vestal was common among the Latin cities.

6.264. Ovid has earlier alluded to the notion that, unlike, for example, most Julio-Claudian emperors, early Romans, such as Numa, were bearded; see 2.30. The poet is likely not equating Numa’s palace with the Hall/Atrium of the Vestals, as the Sabine king’s home is commonly identified with the Regia, the traditional king’s palace which became the office of the Pontifex Maximus (see 3.199–200n.).

6.265–6. Vesta’s temple in the Forum was not, in the original sense of the word, a temple. Latin templum, ‘temple’, is derived from, ultimately, Proto-Indo-European* tem–, ‘to cut’ and denotes the visual space which was marked out for the taking of auspices (see 1.178–80n.) or a quadrangular area delineated in the earth for conducting some form of augury or other sacred activities (see Varro Ling. 7.6–13). Such spaces must be ‘inaugurated’, that is to say, consecrated by the augurs. The temple of Vesta was neither quadrangular nor was it ever inaugurated, thus not a templum, but an aedes sacra, literally a ‘sacred building’, a shrine or sanctuary.

6.267–76. The identification of Vesta with Earth (terra) is acknowledged by various ancient authors (for references, see Bömer 2: 357; Frazer 4: 201–2). In the lines which follow, Ovid attempts to account for the circular shape of Vesta’s temple with its domed top by invoking Vesta’s equation with Earth and the spherical shape of the latter (according to Stoic doctrine); and in this procedure, he is again not alone (see Festus p. 262M). According to Plutarch (Num. 11), the rotundness of Vesta’s temple reflects the shape of the universe, rather than that of the earth.

6.277–80. The poet here refers to the star globe and planetarium (the Sphaerae) which Archimedes, the Greek mathematician and astronomer, was said to have built and displayed in the Sicilian city of Syracuse, his home town (see Cicero Rep. 1.21–2).

6.281–2. Frazer (4: 184–6), among others (see Bömer 2: 357), contends that the round shape of Vesta’s temple continues the roundness of the huts of primitive Italy. A more insightful cause is envisioned by Dumézil. In Vedic India, sacrifices were offered in conjunction with the kindling of three separate fires (which clearly reflect the tripartition of Vedic society) within a ritually prepared, delimited space. The principal flame is that of the ‘master of the house’, the fire called the gārhapatya. This is the fire from which the other two are lit, and it must not be allowed to go out; if it does, the sacrificial ritual is terminated. The gērhapatya must be generated by friction, though its flame may be passed from an earlier such fire or brought from the hearth of a vaiéya (a member of the worker class). The shape of the gērhapatya is round, being referred to as ‘the earth’; close by it stands the wife of the sacrificer. Due east of the gaērhapatya is built a second fire, the ahaēvaniēya, by which stands a brahman, the flame in which the offering is actually made, the fire which sends the sacrifice skyward. Its shape is quadrangular, its sides being aligned with the cardinal points, and it is referred to as ‘the sky’. The third fire is the daksinaēgni, literally the ‘fire of the right’, placed on the southern edge of the delimited sacrifical ground, serving as a warrior to protect the ritual from the invasion of evil (apt to come from this side). See 5.725–6n. and the position of Volcanus on the edge of the pomerium.

Allowing for Rome’s occupying a permanent sacred space within the confines of the pomerium, as opposed to a plot of ground prepared for the observance of a single sacrificial ritual (i.e. for the sessility of the Roman city, as opposed to the nomadism of the early Indo-Aryans), a correspondence of Roman sacred architecture and geometry with the Vedic sacrificial fires readily suggests itself. The temple of Vesta, identified with Earth, with its peculiar round shape, finds an equivalence in the round fire of the gaērhapatya, ‘the earth’; and like the flames of this Vedic fire of the master of the house, Vesta’s flame, the eternal flame of Rome’s hearth, the flame which must be kept burning for the security of Rome, is to be generated by friction (see 6.291n.). As the wife of the Vedic sacrificer positions herself close to the round fire, so Vesta and her flame are attended only by women. As the sacred muries (‘brine’; see 6.263n.) was prepared by the Vestals and stored within Vesta’s temple, so the ground around the gaērhapatya had to be swept (see 6.713–14n.) and then sprinkled with a ‘salty earth’.

In 6.265–6n., we saw that in Rome a templum is of quadrangular shape; when such a sacred area is laid out by an augur, each side is oriented towards a cardinal position, with the augur facing east (see Livy 1.18.7) or south (see Varro Ling. 7.7). The correspondence of the templum with the ahēvanĪya, manifested by their shape and orientation, is augmented by the function of the fire. In Rome, the temples erected within the quadrangular templa and conforming to their shape had affiliated altars which stood outside the temple building (aedes). On these altars, sacrifices were burned and sent to the gods. The fires of the quadrangular temples thus serve the same purpose as the flames of the quadrangular ahaēvaniēya. The similarities observed between the Vedic sacrificial fires and Roman templa and aedes speak to a common Indo-European origin (for further discussion and references, see ARR: 312–19).

6.285–90. The poet’s explanation of the virgin status of Vesta’s attendants – that it mirrors the chastity of the goddess herself – is generated by co-opting a Greek tradition, that of the Titans Cronus and Rhea and their three daughters, Hestia, Demeter and Hera (see 4.197–206n.), and making several Greek to Roman equations. Rhea is identified with Ops (goddess of abundant harvest; see 3.199–200n.), Cronus with Saturnus (see 1.233–6n.), Hera with Juno, Demeter with Ceres, and Hestia with Vesta. The last-named pair (and only these) may indeed have a common Proto-Indo-European pedigree. In Greek myth, Hestia is, like Vesta, a goddess of the hearth and a virgin; unlike Vesta, however, who is commonly invoked at the end of rituals, Hestia is invoked first. Corporately then, the hearth deities Hestia – Vesta show the same ambivalence in this regard as does the Vedic fire god Agni (see 1.171–2n.).

6.291–2. The flame which burned in Vesta’s temple was generated by friction from the wood of an arbor felix (a ‘lucky tree’; see 2.25–6n.)–at least this is how the fire is rekindled if the flame should accidentally go out. Such a rekindling is preceded by a whipping of the Vestals at the hands of the Pontifex Maximus; once the Vestals have generated a new fire, it is then transported into Vesta’s temple on a bronze sieve (see Festus p. 106M). Presumably it was also by means of a fire-drill and wood from an arbor felix that the flame was ritually relit on the Kalends of March (see 3.141–4n.).

6.295–8. Ovid’s claim that no statue of Vesta stood in her temple would seem to be contradicted by Cicero ( De Or. 3.3.10; Nat. D. 3.32.8), when he writes of Vesta’s statue being splashed with the blood of the Pontifex Maximus Quintus Mucius Scaevola, assassinated in 82 BC at the direction of Lucius Iunius Brutus Damasippus. On resolving the apparent contradiction, see Frazer’s extensive discussion (4: 216–20).

6.299–301. Reverting to his free-wheeling etymological technique, Ovid suggests etymologies for both the name of Vesta and the Greek deity Hestia (see 6.285–90n.), which names may indeed be cognate. The ultimate root of origin is perhaps *h_1eu–, ‘to burn’ (see ARR: 322; Ernout-Meillet: 729; Chantraine: 379). In line 299, the poet links the Roman goddess’s name to Latin vi stando (‘from vital standing’). Greek Hestia does double duty as a common noun hestia, meaning ‘hearth’. In line 301, Ovid etymologizes the Greek term by translating it into Latin focus (‘hearth’), and linking this form to Latin fovet (‘it warms, comforts’, here translated by English ‘heartens’, beside English ‘hearth’, to capture Ovid’s impressionistic etymological equation).

6.302–4. Into his etymological web Ovid now draws Latin vestibulum (‘vestibule’), as if the hearth had originally been located at the front of a Roman house, just as Greek Hestia – not Roman Vesta – is commonly situated first among a set of deities to be invoked (see 6.285–90n.).

6.305–6. The gods to whom Ovid refers are Vesta, the Lares and Penates.

6.310. Ovid has already noted that food is offered to the Lares on a platter; see 2.631–4.

6.311–12. According to Lydus (Mens. 4.94), the day of the Vestalia is a holiday for bakers, on which they rest because of the culinary activities conducted in conjunction with Vesta – a reference undoubtedly to the production of the mola salsa; see 6.263n. Millers also have a day off on the Vestalia. The donkeys that turn their millstones are on this day decorated with garlands of bread and with violets (line 469), leading the procession of Vesta. Idle millstones are likewise wreathed in flowers.

6.313–18. Ovid draws together the bakers’ holiday and Vesta by affirming that in Rome’s early days bread was baked in the ashes of the hearth, the place of Vesta, not in ovens, whose goddess Fornax is worshipped on the day of the Fornacalia (see 2.527–30n., 2.531–2n.). Ovens were first used for roasting grain; the baking oven appeared in Rome in the early second century BC (see Pliny HN 18.107–8).

6.319–20. In the long passage which follows (lines 321–48), Ovid retells the story of Priapus (the ‘red’ god; see 1.391–2n., 1.400n.), the braying donkey which foiled his lewd intentions, and the practice of sacrificing such beasts to Priapus at Lampsacus. For his earlier version of the tale, see 1.391–440 with the commentary on these lines.

6.321. Ovid has already alluded to the turreted crown of Cybele; see 4.219–20.

6.327. ‘Ida’ refers to the Anatolian mountain by that name (not the Cretan). Cybele is called the Idaean Mother; see 4.181–2n.

6.335. In his earlier telling of the story, Ovid presents the nymph Lotis as the object of Priapus’ lust; see 1.435–6.

6.339. On Silenus, a member of the retinue of Dionysus, see 1.399n.

6.341. The ‘Hellespont’s god’ is Priapus, worshipped at Lampsacus on the Hellespont; see lines 345–6 and 1.439–40n.

6.345–8. While Priapus takes vengeance on the donkey by requiring its life, Vesta honours it on her day, for saving her chastity according to the poet’s present account. Propertius (4.1.21) asserts that, in her early impoverished state, Vesta took delight in the garlanded donkey; Lactantius (Div. Inst. 1.21.26) observes that the donkey is Vesta’s favourite.

6.349–50. Jupiter Pistor is Jupiter the ‘Baker’, and the ‘Thunderer’ is Jupiter Tonans, whose temple sat upon the Capitoline Hill; see 2.69–70n). In lines 351–94, Ovid relates an event set in the Gallic seige of Rome (390 BC) in order to account for the cult of Jupiter Pistor.

6.362. On the household Lar, see 5.129–32n. As the Gauls neared Rome, most of the city’s inhabitants fled except those men able to bear arms.

6.363–4. The toga picta of purple and gold was worn by military leaders at the celebration of a triumph. Livy (5.40–41) records how, with the Roman warriors having retreated to a defensive position on the Capitoline Hill, the Gauls entered the city and slaughtered the leading elders of Rome in their homes, where they sat robed and awaiting their fate, having chosen not to flee.

6.365. Vesta is called ‘Ilian’ because of her temple and hearth’s affiliation with Troy (Ilium), see 1.528n. As the Gauls approached Rome, the Vestal Virgins removed some of the sacred objects from Vesta’s temple, burying some and carrying others away to safety in Caere, a town north of Rome (see Livy 5.40.7–10).

6.375. Ovid paints Quirinus as holding an augur’s lituus, the curved staff used to mark out a templum (see 6.265–6n.) for the observing of omens (see Cicero Div. 1.30; Livy 1.18.7), and wearing an augur’s robe of purple (trabea; Romulus, deified as Quirinus, is similarly depicted as purple-robed in 2.503). The augurs constituted one of the four priestly colleges of Rome. As we have seen, it is these priests who are responsible for the taking of auspices (see 1.178–80n.) or, quite commonly, for supervising magistrates as they conduct that activity, in which case the legitimacy of the outcome is ruled upon by the augurs. The Augural College functioned as repository of augural knowledge and law. Distinct from the augurs are those priests called the haruspices, whose responsibility first and foremost was to examine the entrails of animals, particularly the liver, in response to the appearance of prodigies. The haruspices were Etruscan priests and as such, though relied upon by Rome for divining, were apparently often looked upon with distrust. Even so, the Roman senate would establish a ‘college’ of haruspices, to consist of young men recruited from the most prominent Etruscan families for training in the haruspicial arts (probably in the second century bc; see Cicero Div. 1.92). In origin, the Etruscan divinatory practice of hepatoscopy (liver-reading) is likely to be traced to Mesopotamia; see OR: 46–53.

6.383–4. The ‘Saturnian virgin’ is Vesta; she can be so called since, somewhat circuitously, she is equated with Greek Hestia, who is daughter of Cronus, with whom the Romans identified their own Saturnus (see 1.233–6n.). In the same way, Ovid refers to Jupiter as Vesta’s brother by Greek equation – Zeus is brother to Hestia; see 4.197–206n.

6.391–4. ‘Ceres’ gifts’ are loaves of bread. Livy (5.48.4) notes that bread was thrown down from the Capitoline to mislead the Gauls concerning the short supply of Roman food.

6.396. Via Nova (‘New Street’), writes Varro (Ling. 6.58–60), is, despite its name, an old Roman street. Prior to the Gallic invasion of Rome, one Marcus Caedicus had been walking along the Via Nova when he heard a mysterious voice forewarning of the coming of the Gauls (see Cicero Div. 1.101, 2.69), but Rome ignored the message. In the aftermath of the city’s destruction, an altar was erected to this voice, called Aius Locutius (or Aius Loquens), where Caedicus had heard its message, close by the temple of Vesta.

6.401–2. The Roman Forum, or Forum Romanum, was the centre of religious, political and commercial life in Rome. In an earlier time, however, the area later occupied by the Forum was marshy bottomland lying in the valley between the Capitoline, Palatine and Quirinal Hills. In the late seventh century BC, draining and filling began the process of transforming the marsh into the great plaza which Ovid knew.

6.403–4. ‘Lake Curtius’ (Lacus Curtius) was the name given to an area within the Forum Romanum, which was certainly not a lake in Ovid’s time. Various traditions are preserved regarding its naming and significance. According to one, set in the context of the Sabine conflict (see 1.260–62n.), a warrior of the Sabines, Mettius Curtius, had plunged into the ‘lake’ after struggling with Romulus, thereby escaping to safety. Another credits the name of the place to Gaius Curtius, a consul in 445 BC, who had the area enclosed by a fence after it had been struck by lightning. A third version attributes eponomy to a prominent young Roman, Marcus Curtius. When a great abyss had opened in this area of the Forum, this Curtius took up armour and weapons, and sitting astride his charger plunged into the hole, offering himself as a sacrifice on behalf of Rome; whereupon the chasm closed (see Varro Ling. 5.148–50).

6.405–6. The Velabrum, lying between the Palatine and the Capitoline, had also once been a marsh. In Ovid’s day it was a busy market area which connected the Forum Romanum and the Forum Boarium (‘Cattle Market’), and through which ran the street called the Vicus Tuscus. Games held in the Circus Maximus were preceded by a procession which moved from the Capitoline Hill to the Circus by way of the Vicus Tuscus.

6.409–10. According to Varro (Ling. 5.46), along the Vicus Tuscus stood a statue of the god Vortumnus (or Vertumnus), and Propertius (4.2.13) records that this deity is the recipient of offerings made by shopkeepers of the area. Though Varro (Ling. 5.46) and Propertius (4.2.3–4) both identify Vortumnus as an Etruscan god, this appears unlikely. No inscription from Etruria bears his name, and that name may well have been assigned its Etruscan connection by association with the goddess Voltumna, Latinized from Etruscan Veltune, deity of the city of Volsinii. Dumézil points out that, despite assertions of Etruscan origin, the Romans at the same time lay claim to a Roman antiquity of the god. Thus, Propertius (4.2.59–64) identifies the sculptor of Vortumnus’ statue as Mamurius Veturius, that smith employed by Numa Pompilius to manufacture forgeries of the ancile (see 3.373–92n.). Varro (Ling. 5.74), in turn, lists Vortumnus among the ‘gods of Titus Tatius’. Moreover, both of these authors give the god’s name a Latin etymology, linking it to vertere (or vortere), ‘to turn’ (and thus the god ‘averting the river’ in line 410, referring to a turning back of the Tiber which left the Velabrum dry; compare Prop. 4.2.7–10). Dumézil tends to agree, deriving the name from passive vorti, ‘to be turned’ (see ARR: 339–40). Vortumnus, the god of turnings, is the deity of the changing of the seasons, for whom the fruits and crops of summer and autumn are born (see Prop. 4.2.11–18, 41–6). In the Metamorphoses (14.623–771), Ovid tells the tale of Vortumnus’ love for Pomona, goddess of poma, ‘fruits’. Both Ovid (line 409; Met. 14.623–771) and Propertius (4.2.19–40), among others, present Vortumnus as capable of turning his shape into that of many different persons (chiefly workers of various sorts).

6.419–20. On Dardanus, ancestor of the Trojans, see 4.31–6n. Ilus, great-grandson of Dardanus, was founder of Troy (Ilium).

6.421–4. According to Apollodorus (3.12.3), when Ilus founded Troy, Zeus caused a statue of Pallas Athena (with whom the Romans equated Minerva), the Palladium, to fall from heaven into the Troad. The statue was regarded as a sign of Zeus’ pleasure in Ilus’ founding of the city.

6.425. ‘Smintheus’ is an epithet of Apollo, apparently derived from Greek sminthos, ‘mouse’. It is Apollo Smintheus who, in shooting his arrows at the Greeks encamped before Troy, causes a plague to fall upon them – as retribution for Agamemnon’s refusal to return Chryseis, the abducted daughter of Apollo’s priest Chryses (see Homer II. 1.8–52). Apollo Smintheus was worshipped in his temple at Chryse in the Troad.

6.427–30. The Palladium’s continued presence within Troy was believed to be vital for the city’s survival.

6.431–2. The ‘beauty contest’ which Athena lost was that one judged by Paris, son of the Trojan King Priam; see 4.121–2n.

6.433–5. Ovid makes allusion to Greek and Roman traditions about the removal of the Palladium from Troy. ‘Adrastus’ grandson’ is the Greek hero Diomedes, and ‘Ulysses’ is the Roman name for the crafty warrior of Greek epic, Odysseus. Diomedes and Odysseus jointly undertook a venture to steal the Palladium from Troy; the endeavour was successful, though traditions vary as to which of the two thieves actually lifted the statue (see the discussion with references in Frazer 2: 258–60). Roman tradition held that, when Aeneas escaped Troy on the night of its destruction, among those items which he carried with him was the Palladium (see Dion. Ant. Rom. 1.69, 2.66.5). In time the statue was deposited in the temple of Vesta and was then deemed to be as essential for Rome’s security as it had earlier been for Troy’s. No man was allowed to look upon the Palladium in Vesta’s temple, only women. Late in the second century AD, however, the temple was consumed by flames; to save the Palladium the Vestals carried it to the house of the Rex Sacrorum in full view of the male public (see Herodian 1.14.4–5). This was not the only occasion on which the Palladium had to be rescued from fire in Vesta’s temple; see lines 443–54 and n.

6.437–42. The temple of Vesta, housing Rome’s perpetual flame, was devastated by fire on several occasions during its history; that one to which Ovid here refers was the fire of 241 BC.

6.443–54. ‘Metellus’ who is unable to rouse the panic-stricken Vestals is the Pontifex Maximus, Lucius Caecilius Metellus. In plunging into the flames to rescue the Palladium and other sacred items, Metellus was said to have been blinded (see, inter alios, Pliny HN 7.141; Livy Per. 19.). On the ‘tokens of fate’ (line 445) or ‘empire’, i.e. the Palladium and Vesta’s flame, see 3.422n.

6.457–60. It was imperative that the Vestals preserve their virginity. A Vestal who was found to have been unchaste was executed by being entombed alive within the earth, in the place called the Campus Sceleratus. Plutarch (Num. 10; Quaest. Rom. 96) describes the macabre and wrenching ceremony with which the entombment was carried out, from the procession in which the bound and gagged Vestal was carried through the streets, to her voluntary descent down a ladder and into the small chamber in which her life would end. The ‘headband’ of line 457 formed part of the priestly vestments of a Vestal; prior to her entombment it was ripped from her head (see Dion. Ant. Rom. 8.79.5). On the identity of Tellus and Vesta (line 460), see 6.267–76 and n.

6.461–2. Appointed consul in 138 BC, Decimus Junius Brutus earned the name Callaicus from his defeat of the Callaici and Lusitani in Spain, and for his victories received a triumph.

6.465–8. On the Crassi, the disastrous defeat which they suffered at Carrhae and the loss of Roman military standards to the Parthians, see 5.583–6n.

6.469–70. The Vestalian holiday which the bakers and millers enjoyed, and on which were honoured the asses that turn the grinding stones, has now come to an end.

6.471–2. Like Pliny (HN 18.255) and Columella (Rust. 11.2.45), Ovid assigns the evening rising of the constellation of the Dolphin to June 10, and accurately so (for the true rising).

6.473. On Tithonus and his wife Eos, Dawn, who leaves him each morning, see 1.461n.

6.475–6. June 11 is the day of the Matralia, the festival of Mater (‘Mother’) Matuta, a goddess of the dawn, of the first morning light (see Lucretius DRN 5.656). She is an ancient deity worshipped widely in Italy, and her festival is noted in numerous calendars: the Fasti Tusculani, Venusini and Maffeiani, as well as the Fasti Antiates Maiores and that of Philocalus. Her name is linked linguistically with Latin matutinus, ‘of the early morning’, as well as manus, ‘good’, mane, ‘in the morning’ (i.e. ‘at a good time’) and maturus, ‘fully developed, ripe’ (i.e. ‘produced at a good moment’); see Ernout-Meillet: 383–4, 386, 391. The ‘Theban goddess’ is Greek Ino (see 3.853–76n.; 6.545–7n.), with whom Matuta came to be equated by the Romans.

6.477–8. The ‘square’ to which Ovid refers is the Forum Boarium (‘Cattle Market’), close by the Circus Maximus; see 6.405–6n. Frazer (4: 275–6) speculates that the ‘bridges’ alluded to may be the Pons Sublicius (see 5.621–2n.) and the Pons Aemilius. It was at the head of the latter that the temple of the god Portunus stood. Perhaps then the poet does indeed have the Pons Aemilius in mind and is foreshadowing his mention of that deity in the coming lines (545–7). Pliny (HN 34.10) writes of a bronze statue of an ox standing in the Forum Boarium, brought from the Greek island Aegina.

6.479–80. In the Forum Boarium stood a temple of Mater Matuta, said to have been founded by the Tarquin king, Servius Tullius, and restored by M. Furius Camillus (see 1.641–2; 6.37) in 396 BC (see Livy 5.19.6, 5.23.7). On the identification of two temples preserved in the area of the Forum Boarium, see Bömer 2: 372–3; Cornell 1995: 147–8.

6.481–2. Slave girls were not permitted in the temple of Mater Matuta; see 6.551–62n. Plutarch (Quaest. Rom. 16) observes that slaves were similarly forbidden from entering the temple of Greek Leucothea (identified with Ino; see 6.545–7n.) at Chaeronea. As Ovid has already indicated (line 476), cakes were offered to Matuta on the day of her festival. Varro (Ling. 5.106) calls such a cake a testuacium, as it was baked in a testu, an earthenware pot. According to Pausanias (3.23.8), Greek Ino also was affiliated with a kind of cake at Epidauros Limera, where the goddess possessed a pool into which these were tossed and observed in the taking of omens.

6.485–550. Ovid relates the Greek story of the birth of Dionysus (Bacchus) and how he and Ino, his aunt and nurse, were persecuted by Hera (Roman Juno).

6.485–6. Ovid has already alluded to Semele, a mortal lover of Zeus, and how she persuaded Zeus to reveal himself fully to her, resulting in her incineration; see 3.503–4n. Zeus rescued the unborn Dionysus from the mother’s ashes and sewed the foetus into his own thigh. When Dionysus was born, Zeus entrusted him to Ino, Semele’s sister.

6.487–90. It was Hera (Roman Juno) who had beguiled Semele and caused her to require of Zeus the fatal revelation. Hera’s fury now turns on Ino, nurse to the offspring of Zeus and Semele. She drives Athamas (see 3.853–76n.), Ino’s husband, mad; and in his lunacy he murders their son Learchus (see Ovid Met. 4.512–14).

6.493–8. Ino is herself possessed by madness and in her deranged state (and pursued by Athamas) leaps into the sea with her son Melicertes, hurtling from the cliffs of the isthmus of Corinth. According to Apollodorus (3.4.3), Ino first killed Melicertes by dropping him into a boiling pot and then jumped into the sea with the infant’s body.

6.501. On Leucothea and Palaemon, see 6.545–7n.

6.503. Stimula appears to have been a Roman goddess of some antiquity, the embodiment of excitement (see St Augustine De Civ. D. 4.11). The grove to which Ovid refers was the site of Bacchic festivals, Bacchanalia, said to be the occasion of sordid and heinous acts committed by the ecstatic devotees of Bacchus. The Bacchanalia were suppressed by Roman legislation in 186 BC (see Livy 39.8–18).

6.506. Evander, the Greek settler of the Palatine, was a native of the region of Arcadia in southern Greece; see 1.462n.

6.507–8. The Bacchantes, followers of Bacchus, are the Maenads of the grove (see line 504). They are called ‘Thyiads’ at line 513.

6.518. Ovid apparently situates the grove of Semele (see line 503) on or near the Aventine Hill.

6.519. The ‘Oetaean’ is Heracles (Roman Hercules), who passed through Evander’s Palatine settlement en route to Greece with Geryon’s cattle; see 1.543–58. The poet’s reference to Heracles as Oetaean invokes the tradition that this Greek hero’s funeral pyre would blaze on Mount Oeta. The cattle which Heracles drives towards Greece are called Hiberian because upon returning to Europe from Geryon’s island, it was in Spain that he made landfall.

6.523–4. ‘Bacchus’ aunt’ is Ino – the sister, that is, of Dionysus’ mother, Semele. Like Ino, Heracles had been hated and tormented by Hera (Roman Juno), being the son of Zeus and one of his mortal lovers, Alcmena.

6.525–6. The ‘sins’ of Ino are those she committed when Hera had inflicted her with madness; see 6.493–8n.

6.529–30. Carmenta is the Italian goddess who came to be identified as the mother of Evander; see 1.462n.

6.531–4. ‘Tegea’s priestess’ is Carmenta. The poet uses ‘Tegean’ to mean ‘Arcadian’, Tegea being a town in that region of Greece (see 1.543–58n.). On the cakes of the Matralia and Ino’s connection with cakes, see 6.481–2n.

6.535–6. The ‘seer’ is Carmenta, regarded as a prophetess; see 1.519–20.

6.538. On divine inspiration, see lines 5–8.

6.545–7. Greek Ino, with whom Italian Mater Matuta is equated, was said to have been transformed into the sea deity Leucothea after diving into the sea. Her son Melicertes underwent a similar transformation, and was thenceforth regarded as Palaemon, a sea deity who, like his mother, assisted mariners when they were assailed by storms at sea (see Apollodorus 3.4.3). The Romans equated Greek Palaemon with their own god Portunus, thereby rendering Portunus the son of Mater Matuta. Portunus is the god of ports (portus), and also of gates (porta). The second role brings him into the sphere of Janus, and indeed there are certain similarities and affinities which the two deities share. For example, Portunus is portrayed in his iconography as holding a key, and the day of his festival (the Portunalia, August 17) is the anniversary of the dedication of both his temple (Varro Ling. 6.19), located by the Pons Aemilius (see lines 477–8), and of Janus’ temple in the Forum Holitorium (‘Vegetable Market’), at which time sacrifices were offered to Janus (see CIL 1: 325, 332). Portunus, unlike Janus, possessed a Flamen, a confirmation of his antiquity. It is the Flamen Portunalis who annually conducts the curious ritual of rubbing Quirinus’ arms with a salve; relevant to this, note Janus’ utterance to Ovid (1.253–4) in which the key-bearing god disavows involvement in war. Janus and the peaceful Quirinus are assimilated by Augustus (RG 13), among others, when he speaks of the periods of peace during his principate, marked by the closing of the doors of ‘Janus Quirinus’ (see ARR: 262–3, 265–6, 329).

6.551–62. Aside from the making of cakes to which Ovid refers in line 476 and the restriction that her celebrants, ‘good mothers’ (line 475), be univirae, women having been married only once (see Tertullian De Monog. 17), two prominent and odd features characterize the celebration of Matuta’s rites. First, though slaves were customarily not permitted in the temple of Matuta (lines 481–2, 551), in the observance of the rites of the goddess, a slave girl was indeed brought into the temple by the ‘good mothers’; she was then slapped in the face, beaten and driven out (see Plutarch Quaest. Rom. 16; Cam. 5). Second, the women celebrating the rites of Matuta were forbidden from praying for their own children (line 559), being required instead to embrace and pray for the children of their sisters (see Plutarch Quaest. Rom. 17; Cam. 5.2; Mor. 492D). Dumézil (see ARR: 50–55) has insightfully proposed that these strange elements of the dawn goddess’s worship at Rome are clarified by comparison of Matuta with her Vedic counterpart, Usas, sometimes represented as a collective plural Usasah; and these elements are thus revealed to be of early Indo-European origin. Briefly, as Matuta’s ‘good mothers’, univirae, drive out the slave girl, so Usas, or her collective identity of Dawns, called aryápatni (‘women of the Arya’, the Aryans, as opposed to the indigenous Śudras, the caste whose role it is to serve; see Rig Veda 7.6.5) drives out the dark shadows with her brilliant light each morning. Having dispelled the shadows, Usas leads in the Sun. In the Rig Veda, Sanskrit svásar–, ‘sister’, is used with regard to a deity almost solely of Usas or her sister, Raētriē, ‘Night’. These two are either (1) presented as jointly being the mothers of the Sun or of Fire; or (2) the Sun or Fire is said to be the son of Raētriē, ‘Night’, but he is given over to the care of her sister Usas, who suckles or licks him, and who brings that sister’s child into his full radiance. In the light of the Vedic evidence, the Roman Matuta’s rites of driving out of the slave girl and the prayerful embracing of the sister’s child are perhaps ritual fossils of ancient Indo-European mythic notions of cleansing and renewal associated with the Dawn – ritual elements which seem highly peculiar in their Roman cultic setting, as they have been dislodged from their full, early mythic context.

In the present lines, however, Ovid offers a Hellenizing interpretation of these archaic features of Mater Matuta’s worship. Ino (called Cadmeïs in line 553, ‘daughter of Cadmus’), with whom the poet equates Matuta, hates slaves (lines 553–8) because of her husband Athamas’ intimate relations with one of her own attendants, named Antiphera according to Plutarch (Quaest. Rom. 16). It was from this slave that Athamas learned of Ino’s ruse of the roasted seeds; see 3.853–76n.

6.569–70. On this day, June 11, Servius Tullius had also founded a temple for the goddess Fortuna in the Forum Boarium, in addition to the one which he dedicated to Mater Matuta in that same place (see lines 479–80). On this monarch’s particular devotion to Fortuna, see 4.145–50n. An image stood in Fortuna’s temple, which was almost completely hidden beneath two draping togas. According to some, the cloaked statue was that of the temple’s founder, Servius Tullius – the view here advocated by Ovid. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Ant. Rom. 4.40.7) agrees and adds that it was an ancient work from the time of Servius, crafted from wood and covered in gold. Others, however, held the image to be that of the goddess herself; see, inter alios, Pliny HN 8.194, 197.

6.578. Ovid rehearses an etymological account known also to Plutarch (see Quaest. Rom. 36), linking the gate called the Porta Fenestella with Latin fenestra, ‘window’.

6.587–96. Tullia was the ambitious daughter of Servius Tullius, married to an equally ambitious husband, Tarquinius Superbus, son of the first of the Tarquin kings (Servius’ predecessor), Tarquinius Priscus. Together they had disposed of their former spouses – who were yet another daughter of Servius and son of Tarquinius Priscus (see lines 589–92)–and plotted to wrench the throne from Tullia’s father (see Dion. Ant. Rom. 4.28–30; Livy 1.42.1, 1.46).

6.597–610. On Superbus’ assassination of his father-in-law and Tullia’s ruthless mutilation of her dying father, see Dion. Ant. Rom. 1.38–9; Livy 1.47–8. Varro (Ling. 5.159) agrees with the cause for the name borne by the Vicus Sceleratus (‘Sin Street’; see line 609).

6.611. The ‘memorial shrine’ is the temple of Fortuna dedicated by Servius Tullius (see line 569).

6.620. According to some, the toga-covered image in Fortuna’s temple (see line 570) was the deity Pudicitia, ‘Modesty’; see Livy 10.23.3; Festus p. 242M.

6.624. Servius is normally regarded as the sixth king of Rome. Ovid may be including Romulus’ Sabine co-regent Titus Tatius in the count. The usual list is: Romulus, Numa Pompilius, Tullus Hostilius, Ancus Marcius, Tarquinius Priscus, Servius Tullius, Tarquinius Superbus.

6.625. In 213 BC, both the temple of Fortuna and the temple of Mater Matuta in the Forum Boarium were consumed by a great fire; rebuilding was undertaken in 212 (see Livy 24.47.15, 25.7.6).

6.627–34. In these lines Ovid relates a tradition about the conception of Servius Tullius which is attested by several authors: see, inter alios, Plutarch De Fort. Rom. 10; Dion. Ant. Rom. 4.2. Ocresia (or Ocrisia) from the Latin town of Corniculum was a slave in the household of Tarquinius Priscus, serving his wife Tanaquil. Other stories are known from Latium about the engendering of a son by a phallus appearing in the fire, a son who would become king. Such an account is preserved of the conception of Caeculus, a king of Praeneste (see Servius Aen. 7.678); a variant tradition of the engendering of Romulus and Remus identifies their mother as a virgin servant girl impregnated by a phallus appearing from the hearth (see Plutarch Rom. 2). Similar traditions are known from epic India. In the Mahabharata, for example, a war god, Karttikeya, is fathered by the fire god Agni, using flames as an instrument of procreation; see ARR: 56–7 and, for the Latin traditions, Frazer 4: 302–3.

6.635–6. One day, while the young Servius was sleeping, fire was seen to leap about his head. He was unharmed and the fire subsided when he awoke.

6.637–8. For the shrine of Concordia (goddess of peaceful agreement) which Livia, wife of Augustus, dedicated to her husband in the Porticus Liviae (lines 639–48), see 1.649–50n.

6.639–48. The great house to which Ovid refers in these lines was that of a member of the equestrian order by the name of Publius Vedius Pollio, a man of enormous wealth. He was famed for his cruelty and reported to have killed slaves with whom he was displeased by tossing them into ponds filled with moray eels. Upon his death in 15 BC, he left his Roman mansion, as well as his villa in Campania, to Augustus. The emperor levelled the Roman house and on its site constructed the Porticus Liviae, a magnificent portico named in honour of Augustus’ wife. It was dedicated jointly by Livia and Tiberius in early January 7 BC (Dio Cassius 55.8.1–2). For the political implications of this see H-B 1994: 145–56 and Introduction 5.VII.

6.649–50. The ‘next day’ would be June 12, and the Ides the 13th. Concerning the identification of the temple of Jupiter Invictus, see Bömer 2: 261.

6.651–2. At the Quinquatrus Minusculae (the lesser Quinquatrus) of June 13, flute players devote themselves to the worship of Minerva, as Ovid reports in the lines which follow. On the greater Quinquatrus of March 19 to 23, see 3.809–76, and the accompanying notes.

6.653–4. While most artisans worshipped Minerva, goddess of crafts, at the time of her March festival, the greater Quinquatrus (see 3.815–34n.), the guild of flautists is active in her celebration of this day. Festus (pp. 148–9M) and Varro (Ling. 6.17), among others, attest the occasion to be a festival of flute players, roaming about the city. Valerius Maximus (2.5.4) writes of the guild of flautists performing in mask and outlandish costume, though the day of the occasion is not specified. In the lines which follow (657–92), Ovid offers his account of the flautists’ involvement in the celebration of the lesser Quinquatrus.

6.655. ‘Tritonia’ is an epithet of Greek Athena (compare Homeric Tritogeneia), variously explained. According to Herodotus (4.180), certain Libyan tribes believe the goddess to be daughter of Poseidon and the Tritonian lake of Libya. Ovid can here so name the Roman goddess Minerva by reason of her equation with Athena. Completely assimilated to the Greek virgin warrior goddess, protectoress of Athens, Roman Minerva can further be portrayed as laying aside a spear as she begins her response to the poet’s question.

6.659–60. Flute music was an essential element of Roman ritual. The guild of flautists is the collegium tibicinum qui sacris publicus praesto sunt (‘guild of flautists who are on hand at public rituals’).

6.661–4. By Roman tradition, a written collection of laws called the Twelve Tables was compiled in the years 451 and 450 BC by panels of ten men, the First and Second Decemvirates. Cicero (Leg. 2.59) notes that one of these laws limited to ten the number of flautists permitted to play at a funeral.

6.665–6. An account of the self-imposed exile of the flautists to Tibur is also preserved by Livy (9.30.5–10), Plutarch (Quaest. Rom. 55) and Valerius Maximus (2.5.4). According to Livy, the withdrawal to Tibur occurred in 311 BC in reaction to a ruling of 312 when Appius Claudius (see 6.203–4n.) was censor, by which flute players were prohibited from eating in the temple of Jupiter. On Tibur, see 4.71–2n.

6.669–84. According to Livy, it was city officials of Tibur, rather than a manumitted slave, who, acting at the promptings of the Roman senate, caused the exiled flute players to become drunk with wine, and then carted them off to Rome in their intoxicated state. Plutarch, however, agrees with Ovid.

6.685–90. Gaius Plautius Venox was censor with Appius Claudius in 312 BC, when the measure was enacted which excluded the flute players from feasting in Jupiter’s temple (see 6.665–6n.).

6.691–2. In Livy’s version of the return of the flute players from Tibur (see 6.669–84n.), by way of appeasement they are given the right to roam the city in costume, revelling with their instruments, three days out of each year, and permitted once again to feast in Jupiter’s temple.

6.693–4. In the lines which follow, Ovid links the application of the name Quinquatrus to the June 13 festival of the flute players by invoking the Greek myth of Athena (with whom the Romans identify Minerva) and the satyr Marsyas. On Ovid’s etymology of Quinquatrus, see 3.809–10n.

6.695–8. Greek Athena was commonly said to be the inventor of the flute (see, inter alios, Pindar Pyth. 12.6–8, 18–24).

6.699–706. According to Hyginus (Fab. 165), Hera and Aphrodite laughed at Athena when they saw her playing the flute – it made her face bulge. Athena herself subsequently saw her bulbous cheeks mirrored in water as she played, and promptly discarded the instrument, which was found by Marsyas. Devoting himself to experimenting and practising with Athena’s abandoned flute, the satyr in time became an accomplished flute player.

6.707–8. Flushed with his new-found expertise, Marsyas challenged Apollo to a musical contest. In the version of the story attested by Hyginus (Fab. 165), Marsyas and Apollo duel on flute and lyre respectively, with the Muses, goddesses of the arts, serving as judges. Marsyas is initially judged the winner, but Apollo extends the contest by playing his lyre upside down and challenging Marsyas to do the same with his flute. The results for Marsyas are miserable, and Apollo is declared the winner; whereupon, by prearranged agreement, the victor, Apollo, is permitted to do with the loser whatever he pleases. According to Apollodorus (1.4.2), among numerous others, Apollo ties the the satyr to a pine tree and cruelly kills him by stripping the skin from his body.

6.711–12. Thyone is one of the Hyades (see 5.163–8, 5.169–82) and is named by Ovid with reference to the entire star-group. According to Pherecydes (FGrH 3 F 90), the Hyades were in origin nymphs of Dodona, in north-western Greece, and hence here can be called ‘Dodonid’. By ‘Agenor’s bull’, the poet refers to the bull (Zeus) which abducted Europa, daughter of the Phoenician king, Agenor, and hence to the constellation Taurus, the Bull (see 5.603–4n., 5.605–16n.); regarding the gender of this bovine constellation, see 5.619–20n. It is the morning rising of the Hyades, situated in the face of Taurus, to which Ovid here, yet again, alerts his readers; see 5.734 and n.

6.713–14. June 15 is the day on which the temple of Vesta receives its annual sweeping out, one of those three days of the year which are said to be dies fissi (see 5.727–8n.), marked in the Fasti Antiates Maiores, Venusini and Maffeiani as Q.ST.D.F., and as Q.S.D.F. in the Fasti Tusculani. Varro (Ling. 6.32) reveals the reading of the abbreviation to be quando stercum delatum fas, ‘when the dung has been carried down [the day is] lawful’, and tells us that the phrase refers to the removal of stercus, ‘dung’, from Vesta’s temple and the depositing of that material at a point along the Clivus Capitolinus (the street running from the Forum up the Capitoline). Festus (p. 344M) agrees and adds that the spot in which the dung is piled is in an alley about halfway to the top of the Clivus Capitolinus, not far from the Porta Stercoria (‘Dung Gate’). As dung was hardly likely to have been accumulating in Vesta’s temple (and as the temple was undoubtedly kept clean at all times), Dumézil has insightfully contended that the term stercus as used in conjunction with the annual cleansing of Vesta’s temple is a fossilized archaism dating to a much earlier time and activity – when Indo-European pastoralists had to remove animal droppings from the area in which their sacred flame was to be kindled, a rite of such importance that it and the name of the material it removed survived to appear in Rome in the cleansing ritual of the round temple of the sacred flame. Instructive again is a comparison with the Vedic ritual of the three fires; see 6.281–2n. Before the round fire, the gērhapatya, is lit, the surrounding area must be ritually swept clean; this precaution does not apply, however, to the quadrangular āhavanīya; see ARR: 318–19.

6.717. The Heliades are the daughters of Helios, the sun; Ovid’s poetic reference is to the sunset.

6.719. Hyrieus’ son is Orion; see 5.493–544 with commentary. June 17 is close to the date of the morning rising of the constellation, rather than the evening rising as Ovid would have it.

6.720. Ovid has also noted the evening rising of the Dolphin in his entry for June 10, a date with which both Pliny (HN 18.255) and Columella (Rust. 1.2.45) agree and which was the date of the constellation’s true evening rising in Ovid’s time.

6.721–4. The event to which the poet alludes is the Roman defeat of the Volsci (an Italic people of southern Latium) and Aequi (or Aequiculi; see 3.87–96) under the leadership of the dictator Aulus Postumius Tubertus in 431 BC (see Livy 4.26–9). The scene of the fight was the Algidus Pass on the eastern edge of the Alban hills.

6.725–6. Ovid now begins a ‘countdown’ to the end of the month. Thirteen days to go here (according to the Roman inclusive method of counting), ten at line 768, seven at 774, three at 795, one at 797. The device signals closure.

6.727. On the constellation Gemini, see 5.693–6n. Cancer is the constellation of the Crab; its identification with this animal is of Babylonian origin and surpasses the Greek recognition of two star-groups among its members: Asini (Asses) and Praesepe (the Manger, also known as the Beehive).

6.728. Ovid’s reference is to the Aventine temple of Minerva, whom the Romans identify with Pallas Athena. March 19 is the date of the dedication of that temple (see 3.811–14n.). As it was restored by Augustus, June 19 has been conjectured to be the date of the temple’s restoration. Even if this were so, restoration cannot be the sole significance of this day, as the Fasti Antiates Maiores, a calendar of the republic, marks June 19 as Minervae (‘to Minerva’); see Bömer 2: 199.

6.729–30. Laomedon is the father of Tithonus, and, hence, his ‘son’s wife’ is Eos, goddess of the dawn (see 1.461).

6.731–2. Varro (Ling. 5.74) lists Summanus among the gods of Titus Tatius. According to the Fasti Venusini, Amiternini and Esquilini, the deity has a temple in the vicinity of the Circus Maximus which was dedicated on this date. He is poorly understood, but in what records survive he is presented as a god of nocturnal lightning (see Festus p. 75M; Pliny HN 2.138). To this extent, he appears to be something of a dark equivalent of Jupiter, and certain inscriptions record offerings made to Jupiter Summanus. The Fratres Arvales sacrifice two black sheep to Summanus Pater when lightning strikes trees of their sacred grove (see ILS 5048). The name of the god is perhaps derived from Latin sub plus mane, in the sense ‘before morning’; Dumézil cites an exact Armenian parallel (see ARR: 200). On Pyrrhus, see 6.203–4n.

6.735–6. The constellation to which Ovid here refers is that of the Snake-Holder, Ophiuchus (translated as Anguitenens by the Romans, see Cicero Nat. D. 2.109, or in various other ways). Ophiuchus was commonly identified with Apollo’s son Asclepius, called Aesculapius by the Romans, whose story Ovid tells in the lines which follow. The evening rising of Ophiuchus, to which the poet here refers, actually occurred on April 19. According to Columella (Rust. 11.2.49), June 21 is the date of the constellation’s morning setting.

6.737–45. In Greek tradition, Phaedra is the wife of the Athenian hero Theseus (see 3.459–64n.). By his former wife, the Amazon Antiope (or Hippolyte), Theseus had a son named Hippolytus, ‘the fatally pious youth’ (line 739), who, becoming a hunter, devoted himself to Artemis and shunned Aphrodite. For ignoring her, Aphrodite caused Hippolytus to become the object of his stepmother’s passion. Hippolytus rejected Phaedra’s advances; being so scorned, she accused Hippolytus of having tried to rape her. Theseus was duped by Phaedra’s indictment, and prayed that Poseidon (Neptune) would take vengeance upon the son (in Euripides’ Hippolytus, 1173–1248, he also banished his son). As Hippolytus drove his chariot along the shore at Troezen, Poseidon caused a great bull to rise out of the sea. Terrified, his chariot horses ran wild; Hippolytus fell and became entangled in the reins, and was dragged to death by his own horses. Phaedra killed herself (in Euripides, after leaving a suicide note in which Hippolytus was accused; in Seneca’s Phaedra after Hippolytus’ death). See Ovid’s account of the story in Met. 15.497–529.

6.750–52. The ‘augur’ is the seer Polyidus, who restored Glaucus, the son of Minos, to life through the application of a herb which he had observed a snake using to bring new life into the body of a dead snake (see Apollodorus 3.3.1).

6.755–6. ‘Dictynna’ is a Greek epithet used of Britomartis, a Cretan goddess of nature, and also of Artemis, with whom Britomartis is affiliated. In the present passage, Ovid uses the term to denote Diana, with whom the Romans equate Greek Artemis. ‘Dictynna’s wood’ is thus a reference to the sacred grove of Diana located at Aricia, the most sacred of Diana’s sanctuaries. Virbius is the spirit who lives in that grove, identified by the Romans with Hippolytus; see 3.265–6n.

6.759–62. Zeus (Roman Jove) was angered by Asclepius’ rescue of Hippolytus from the dead, fearing the beginning of a trend, and so killed Apollo’s physician son with a thunderbolt. Apollo avenged his son’s death by killing the Cyclopes (see 4.287–8), who had first presented Zeus with his weapons of lightning (see Apollodorus 3.10.3–4).

6.763–8. In these lines the poet cites this day as the anniversary of the Roman military disaster of Lake Trasimene in 217 bc; see 4.871–6n. Prior to the battle, the commander of the Roman forces, Gaius Flaminius, ridiculed and refused to heed ill omens – military standards which stuck fast in the ground, Flaminius falling from his own horse, the refusal of the sacred chickens to eat (see Cicero Div. 1.35.77). On auspices, including observation of the sacred chickens, see 1.178–80n. On the closural countdown to the end of the month (line 768) see 6.725–6n.

6.769–70. In these lines Ovid refers to two different events of the second Punic War (218–201 BC). See entries under Masinissa and Hasdrubal in the Glossary. The tradition that Hasdrubal’s death was by his own hand is not otherwise known.

6.771. For the pun on tempora, ‘times’ and ‘Times’ (i.e., Ovid’s Fasti), see 4.15–16n.

6.773–4. June 24 is the day of the festival of the goddess Fors Fortuna, so marked in the Fasti Amiternini, Venusini and the calendar of Philocalus. Latin Fors (‘Luck, Chance’) is commonly prefixed to the name of the deity Fortuna, on whom see 4.145–50n. On closural countdown, see 6.725–6n.

6.775–84. Servius Tullius was particularly dedicated to the goddess Fortuna, because of his good fortune in rising from being the son of a slave to occupying the throne of Rome; see 6.627–34 and n. Varro (Ling. 6.17) writes that Servius Tullius dedicated a fanum (‘shrine’ or ‘temple’) to Fors Fortuna on the banks of the Tiber in the month of June. The entry for this date in the Fasti Amiternini notes that the festival of the goddess is celebrated at two different locations (at the first and sixth milestones) beyond the Tiber (see CIL 1: 243, 320). According to Pliny (HN 18.256) and Columella (Rust. 11.2.49), but not Ovid (see line 790), June 24 is also the date of the summer solstice.

6.785. The shrine is one of those of Fors Fortuna; see line 784.

6.787–8. The middle star of Orion’s belt had its true morning rising on June 21; compare 6.719. On the date of the summer solstice, see 6.775–84n.

6.791–2. The Lares’ shrine which was dedicated on this day is likely the temple of the Lares located at the summit of the Sacra Via (and distinct from the altar dedicated to the Lares Praestites on May 1; see 5.129 and Bömer 2: 300–301; Frazer 4: 336–9). The temple had been restored by Augustus (see RG 4.7).

6.793–4. During Rome’s first war, in that battle fought between the Sabines and Romans on the marsh which would become the Forum Romanum (see 1.263–6n.; 3.213–34), Romulus’ warriors began to waver and fall back. In that desperate moment, Romulus called upon Jupiter, vowing a temple to Jupiter Stator (Jupiter the ‘Stayer’) if Rome’s forces were spared defeat – as they were. According to Livy (10.36.11; 10.37.15–16), Romulus never himself built the temple, but only prepared an area for it (Bömer 2: 390 suggests perhaps a sacellum, a shrine not enclosed within a building). The temple’s construction occurred in 294 BC, after having been vowed a second time, on this occasion by M. Atilius Regulus.

6.795. The Parcae or Fates are three in number: three days are left before July 1 by the Romans’ inclusive method of counting days. On closural countdown, see 6.725–6n.

6.796. June 29 appears to be the date on which Augustus dedicated the restored temple of Quirinus on the Quirinal Hill (see 2.511–12n.), originally dedicated in 293 BC by Lucius Papirius Cursor.

6.798–800. The Piërides are the Muses (see 2.269n.); and the ‘man whose stepmother reluctantly yielded’ is Heracles. Hera had hated Heracles (Roman Hercules) and persecuted him, being a son of her husband Zeus by another woman (Alcmena). After Heracles’ mortal life had ended, however, he ascended to Olympus and took as his wife Hebe (Roman Juventas), daughter of Hera and Zeus (see 6.65–6n.). The ‘attachment’ to which Ovid here refers is that displayed in the Aedes Herculis Musarum, ‘Temple of Hercules of the Muses’.

6.801–2. Ovid refers to the temple of Hercules of the Muses as the monument of Philippus, i.e. Lucius Marcius Philippus, the son of Augustus’ stepfather. He restored the temple c. 29 BC and added a portico, the Porticus Philippi. The builder of the temple, however, was Marcus Fulvius Nobilior, and its construction dates to 179 BC during his tenure as censor. Fulvius served in Greece and had directed the siege of Ambracia (in the north-west of Greece), from which place he looted and brought to Rome many magnificent works of Greek art, including statues of the Muses sculpted by Zeuxis, which he installed in his new temple (Pliny HN 35.36). The actual cult of Hercules of the Muses was perhaps likewise introduced from Greece, where Fulvius encountered the figure of Hercules Musagetes (‘leader of the Muses’), or from southern Italy (see Newlands 1995: 215–17). Fulvius, who was the patron of the epic poet Ennius, also installed in the temple an inscribed Fasti, i.e. calendar (Macr. Sat. 1.12.16). His Ambracian campaign (and perhaps his founding of the present temple) closed the first version of Ennius’ Annals, just as his pointed absence here and the temple he founded closes Ovid’s own Fasti. See Introduction 5.VII.

6.803–10. Marcia is the daughter of Lucius Marcius Philippus, who restored the temple of Hercules of the Muses, and Atia, ‘Caesar’s aunt’ (line 809), the younger sister of the mother of Augustus (also named Atia). The Marcian family claimed descent from Rome’s fourth king, Ancus Marcius. This Marcia, cousin of Augustus, was wife of Paullus Fabius Maximus, perhaps Ovid’s main patron (see Pont. 1.2.127–42, 3.1.75–8) and confidant of Augustus (see Tacitus Ann. 1.5). The Fabii claimed descent from Hercules (see 2.193–242). Fabius Maximus died by suicide after Marcia had revealed to Augustus’ wife Livia confidential information regarding Augustus’ intention to pardon his last remaining (and exiled) grandson, Agrippa Postumus, Tiberius’ rival to the throne. The revelation according to Tacitus hastened Augustus’ death. See Introduction 1.I and 5.VII. Notably Ovid ends his final work with the focus on female relatives of Augustus, as Propertius (4.11: Cornelia) had done.

6.811. This speech of Clio, the Muse of History, elicits agreement from the Muses in contrast to the disagreement they had displayed at the opening of Fasti 5 (line 9). Note too the inversion of Callimachus: Clio was the first informant of Callimachus’ Aitia (see Pfeiffer 1:13); she is the last informant of Ovid’s Fasti.

6.812. More closure: Horace’s final ode (Odes 4.15) begins with ‘twanging’ and Ovid’s Amores similarly ends with a ‘twang’ (Am. 3.15.17). It can be plausibly argued that Ovid stamped the last lines of Book 6 with a surfeit of closural devices to mark the end of the whole work, i.e. Fasti 7–12 are pointedly unwritten. See Introduction 4.VIII.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Ancient Works

Apollodorus | Bibliotheca (The Library)

Appian BC

Bella Civilia (Civil Wars)

Apuleius De Deo Soc.

De Deo Socratis (On the God of Socrates)

Aratus Phain.

Phainomena

Arnobius Adv. Nat.

Adversus Nationes (Against the Peoples)

Augustine (St) De Civ. D.

De Civitate Dei (The City of God)

Augustus RG

Res Gestae (Achievements)

Aulus Gellius

Noctes Atticae (Attic Nights)

Cato Agr.

De Agri Cultura (On Agriculture)

Censorinus DN

De Die Natali (On the Birthday)

Cicero De Or.

De Oratore (On the Orator)

Div.

De Divinatione (On Divination)

Dom.

De Domo Sua (On his House)

Har. Resp.

De Haruspicum Responso (On the Response of the Soothsayers)

Leg.

De Legibus (On Laws)

Nat. D.

De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods)

Rep.

De Republica (On the Republic)

Clement of Alexandria Protr.

Protrepticus (Exhortation)

Columella Rust.

De Re Rustica (On Rural Matters)

Dio Cassius (Dio)

Roman History

Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Dion.) Ant. Rom.

Antiquitates Romanae (Roman Antiquities

Eratosthenes Cat.

Catasterismoi (Placings among the Stars)

Festus

De Verborum Significatu (On the Meaning

Words) M (Lindsay 1913); L^2 (Lindsay 1930)

Herodotus

Histories

Hesiod Op.

Opera et Dies (Works and Days)

Th.

Theogony

Homer Il.

Iliad

Od.

Odyssey

Horace Ars

Ars Poetica (Art of Poetry)

CS

Carmen Saeculare (Centennial Hymn)

Epist.

Epistles

Epod.

Epodes

Hyginus Astr.

Astronomica

Fab.

Fabulae

Lactantius Div. Inst.

Divinae Institutiones (Divine Institutions)

Livy

Ab Urbe Condita (From the City’s Foundation)

Per.

Periochae (Summaries)

Lucretius DRN

De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)

Lydus Mens.

De Mensibus (On the Months)

Macrobius (Macr.) Sat.

Saturnalia

Martial Ep.

Epigrams

Martianus Capella

Philologia

Nonius Marcellus

De Compendiosa Doctrina (On Compendious Learning)

Ovid Am.

Amores (Loves)

Ars

Ars Amatoria (Art of Love)

Met.

Metamorphoses

Pont.

Epistulae Ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea)

Tr.

Tristia (Sorrows)

Pausanias

Description of Greece

Pindar Ol.

Olympian Odes

Pyth.

Pythian Odes

Plautus Mil.

Miles Gloriosus (Braggart Soldier)

Pliny (Elder) HN

Historia Naturalis (Natural History)

Pliny (Younger) Ep.

Epistles

Plutarch Cam.

Camillus

De Fort. Rom.

De Fortuna Romanorum (On the Fortune of the Romans)

Marc.

Marcellus

Mor.

Moralia

Num.

Numa

Quaest. Rom.

Quaestiones Romanae (Roman Questions)

Rom.

Romulus

Porphyry Abst.

De Abstinentia (On Abstinence)

Propertius (Prop.)

Elegies

Quintilian Inst. Or.

Institutio Oratoria (Education of the Orator)

RG

Res Gestae (Achievements of Augustus)

RV

O’Flaherty, W. Doniger (trans.), The Rig Veda (London 1981)

Servius Aen.

Commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid

Strabo

Geographia

Suetonius (Suet.) Aug.

Augustus

Gram.

De Grammaticis (On Grammarians)

Jul.

Julius

Tacitus Ann.

Annals

Germ.

Germania

Tertullian De Monog.

De Monogamia (On Monogamy)

Theocritus Id.

Idylls

Tibullus

Elegies

Valerius Maximus

Facta et Dicta Memorabilia

Varro Ling.

De Lingua Latina (On the Latin Language)

Rust.

Res Rusticae (Rural Matters)

Virgil Aen.

Aeneid

Ecl.

Eclogues

Geo.

Georgics

Vitruvius

De Architectura (On Architecture)

Xenophon Cyr.

Cyropaedia (Education of Cyrus)

Modern Works

ARR

Dumézil, G., Archaic Roman Religion, 2 vols., trans. P. Krapp (Baltimore, MD 1996)

Barsby 1978

Barsby, J., Ovid (Greece & Rome New Survey 12, Oxford)

Bömer

Bömer, F., P. Ovidius Naso: Die Fasten, 2 vols. (Heidelberg 1957/1958)

Chantraine

Chantraine, P., Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque (Pans 1968)

CIL

Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, 16 vols. (Berlin 1863-)

Cornell 1995

Cornell, T.J.,The Beginnings of Rome (London)

Degrassi 1963

Degrassi, A., Inscriptiones Italiae 13.2 (Rome)

Ernout-Meillet

Ernout, A. and Meillet, A., Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, 4th edn (Paris 1959)

Fantham 1992

Fantham, E., ‘The Role of Evander in Ovid’s Fasti’, Arethusa 25: 155–70

Fantham 1998

Fantham, E., Ovid Fasti: Book IV (Cambridge)

FGrH

Jacoby, F. (ed.), Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (Berlin and Leiden, 1923–)

Fränkel 1945

Fränkel, E., Ovid: A Poet between Two Worlds (Berkeley)

Frazer

Frazer, J. G., Publii Ovidii Nasonis Fastorum Libri Sex, 5 vols. (London 1929)

GR

Burkert, W., Greek Religion, trans. J. Raffau (Cambndge, MA 1985)

H-B 1994

Herbert-Brown, G., Ovid and the Fasti: A Historical Study (Oxford)

Ideler 1825

Ideler, J., Über den astronomischen Theil der Fasti des Ovid, Abhandlung der histor.-philolog. Klasse der Kónigl. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, aus den Jahren 1822 und 1823

ILS

Dessau, H., Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae (Berlin 1892–1916)

Kenney 1982

Kenney, E. J., ‘Ovid’, Cambridge History of Latin Literature: 420–57

Martini 1970

Martini, E., ‘Ovid und seme Bedeutung für die rómische Poesie’, Einleitung zu Ovid (Darmstadt): 105–34

ME

Dumézil, G., Mythe et épopée, vol. 1 (Paris 1968)

Michels 1967

Michels, A. K., The Calendar of the Roman Republic (Princeton, NJ)

MV

Dumézil, G., Mitra-Varuņa, 2nd edn (Paris 1948)

Nagy 1990

Nagy, G., Greek Mythology and Poetics (Ithaca, NY)

Newlands 1995

Newlands, C. E., Playing with Time: Ovid and the Fasti (Ithaca, NY)

OR

Burkert, W., The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Easten Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age,trans. W. Burkert and M. E. Pinder (Cambridge, MA 1992)

Pfeiffer

Pfeiffer, R., Callimachus, 2 vols. (Oxford 1949)

Poultney 1959

Poultney, J., The Bronze Tables of Iguvium (Baltimore)

R&R

Rees, A. and Rees, B., Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales (London 1961)

RR

Beard, M., North, J. and Price, S., Religions of Rome, 2 vols. (Cambridge 1998)

Simpson 1977

Simpson, C. J., ‘The Date of the Dedication of the Temple of Mars Ultor’, Journal of Roman Studies 67: 91

Skutsch

Skutsch. O. (ed.), The Annals of Quintus Ennius (Oxford 1985)

Syme 1978

Syme, R., History in Ovid (Oxford)

Wackernagel 1923–4

Wackernagel, J., ‘Dies ater’, Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 22: 215–16

W&W 1990

Westbrook, R. and Woodard, R. D., ‘The Edict of Tudhaliya’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 110:641–59

Wormell 1979

Wormell, D. E. W., ‘Ovid and the Fasti’, Hermathena 127: 39–50

GLOSSARY

To assist the pronunciation of ancient names and words, the stressed vowel is signalled by an accent, and a diaeresis indicates two syllables (e.g. Cránaë is pronounced with ‘Cra’ stressed and ‘a’ and ‘e’ as separate syllables). A vowel at the end of an ancient name should normally be pronounced. ‘Eus’, as in ‘Théseus’, is generally pronounced as a long syllable to rhyme with ‘juice’.

Greek names of deities and heroes (i.e. Zeus rather than Jupiter, Heracles rather than Hercules) are used in glossing a myth where the myth is Greek. The main Greek deities and heroes relevant to the poem and their Roman counterparts or names (where different) are:

Greek

Roman

Aphrodite

Venus

Ares

Mars

Artemis

Diana

Asclepius

Aesculapius

Athena

Minerva

Cronus

Saturnus

Demeter

Ceres

Dionysus

Bacchus

Dioscuri

Gemini

Eos

Aurora

Hades

Dis

Hebe

Juventas

Hephaestus

Volcanus

Hera

Juno

Heracles

Hercules

Hermes

Mercury

Hestia

Vesta

Leto

Latona

Leucothea

Mater Matuta

Odysseus

Ulysses

Palaemon

Portunus

Pan

Faunus

Persephone

Proserpina

Polydeuces

Pollux

Poseidon

Neptune

Rhea

Ops

Zeus

Jupiter or Jove

ACÁSTUS King of Thessaly who cleansed Peleus after the latter's involuntary homicide.

ÁCCA Also called Acca Larentia; foster mother of Romulus and Remus.

ACHÁEA District in the northern part of the Peloponnese; name of the Roman province. Often = ‘Greece’.

ACHÁTES Companion of Aeneas.

ACHELÓÜS God of a river of the same name, longest of all Greek rivers; offspring of the Titans, Oceanus and Tethys; sometimes used metonymically for ‘water’.

ACHÍLLES Greatest of the Greek warriors in the Trojan War and hero of Homer’s Iliad; son of Peleus, king of Thessaly, and of Thetis, a sea nymph.

ÁCIS River in Sicily, passing not far from Mount Etna.

ACMÓNIDES One of the Cyclopes.

ÁCRAGAS City on the southern coast of Sicily; the modern Agrigento.

ÁCTIUM Promontory on the Abracian gulf in north-western Greece; site of the decisive naval battle in 31 BC in which Octavian defeated Antony, becoming unchallenged ruler of Rome. The victory in effect ended the Roman republic.

ACTÓRIDES Another name for Patroclus, after his grandfather, Actor.

ADÓNIS Young and beautiful lover of Venus; he was killed by a boar and the anemone sprang from his blood; son of Myrrha by her father Cinyras.

ADRÁSTUS King of Argos; grandfather of Diomedes; one of the famous ‘Seven’ who fought against Thebes to support Polynices' claim on its throne.

AEÁCIDES Descendant of Aeacus.

ÁEACUS King of Aegina; grandfather of Achilles; later a judge of the dead.

ÁEDILE Roman magistrate responsible for security in the city of Rome and the supervision of public markets, buildings and religious festivals (including the games and theatrical productions associated with them).

ÁEGEUS King of Athens; father of Theseus.

AENÉADAE Descendants of Aeneas.

AENÉAS Trojan hero, son of Venus and Anchises, and legendary ancestor of the Roman people. His journey from Troy to Italy and the war that ensued are the subject of Virgil’s epic poem Aeneid.

ÁEOLUS Mythical divine king of the Aeolian islands (Lipara?), between Italy and Sicily; he controlled the winds, which he kept pent up in a mountain except when he unleashed them (by request) to help or hinder such heroes as Ulysses/Odysseus or Aeneas.

ÁEQUI Umbrian-speaking inhabitants of the mountains beyond Tibur, conquered by Rome in the 4th century BC.

AEQUÍCULI Another name for the Aequi.

AESCULÁPIUS Roman form of Asclepius; son of Apollo and Coronis; the constellation, Ophiuchus, the ‘Serpent Holder’, was named after him; see 6.735–6n.

ÁETHRA Mother of the Hyades.

AFRICA Originally Libya, the territory of Carthage and later the whole quarter of the globe south of the Mediterranean Sea.

AGAMÉMNON Son of Atreus, king of Mycenae (or Argos), and leader of the Greek expedition to Troy. Victorious in the Trojan War, he returned home only to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus.

AGANÍPPE Spring on Mount Helicon, sacred to the Muses.

AGANÍPPID Of the Aganippe spring, associated with the Muses.

AGÁNTUR Latin for ‘are driven’.

AGÁTNE Latin for ‘whether to act’.

AGÉNOR Father of Europa; ‘Agenor’s bull’ is the constellation Taurus.

AGNÁLIA A variant spelling of Agonalia.

AGÓNAL Of or relating to the Agonalia.

AGONÁLIA Religious festivals in January, March, May, and December; also called Agonia. See 1.317–18n.

AGÓNIA See AGONALIA.

AGRÍPPA King of Alba, descendant of Iulus, son of Aeneas.

ÁLBA (1) Great grandson of Iulus, Aeneas' son. (2) City of Alba Longa; hence ‘Albans’.

ÁLBALÓNGA Mother city of Rome founded c. 1152 BC by Iulus (Ascanius), situated in the hills south of Rome; birthplace of Romulus and Remus.

ÁLBULA Ancient name for the river Tiber before the drowning of Tiberinus.

ALCÍDES Patronym of Heracles, from his family connection with Alcaeus, father of Amphitryon, husband of Heracles' mother Alcmena.

ALCMÁEON Son of Amphiaraus; murdered his mother for betrayal of his father.

ALCYÁONE One of the Pleiades.

ALÉRNUS Obscure deity, perhaps affiliated with the Underworld; he had an ancient grove near the mouth of the Tiber.

ÁLGIDUS Mountain to the south of Tusculum.

ÁLMO Tributary of the Tiber; father of Lara.

AMALTHÉA A Naiad; her she-goat nursed Jupiter as a baby.

AMÁTA Wife of King Latinus and mother of Lavinia, who was sought by Aeneas and Turnus in marriage.

AMENÁNUS River running through the city of Catana on the east coast of Sicily.

ÁMPELOS Boy loved by Bacchus.

AMPHIARÉÏDES Alcmaeon, the son of Amphiaraus.

AMPHITRÍTE Wife of Neptune; often = ‘sea’.

AMÚLIUS Usurper who took Alban throne from his brother Numitor; uncle of Rhea Silvia; ordered Romulus and Remus to be drowned at birth.

ANÁPUS River in Sicily.

ANCHÍSES Father of Aeneas, who bore him on his shoulders from Troy.

ANCÍLE A small figure-of-eight shaped shield that was said to have fallen from heaven in the reign of Numa. See MAMURIUS and SALII.

ÁNCUS Ancus Marcius, fourth king of Rome.

ANDRÓMACHE Wife of Hector and mother of Astyanax. After the death of her husband and fall of Troy, she became a slave to Pyrrhus (also called Neoptolemus), son of Achilles.

ÁNGUIS Constellation of the Snake.

ÁNIO Tributary of the river Tiber.

ANNA (1) Sister of Dido, queen of Carthage. (2) Old woman of Bovillae. Both identified with Anna Perenna.

ANNA PERÉNNA A native Italian goddess, personification of the year (annus), whose festival on the Ides of March (the first full moon of the new year in the old Roman calendar) involved much drinking and the singing of licentious songs by women. Identified with Anna, sister of Dido, with Themis, with the nymph Azanis, with Io, with the nymph Hagno, with Inachus' cow and with Anna of Bovillae.

ANTÉNOR Trojan elder and counsellor; the post-Trojan War foundations of several cities are attributed to him. For his founding of Patavium, see 4.75–6n.

ANTONY Marcus Antonius (‘Mark Antony’), c. 82–30 BC; Julius Caesar’s chief lieutenant in the civil war with Pompey. He joined with Octavian (later the first emperor Augustus) and Lepidus to form the second triumvirate (43 bc) and together with Octavian defeated Caesar’s assassins at the battle of Philippi (42 BC). He was himself defeated by Octavian in 31 BC. See ACTIUM.

AÓNIA Part of Boeotia, and generally another name for Boeotia; hence ‘Aonian’.

APHÍDNA Location of the fight between the Dioscuri (Roman Gemini) and Idas and Lynceus.

APÓLLINE Pertaining to Apollo.

APÓLLO God of music, poetry, prophecy, healing and archery; son of Zeus and Leto, brother of Artemis. He is often identified with the sun. Also called Paean and Phoebus.

ÁPPIUS Appius Claudius Caecus; censor in 312 BC, builder of Rome’s first aqueduct and first great road, the Via Appia or Appian Way.

APÚLIA Region in south-east Italy, immediately north of Calabria; hence ‘Apulian’.

AQUÁRIUS Constellation of the Water-Carrier.

ÁQUA VÍRGO An aqueduct built by Agrippa in 19 BC; the spring at its origin was said to have been first revealed to the Romans by a young girl (virgo). It still brings water to Rome today.

ÁRA PÁCIS The ‘Altar of Peace’, Ara Pacis Augustae, dedicated in the Campus Martius on 30 January 9 BC to celebrate Augustus' return from Gaul and Spain.

ARCÁDIA Mountainous area of central Peloponnese; often associated with an idyllic pastoral environment and with Pan; hence ‘Arcadian’.

ÁRCAS Ancestor of the Arcadians; son of Zeus and Callisto; he and his mother became the constellations Arctophýlax (Boötes) and Arctos (Ursa Major) respectively.

ARCTOPHÝLAX The constellation of the ‘Bear-Keeper’ or Boötes; Callisto’s ‘bear-child’.

ÁRCTOS The constellation of the Bear or Ursa Major; formerly Callisto before Hera changed her into a bear to punish her for her affair with Zeus.

ÁRDEA Town besieged by King Tarquin, when Lucretia was raped.

ARETHÚSA Nymph of a spring in Sicily, where she had fled after being pursued by the Peloponnesian river god, Alpheus; hence ‘Arethusan’.

ARGÉÏ Human effigies or dummies made of straw, hurled into the Tiber on 14 May.

ARGÉSTES North-west wind.

ÁRGIVE Of or relating to Argos; sometimes = ‘Greek’.

ARGÓLIC See ARGOS.

ÁRGONAUTS Mariners who, led by Jason, sailed in the ship Argo in search of the Golden Fleece.

ÁRGOS Principal city of the eastern Peloponnese; sometimes serves as the capital of Agamemnon’s kingdom; hence ‘Argive’, ‘Argolic’.

ARIÁDNE Daughter of Minos, king of Crete. She helped Theseus to slay the Minotaur and escape from the labyrinth. Deserted by him, she became the bride of Bacchus.

ARÍCIA Ancient town in Latium near Alba Longa, situated at the base of the Alban hills; it was the site of a grove of Diana, in which lived the Rex Nemorensis; hence ‘Arician’.

ARÍON Singer and lyre-player; rescued by a dolphin.

ARISTÁEUS Son of Apollo and the nymph Cyrene; pursuer of Eurydice; as a beekeeper, he learned how to regenerate his lost bees.

ÁSCRA Mountain in Boeotia where the Muses appeared to the poet Hesiod.

ASSÁRACUS King of Troy; son of Tros and grandfather of Anchises; related to Tithonus (distant cousin).

ÁTHAMAS Husband firstly of Nephele, then Ino; father of Phrixus and Helle; hence ‘Athamantic’.

ATHÉNA See MINERVA.

ATLANTÉAN Of or relating to the Pleiades, daughters of Atlas.

ATLÁNTID An epithet of Electra, one of the Pleiades, who were daughters of Atlas.

ÁTLAS Son of the Titan Iapetus; giant who supports the sky upon his shoulders (perhaps as punishment for helping Cronus in the war between the Olympian deities and the Titans).

ÁTREUS Son of Pelops and brother of Thyestes, whose children he served up to him as a feast. A frequent subject for tragedy.

ATRÍDES Sons of Atreus, namely Agamemnon and Menelaus.

ÁTTALUS Attalus I Soter (c. 269–197 BC); king of Pergamum.

ÁTTIC Of the area of Greece in which Athens is situated, generally = ‘Athenian’.

ÁTTIS Emasculated devotee (or consort) of the goddess, the Great Mother, Cybele.

AUGÚSTAN FORUM Begun in 20 BC and finished in 2 BC, the forum was perpendicular to Julius Casear’s forum and was dominated by the temple to Mars the Avenger (Mars Ultor). See 5.545–98.

AUGÚSTI The family and descendants of Augustus.

AUGÚSTUS Gaius Octavius, 63 BC–ad 14; heir to Julius Caesar, he emerged from the bloody civil wars of the last years of the republic after the battle of Actium in 31 BC to establish the principate and create the Roman empire as it would survive until AD 476. His early patronage of literature and the arts gave way to increasing autocracy and the banishment of Ovid. He received the name ‘Augustus’ in 27 BC (see 1.590).

AURÓRA Goddess of dawn.

AUSÓNIA Lower Italy or a poetic name for Italy itself, after the Ausones, a people of Campania; hence ‘Ausonian’ = ‘Italian’.

ÁUSPICES Observation of birds for omens; or simply omens, especially favourable ones; or favourable patronage.

ÁUSTER South wind.

ÁVENTINE One of Rome’s seven hills.

AVENTÍNUS An Alban king.

AZÁNIS An Arcadian nymph.

BÁCCHANTES Ecstatic female followers/devotees of Bacchus.

BÁCCHUS Greek Dionysus, son of Zeus and Semele; god of vegetation, wine, poets and inspiration. He forcibly imposed his cult on Thebes. Identified with Liber and worshipped at the Liberalia in March. Sometimes used by metonymy for ‘wine’. See also ARIADNE.

BÁTTUS Founder of Cyrene, king of Melite/Malta (according to Ovid); the poet Callimachus claimed descent from him.

BELLÉROPHON Falsely accused of making sexual advances to the wife of Proetus, he was sent to kill the monster Chimaera, which he did with the aid of the winged horse, Pegasus. His name cleared, he became the king of Lycia.

BELLÓNA Native Roman war goddess.

BERECÝNTIA Another name for Cybele; hence ‘Berecyntian’.

BOARD OF TEN Decemviri stlitibus iudicandis, in Latin; tribunal for deciding cases involving liberty and citizenship.

BOEÓTIA A district in central Greece; its most famous son was Hesiod; hence ‘Boeotian’.

BÓNA DÉA ‘Good Goddess’. Her festival was attended by women only; she had a temple on the Aventine.

BOÖTES The northern constellation of ‘The Wagoner’ also called Arctophylax.

BÓREAS North wind.

BOVÍLLAE First small town south from Rome on the Appian Way near Aricia, where there was a hill; the traditional haunt of beggars.

BRÍAREUS One of the hundred-handed giants, the ‘Hecatonchires’.

BRÓNTES One of the three Cyclopes (with Steropes and Arges) who forged Zeus’ thunderbolts.

BRÚTUS (1) Lucius Junius Brutus, ‘The Liberator’ one of the first consuls after he had expelled the Etruscan tyrants from Rome in 510 BC.(2) Decimus Junius Brutus, consul of 138 BC, who defeated the Callaici in Spain.

CÁCUS Fire-breathing monstrous son of Volcanus, whom Hercules killed at the future site of Rome. His cave was on the Aventine Hill.

CADMÉÏS Ino, daughter of Cadmus.

CÁDMUS Son of Agenor, king of ancient Tyre. He founded Thebes by sowing the teeth of the dragon of Mars which he had killed, and setting against each other the crop of armed men that resulted.

CÁELIAN One of Rome’s seven hills.

CAENÍNA A city of Latium associated with the Sabines.

CAESAR (1) Gaius Julius Caesar, 100–44 BC; soldier and statesman, who after his conquest of Gaul defeated the senatorial forces under Pompey and Cato in a bitter civil war and made himself master of Rome. He was assassinated on the Ides of March 44 BC.(2) Normal appellation of the emperor, beginning with the first emperor Augustus; used also in Fasti of Germanicus.

CALÁBRIA The flat south-eastern ‘heel’ of Italy; nowadays its south-western promontory; hence ‘Calabrian’.

CALLÁICAN Of the Callaici, a people of north-western Spain; the modern Galicia.

CALLÍOPE The Muse of epic poetry.

CALLÍSTO A nymph; having been raped by Zeus and turned into a bear by Hera, she became the Bear constellation (Arctos, Ursa Major).

CÁLPETUS A descendant of Iulus, Aeneas' son.

CAMÉNA (plural camÉnae) Italian nymphs, who became the Italian goddesses of song; they had a temple just outside one of the main gates of Rome, the Porta Capena or Capena Gate.

CÁMERE The area near the Crathis river.

CAMERÍNA City on the southern coast of Sicily.

CAMÍLLUS Marcus Furius, saviour of Rome from the Gauls in 390 BC; victor over Veii, the Aequi and the Volscians. Regarded as the second founder of Rome; dedicated the temple of Concordia in 367 BC and the temple of Juno Moneta in 344 BC.

CÁMPUS Campus Martius.

CÁMPUS MÁRTIUS Field of Mars, a large area on the bank of the Tiber originally used for military training but studded in imperial times with temples, colonnades, theatres, gymnasia and running-tracks; a popular meeting place for business, athletics and religious and social gatherings.

CANCER Constellation of the Crab.

CÁNIS ‘Dog-Star’ or Sirius.

CAPÉLLA ‘She-Goat’, the brightest star in the constellation of Auriga.

CAPITOL Most important of Rome’s seven hills. Built on it was a citadel and temple of Jupiter. Also known as the Capitoline.

CÁPITOLINE See CAPITOL.

CÁPITOLINE THUNDERER Jupiter, whose weapon was the thunderbolt.

CAPRICÓRNUS Constellation of Capricorn or the Goat.

CÁPUT Latin for ‘head’.

CÁPYS (1) Father of Anchises. (2) Descendant of Iulus, Aeneas' son.

CÁRI Latin for ‘beloved ones’ or ‘relatives’.

CARÍSTIA Festival on February 22 when relatives honoured their kin; see 2.617–22n.

CARMÉNTA An old Italian goddess of women and childbirth; an Arcadian goddess of prophecy; mother of Evander; connected by Ovid with the Latin word for poetry or song, carmen. Also called Carmentis. See further 1.462n.

CARMENTÁLIA Festival in honour of the goddess Carmenta or Carmentis held on January 11 and 15; see 1.462n.

CÁRNA Goddess who protects the vital organs, honoured on June 1 and associated by Ovid with the hinge. See CRANAË.

CARPÉNTA Latin for ‘wagons’.

CARSÉOLI A town (modern CarsÓli) of the Aequi, 42 miles (67 kilometres) east of Rome.

CÁRTHAGE City of north Africa founded and ruled in legend by Dido; major military power and chief rival of Rome in the 3rd century BC. The most devastating of the wars between Rome and Carthage was the second Punic War (218–201 BC).

CARÝSTOS Ancient Greek town on the south coast of Euboea, famous for its marble.

CÁSTOR One of the Gemini or Dioscuri, whose temple stood prominently in the Roman Forum; brother of Pollux, son of Leda by Tyndareus. The constellation Gemini served as a guide to sailors at sea.

CÉCROPIDS Descendants of Cecrops; = ‘Athenians’.

CÉCROPS Legendary ancient king of Attica/Athens; ‘Cecropia’ = ‘Athens’.

CELÁENO One of the Pleiades.

CÉLER Romulus' assistant who, in a variant of the myth, kills Remus.

CÉLEUS Host to Demeter at Eleusis after her wanderings in search of her daughter, Persephone.

CÉNTAUR One of a race of half-equine, half-human creatures who lived in the wooded mountains of Thessaly; known for their unbridled passions.

CÉRES Roman deity identified with Greek Demeter, goddess of agriculture; one of three daughters born to Cronus and Rhea, fourth wife of Zeus and mother of Persephone (Roman Proserpina, perhaps derived from the Etruscan pronunciation of her name). After Persephone was abducted by the god of the Underworld, Demeter wandered from Sicily to Eleusis in search of her. Ceres is associated in worship with Tellus, outside whose temple at Rome there was a statue of her (Pliny NH 34.15). Ceres' own temple had connections with the plebs, functioning as both the headquarters for plebeian magistrates and the centre for the distribution of corn. Often used as a metonym for ‘corn’ or ‘bread’.

CERIÁLIA Festival of Ceres, beginning on April 12; see 4.393n.

CHAOS A primitive god identified with the original shapeless form of the universe.

CHARÝBDIS A legendary whirlpool, traditionally located in the straits between Italy and Sicily.

CHÍRON Centaur famous for his knowledge of archery, music, plants, medicine and divination; son of Cronus and the Oceanid Philyra. He served as the tutor of such heroes as Jason, Achilles and Asclepius. He became a constellation after being accidentally poisoned by one of Hercules' arrows.

CHLÓRIS Greek deity whom Ovid identifies with Roman Flora.

CILÍCIA A province in the southern part of Asia Minor, between Pamphylia and Syria; hence ‘Cilician’.

CÍNYRAS King of Cyprus, father of Adonis by his own daughter, Myrrha.

CÍRCE Daughter of Helios and Perse; the divine enchantress of the island of Aeaea, who kept Odysseus on her island for a year and bore him Telegonus.

CIRCUS See CIRCUS MAXIMUS.

CIRCUS FLAMÍNIUS Racetrack in the Campus Martius, built by Flaminius in 220 BC.

CIRCUS MAXIMUS Racetrack between the Palatine and the Aventine.

CLÁROS Town in Ionia (Asia Minor) with an oracle and grove sacred to Apollo.

CLÁUDIA QUÍNTA Granddaughter of Appius Claudius; involved in Cybele’s arrival in Rome.

CLÁUDIUS See MARCELLUS.

CLÁUSUS Ancestor of the Claudian family.

CLÍO Muse of history.

CLÓTHO One of the three Moirai or Fates. See FATES.

CLÚSIUS Another name for Janus, after the Latin word for ‘close’ (cludo).

CLÝMENUS Another name for Hades, brother of Zeus and ruler of the Underworld.

CNÓSSOS The ancient capital of Crete where Minos was king and Theseus killed the Minotaur with the aid of Ariadne.

CÓLCHIS Kingdom east of the Black Sea; home of King Aeëtes and his daughter, Medea.

COLLÁTIA Town close to Rome.

COLLATÍNUS Husband of Lucretia.

CÓLLINE GATE Gate at the north-eastern end of the Quirinal.

COMITIÁLIS A day on which assemblies of the Roman people could be held for electoral or legislative purposes.

CONCÓRDIA Roman goddess of concord with a major temple in the Roman Forum. The temple was vowed by Camillus in 367 BC, restored in 121 BC, and rededicated as Concordia Augusta by Tiberius in AD 10.

CÓNSUL One of the two chief officers of the Roman state, originally elected annually. During the republic the consuls were the supreme civil and military magistrates of Rome. The office retained its prestige under the empire but lost most of its power.

CÓNSUS An ancient Italian deity, god of the stored grain. He was honoured twice a year (August 21 and December 15) at the Consualia.

CORINTH City at the isthmus between the Peloponnese and central Greece.

CORNÍCULUM Town near Collatia.

CORONÍDES Asclepius (Roman Aesculapius), son of Coronis and Apollo, and like his father famed for his healing skills.

CORÓNIS Nymph, mother of Asclepius by Apollo.

CORSICAN Of or relating to Corsica, the island in the Mediterranean Sea.

CÓRVUS Constellation of the Raven.

CORYBÁNTES Spirits of nature associated with the Great Mother goddess, Cybele.

COSÝRA Island near Malta, modern Pantelleria.

COVERED WAY Possibly a colonnade along the Appian Way.

CRÁNAË Nymph who became the goddess Carna after being raped by Janus.

CRÁSSUS Marcus Licinius Crassus, d. 53 BC; initially a conservative republican financier of enormous wealth and some military ability; ambitious for more political power, he joined Pompey and Julius Caesar in the first triumvirate. Hoping to rival their military reputations, he took on the Parthians who defeated and killed him at Carrhae.

CRÁTER Constellation of the Bowl.

CRÁTHIS River of Calabria at the toe of Italy.

CRÉMERA River in Etruria, where the Fabii heroically fought and were massacred by the Etruscans from Veii in 477 BC.

CRETE Island in the Mediterranean Sea; hence ‘Cretan’.

CROCUS Boy transformed into a saffron flower.

CROWN Constellation into which Ariadne turned.

CUMÁEAN Of Cumae, the Chalcidian colony on the coast of Campania, renowned on account of its Sibyl.

CÚPID Greek Eros, son of Aphrodite by Ares; usually represented as a smiling winged infant armed with a bow and arrows, which, when shot, inspire love and desire.

CÚRES Sabine capital.

CURÉTES Cretan warrior figures, spirits of nature, who protected Zeus in his infancy.

CÚRIS Latin for ‘spear’, one of Ovid’s etyma for the name Quirinus.

CÚRIUS Manius Curius Dentatus, consul 290 BC; victorious general and Roman symbol of moral severity.

CÚRTIUS Marcus Curtius ( c. 362 BC), who gave his name to the ‘lake’ which was once at the site of the forum.

CÚRULE CHAIR Official chair of Roman consuls, praetors, and curule aediles.

CÚSTOS Latin for ‘Guardian’, cult-title of Hercules. See HERCULES.

CÝANE Spring in Sicily.

CÝBELE (1) The Great Mother, Magna Mater, an orgiastic Anatolian mother-goddess, associated with Phrygia. Her cult was introduced into Rome c. 205 BC, where she had a temple on the Palatine near the house of Augustus. Her consort was Attis and her priests were the castrated Galli. (2) Mountain in Phrygia named after the Great Mother.

CÝCLADES Group of Greek islands lying between south-west Anatolia and Greece.

CÝCLOPES (singular CÝCLOPS) Sons of Gaea and Uranus (Hesiod Th. 139–46), mighty one-eyed giant smiths who worked for Hephaestus under Mount Etna.

CYLLÉNE Mountain in Arcadia.

CYNOSÚRA ‘Dog’s Tail’, a Greek name for the constellation of the ‘Little Bear’, Ursa Minor.

CÝNTHIA Another name for Artemis.

CÝNTHIAN Epithet of Apollo and Artemis, who were born on Mount Cynthus on the island of Delos.

CÝNTHIUS Apollo.

CYRÉNE (1) Mother of Aristaeus. (2) Important town in north-western Libya.

CYTHÉRA Island in the Aegean sacred to Aphrodite; hence ‘Cytheran’ = ‘of Aphrodite/Venus’.

CYTHERÉA Aphrodite (Roman Venus), after the island of Cythera.

DARDÁNIA Poetic name for Troy, founded by Dardanus near the Hellespont in north-western Asia Minor; hence ‘Dardanian’ and ‘Dardan’.

DÁRDANUS Founder of Troy.

DÁUNUS Legendary king of Apulia.

DAWN Goddess of the dawn.

DECEMVIRS Latin Decemviri, appointed commission of ten men; one such was appointed in 451 BC to codify the laws.

DÉLIA Another name for Artemis who, with her brother Apollo, was born on Delos.

DÉLPHI Cult centre of Apollo and the most famous oracle in the ancient world. It was situated in Phocis in central Greece.

DÉLPHIS Constellation of the Dolphin.

DEUCÁLION Son of Prometheus and survivor (with his wife Pyrrha) of the great flood sent by Jupiter to punish humankind for its sins. Warned of the intended deluge by Prometheus, Deucalion built an ark in which he and his wife escaped the ravages of the flood. Subsequently they regenerated the human race by throwing stones behind them.

DIÁLIS ‘Of Jove’, used of the Flamen who was the priest of Jove, the most distinguished of the Flamens.

DIANA Goddess of the hunt, the moon and childbirth; equated with Greek Artemis, and so daughter of Jupiter and Latona and sister of Apollo. There was a famous temple to her at Ephesus in Ionia/Asia Minor. Also called Cynthia, Delia, Dictynna and Phoebe.

DÍCTE Mountain in Crete.

DICTÝNNA A promontory on the north-west coast of Crete, where a temple of Artemis stood; hence a cult-title of Diana, for which see 6.755–6n.

DÍDIUS Titus Didius, consul of 98 BC, who earned two triumphs for victories in Thrace and Spain; he fought in the war between Rome and its Allies (‘Social War’) and was killed (89 BC).

DÍDO Legendary founder and queen of Carthage, who loved and was loved by Aeneas. Her abandonment by Aeneas and suicide are narrated by Virgil in Aeneid 4.

DÍDYME Island off the northern coast of Sicily.

DÍNDYMUS Mountain in Phrygia near Pessinus, an important cult site of Cybele.

DIOMÉDES One of the greatest warriors at Troy who helped Odysseus steal the Palladium, the sacred image of Pallas, on which the fortunes of the city depended. See also 4.75–6n.

DIÓNE Strictly the mother of Aphrodite, but sometimes used for Aphrodite herself. See 2.461–2n.

DIS Divine lord of the Underworld and the dead; also known also as Hades and Pluto.

DODÓNA City in north-western Greece.

DODÓNID One of the Hyades, nymphs of Dodona.

DOG-STAR Sirius, the brightest star in the constellation of Canis Major, ‘Greater Dog’.

DÓMINUS Latin for ‘master’.

DORIS Daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, and sister and wife of Nereus; used by metonymy for the sea.

DRÚSUS (1) Nero Claudius Drusus, 38–9 BC; son of Livia, brother of Tiberius, and father of Germanicus. (2) Julius Caesar Drusus, 13 BC– AD 23; son of Tiberius and adoptive brother of Germanicus.

DRÝADS Wood nymphs.

EARTH In Latin, Tellus or Terra; the Roman earth goddess.

EËTION King of Thebe in Cilicia and father of Andromache. He was killed by Achilles.

EGÉRIA One of four prophetic Italian nymphs, the Camenae, later the Italian Muses; honoured as the ‘wife’ and adviser of Numa.

ELÉCTRA One of the Pleiades.

ELÉUSIS Important Attic town near Athens, famed for its mysteries celebrating Demeter (Ceres) and Persephone (Proserpina).

ELÍCIUS Cult-title of Jupiter.

ELÍSSA Phoenician name for Dido, the founder of Carthage.

ENDOTERCÍSUS ‘Divided’ day in the Roman calendar. In the morning an animal is sacrificed and in the evening its entrails are burnt. Both periods are nefastus, but the time in between is fastus, enabling legal and political activity to occur. See FASTUS, NEFASTUS and Introduction 3.III.

EPÉÜS Greek carpenter who made the Trojan Horse.

ÉPYTUS Descendant of Aeneas' son Iulus.

EQUÍRRIA Festival of horse-racing in honour of Mars held on February 27 and March 14. See 2.857–60n.

ÉRATO Muse of erotic poetry.

ERÉC (H) THEUS A fabled king of Athens, father of Procris, Orithyia, Chthonia and Creusa, who devoted themselves to death for their country. Orithyia had been raped by Boreas.

ERICHTHÓNIUS Son of Dardanus and ancestor of Aeneas.

ERÍGONE Daughter of Icarius, who hung herself in grief over her father’s death, and was rewarded for it by being changed into the constellation Virgo. ‘Erigone’s dog’ was the constellation which accompanied her, the brightest star of which was Sirius, the ‘Dog-Star’.

ERYCÍNA Cult-title of Venus, after the mountain on Sicily on which was a famous temple to Aphrodite (Roman Venus).

ERYTHÉA An island in the west whence Heracles came with the herds of Geryon.

ÉRYX City and mountain in the north-west corner of Sicily.

ÉSQUILINE One of Rome’s seven hills.

ÉTNA The great volcano in Sicily.

ETRÚRIA District north of Rome.

ETRÚSCAN Associated with, or an inhabitant of, Etruria.

EUBÓEA Large island in the Aegean Sea off the east coast of central Greece; hence ‘Euboean’.

EUPHRÁTES River in ancient Mesopotamia.

EURÓPA Daughter of the king of Tyre; she was raped by Zeus in the guise of a bull and taken to Crete.

EVÁNDER Arcadian king, in Roman legend, who established a settlement, Pallanteum, in the place where Rome was later founded. In Virgil’s Aeneid he is an ally of Aeneas.

FÁBII Ancient Roman family which claimed descent from Hercules; hence ‘Fabian’.

FALÉRII City in Etruria; chief city of the Faliscans; hence ‘Falerian’.

FALÍSCANS An Italian people speaking a language closely related to Latin.

FÁSTUS Day on which it is permissible to undertake legal action; marked in the calendar by F (fastus). See Introduction 3.III.

FATES The Parcae or Moirai, three sisters (Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos), daughters of Zeus and the Titan Themis, according to Hesiod (Th. 901–6). The three are represented as spinning human fate (see, e.g., Homer Il. 24.209–11), each life being a thread which comes to an end when the thread is broken.

FATHER OF THE FATHERLAND In Latin, pater patriae, the title given to Augustus in 2 BC.

FATHERS Members of the Roman Senate.

FÁUNUS Native Italian god of field, flock and village; he was honoured at the Lupercalia and possessed prophetic powers. Sometimes identified with Pan. See 3.291–2n.

FÁUSTULUS Foster-father of Romulus and Remus.

FEAST OF FOOLS Ritual of the Quirinalia.

FÉBRUA Obscure Latin word connected with purification rituals; ‘means of purification’.

FERÁLIA Last day of the Parentalia (February 21), on which offerings of food were made at the tombs of the dead.

FÉRUNT Latin for ‘they bear’ or ‘they carry’.

FÍDIUS Semo Sancus Dius Fidius, god of faith (fides), to whom there was a temple on the Quirinal. In Ovid, the god has three different names: Semo, Sancus and Fidius.

FLÁMEN A priest of one particular deity; the most prestigious Flamen was the Flamen Dialis, the priest of Jupiter.

FLAMÍNICA Wife of a Flamen.

FLAMÍNIUS Gaius Flaminius, consul 223, 220, 217 BC; commander at Lake Trasimene (217 BC), where he perished.

FLÓRA Italian goddess of flowers; her festival, the Floralia (28 April–3 May), was a licentious holiday celebrating the rites of spring. Games, stage shows and exhibitions of naked prostitutes were featured. See 4.945–6n. and 5.183–8n.

FLORÁLIA Festival in honour of the goddess Flora; see FLORA.

FORDICÍDIA Festival in honour of Tellus involving the sacrifice of pregnant cows, held on April 15; see 4.629–32n.

FÓRMIAE City on the coast of Latium.

FORNACÁLIA Moveable festival of the roasting of grain in honour of Fornax.

FÓRNAX In Latin, ‘oven’, hence goddess of ovens.

FÓRS FORTÚNA Italian goddess identified with Tyche, Greek goddess of luck; a festival was held in her honour on June 24.

FORTÚNA ‘Fortune’, goddess of luck; she had three temples on the Quirinal, one in the Forum Boarium, ‘Cattle Market’. The most famous temple to Fortuna is outside Rome at Praeneste.

FORTÚNA PÚBLICA ‘Public Fortune’. The three temples to Fortuna on the Quirinal may have all been hers. Her main festival was on April 5. For another temple dedicated to her, see May 25.

FORTÚNA VIRÍLIS ‘Man’s Fortune’, cult-title of Fortuna under which she was worshipped during the Veneralia.

FÓRUM The Forum Romanum was the social, political and religious centre of Rome; later, forums by Caesar, Augustus, Vespasian, Domitian and Trajan were added. See also AUGUSTAN FORUM.

FURIES Spirits who avenged bloodshed; they carried out the curse pronounced on criminals, tortured the guilty with the pangs of conscience, or afflicted famines and plagues.

FÚRIUS See CAMILLUS.

GÁBII City near Rome; Sextus Tarquinius seized it.

GAETÚLIAN Of Gaetulia in north-west Africa, which harvested a shellfish famed for its purple dye.

GALATÉA A beautiful sea nymph, a daughter of the sea-deity, Nereus.

GÁLLI (1) Tribesmen of Gaul. (2) Eunuch priests of Cybele.

GÁLLUS River in Bithynia.

GÁNGES River in northern India.

GÁNYMEDE Handsome son of Laomedon who was snatched by Jupiter’s eagle from Mount Ida to heaven to serve as catamite and cup-bearer to Jupiter.

GAUL The country of the Gauls, beyond the Rhine and in Upper Italy; hence ‘Gallic’.

GÉLA River in Sicily.

GÉMINI The Heavenly Twins, Castor and Pollux (Greek Polydeuces), sons of Leda, the former by Tyndareus, the latter by Zeus (see 5.699–700n.). They became the constellation Gemini, which served as a guide to sailors at sea.

GENIUS The spirit of an individual (especially the emperor) regarded as an object of worship.

GERMÁNICUS Son of Drusus (1), nephew and adopted son of Tiberius, and dedicatee of Ovid’s Fasti.

GÉRYON Three-headed, three-bodied giant, the plundering of whose magnificent cattle was one of Heracles' tasks.

GIANTS Monstrous offspring of Earth, who engaged in an epic battle with the Olympian gods and were defeated. Often grouped with them are the sons of Aloeus, Otus and Ephialtes, who tried to climb from earth to heaven by piling Mount Ossa on Mount Olympus and Mount Pelion on Mount Ossa.

GLÁUCUS Son of Minos and Pasiphae, who during his childhood, when chasing a mouse, fell into a pot of honey and drowned, only to be brought back to life by the seer Polyidus. See 6.750–52n.

GOAT’S PIT Site of Romulus' apotheosis.

GORGÓNIAN Of the Gorgons. Epithet of Pegasus, the horse which sprang from the severed neck of the Gorgon Medusa.

GRACES Also called the Charities; three daughters of Zeus and Eurynome, his third wife; they personified charm, grace and beauty, and bestowed these characteristics on others.

GRADÍVUS Cult-title of Mars, said to be the ‘Marcher’, although the etymology is uncertain.

GREAT GODDESS Another name for Cybele.

GREAT MOTHER Another name for Cybele.

GREATER GREECE Coastal area of lower Italy, called Magna Graecia, colonized by the Greeks between the 8th and the 5th centuries BC.

GÝGES One of the Hecatonchires.

HADRIATIC The Adriatic Sea.

HAEMÓNIA Thessaly, from Mount Haemus in Thrace.

HÁEMUS Mountain range in northern Thrace.

HALÁESUS Agamemnon’s companion or son who fled to Italy after Agamemnon’s murder and there founded Falerii, chief city of the Faliscans.

HAMADRÝAD Wood nymph who inhabits a tree and lives only so long (Greek hama, ‘at the same time’) as the tree lives.

HÁNNIBAL Leader of the Carthaginian invasion of Italy in the second Punic War (218–201 BC); after bringing his army across the Alps with the aid of elephants, he defeated Rome in many battles before being defeated himself at Zama near Carthage.

HÁRPIES Fierce, winged monsters, with faces of women and the bodies of vultures. They left a stench, snatched and defiled the food of their victims, serving as ministers of divine vengeance and punishing criminals.

HÁSDRUBAL Carthaginian general and younger brother of Hannibal; he fell fighting at the Metaurus in 207 BC, where his Carthaginian force was defeated by the Romans.

HEART CHANGER Latin, Verticordia, cult-title of Venus.

HÉBRUS Principal river (now the Maritza) in Thrace, the large territory to the north-east of Greece.

HÉCATE Goddess of the moon and the Underworld, and of magic and witchcraft, often represented with three faces; daughter of Perses and Asteria, sister of Leto. Identified with Artemis, Roman Luna, and Persephone, she presided over enchantments and conjurations, and was particularly associated with the Underworld.

HECATONCHÍRES Hundred-armed and fifty-headed sons of Gaea and Uranus.

HÉCTOR Son of Priam and Hecuba, husband of Andromache, and the bravest warrior among the Trojans in Homer’s Iliad. He finally fought Achilles, who slew him and dragged his corpse three times round Troy. His body was ransomed by his father, Priam; his funeral concludes Homer’s epic.

HELEN Daughter of Zeus and Leda and wife of Menelaus; she was carried off to Troy by Paris, who had been promised the most beautiful woman in the world as a reward for judging Aphrodite superior in beauty to Hera and Athena. The abduction precipitated the Trojan War.

HÉLIADS Daughters of Helios and sisters of Phaethon, for whom they wept until they were transformed into poplars (or alders).

HÉLICE A Greek name for the constellation of the ‘Great Bear’, Ursa Major.

HÉLICON Mountain in Boeotia in mainland Greece, inhabited by the Muses; it became a symbol of poetic inspiration.

HÉLLE Daughter of Athamas and Nephele, sister of Phrixus. She fled with Phrixus from their jealous stepmother Ino on a ram with a golden fleece to Colchis but was drowned in the strait thereafter called Hellespont, ‘the sea of Helle’, in her memory.

HÉLLESPONT Modern name, the Dardanelles; see HELLE.

HELÓRIAN Of or relating to Helorus, the river in Sicily.

HÉNNA Ancient city in central Sicily with a famous temple of Demeter. It was from here that Hades carried off Persephone.

HÉRACLES See HERCULES.

HERALD Epithet of Hermes (Roman Mercury), the messenger god.

HÉRCULES Roman name of Greek Heracles, son of Zeus and Alcmene; a hero of incredible strength who was deified for his mighty achievements. His Twelve Labours were performed in the service of King Eurystheus of Argos, as a penance imposed by Delphi to expiate his killing of his wife and children in a fit of madness. He had close connections with both Thebes (his birthplace) and Argos, and was responsible for an early sack of Troy. During Evander’s reign he visited the future site of Rome, fought and killed Cacus, and set up an altar there, the Ara Maxima. Under the cult-name of Hercules Custos (‘Guardian’) he had a temple on the west side of the Circus Flaminius, prescribed in 218 BC by the Sibylline Books. Also called ‘Alcides’. See also CHIRON, INO.

HERNÍCIA Part of Latium occupied by the ancient people, the Hernici, ‘men of the rocks’, who were perhaps speakers of an Oscan dialect.

HESPÉRIA The western land (derived from ‘Hesperus’), often used in Roman verse for Italy; hence ‘Hesperian’.

HÉSPERUS Greek name of the evening star, said to be a son of Eos, the dawn goddess. His father is sometimes identified as Astraeus (son of the Titan Crius) or Atlas.

HIBÉRIAN Of or relating to Iberia (Spain).

HÍMERA City on the north central coast of Sicily.

HIPPOCRÉNE Fount of the Muses in Mount Helicon, created by a blow from the hoof of the winged horse Pegasus.

HIPPÓLYTUS Son of Theseus by the Amazon Queen Antiope (or Hippolyte), and a devotee of hunting and Artemis (Diana). For his fatal rejection of Aphrodite (Venus) and of the love of his stepmother, Phaedra, see 6.737–45n. He was later identified with the Italian rustic god, Virbius.

HISPANIC Spanish.

HÓMER Eighth-century Greek poet, author of Iliad and Odyssey and revered founder of the Greek epic tradition. He was reputed to have been blind and born in Chios or on the Ionian mainland.

HÓSTES Latin for ‘enemies’.

HÓSTIA Latin for ‘victim’.

HOURS or HORAE Three divine daughters of Zeus and Themis; they presided over the changes of seasons.

HYACÍNTHUS Spartan boy beloved of Apollo, by whom he was accidentally killed with a discus.

HÝADES or HYADS ‘The Raining Ones’. Seven (according to some accounts, five) daughters of Atlas and sisters of the Pleiades; they wept themselves to death when their brother Hyas was killed hunting, after which they were translated to the heavens as a star-group situated within the head of the constellation of Taurus. The constellation’s evening rising and setting were associated with rainy weather. See PLEIADES.

HÝAS Son of Atlas and brother of the Hyades.

HÝDRA Nine-headed water-serpent killed by Heracles near the Lernaean Lake, although it grew fresh heads when one was cut off, until the stumps were cauterized.

HYMENÁEUS Greek god of marriage.

HYPÉRION Another name for the sun or for the Titan father of the sun.

HYPSÍPYLE Queen of Lemnos.

HÝRIEUS A poor Boeotian, father of Orion.

LÁNI Latin for ‘arches’ or ‘doorways’.

IÁRBAS North African king and suitor of Dido, who rejected him.

ICÁRIAN (1) Of Icarius, king of Sparta, who received Bacchus hospitably when he came to Attica and was given the vine. (2) Sea in the eastern Aegean, named after Icarus, son of Daedalus, who fell to his death between the islands of Samos and Icaria.

ÍCARUS Son of Daedalus, who, in escaping with his father from Crete, flew too near the sun, which melted the wax structure of his wings.

ÍDA (1) Mountain on Crete. (2) Mountain in Anatolia near Troy, ‘Phrygian Ida’ hence ‘Idaean’ or ‘Idalian’.

ÍDAS Brother of Lynceus; fought with the Dioscuri (Gemini) and was killed by Zeus.

ÍDES 15th of March, May, July and October; 13th of other months.

ÍLIA Rhea Silvia, daughter of Numitor and the mother by Mars of Romulus and Remus. Roman poets tell how she threw herself into the Anio, or Tiber, and was taken by the river god to be his wife.

ÍLIUM Troy; hence ‘Ilian’.

ÍLUS Founder of Troy; great-grandson of Dardanus.

IMPERÁTOR Latin for ‘Commander’ the title first taken as a permanent cognomen by Julius Caesar in 45 BC. Octavian (the later ‘Augustus’) took the title in 43 BC after his victory at Mutina.

INACHIÓTIS Daughter of Inachus, Io, often identified with the Egyptian goddess Isis.

ÍNACHUS (1) River in Argos. (2) First king of Argos and father of Io.

ÍNO Sister of Semele, mother of Palaemon and daughter of Cadmus, the founder of Thebes. Identified by the Romans with the goddess Mater Matuta, by the Greeks with Leucothea.

INVÍCTUS ‘Unconquered’, cult-title of Jupiter.

ÍO Daughter of Inachus, seduced by Zeus, who turned her into a heifer to avoid suspicion. Tormented by a gadfly sent in jealousy by Hera, she wandered the world until she came to Egypt and became a woman once again. Became assimilated to the Egyptian goddess Isis.

IÓNIA Central west coast of Asia Minor. Colonized around the 8th century BC by Athens and other Greek cities, it developed a high degree of culture, despite pressure from its barbarian neighbours.

IÓNIAN SEA Sea to the west of Greece.

IPHIGENÍA Daughter of Agamemnon; sacrificed by her father to get favourable winds for the Greek expedition against Troy. According to other accounts, she was rescued by Artemis (Diana) and made her priestess among the Tauri (in modern Crimea).

ISÁURIA A country in Asia Minor between Pamphylia, Lycaonia and Cilicia.

ÍSIS Egyptian goddess worshipped at Rome in a temple in the Campus Martius.

ISMÁRIAN Of or relating to Ismarus, a mountain in Thrace.

ÍTHACAN Of or relating to Ithaca, an island in the Adriatic Sea, off the west coast of Greece, the centre of Odysseus’ kingdom.

ÍTYS Son of Procne, murdered by her to avenge the rape of her sister Philomela by her husband Tereus.

IÚLUS Son of Aeneas; ancestor of the Julian imperial family and (more generally) of Rome. Also called Ascanius.

JANÍCULUM A long, high ridge on the right, i.e. west, bank of the Tiber at Rome.

JÁNUS Old Roman god of the gate, and so of beginnings (hence January); he was typically represented with two faces, one in front and one behind. Janus Geminus or Janus Quirinus possessed a shrine to the north of the Forum which was open during war and closed during peace.

JASON Leader of the Argonauts on the quest for the Golden Fleece. His adventures decorated a famous colonnade, the Porticus of Agrippa, in the Campus Martius at Rome.

JOVE Another name for Jupiter.

JÚBA Arrogant client-king of Numidia, who sided with the senate against Julius Caesar and was granted control also of Libya. He was defeated by Caesar at the battle of Thapsus (46 bc) and committed suicide.

JULIA (1) Daughter of Augustus exiled by him for adultery in 2 BC.(2) Her daughter, also exiled by Augustus in AD 8.

JULIA AUGÚSTA Name bequeathed to his widow, Livia, by Augustus in his will.

JULIAN Of the family of the Iulii or Julians, which claimed descent from Iulus, son of Aeneas. The most famous Julians were Julius Caesar and Augustus.

JULIUS CAESAR See CAESAR (1).

JÚNO Roman goddess of childbirth, wife of Jupiter and queen of heaven. Through her equation with Greek Hera, said to be the daughter of Saturnus (hence her name ‘Saturnia’). Cult-titles include ‘Sospita’, ‘Lucina’ and ‘Moneta’.

JÚPITER Roman sky god, equated with Greek Zeus, king of the Olympian deities; father of Apollo, Bacchus, Hercules, etc. His divine wife was Juno. Cult-titles include ‘Capitoline’, ‘Thunderer’ (Tonans), ‘Victor’, ‘Pistor’ (‘Baker’), ‘Invictus’ (‘Unconquered’), ‘Stator’. Also called Jove.

JUSTICE ASTRAEA, who left the earth with Chastity (Pudicitia) in the Bronze Age, when humankind had deteriorated from the primal innocence of the Golden Age (see 1.249–50n.).

JUTÚRNA (1) Sister of Turnus, the young Italian warrior and leader killed by Aeneas. (2) Pool in the Forum and Spring at Lavinium named after her. See 1.463–4n.

JUVÉNTAS Roman goddess equated with Greek Hebe, wife of Heracles, goddess of youth and cupbearer to the Olympian deities.

KÁLENDS The first day of the Roman month.

KING-PRIEST In Latin, Rex Sacrorum, an important priest from the patrician class, superior in rank but inferior in authority to the Pontifex Maximus.

LABYRINTH A maze-like structure built by Daedalus on Crete; inhabited by the Minotaur.

LÁDON River in Arcadia.

LÁENAS Marcus Popillius Laenas, consul 173 BC, who with his fellow consul Postumius instituted annual shows for the goddess Flora.

LAESTRYGÓNIANS Cannibal giants encountered by Odysseus during his voyage home. Formiae was reputedly founded by their king, Lamas.

LAKE CÚRTIUS See CURTIUS.

LÁMPSACUS City on the Hellespont.

LANÚVIUM Town in the Alban hills.

LAÓMEDON King of Troy; son of Ilus.

LAR Household god that provided the centre of Roman family worship; often depicted in Roman wall painting and statuary as a young man with a short tunic, dancing. Tutelary deity, often of a house. Used in the singular by metonymy for the hearth or home. Most often used in the plural, Lares. Epithets are ‘Standguard’ (Praestites) and ‘Crossroads’ (Compitales).

LÁRA Nymph whom Ovid identifies as mother of the Lares (see 2.608–16n.).

LARENTÁLIA Festival in honour of Larentia.

LARÉNTIA Also called Acca Larentia; foster-mother of Romulus and Remus; prostitute and benefactor of the Roman people.

LATIN Of or relating to Latium. The Latin people gave their name to the Latin language.

LATÍNUS (1) King of Laurentum, father of Lavinia and Aeneas’ father-in-law. (2) Grandson of Iulus.

LÁTIUM Region in Italy occupied by the Latin tribes of early Italy and in which Rome is situated. It stretches southwards from the Tiber and Anio rivers and is bounded on the east by the Apennines. Adjectives: ‘Latin’, ‘Latian’.

LATÓNA Roman name of Greek Leto, mother of Apollo and Artemis.

LAURÉNTINE Inhabitant of Laurentum or Latium in general; supporters of Aeneas.

LAURÉNTUM City in Latium, ruled by King Latinus.

LÁUSUS Brother of Silvia.

LAVÍNIA Daughter of King Latinus, wife of Aeneas; see 3.629n.

LEÁRCHUS Son of Ino and Athamas; killed by his mad father.

LEDÁEAN Of or relating to Leda, mother of Castor and Pollux.

LÉMNOS Island in the north Aegean.

LEMÚRES ‘Silent Souls’.

LEMÚRIA Festival for placating family ghosts held on May 9, 11 and 13; see 5.421–2n.

LÉO Constellation of the Lion.

LEONTÍNI City of Sicily, north-west of Syracuse.

LÉRNA Small settlement near Argos, sometimes used as another term for Argos. The killing of the many-headed Hydra at Lerna was one of Heracles’ Labours.

LÉSBIAN Of or relating to Lesbos.

LÉSBOS Largest island off Asia Minor, not far from Troy; famed for its culture; it boasted Sappho and Alcaeus among its poets.

LEUCÁDIAN Of or relating to Leucas, an island off the west coast of Greece with a famous promontory.

LEUCÍPPUS Father of Phoebe and Hilaeira.

LEUCÓTHEA Ino’s name as a sea deity.

LÍBA Latin for ‘cakes’.

LÍBER Liber Pater, an Italian god of the grape and, generally, offertility, whom the Romans equated with the Greek Dionysus and the Roman Bacchus.

LÍBERA Italian goddess identified with Ariadne.

LIBERÁLIA Festival of the Italian fertility deities, Liber and Libera, held on March 17; see 3.713–14n.

LIBERATOR One meaning of Liber.

LIBERTY The Hall of Liberty, Atrium Libertatis, was situated near the Roman Forum. It housed the first public library of Rome and was associated with Gaius Asinius Pollio who restored it some time after 39 BC. Ovid confuses this with the Temple of Liberty dedicated on 13 April c. 238 BC and restored by Augustus.

LÍBRA Constellation of the Scales.

LIBYA Coast district of North Africa, west of Egypt, which included the city of Carthage; North Africa generally; hence ‘Libyan’.

LILYBÁEUM City in western Sicily.

LÍVIA LIVIA Drusilla, 58 BC–AD 29, Wife Of Augustus; Mother Of Tiberius And Drusus By Tiberius Claudius Nero, Whom She Divorced.

LÓTIS Nymph Desired By Priapus.

LOVES Eros And Anteros.

LÚCERES One Of The Three Tribes Instituted By Romulus.

LÚCES Latin For ‘Dawns’ Or ‘Days’, Literally ‘Lights’.

LÚCIFER The morning star, literally ‘Bringer of Light’.

LUCÍNA Goddess of childbirth, identified with Juno or Diana; see 2.449–52n.

LUCRÉTIA Legendary Roman heroine, wife of Tarquinius Collatinus; her rape by Sextus Tarquinius in 510 BC led to the expulsion of the Etruscan kings from Rome and the establishment of Rome as a republic. She became a symbol of old-fashioned Roman chastity.

LÚCUS Latin for ‘grove’.

LÚDI Latin for the ‘games’ or ‘shows’ that often accompanied religious festivals.

LÚNA Goddess of the moon, whose temple was on the Aventine Hill, dedicated (traditionally) by Servius Tullius on March 31.

LÚPERCAL Cave at the foot of the Palatine Hill where the she-wolf nursed Romulus and Remus.

LUPERCÁLIA Festival held on February 15. See LUPERCI.

LUPÉRCI Members of a sodality associated with the god Faunus (equated with Greek Pan). In the festival of the Lupercalia (March) they ran through Rome half-naked, striking women with goat-skins to induce fertility.

LUX Latin for ‘light’.

LYÁEUS ‘One who frees’ another name for Bacchus.

LYCÁEUS Mountain in Arcadia, sacred to Pan; hence ‘Lycaean’.

LYCÁON Father of Callisto; grandfather of Arcas; hence ‘Lycaonian’.

LYCÁONID Children of Lycaon, here Callisto.

LYCÚRGUS King of Thrace, punished by Dionysus; he killed his son thinking him to be a vine.

LÝDIA Region of western Asia Minor. Ruled by King Croesus in the 6th century BC, it later became part of the Persian empire; hence ‘Lydian’.

LÝNCEUS Brother of Idas.

LÝRA OR LYRE Constellation.

MÁENADS Ecstatic female devotees of Dionysus/Bacchus, known in antiquity for their frenzied, at times violent, behaviour, as they practised the secret rites of their Bacchic cult. See also BACCHANTES and thyiades.

MÁENALUS Mountain range in Arcadia; hence ‘Maenalian’ often = ‘Arcadian’.

MAEÓNIA An ancient name for Lydia; hence ‘Maeonian’ = ‘Lydian’, or even Homer, ‘the Maeonian’.

MAEÓNIDES Common Ovidian name for Homer, said to be born in Maeonia. Other sources construe the name as a patronymic, ‘son of Maeon’ (allegedly Homer’s father).

MÁGNUS ‘The Great’, a title given to the Roman general Pompey by Sulla. Pompey (106–48 bc) was Julius Caesar’s main rival in the late republic and the leader of the senatorial forces against him in the civil wars.

MÍA One of the Pleiades; mother by Zeus of Hermes (Roman Mercury). See 5.85–6n.

MAIÉSTAS ‘Majesty’, allegorical goddess, daughter of Honour and Reverence. Under Augustus and Tiberius maiestas denoted the dignity and majesty of the emperor, offences against which constituted high treason.

MAIÓRES Latin for ‘elders’.

MAMÚRIUS Metalworker who made replicas of the ancile.

MÁNIPLI Latin for ‘handfuls’ a ‘maniple’ was a unit of Roman infantry consisting of two centuries.

MÁNLIUS Marcus Manlius Capitolinus, who defended the Capitoline from the Gauls in 390 BC. He was executed for treason in 384 BC, allegedly after his support of the plebsled to charges by the patricians that he intended to establish himself as a tyrant. His house was later the site of the temple of Juno Moneta.

MARCÉLLUS Marcus Claudius Marcellus, consul 222, 214, 210, 208 bc; one of the main Roman generals in the war against Hannibal, especially in Sicily where he captured the city of Syracuse. He was ambushed and killed by the enemy in 208 BC.

MÁRCIA Daughter of Lucius Marcius Philippus (1), cousin of Augustus, wife of Ovid’s friend, Paullus Fabius Maximus; her information to Livia may have caused her husband’s death during the dynastic struggle of AD 14.

MARS God of war and father of Romulus, the founder of Rome, and (by assimilation to the Greek Pantheon) son of Juno. He gave his name to March. As Mars Ultor (‘Avenger’) he had a magnificent temple in the Forum of Augustus, commemorating (according to Fasti 5) both the avenging of Caear’s assassination and Crassus’ defeat at Carrhae (but see Introduction 4.VII). Also known as ‘Gradivus’.

MÁRSIAN Of or relating to the Marsii, an Italian people.

MÁRSYAS Satyr who unsuccessfully challenged Apollo to a contest of the flute and was flayed alive; he was a symbol of liberty, especially to the Roman plebs. There was a statue of him in the Roman Forum which was regularly crowned with flowers.

MASINÍSSA King of Numidia; an ally of Rome during the second Punic War (218–201 bc), who (together with the Roman commander Scipio Africanus) defeated Syphax, king of the western Numidians and ally of Carthage, in 203 BC.

MATRÁLIA Festival in honour of Mother Matuta (identified by the Romans with Ino) held on June 11; see 6.475–6n.

MATÚTA In Latin, Mater Matuta, goddess of mothers, identified with Ino, and the Greek goddess Leucothea.

MÁVORS An older, uncontracted form of the name for Mars, the war god.

MÁXIMA Latin for ‘Greatest’, the name of the altar (Ara Maxima) set up by Hercules at the future site of Rome after the defeat of Cacus.

MÁXIMUS Quintus Fabius Maximus Cunctator, consul 233, 228, 215, 214, 209 bc; his cognomen ‘Delayer’ (Cunctator) was earned in the second Punic War.

MEDÉA Granddaughter of the Sun; tragic and epic heroine, who, for love, helped the Argonaut Jason in his quest for the Golden Fleece. When he rejected her for a princess of Corinth, she killed both the princess and her own children (by Jason) in revenge.

MEDÚSA Gorgon with snakes for hair who was beheaded by Perseus.

MEGALÉNSIA Festival in honour of Cybele, beginning on April 4 and accompanied by theatrical shows: see 4.181–2n.

MÉGARA A city in Sicily up the coast from Syracuse.

MELEÁGER The hero of the Calydonian boar hunt; he killed his uncles and in revenge his mother killed him by throwing his talisman, a log, on the fire.

MELICÉRTES Younger son of Ino, transformed into a sea deity known to the Greeks as Palaemon, to the Romans as Portunus. See LEARCHUS.

MÉLITE Island in the Mediterranean, modern name Malta.

MÉMNON Son of Aurora, the dawn goddess, and an ally of Troy.

MENS ‘Mind’, Roman goddess with a temple on the Capitol dedicated in 215 BC. See 6.241–8n.

MERCURY God of travellers, boundaries, unexpected treasure trove, merchants and thieves; the guide of souls to the Underworld. Also called ‘Caducifer’ because he carries a magic wand (caduceus). He had a temple between the Aventine Hill and the Circus.

MÉROË A large and celebrated city on the Nile, in modern Sudan.

MÉROPE One of the Pleiades; she married Sisyphus.

MESSÁNA A Sicilian city, situated on the strait between Italy and Sicily.

METANÍRA Mother of Triptolemus and wife of Celeus.

METÉLLUS (1) Lucius Caecilius Metellus, who in 241 BC, as Pontifex Maximus, rescued the Palladium from a fire in the temple of Vesta. (2) Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus, consul 109 BC, who restored the temple of Cybele after the fire of 111 BC.

MEZÉNTIUS King of the Etruscan city of Caere and ally of Turnus in the war against Aeneas.

MÍLVUS Constellation of the Kite.

MIND In Latin, Mens; see MENS.

MINÉRVA Virgin goddess of arts and wisdom, and so of schoolboys, who paid their fees on or around the festival of Minerva (March 19); identified with the Greek goddess Pallas Athena, patron goddess of Athens, protectress of civilized life and goddess of war, wisdom and agriculture, especially the cultivation of the olive. The Palladium, a miniature statue of the goddess, which was seized during the Trojan War, was kept in the temple of Vesta. Often called Pallas and Tritonia. Ovid mentions her shrine of Minerva Capta.

MÍNOS Legendary king of Crete, husband of Pasiphaë and (in the Underworld) one of the judges of the dead; hence ‘Minoan’.

MONÉTA Cult-title of Juno. The temple of Juno Moneta served as the Roman mint.

MOOR An inhabitant of North Africa.

MOORISH Of or relating to the Moors, inhabitants of Mauretania.

MORNING STAR Lucifer.

MÚLCIBER Cult-title of Volcanus, father of the monster, Cacus, killed by Hercules, and legendary father of Servius Tullius. The title is perhaps derived from mulcere, ‘to soothe, appease’ (see Ernout-Meillet: 418).

MUSES The nine goddesses of the liberal arts, daughters of Zeus and Memory, identified with the Latin Camenae.

MÚTA Latin for ‘The Mute One’ a goddess, previously called Lara, whom Jupiter had struck dumb and Mercury raped; mother of the Lares (see 2.608–16n.).

MÚTINA A city in Cisalpine Gaul, modern Modena. The site at which Octavian (the later Augustus) defeated Antony in 43 BC.

MYCÉNAE Prehistoric town in the Argive plain; centre of Mycenaean civilization. In myth, it was the kingdom of Atreus and Agamemnon and the leading participant in the expedition against Troy.

MÝLAE Town on the northern coast of Sicily.

NÁ IADS Nymphs of freshwater streams, lakes and fountains.

NARCÍSSUS The beautiful boy who died from love of his own reflection in a pool; he became the narcissus flower. He was the son of the river god Cephissus and the nymph Liriope.

NASÍCA Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica; received Cybele on arrival in Ostia.

NÁSO Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 bc–c. AD 17, author of Fasti.

NAUPÁCTIAN Of or relating to Naupactus, a city of Aetolia, on the Gulf of Corinth.

NEFÁSTUS Days on which it is not permitted to undertake legal action; marked in the calendar by N (nefastus). See Introduction 3.III.

NÉMESIS Personification of divine retribution.

NEPTUNE Roman deity identified with Greek Poseidon, Olympian god, ruler of the sea, sharing universal power with his brothers, Zeus and Hades. His symbol was the trident.

NÉREÍD One of the sea-nymphs born of Doris and Nereus.

NERÍTIAN Odysseus, after Mount Neriton in Ithaca.

NÉSTOR Mythical king of Pylos in the Peloponnese, who contributed his experience and his sons to the Trojan War; celebrated among the heroes of Troy for his wisdom, eloquence and longevity.

NILE River in Egypt, celebrated for its annual overflow.

NÍSUS A king of Megara, father of Scylla who, in order to gain the love of Minos, cut off her father’s lock of purple hair.

NOMÉNTUM Town about 15 miles (24 kilometres) north-east of Rome, known for its wine and country homes.

NONÁCRIS Name of a mountain in Arcadia and the city at its foot; hence ‘Nonacrian’.

NÓNES 7th of March, May, July and October; 5th of other months.

NORTH WIND In Latin, Boreas.

NORTHWEST WIND In Latin, Argestes.

NÚMA Second king of Rome (traditional dates: 715–673 bc), a lawmaker, who taught the values of peace; a standard model of old-time virtue, especially ‘piety’.

NUMÁNTIA Town in Spain, the modern Garray.

NUMÍCIUS Stream in Latium (modern Fossa di Pratica), which flowed not far from the town of Lavinium.

NUMÍDIA Region in North Africa, surrounding Carthage on the west and south (now eastern Algeria); hence ‘Numidian’.

NÚMITOR King of Alba Longa, grandfather of Romulus and Remus.

NYMPHS Minor deities associated with streams, fountains, seas, trees, woods and mountains.

NÝSA Place where, according to legend, Dionysus was reared by local nymphs.

OCEAN The great sea that encompasses the known land-masses.

OCEÁNUS A Titan, son of Gaea and Uranus, husband of Tethys, and father of the rivers and nymphs called Oceanids; = ocean.

OCRÉSIA Mother of King Servius.

ODÝSSEUS See ULYSSES.

ÓEBALIDS Descendants of Oebalus, commonly Castor and Pollux.

ÓEBALUS A king of Sparta, father of Tyndareus, and grandfather of Helen; hence ‘Oebalian’.

OENÍDES Male descendant of Oeneus, commonly used of Meleager and Diomedes (grandson of Oeneus); on Diomedes’ founding of Argyripa, see 4.75–6n.

OETÁEAN Of or relating to Oeta, the mountain range between Thessaly and Aetolia, where Heracles was burnt on the pyre; ‘the Oetaean’ = Heracles (Roman Hercules).

ÓLENUS (1) Name of several towns in Greece. (2) Son of Hephaestus/Volcanus; hence ‘Olenian’.

OLÝMPUS Mountain in Thessaly and the highest in Greece, traditionally regarded as the home of the gods or the heavens.

ÓMPHALE Queen of Lydia, with whom Heracles fell in love and for whom he served as a slave, wearing effeminate dress and jewellery and performing women’s duties.

OPS The goddess of plenty, riches and power; wife of Saturnus.

ORÍON Constellation.

ORTÝGIA (1) Island at the entrance to the harbour of Syracuse in Sicily. (2) An early name for the island of Delos in the Aegaean.

ÓSSA High mountain in Thessaly; it was piled on Pelion by the Giants to assault Mount Olympus.

OTHRÝADES The only survivor of the Spartans in the fight between Sparta and Argos.

PACHÝNUS The south-east promontory of Sicily (modern Capo Passaro).

PACIFIC Relating to Peace, especially the Altar of Peace.

PÁEAN Another name for Apollo, as god of healing (see 4.263–4n.).

PAELÍGNIAN Of or relating to the Paeligni, speakers of an Italic language similar to Oscan and inhabitants of the area of central Italy east of Rome, the chief town of which was Sulmo (modern Sulmona), where Ovid was born.

PAGASÉAN Of or relating to Pagasae, a port city of Thessaly; sometimes = ‘Thessalian’.

PALÁEMON Greek sea deity, originally Melicertes son of Ino, with whom in a fit of madness she jumped into the sea at Corinth; identified with the Roman harbour god, Portunus.

PÁLATINE One of the seven hills of Rome: it overlooked the Roman Forum and was the site of the main imperial residence (hence ‘palace’) from Augustus onwards. Also on the Palatine were the temple of Apollo and its libraries, the house of Romulus and the temple of Magna Mater, the Great Mother.

PÁLES Country goddess (or god) who protected herds and flocks and whose festival was the Parilia (April 21).

PALESTINE A country in Syria.

PALLÁDIUM Wooden image of Pallas Athena, captured from the Trojans in the Trojan War (see 6.433–5n.). At Rome, it was kept in the temple of Vesta.

PALLÁNTIAN Of Pallantium, a town in Arcadia where Evander was born.

PALLÁNTIS Another name for Eos (Roman Aurora), the dawn goddess. She is literally ‘the daughter of Pallas’, who is himself the son of the Titans Crius and Eurybia (see Hesiod Th. 375–6). According to Hesiod (Th. 371–4), however, Eos is the daughter of the Titans Hyperion and Theia.

PÁLLAS (1) Evander’s son who was placed under Aeneas’ tutelage, killed by Turnus and avenged by Aeneas. (2) A title of Minerva (Greek Athena): see 2.89n. (3) Father of the dawn goddess; see 4.373n. See also MINERVA.

PAN Greek god of woods and shepherds, protector of sheep, inventor of the shepherd’s pipe (syrinx) consisting of several reeds of different lengths. Native to mountainous Arcadia, and often regarded as the son of the Arcadian god Hermes. He carries a lagobolon (Greek, a stick for catching hares), being also a hunting god, but associated only with small game. Sometimes identified with Roman Faunus or Silvanus. The plural, ‘Pans’, denotes minor woodland deities.

PANGÁEA Mountain in Thrace.

PÁNOPE A Nereid, i.e. one of the nymph daughters of the sea deity, Nereus.

PANTÁGIAS A small river in the eastern part of Sicily.

PÁRCAE Another name for the three Moirai or Fates. See FATES.

PARENTÁLIA Festival honouring familial dead.

PARÍLIA Festival of Pales, held on April 21; see 4.721–2n.

PÁRIS Trojan hero, son of Priam. After judging the beauty contest between Athena, Hera and Aphrodite, his abduction of Helen precipitated the Trojan War.

PARRHÁSIA Small town of Arcadia in southern Greece from where Evander led his people to settle what was later to be the site of Rome; hence ‘Parrhasian’. Often used metonymically for ‘Arcadia’. On ‘Parrhasian stars’, see 4.577–80n.

PÁRTHIA Unconquered kingdom on the Romanfrontiers of Asia; perceived as a constant military threat, the Parthians figured frequently in Roman historical poetry.

PATRÓCLUS Greek hero, companion, attendant and close friend of Achilles in Homer’s Iliad.

PATÚLCIUS Another name for Janus, after the Latin for ‘open’ (pateo).

PAX ‘Peace’, Roman goddess imaged on coinage as a young woman with a cornucopia in her right hand and the staff of Mercury or an olive branch in her left. See ARA PACIS.

PÉGASUS Winged horse of Bellerophon; a blow of its hoof uncovered the spring Hippocrene, sacred to the Muses.

PELÁSGIAN Of the Pelasgi, the ancient native population of the Aegean; commonly = ‘Greek’.

PÉLEUS Father of Achilles and husband of the sea goddess Thetis.

PÉLION Mountain in Thessaly, home of the centaur, Chiron.

PÉLOPID Descendants of Pelops.

PÉLOPONNESE The southern part of Greece, named after Pelops who settled there.

PÉLOPS Son of Tantalus, he was slain and his flesh cooked by his father as a dish for the gods, whereupon he was restored to life by Zeus, who gave him an ivory shoulder in place of the one eaten by Demeter. His children were Atreus and Thyestes. The southern part of Greece (the Peloponnese, ‘the island of Pelops’) was named after him.

PELÓRIAS A promontory at the north-east end of Sicily.

PENÁTES Gods of the inner reaches of the house, technically of the store-cupboard; used by metonymy for the house itself.

PÉNTHEUS King of Thebes; in resisting the Bacchic religion, he was induced by the god to put on female clothing and was torn to pieces by his mother Agave and her fellow Bacchantes.

PERÉNNA See ANNA PERENNA.

PÉRGAMUM Ancient Greek kingdom in Asia Minor; sometimes = ‘Troy’.

PERSÉPHONE See PROSERPINA.

PERSIA The country on the Persian gulf between Carmania, Media, and Susiana.

PHÁEDRA Daughter of King Minos of Crete and Pasiphaë; wife of Theseus. For her love for her stepson, Hippolytus, and its tragic consequences, see 6.737–45n.

PHÁËTHON Hero who was permitted to drive the chariot of his father, the Sun, but was unable to control the reins. To prevent the earth from being incinerated, Jupiter struck him with his thunderbolts and he fell to his death in the river Po (Eridanus).

PHÁRIAN Of or relating to Pharos, an island near Alexandria in Egypt, famous for its lighthouse. Often = ‘Egyptian’. The ‘Pharian heifer’ is Io.

PHÁSIS River in Colchis, a kingdom in Asia, south-east of the Black Sea; hence ‘Phasian’.

PHILÍPPI City in Macedonia famous for the battle (42 bc) in which the assassins of Julius Caesar, Brutus and Cassius, were defeated by Mark Antony and Octavian.

PHILÍPPUS (1) Lucius Marcius Philippus the younger, suffect consul 38 bc; husband of Atia and father of Marcia. (2) Lucius Marcius Philippus the elder, consul 56 bc; father of Lucius Marcius Philippus the younger.

PHÍLYRA Oceanid mother of the centaur Chiron.

PHÍNEUS Blind prophet-king of Thrace, who was harassed by the Harpies.

PHÓCUS Son of Aeacus, who was killed by his brother Peleus.

PHÓEBE (1) Feminine equivalent of Phoebus, hence name of his sister Artemis and often used of the moon with which Artemis (and Diana) were sometimes identified. (2) Daughter of Leucippus and sister of Hilaeira.

PHÓEBUS ‘Bright One’, another name for Apollo, as god of the sun; often used by Ovid to mean ‘the sun’.

PHOENÍCIA A country of Syria; its principal cities were Tyre and Sidon; hence ‘Phoenicians’.

PHÓLOE A mountain in Arcadia.

PHRÍXUS Son of Athamas and Nephele, who escaped on a ram with a golden fleece to Colchis, where he sacrificed the ram and married Chalciope, daughter of the Colchian king, Aeëtes. See HELLE.

PHRÝGIA Region of north-west Asia Minor, often identified with Troy; hence ‘Phrygian’.

PHRYGIAN MOTHER Another name for Cybele.

PÍCUS Old Italian deity with prophetic powers; sometimes identified as the father of Faunus. See 3.291–2n.

PÍËRID (plural PIÉRIDES) Another name for one of the Muses, whose home was sometimes said to be in Pieria, near Mount Olympus.

PIRÁEUS Harbour of Athens.

PISCATÓRII Latin for ‘of the fishermen’.

PÍSCIS or PÍSCES Constellation of the Fish.

PÍSTOR ‘Baker’, cult-title of Jupiter.

PLÁUTIUS Gaius Plautius Venox, censor with Appius Claudius Caecus in 312 BC.

PLEBS The common people or lower class, the plebeians.

PLÉIADES OR PLÉIADS Seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione, pursued fruitlessly by the great hunter, Orion; thence the constellation of the Seven Stars. As daughters of Atlas they are sometimes called ‘Atlantid’ and ‘Atlantean’. See HYADES.

PLÉIONE Mother of the Pleiades.

PLUTO Another name of the Greek deity Hades, brother of Zeus and ruler of the Underworld.

PO Principal river in northern Italy (ancient name Eridanus).

PÓLLUX Roman name of Greek Polydeuces, one of the Dioscuri (Roman Gemini), twin brother of Castor; son of Leda by Zeus.

POLYHÝMNIA The Muse of hymns and pantomime.

POLYÍDUS The seer who restored Glaucus to life.

POMPÍLIUS See NUMA.

PÓRRIMA Title of Carmenta/Carmentis as goddess of prophecy or of childbirth. See 1.631–6n.

PÓRRO Latin for ‘in the past’.

PÓRTA Latin for ‘Gate’, used in Fasti with reference to one of the main gates of the city of Rome.

PÓRTA CAPÉNA One of the main gates of Rome on the Appian Way.

PÓRTA CARMÉNTIS The Carmental Gate at the foot of the Capitol, near the shrine and altar of Carmenta/Carmentis.

PÓRTA FENESTÉLLA Location unknown.

PÓRTICUS LÍVIAE The colonnade built by Augustus on the site bequeathed to him by Vedius Pollio.

PORTÚNUS Roman harbour deity identified with the deified Melicertes and equated with the Greek god Palaemon.

POST Latin for ‘afterward’.

POSTÚMIUS Lucius Postumius Albinus, consul 173 BC. See LAENAS.

PÓSTUMUS Silvius Postumus, son of Iulus.

POSTVÉRTA Title of Carmenta/Carmentis as goddess of prophecy or of childbirth. See 1.631–6n.

PRAENÉSTE A hill town near Rome (the modern Palestrina).

PRÁESTITES Latin for ‘Standguard’, epithet of the Lares.

PRÍAM Famed king of Troy during its war with the Greeks and father of numerous Trojan heroes and heroines including Hector, Paris, Polyxena and Cassandra; his wife was Hecuba. He was slain during the sack of Troy as he sought refuge at the altar of Zeus in his palace. He became a symbol of longevity and tragedy.

PRIÁPUS Ithyphallic god of sexuality and fertility (his symbol was the erect phallus and the sickle); also the protector of gardens, in which his statue, normally of wood, was placed to ward off thieves. He was the subject of many Latin poems and a standard symbol of lust and male potency.

PRÍNCIPES plural of princeps, = ‘first men’, ‘chiefs’.

PRÍNCEPS Latin adjective meaning ‘first’ or ‘chief’. In political contexts in the late republic it denoted ‘first senator’ or ‘first citizen’. Augustus and his successors adopted this title to disguise their own autocracy, often translated as ‘emperor’ in that connection.

PRÓCA An Alban king.

PRÓCNE Wife of Tereus, the Thracian king, to whom she served up his son, Itys, in revenge for the rape of her sister Philomela; she metamorphosed into a swallow.

PRÓCULUS JULIUS Man to whom Romulus presented himself after his disappearance and deification.

PROPÓNTIS Sea of Marmora.

PROSÉRPINA Roman name of Persephone, daughter of Demeter (Roman Ceres) and Zeus. Hades (Roman Dis) seized her as she was gathering flowers in a Sicilian meadow and carried her away to the Underworld to be his wife.

PRÓTEUS Sea god who could change his shape.

PUBLÍCIUS The family name of Lucius and Manlius Publicius Malleolus, who built the Publician road.

PÚNIC Carthaginian.

PYGMÁLION Brother of Dido and Anna.

PYGMY Of the race of dwarves in Ethiopia.

PÝRRHUS King of Epirus, 319–272 BC.

PYTHÁGORAS A Greek philosopher and mathematician, fl. c. 530 bc; he was a vegetarian, believing that souls transmigrated between animal and man in reincarnation.

QRCF See 5.727–8n.

QUINQUÁTRUS Festivals in honour of Minerva, held on March 19–23 and June 13; see 3.809–10n. and 6.651–2n.

QUINTÍLII One of two priestly colleges of Luperci; the other was the Fabii.

QUINTÍLIS Former name for July (= the ‘Fifth Month’).

QÚIRINAL One of Rome’s seven hills.

QUIRINÁLIA Festival in honour of Quirinus held on February 17; see 2.475–80n.

QUIRÍNUS Roman deity, originally associated closely with grain, identified with Romulus; often used by Ovid as an alternative name for Romulus.

QUIRÍTES Roman citizens in their civil, non-military aspect. See 2.475–80n.

RAM Constellation Aries.

RÁMNES One of the three Romulean ‘tribes’.

REGIFÚGIUM Literally ‘Flight of the King’, an obscure festival under the patronage of Jupiter held on February 24; see 2.685–6n.

REGÍNA ‘Queen’, cult-title of Juno; see 6.37n.

RÉMULUS Grandson of Tiberinus, an Alban king.

RÉMUS Twin brother of Romulus, killed either by Romulus or Romulus’ assistant, Celer, during the construction of the walls of Rome.

REVERENCE Latin Reverentia, allegorical divine mother of MAIÉstas.

RHÉA Titan and wife of Cronus, mother of the Olympian gods; equated with Roman Ops and with Cybele.

RHÉA SÍLVIA See SILVIA.

RHINE River which divided Gaul from Germany.

RHÓDOPE Mountain (range) in Thrace.

RHOETÉUM Small town in the Troad.

RHONE River in Gaul.

ROBIGÁLIA Festival of Robigo held on April 25; see 4.907n.

ROBÍGO ‘Rust’, god of grain-rust; see 4.907n.

ROCK Name given to the peak of the Aventine Hill.

RÓMULUS Mythical founder, first king of Rome; said to have founded Rome on 21 April 753 BC.

RÚMINAL A fig tree on the Lupercal.

RUTÍLIUS Publius Rutilius Lupus, consul 90 bc; killed on the banks of the Tolenus river during the Social War, fighting against Vettius Scato and the Marsi.

RUTÚLIAN Belonging to the Rutuli, the Latin nation of Turnus, which dwelt south of Rome.

SÁBINES People just north-east of Rome who were the first to be absorbed into the Roman state, their women being taken forcibly as wives by the men of Rome (the ‘Sabine Rape’). The women became symbols of old-fashioned hardiness and chastity. The ‘Sabine plant’ is a type of juniper.

SACRED KING See KING-PRIEST.

SAGARÍTIS Nymph with whom Attis was involved.

SÁLII A college of priests at Rome dedicated by Numa to the service of Mars. With songs and dance, and bearing the sacred shields, they made solemn processions annually throughout Rome. See 3.809–10n. See also ANCILE and MAMURIUS.

SÁLTUS Latin for ‘dance’ or ‘leaping’.

SÁLUS ROMÁNA ‘Roman Safety’, goddess of the health and safety of the Roman people with a temple on the Quirinal Hill.

SÁMOS Island off the west coast of Asia Minor; hence ‘Samian’.

SÁNCUS See FIDIUS.

SAPÁEANS Thracian tribe.

SARDÍNIA Island in the Mediterranean Sea.

SATÚRNIA Another name for Juno, daughter of Saturnus; hence ‘Saturnian’.

SATÚRNUS An early Italian god of agriculture, who was later identified with the Greek Cronus; hence the father of Jupiter and Juno and the ruler of heaven before Jupiter; mythical king of Italy during the Golden Age (= ‘Saturnus’ Age’, ‘Saturnian Age’).

SÁTYR Lecherous male spirit of the wilderness, labelled by Hesiod as ‘worthless and mischievous’. Satyrswererepresentedas men withequinefeatures (such as a horse’s tail) or, especially later, caprine (with a goat’s horns, ears, hind legs and tail); they were frequent companions of Bacchus.

SCÓRPIOS Constellation of the Scorpion.

SCÝLLA Famous rock opposite Charybdis between Italy and Sicily, inhabited by a sea-monster (daughter of Phorcys) of the same name, who preyed on sailors passing through the Sicilian straits; see 4.499–500n.

SCÝTHIA Area in northern Europe and Asia stretching from the Black Sea and inhabited by nomadic tribes; hence ‘Scythian’, ‘Scythic’.

SÉMELE Daughter of Cadmus, founder of Thebes and mother of Dionysus by Zeus, who in response to Semele’s request to visit her in all his might entered her as a thunderbolt and killed her. The fatal intercourse was contrived by Hera.

SÉMO See FIDIUS.

SENATE Deliberative body made up of ex-magistrates (= the ‘Fathers’).

SÉRVIUS Servius Tullius, normally regarded as the sixth king of Rome, but according to Ovid the seventh (see 6.624n.); he founded the temple of Mater Matuta and the temple of Fortune.

SHAME In Latin, Pudor.

SÍBYL Female prophetess, variously located. The most famous was the Cumaean Sibyl, who inhabited a cave at Cumae from the time of Aeneas. Apollo granted her request for immortality, but, when she spurned his advances, he refused to grant her eternal youth, after which she withered away in old age. The Sibylline Books, containing prophecies relevant to Rome, were kept in the temple of Apollo on the Palatine and consulted in times of national crisis.

SICILY Large triangular island by the toe of Italy; it was colonized by the Greeks.

SIDÓNIAN Of or relating to Sidon, the ancient Phoenician city.

SIGÉAN Of or relating to Sigeum.

SIGÉUM Town and promontory in the Troad; hence ‘Sigean’.

SILÉNUS Chief satyr, and companion and teacher of Bacchus. He is often represented as a fat, bald, jolly old man with large ears and a pug nose; see further 1.399n.

SÍLVIA Rhea Silvia, mother of Romulus and Remus; also called Ilia.

SÍLVIUS Silvius Postumus, king of Alba, son of Iulus.

SÍRIUS The ‘Dog-Star’, the brightest star in the constellation of Canis Major, ‘Greater Dog’.

SÍSYPHUS Mythic king of Corinth, who was able through trickery to overcome death. For this he was eventually condemned in the Underworld to the eternal torment of pushing a large rock uphill, only to have it roll down again.

SITHÓNIAN Of or relating to the Sithonii, a Thracian people.

SMÍNTHEUS Cult-title of Apollo, who destroyed a plague of mice. Probably from a Greek word for ‘mouse’.

SÓLIMUS Companion of Aeneas, founder of Sulmo, Ovid’s birthplace.

SÓSPITA Latin for ‘Saviour’; cult-title of Juno.

SOUTH WIND In Latin, Auster.

SOWING DAY In Latin, Feriae Sementivae; an agricultural festival in honour of Ceres and Tellus (Earth).

SPÁRTA Important Greek state in southern Peloponnese, famous for its military strength and the martial qualities of its citizens. It was once ruled by Menelaus and his wife Helen; hence ‘Spartan’.

STAFF-BEARER Title of Mercury whose symbol was the staff.

STÁTOR Cult-title of Jupiter, the ‘Stayer’, who stayed the rout of the Roman people in a battle with the Sabines. The temple vowed and allegedly ‘founded’ by Romulus at the foot of the Palatine was not actually built until 294 bc; see 6.793–4n.

STÉROPE One of the Pleiades.

STÍMULA Ancient Roman goddess whose grove was situated near the Tiber.

STÝGIAN Often used to mean ‘of the Underworld’, after its main river, the Styx. ‘Stygian Jove’ is Pluto.

STYMPHÁLUS Lake in Arcadia; hence ‘Stymphalian’.

STYX Chief river of the Underworld. By it the gods swore their ‘greatest and most dread oath’; hence ‘Stygian’.

SÚLLA Lucius Cornelius Sulla, 131–78 BC; famous Roman general and dictator; he restored the temple of Hercules the Guardian.

SÚLMO Latin, Sulmona, Ovid’s birthplace, 90 miles (about 150 kilometres) north-west of Rome.

SUMMÁNUS Obscure god of nocturnal lightning, identified apparently with Jupiter; see 6.731–2n.

SUN In Latin, Sol, in Greek, Helios; as Phoebus and Cynthius he is identified with Apollo.

SÚNIUM Promontory in southern Attica.

SUPÉRBUS See TARQUINIUS (1).

SYMÁETHUS Largest river in Sicily.

SÝPHAX Numidian prince, ally of the Carthaginians, who was defeated by Masinissa and Scipio Africanus in 203 BC.

SÝRACUSE Chief city in Sicily; hence ‘Syracusan’.

SÝRIA Region of south-west Asia on the Mediterranean Sea; hence ‘Syrian’.

SÝRTES Greater and Lesser, treacherous shoals off the coast of North Africa, in what is now the Gulf of Sidra.

TÁCITA ‘The Silent Goddess’, whom Ovid identifies with the mother of the public Lares. See MUTA.

TÁENARUM A peninsula and its cape in Laconia; commonly identified with Tartarus as there was supposed to be a mouth of hell there. ‘Taenarian dell’ = ‘Hades’.

TÁNAQUIL Prophetic Etruscan wife of Tarquinius Priscus, the fifth king of Rome ( c. 600 bc).

TÁNTALID (plural TANTÁLIDES) Descendant of Tantalus son of Zeus and father of Pelops; epithet of Atreus, Thyestes and Agamemnon.

TÁNTALUS Son of Zeus, condemned to eternal hunger and thirst for serving his son Pelops to the gods at a feast; water and hanging fruit would withdraw from his grasp as he reached for them.

TARÉNTUM Greek town on the ‘heel’ of Italy (Calabria); well known as one of the ancient world’s fleshpots.

TARPÉIA Daughter of a Roman general, she betrayed the citadel to the Sabines. She was buried and commemorated on the Capitol, to which ‘Tarpeian’ or ‘Tarpeian heights’ often refers. From the ‘Tarpeian Rock’ on the Capitol criminals were thrown.

TARQUÍNIUS (1) Tarquinius Superbus, ‘the Proud’; Etruscan (and last) king of Rome; expelled in 510 BC.(2) Sextus Tarquin (‘Young Tarquinius’), son of Tarquinius Superbus; his rape of Lucretia would bring an end to the Roman monarchy.

TÁRTARUS Bottommost pit of hell; the Underworld’s grimmest part, where the wicked were consigned for punishment. Generally, the Underworld; see 3.620n.

TÁTIUS Titus Tatius, Sabine king at the time of the Rape of the Sabine Women and subsequent co-ruler of Rome with Romulus; another standard model of old-fashioned virtue.

TAURÓMENUM A town in the north-east part of Sicily (the modern Taormina).

TÁURUS Constellation of the Bull.

TAÝGETE One of the Pleiades.

TEGÉA An ancient town in Arcadia; hence ‘Tegean’. The ‘Tegean Mother’ is Carmenta.

TELÉGONUS Son of Odysseus (Roman Ulysses) and Circe; legendary founder of Tusculum.

TÉLLUS The Roman earth goddess; her official title used in Roman civic cult. At Rome a statue of Ceres stood outside her temple.

TÉMESAN Of or relating to Temesus, a town in the territory of the Bruttii, where there were copper mines.

TÉMPE A gorge in Thessaly, known for its beauty; often used generically for a beautiful valley.

TEMPÉSTAS (plural TEMPESTÁTES) ‘Tempest’. There was a temple to the Roman goddesses of storm, Tempestates, outside the Porta Capena in Rome. It was vowed in 259 BC after the Roman fleet survived a storm off Corsica.

TÉNEDOS Island in the Aegean just off the coast of the Troad.

TÉREUS Mythical Thracian king, married to Procne, whose sister Philomela he raped, tearing out her tongue. He was turned into a hoopoe, the sisters into a nightingale (Philomela) and swallow (Procne).

TERMINÁLIA Festival on February 23 honouring Terminus; see 2.639–42n.

TÉRMINUS God of boundaries.

TÉTHYS A Titan, wife of Oceanus; in general, the sea.

THÁLIA The Muse of comedy and pastoral; sometimes of lyric poetry.

THÁPSUS (1) Site of battle in north Africa, in which Caesar defeated King Juba and Caecilius Scipio; one of the four main battles of the civil war. (2) City in Sicily.

THÉBES Greek city, capital of Boeotia, founded by Cadmus; hence ‘Theban’.

THÉMIS Greek goddess, daughter of Gaea (‘Earth’) and Uranus (‘Sky’), and the second wife of Zeus, according to Hesiod (Th. 135, 901–6). She is a prophetic goddess, affiliated with the Delphic oracle prior to Apollo, and had provided nourishment for both Zeus and Apollo when they were infants. She prepared the banquets of the Olympian deities, and is associated with order and justice.

THERAPNÉAN Of Therapnae, a small town in Laconia near Sparta.

THÉSEUS Fabled king of Athens, son of Aegeus or Poseidon, husband of Ariadne and later Phaedra, father of Hippolytus by the Amazon Antiope (or Hippolyte). Famous for his slaying of the Minotaur and subsequent escape from the Labyrinth, and for his fatal cursing of his son. See 6.737–45n.

THÉSSALY Large district of northern Greece, famous for its heroes and horses.

THESTÍADES Meleager, son of Oeneus, king of Calydon, by Althaea, daughter of Thestius.

THRACE Territory stretching from the Danube to the Hellespont (Dardanelles) and from Byzantium (Istanbul) to the Strymon river; its tribes were regarded as wild and primitive. It was especially associated with the worship of Dionysus/Bacchus. Adjective: ‘Thracian’.

THUNDERER In Latin, Tonans; Jupiter or Jove, the Roman sky god, whose symbol was the thunderbolt. Augustus dedicated a temple to Jupiter Tonans on the Capitoline on 1 September 22 BC. The ‘Thunderer’s Spouse’ is Juno.

THYÍADES Bacchantes, frenzied female followers of the god Bacchus.

THYÓNE One of the Hyades.

THÝREAN Of Thyrea, region of the Peloponnese, the possession of which was contested by the Argives and Lacedaemonians (see 2.663–6n.).

TÍBER River that flows through the city of Rome.

TIBERÍNID Of or belonging to the Tiber.

TIBERÍNUS Alban king, descendant of Iulus.

TIBER’S HALL The name given to the bend in the river Tiber.

TÍBUR Ancient hill town of Latium, on the Via Valeria 15 miles (24 kilometres) east of Rome, a favourite retreat from the hot Roman summers.

TIMES Latin, Tempora, the opening word of Fasti and its alternative title; its meaning is slightly broader than the English ‘Times’ and denotes ‘seasons’ as well as ‘times’; also, in appropriate context, the ‘temples’ of the head.

TÍRYNS Town in north-east Peloponnese; residence of Hercules; hence ‘Tirynthian’.

TÍITAN Son of Hyperion, the Sun god; often = ‘the sun’.

TÍITANS Generation of gods ruled by Cronus, who were forcibly replaced by Zeus and the Olympians.

TITHÓNIA Dawn, wife of Tithonus.

TITHÓNUS Trojan prince loved by the goddess of the dawn (Greek Eos, Roman Aurora), who became his wife. He was granted immortality without youth and became a symbol of decrepit old age.

TITIÉNSES One of the three ‘tribes’ established by Romulus.

TMÓLUS Mountain in Lydia, famous for the vineyards on its slopes.

TÓGA PÍCTA The gown worn by a victorious Roman general in his triumphal procession.

TOLÉNUS River where Rutilius was defeated and killed.

TRÁSIMENE A lake in Etruria and site of a battle in the second Punic War (217 BC), in which the Roman army was annihilated by Hannibal; see 6.763–8n.

TRICRÉNE Mountain in Arcadia.

TRINÁCRIS Another name for Sicily; hence ‘Trinacrian’. See 4.419–20n.

TRIPTÓLEMUS Culture hero associated with Eleusis near Athens. He was taught the arts of agriculture by the goddess Demeter (Roman Ceres) and passed them on to mankind.

TRITÓNIA Another name for Minerva; see 6.655n.

TRÍVIA Another name for Hecate or Diana, as goddess of the crossroads (‘where three ways meet’); see further 1.389–90n.

TRÓAD Mountainous north-west corner of Anatolia, believed by the ancients to have been ruled in earlier times by the city of Troy.

TRÓEZEN Town at the end of the Argolid peninsula in the Peloponnese; birthplace of Theseus.

TROJAN Of or relating to Troy.

TROS Eponymous ancestor of the Trojans, Troy; so ultimately an ancestor of Aeneas.

TROY Celebrated city in north-western Asia Minor, plundered and destroyed by the Greeks. Aeneas escaped to establish a new race in Italy and a reborn Troy.

TUBÉRTUS Aulus Postumius Tubertus, who celebrated a triumph over the Aequi and Volsci in 431 BC.

TUBILÚSTRIA Festivals in which trumpets were purified, held on March 23, May 23 and other days; see 3.849–50n. and 5.725–6n.

TÚLLIUS See SERVIUS.

TÚRNUS Youthful king of the Rutuli, who made war on Aeneas, his rival for the love of Lavinia, and was slain by him.

TÚSCAN Etruscan.

TÚSCULUM Ancient town of Latium, in the Alban hills, 15 miles (24 kilometres) south-east of Rome, near modern Frascati; hence ‘Tusculan’.

TÝCHIUS Leatherworker who made Ajax’ shield and was said to have invented the art of shoe-making.

TÝDEUS Heroic warrior and prince of Calydonia, one of the ‘Seven against Thebes’, the heroes who stormed the city.

TÝNDARID Male descendant of Tyndareus, i.e. Castor and Pollux.

TYPHÓEUS Primeval monster or giant, who struggled for supremacy with Zeus, but was subdued by the latter’s lightning bolts and buried under Mount Etna in Sicily.

TÝPHON Another name for Typhoeus.

TYRE Major maritime and commercial city of Phoenicia, famous for finely woven fabrics of silk or linen and for purple dye; hence ‘Tyrian’.

TYRRHÉNIA Etruria, country of the Tyrrhenians, a Pelasgian people who (according to some authors) migrated to Italy under the leadership of a Lydian prince named Tyrrhenus and formed the parent stock of the Etruscans; hence ‘Tyrrhenian’, ‘Tyrrhene’ = ‘Etruscan’.

ÚLTOR ‘Avenger’, see MARS.

ULÝSSES Roman name for Greek Odysseus, king of Ithaca who was pre-eminent among the Greek heroes at Troy for his cunning and eloquence. Through the device of the Wooden Horse he contrived Troy’s fall.

URÁNIA The Muse of astronomy.

ÚRSA Constellation of the Bear or Arctos.

VACÚNA Sabine goddess worshipped on June 9, identified by the Romans with Victory or Bellona, among other deities.

VÉDJOVIS A god to whom a temple was dedicated on the Capitoline in 192 BC. See 3.445–8n.

VEGRÁNDIA Latin for ‘undersized, puny’.

VÉII Important Etruscan city north of Rome; captured by Camillus in 396 bc; hence ‘Veientine’.

VELÁBRUM Valley between the Palatine and Capitoline.

VENERÁLIA Festival of Venus held on April 1; see 4.133–4n.

VÉNUS Roman goddess of sexual love (corresponding to the Greek Aphrodite), mother of Aeneas (by Anchises) and Cupid; wife of Volcanus, and protectress of Rome. The emperor Augustus and the Julian family claimed descent from her through Aeneas’ son, Iulus. Cult-titles are ‘Erycina’, ‘Cytherea’, ‘Verticordia’ (‘Heart Changer’).

VERTÚMNUS Etruscan god.

VÉSCA Latin for ‘thin’, ‘small’.

VÉSTA Roman goddess of the hearth and of the city; her cult, with the care of the undying flame, was served by the Vestal Virgins. Vesta’s temple and house, in which the Vestals resided, were in the Roman Forum.

VÉSTAL Pertaining or belonging to the Vestal Virgins who guarded the sacred fire that burned in the temple of Vesta.

VESTÁLIA Festival in honour of Vesta held on June 9; see 6.249–50n.

VÍA NÓVA Latin for ‘New Street’. This old road ran from the Porta Mugonia (the gate of the Palatine) along the north slope of the Palatine. From it a staircase led down to the Velabrum.

VÍCTOR Epithet and cult-title of Jupiter.

VÍCUS SCELERÁTUS Latin for ‘Sin Street’, so named because Tullia drove a chariot over her dead father, Servius, there.

VINÁLIA Wine festival on April 23; see 4.863–4n.

VINDÉMITOR Constellation of the Grape-Gatherer.

VINE -PLANTER Title of Bacchus.

VÍRBIUS Italian deity worshipped at Aricia; he was identified with the Greek hero Hippolytus.

VOLCÁNUS ‘Vulcan’, archaic Roman god of fire, with his own Flamen; later identified with Greek Hephaestus, husbandof Aphrodite; see 5.725–6n.

VÓLSCI Tribe of Latium in central Italy, conquered by the Romans in the 5th century BC.

WEST WIND In Latin, Zephyrus; he raped and married the goddess Flora.

ZÁNCLE Another name for Messana, a city on the north-east coast of Sicily; hence ‘Zanclaean’.

ZE`PHYR OR ZE`PHYRUS West wind and husband of Flora.