Ovid’s Women of the Year: Narratives of Roman Identity in the Fasti

Roman love-poet Ovid, best known for the epic Metamorphoses, offersin his Fasti the self-proclaimed goal of exploring and explicating theRoman calendar. Published in his maturity circa 14 CE, the Fasti presentsclaims of aetiological, astronomical, and even antiquarian interests,but more importantly the poem highlights an extraordinary prominenceof female characters at work, play, and worship in its verses. Fromflirtatious goddesses to talkative old women, beautiful puellae to sternprophetesses and beyond, Ovid’s calendar girls appear in a vast andkaleidoscopic array of guises and narratives, importing and transformingliterary genre and expectation alike in a poem that already in shape andpurpose is unique in Latin literature. The poet’s long-standing fascinationwith female figures that had first appeared in his earliest work and thenaccompanied him throughout his career now resurfaces in a much morecomplex form.

Of interest to literary scholars, antiquarians, and those studying thesocial and political roles of ancient women, Ovid’s Women of the Yearoffers an intriguing view of an Ovidian poem now coming into its own.