Michigan (2016) h/b 220pp £56.26 (ISBN 9780472130047)
As the title indicates, the author focusses on the ‘calendar girls’ in Ovid’s Fasti. The goal is to see how this long-marginalised group of characters contributes to the poem, (Ovidian experiments with) the genre of elegy, and contemporary discourses. In particular, C. reads Ovid’s women against the backdrop of parallel episodes in Livy’s Ab urbe condita (Ch. 1) and Vergil’s Aeneid (Ch. 2), but also against the figure of Augustus himself (Ch. 3) and Ovid’s other elegiac/elegiacizing output (Ch. 4). The result is a fast-paced series of close readings of figures such as Anna Perenna (and her namesakes), Carmentis, Vesta, and of course Livia.
The Introduction goes through the motions of summarizing Ovid’s life and career and explaining the workings of ancient fasti, while skating over some controversies. Most notably the phrase carmen et error, ‘a poem and a mistake’ (Tristia 2.207), which Ovid gives as reason for his relegation to Tomis, is hotly debated: while the Ars Amatoria is (almost) universally accepted as the carmen, the error is not so easily defined (an illicit relationship with someone in the Augustan household, something else?). As the author points out, we think we know more about Ovid than about any other poet, but that is mostly from what he chooses to tell us—and that is always tricky. Yet, C. on this occasion decides to take the poet at his word and believes that the relegation is real. Possibly, but there are other explanations which also have merit.
The meat of the book, of course, is the four central chapters. By clustering the close readings from the Fasti around their foil or intertext (Livy, Vergil, Augustus, Ovid) instead of by figure discussed, the narrative of C.’s book becomes as disjointed as that of the Fasti itself. This is not a criticism: since Ovid consciously chose this form, it is worth investigating how a similarly fragmented reading of the poem influences our interpretation of it. This fragmentation, moreover, is enhanced by the poet’s revelling in multiple aetiologies and/or etymologies for the same custom/month/god.
One example will stand for many. When Ovid discusses the feast of Anna Perenna (Fasti 3.523-544: 15 March), he acknowledges that there are competing accounts for the person behind the festival. The first extended story (3.545-656) openly takes on the Aeneid and within the framework of Ovid’s religious calendar is designed to make the reader wonder how pius Aeneas really was. It tells how Anna, sister of the Carthaginian queen Dido, arrives in Italy after Aeneas. There, a rivalry develops between Anna and Aeneas’ wife Lavinia (a Latin ersatz-Dido). Suspecting foul play, Anna escapes; she is eventually swept away by the river Numicius and becomes one of his nymphs. A little further down, Ovid offers the story of the elderly Anna of Bovillae (3.661-696) which ties in with another account of Roman history sanctioned by Augustus, Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita. During the secessio plebis to the Mons Sacer in 494 BC (a famous episode in the Conflict of the Orders, described by Livy in AUC 2.32-33), the starved people are fed by the libae or cakes of the baker Anna. As a reward for doing her civic duty, she received a statue—an almost unique honour for women. As C. points out, Anna’s fame resides not in her reconciling the orders (as the patrician Menenius Agrippa did), but in her supporting the plebs.
In the final chapter, C. stresses that Ovid demands the active participation of the reader in making sense of the calendar and the various causae connected to it: a reader is encouraged to work just as hard (harder?) than the operosus vates (Fasti 1.101) himself to connect the dots. Returning to the example of Anna Perenna, the juxtaposition of the extended narratives leads a reader to compare them, to look for similarities and differences, to weigh the probability of the one versus the other, and to choose—or not.
For instance, one might be tempted to prefer the ‘plebeian’ version, which already seems foreshadowed in the introduction to the feast (525: plebs venit). On the other hand, though Aeneas is hardly a plebeian, his descendants claimed to be champions of the people. Moreover, just as Ovid’s people ‘fled’ to the Mons Sacer (3.663-664: plebs … fugit), so too Aeneas in Vergil’s epic is a refugee of sorts (almost from the word go: Aen. 1.2: fato profugus). Furthermore, what does Ovid’s seamless transition into the murder of Julius Caesar (3.697-710), which ominously took place on the same day as Anna’s festival, mean for our interpretation? Is the euphemic praeteritio with which Ovid passes over the killing of Caesar genuine respect or not? Which women are we to think of as playing a role (whether for good or bad) in Caesar’s final days? And, if old causae are relevant to present-day feasting, what does this predict for the new Caesar?
The book’s closest analogue is perhaps A. Barchiesi’s The Poet and the Prince: Ovid and Augustan Discourse (California, 1997). C. writes engagingly, with appropriate touches of wit. Hers is a book, therefore, not unlike the Fasti itself, and one that can sit happily on the shelf next to A. Keith’s Gendering Rome: Women in Latin Epic (Cambridge, 2000). Judiciously turning the spotlight onto the women of the Fasti, C. succeeds in bringing out the complexities of (reading) the poem, even if one sometimes feels more could have been done to engage with Augustan-age ideologies. On the whole, the book is well-produced, save for some fading and streaks on pp. 137 and 140 of my copy and the accidental antedating of S. Hinds’ Allusion and Intertext (Cambridge, 1998) to 1988 in the footnotes and bibliography. A wonderfully full and oecumenical bibliography, index locorum, and general index complete the book.
Gary Vos