Ovid, Aratus and Augustus
Astronomy in Ovid's Fasti

The astronomical material in Ovid's Fasti has been overlooked. It is this material which is the subject of this book.

Emma Gee (Author)

9780521101776, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 18 December 2008

240 pages, 5 b/w illus.
21.6 x 14 x 1.4 cm, 0.31 kg

"The book's editorirla work is generally excellent....The principal merit of G.'s study is that it provides a detailed and thoughtful analysis of Aratus' astropoetic and Augustus' propagandistic influence on Ovid's Fasti....(The book) deserves a place especially on the shelves of those interested in the Fasti and in the Nachleben of Aratus." Classical Bulletin

The astronomical material in Ovid's Fasti has been overlooked by the current trend of scholarly interest in the poem. It is this material which is the subject of this book. The author does not study Ovid's stars using the techniques of mathematical astronomy. Rather she aims to combine the methodology of recent 'programmatic' or genre-based readings with a broad cultural perspective. Arguing that the stars serve to align the Fasti with hexameter didactic poetry, she first tests the assumption that the Fasti is influenced by the Phaenomena of Aratus. A second task is to assess the value of such writing in Augustan Rome: the Fasti and its Aratean model may be removed from the literary-historical sphere and placed in the political setting of the later Augustan Principate, in which the stars had been appropriated to express the powerful connection between the Julian family and the cosmos.

Introduction
1. Calendrical astronomy?
2. Astronomy and genre
3. Verse and universe in Aratus' Phaenomena
4. Vesta and the architecture of the Fasti
5. Roman Aratus
6. The metamorphosis of time
Epilogue
Appendices
Bibliography
Indexes.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB]