Ovid: Fasti Book 3

Presents a clear and detailed guide to a central book of the Fasti, Ovid's account of Rome and its calendar.

S. J. Heyworth (Edited by)

9781107016477, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 May 2019

296 pages
22.3 x 14.3 x 2 cm, 0.47 kg

'This is a truly excellent commentary. It is both informative for a dip-in reader and eminently readable for those approaching the text and commentary in linear fashion … It is exemplary in terms of its scholarly focus, conciseness, and attention to a variety of different readers of the poem.' Steven J. Green, Exemplaria Classica

Ovid is now firmly established as a central figure in the Latin poetic canon, and his Fasti is his most complex elegy. Drafted alongside the Metamorphoses before the poet's exile, it was only published after the death of Augustus, and involves a wide range of myth, Roman history, religion, astronomy and explication of the calendar. In its aetiology and conversations with gods, it is a Latin equivalent of Callimachus' Aetia. This invaluable new commentary on a central book of the poem explores Ovid's playful inversion of genre, his witty but challenging style of Latin, his use of the elegiac couplet, intertextuality and much more. With a comprehensive introduction providing key background for students and instructors, this guide to Book 3, the first in English for nearly a century, makes use of the latest scholarly research to illuminate Ovid's wide-ranging and amusing account of Roman life.

Preface
Introduction
1. Ovid's life and career
2. Fasti and Metamorphoses
3. Fasti and exile
4. Fasti and calendars
5. Book 3
6. Genre
7. Text
P. Ovidi Nasonis Fastorvm Liber Tertivs
Commentary.

Subject Areas: Classical history / classical civilisation [HBLA1], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Literature: history & criticism [DS]