Ovid

Roger Woodard

Anthony Boyle

One of the fullest and most enjoyable sources of information on Roman myth and religion, the Fasti is both a calendar of daily rituals and a witty sequence of stories recounted in a variety of styles and genres, comic, tragic, elegiac, epic and erotic. Yet many of them contain uncomfortable political echoes. Augustus tried to control his subjects by imposing his own version of history and annual cycle of festivals on them, but Ovid - banished to the Black Sea - brilliantly debunks the official heroes and power structures. (After celebrating the emperor as a Jupiter-on-earth, for example, he deliberately juxtaposes a story showing the king of gods as a savage rapist.) Endlessly playful, this is also a work of real integrity and courage, a superb climax to the career of one of Rome's greatest writers.

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