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

"Vivam" is the very last word of Ovid's masterpiece, the Metamorphoses: "I shall live." If we're still reading it two millennia after Ovid's death, this is by definition a remarkably accurate prophecy. Ovid was not the only ancient author with aspirations to be read for eternity, but no poet of the Greco-Roman world has had a deeper or more lasting impact on subsequent literature and art than he can claim. In the present day no Greek or Roman poet is as accessible, to artists, writers, or the general reader: Ovid's voice remains a compellingly contemporary one, as modern as it seemed to his contemporaries in Augustan Rome. But Ovid was also a man of his time, his own story fatally entwined with that of the first emperor Augustus, and the poetry he wrote channels in its own way the cultural and political upheavals of the contemporary city, its public life, sexual mores, religion, and urban landscape, while also exploiting the superbly rich store of poetic convention that Greek literature and his Roman predecessors had bequeathed to him. This Very Short Introduction explains Ovid's background, social and literary, and introduces his poetry, on love, metamorphosis, Roman festivals, and his own exile, a restlessly innovative oeuvre driven by the irrepressible ingenium or wit for which he was famous. Llewelyn Morgan also explores Ovid's immense influence on later literature and art, spanning from Shakespeare to Bernini. Throughout, Ovid's poetry is revealed as enduringly scintillating, his personal story compelling, and the issues his life and poetry raise of continuing relevance and interest. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

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

"After the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Phaenomena was the most widely read poem in the ancient world. Its fame was immediate. It was translated into Latin by Ovid and Cicero and quoted by St. Paul in the New Testament, and it was one of the few Greek poems translated into Arabic" -- BACK COVER.

"The Phaenomena is a didactic epic poem modelled on Hesiod's Works and Days and cleverly updated to appeal to contemporary readers interested in new trends in Greek poetry, philosophy and science. Aratus invokes a beneficent Stoic Zeus who has created the constellations and their movements to help men follow the progress of the solar year, and also provides a great variety of signs in sky, air, earth and sea as warnings of weather changes." "This volume presents for the first time in English an edition of the poem with a full introduction, a facing translation and a line by line commentary. The introduction explains the literary and scientific background, the characteristic features of Aratus' language, style and metre, and the transmission of the text to the end of the Middle Ages. The commentary gives help with the content of the poem and aims to discuss and resolve the many problems of text and interpretation caused by Aratus' innovative use of language. The text is based on a new reading of the MSS, including one not used before."--BOOK JACKET.

Drawing on the historicizing turn in Latin literary scholarship, Roman Literary Cultures combines new critical methods with traditional analysis across four hundred years of Latin literature, from mid-republican Rome in the second century BC to the Second Sophistic in the second century AD. The contributors explore Latin texts both famous and obscure, from Roman drama and Menippean satire through Latin elegies, epics, and novels to letters issued by Roman emperors and compilations of laws. Each of the essays in this volume combines close reading of Latin literary texts with historical and cultural contextualization, making the collection an accessible and engaging combination of formalist criticism and historicist exegesis that attends to the many ways in which classical Latin literature participated in ancient Roman civic debates.

This book considers the relationship between the Fasti, Ovid's long poem on the Roman calendar, and the calendar itself, conceived of as consisting both in the rites and commemorations it organizes and in its graphic representation. The Fasti treats the calendar, recently revised by Caesar and Augustus, as its most important cultural model and as a quasi-literary 'intertext': the poem simultaneously reshapes and is itself shaped by the calendar. The study includes chapters on Book 4 and the rites of April, on the addition of Julio-Claudian holidays to the calendar, and on the final two books of the poem as shaped by the renaming of the months Quintilis and Sextilis for Julius Caesar and Augustus.