Introduction: Fasti
ATTENTION: this is the original Introduction printed with Frazer's 1931 edition! It contains some OUTDATED information and language.
§ 1. The Life of Ovid
On the life of Ovid we have more authentic information than on that of most ancient writers, for not only has he interspersed many allusions to it in his poems but in one of them he has given us a formal autobiography,1 a species of composition to which the ancients were not addicted. Indeed, even the art of biography was little cultivated in antiquity, and were it not for the splendid portrait gallery which Plutarch has bequeathed to us in his Lives our knowledge of the personal character and fortunes of the great men of Greece and Rome would be for the most part but slight and fragmentary, and for us they might have stalked like masked figures, looming vast and dim through the mist, across the stage of history.
Ovid was born in 43 B.C., the year in which the two consuls, Hirtius and Pansa, fell in battle during the civil war which followed the assassination of Caesar. His birthplace was Sulmo, the modern Solmona, a town situated in a well-watered valley of the Apennines, in the land of the Paelignians, about ninety miles to the east of Rome. He has himself described the happy vale, rich in corn and vines, dotted here and there with grey olive-groves and traversed by winding streams, the ground everywhere kept fresh and green even in the baking heat of summer by the springs that bubbled up through the grassy turf.2 No wonder that in his dreary exile on the dismal shore of the Black Sea the memory of his sweet native dale should have come back on him with many a pang of fond regret.3
The poet came of an old equestrian or knightly family and prided himself on being a knight by birth and not by the gift of fortune or, like a multitude of newly dubbed knights in that age of civil war, in virtue of military service.4 He had a brother a year older than himself, who died at the age of twenty. Together the boys were sent at an early age by their father to be educated at Rome, where they were placed under the care of eminent masters. His brother displayed a taste for rhetoric and looked forward to the profession of a pleader in the courts.5 Ovid’s own bent from childhood was all for poetry. In this he received no encouragement from his father, who endeavoured to dissuade him from so unprofitable a course of life, holding up to him, as an awful warning, the fate of Homer, who had died a poor man.6 Clearly the old gentleman thought that there was no money in the poetical business, and substantially he was doubtless right. Gold is not the guerdon which the Muses dangle before the eyes of their votaries, luring them on “to scorn delights and live laborious days.” For a time the youthful poet endeavoured to comply with the paternal injunction. He turned his back on the Muses’ hill and struggled to write prose instead of poetry, but do what he would all that he wrote fell naturally and inevitably into verse.7
On attaining to manhood he exchanged the broad purple stripe, which as a noble youth he had worn on his tunic, for the narrow purple edge which was the badge of a Roman knight. At the same time he renounced all intention of aspiring to the rank of senator, which would have entitled him to flaunt for life the broad purple on his tunic. However, he set his foot on the first rung of the official ladder by accepting a place on the board of minor magistrates charged with the duty of inspecting prisons and superintending executions—duties which can have been but little to the taste of the poet’s gentle and sensitive nature.8 But in the company of poets he found a society more congenial than that of gaol-birds and hangmen. For Rome was then at the very zenith of its poetical activity and fame. Virgil and Horace, Propertius and Tibullus, were all alive and singing when Ovid was a young man at Rome, and in the poetical heaven shone lesser stars whose light has long been quenched. Among them Ovid sat entranced, looking on every poet as a god. He was an intimate friend of Propertius and listened to the bard pouring out his fiery elegiacs. He heard Horace chanting his melodious lays to the music of the Ausonian lyre.9 He lived to mourn the early death of Tibullus.10 Virgil our author appears to have seen only once without obtaining speech of him,11 in which he was less fortunate than the nobody, recorded by Browning, who once had the good fortune to see Shelley:
And did you once see Shelley plain?
And did he stop and speak to you?
But even in the society of poets Ovid was not content to pass all his life in the smoke and din of Rome. He travelled widely to see for himself the places of which he had read in story. As a student he visited Athens,12 and in the company of his friend Macer he roamed among the splendid cities of Asia and spent the greater part of a year in Sicily, where he beheld the famous fountain of Arethuse, the lakes of Enna, and the sky ablaze with the flames of Aetna; and in a letter to his friend, written in exile, he recalls the happy time they had passed together driving in a light car or floating in a painted skiff on the blue water, when even the long hours of a summer day seemed too short for their talk.13
Ovid was thrice married. His first marriage, contracted in early youth, was brief and unhappy: his second was also brief; but his third wife proved a faithful helpmeet to him in his later years and stood by him in the last great trial of his life, his exile, though she was not allowed to share it.14 In a letter addressed to her from his place of banishment he speaks of her as the model of a good wife.15 By one of his wives Ovid had a daughter to whom he was tenderly attached, and who made him twice a grandfather, though by different husbands.16 When he was about to give her in marriage, the poet consulted no less a personage than the High Priestess of Jupiter (the Flaminica Dialis) as to a lucky day for the wedding, and was warned by her not to let his daughter wed in the first half of June or, to be more exact, not until the Ides (the thirteenth day of the month) should be past.17
Meantime his poems had made him famous: his acquaintance was sought by younger bards, as he himself had courted that of their elders18; and in the noble epilogue to his greatest work, the Metamorphoses, the poet anticipated, not unjustly, for his works a deathless renown.19
It was when he was thus in the full enjoyment of domestic happiness and literary fame that the sentence of banishment, pronounced by Augustus, fell on Ovid like a bolt from the blue. His fiftieth year was past and his hair was already grisled; we may suppose. that it was the year 8 of our era.20 The place of his exile was to be Tomi on the bleak western shore of the Black Sea, where the land of the barbarous Getae bordered on the land of the barbarous Sarmatians.21 The alleged reason for the sentence was the immoral tendency of his poem The Art of Love,22 but that can hardly have been the Emperor’s real motive, since the offending poem had been published many years before, apparently without creating a scandal at the time. The real motive, as the poet plainly implies, was a deep offence which he had given to Augustus and which the Emperor never forgave.23 To this the poet alludes again and again, but always in veiled language; he never revealed the exact nature of the offence. He protests over and over again that the cause of his ruin was an error, not a crime.24 The nearest he comes to lifting the veil is a passage in which he asks, in grief and remorse, why had he seen something? why had he made his eyes culpable? why had he been accidentally privy to a guilty secret? and compares his case to that of Actaeon who was punished for unwittingly coming on Diana naked.25 On the strength of this passage some modern writers have suggested that Ovid may have accidentally witnessed an escapade of the Emperor’s profligate granddaughter Julia, who was banished by Augustus in the same year as the poet.26 But this is a mere conjecture. Ovid kept the fatal secret locked up in his breast, and we shall never know it.
He has described in pathetic language the last night he passed in Rome—the passionate grief of his weeping wife, now clasping him in her arms, now prostrating herself in prayer before the household gods at the hearth where the fire was dead as her hopes; the tears and sighs of the grief-stricken household, the last farewell to friends; till, as the night grew late, the sounds of lamentation died away into silence in the house, while outside the moonlight slept white on the marble fanes of the Capitol close at hand. But with break of day the parting hour was come, and the Morning Star gave the signal for departure.27
The long and difficult journey to Tomi would seem to have been compulsorily undertaken in winter, for the poet tells us that in chill December he was shivering on the Adriatic, while he wrote versified epistles on shipboard to the friends he had left behind him.28 Here the ship encountered a storm that threatened to drive her back to the port from which she had sailed, and the exiled bard was tantalized by seeing, across the heaving waters, the distant coast of Italy on which he might never set foot again.29 He crossed the Isthmus of Corinth and took ship again at the port of Cenchreae, only to be again tempest-tossed on the Aegean as he had been on the Adriatic, and again to scribble verses in the height of the storm, to the astonishment, as the poet Imagined, of the very Cyclades themselves. After touching at the island of Samothrace he landed in Thrace and made his way on foot through the country of the Bistones to Tomi.30 It was doubtless on this land journey through the snowy Thracian mountains that our author beheld the Sapaeans and other wild highlanders offering the entrails of dogs in sacrifice to a barbarous deity whom he identified with Diana.31
At Tomi our author sought to while away the tedious hours of exile by inditing poetical epistles to his family, his friends and patrons in Rome, entreating them to use their influence with the Emperor to ensure his pardon or at least his removal to a less distant and less barbarous place of banishment. He even addressed himself to Augustus direct in the longest of these poems,32 beseeching him for mercy, but all in vain. And after the death of Augustus the unhappy poet turned to the popular prince Germanicus the stream of his mingled flattery and prayer in the hope of touching his clement heart and obtaining at least a mitigation of his sentence.33 But all his entreaties fell on deaf ears.
The neighbouring barbarians did not add to the amenities of life in the frontier town by the random flights of poisoned arrows which from time to time they sent whizzing over the walls in the hope of picking off some fat pursy citizen as he went about his peaceful business in the streets. Ovid often alludes to these missiles34 and even contemplated the possibility of his blood dyeing a Scythian arrow or a Getic sword,35 but we have no reason to suppose that his life was thus brought to an untimely end, although, when the watchman on the battlements gave the signal of an approaching raid, and the hostile cavalry were circling at full gallop round the walls, the stout- hearted bard used to clap a helmet on his grey head and, grasping sword and shield in his tremulous hands, hurry to the gate to meet the foe.36
However, the valiant poet returned good for evil by learning the languages of both the barbarous tribes, the Getae and the Sarmatians,37 who infested the bleak, treeless, birdless plains that stretched away to the horizon from the walls of Tomi—plains where spring brought no vernal flowers and autumn no cheerful reapers, and the only crop that broke the dreary prospect was here and there a patch of bitter worm-wood.38 But Ovid did more than learn the language of his enemies. He composed a poem in the Getic language in which he paid high, not to say fulsome, compliments to the memory of the deceased Augustus, to his surviving widow, to his sons, and to his successor on the throne, the Emperor Tiberius; and this precious effusion he professes to have recited to a circle of Getic hearers, who received it with murmurs of applause, which they emphasized appropriately by rattling their quivers.39 The poet even expressed a fear that his study of the Getic language had corrupted his Latin style.40 In the interest of science, if not of literature, it is much to be regretted that the poem has perished; had it survived it would have been of priceless value as a unique example of a barbarous language preserved for us by the care and diligence of a classical writer.
Among the poet’s murmurs at his fate are naturally many references to the rigorous climate of his place of banishment in the far north, on the very edge of the Roman world. He says that winter there was almost continuous,41 that the sea froze, that the wine turned to blocks of ice, and that the barbarians drove their creaking ox-drawn wains over the frozen Danube.42 Of the society of the place he does not paint a flattering portrait. He admits that there was a tincture of Greek blood and a smatch of Greek culture in them, but adds that in their composition there was more of the Getic barbarian, which came out in their harsh voices, grim faces, and shaggy unkempt hair and beard; every man carried a bow and wore a knife at his side, with which he was ready to stab at the smallest provocation.43 However, a residence of nine or ten years at this end of the world would seem to have in some measure reconciled the poet to his lot. In one of his last letters, written to a friend from Tomi, he tells him that he keeps all his old serenity of mind; that he had won the goodwill of the people of Tomi, who for their own sakes would gladly keep him with them, though for his sake they would willingly let him depart; and that they and the inhabitants of neighbouring towns had publicly testified to their friendship by passing decrees in his honour and granting him immunity from taxes.44 And in almost the last letter of all he addresses the people of Tomi, telling them that not even the folk of his dear native vale among the Apennines could have been kinder to him in his misfortune and sorrow than they had been, and he even adds that Tomi had grown as dear to him as Delos to Diana when she stayed the wandering island and found in it a place of rest and peace.45 So the curtain falls gently, almost tenderly, on the exiled poet. He died at the age of sixty in the year A.D. 17 or 18, and was buried at Tomi,46 among the people whom he had made his friends.
§ 2. The Fasti
The Fasti may rank next to the Metamorphoses as the most elaborate and important of Ovid’s works. It is a poetical treatise on the Roman calendar, which it discusses in strictly chronological order, beginning with the first day of January and ending with the last day of June, where it stops abruptly. But repeated references in the poem to later dates in the year, of which he purposed to speak,47 suffice to prove that the poet intended to continue his work on the same plan to the end of December, no doubt devoting to each of the last six months a separate book, as he has done with the first six months of the year in the poem as we possess it. Indeed, in one of his poems written in exile and addressed to Augustus, he expressly says that he had written the Fasti in twelve books, each book dealing with a separate month, and that he had dedicated the whole work to the Emperor, though his fate, by which he means his exile, had interrupted it.48 We have no reason to reject such a definite statement addressed by the author to the man whom of all others he least dared to deceive. But the last six books of the poem have disappeared without leaving a trace; for no ancient writer cites or refers to them, and the four doggerel verses which a few manuscripts insert at the end of the sixth book, purporting to explain the old name of July (Quintilis), are clearly the interpolation of a clumsy scribe. It is true that in the seventeenth century the great scholar Nicolaus Heinsius mentioned, on the authority of Gronovius, a rumour that the last six books of the Fasti were preserved by a presbyter in a village near Ulm, but the rumour was probably no better founded than the reports of the discovery of the lost books of Livy, which occasionally startle the more credulous portion of the learned world. We can only apparently conclude, either that the last six books of the Fasti were lost, possibly in the post, which can hardly have been very regular or secure at Tomi, or that the poet left them in so rough and unfinished a state that his literary executors, in justice to the author’s reputation, deemed it prudent to suppress them. Of the two alternative suppositions the latter is perhaps the more probable, since Ovid’s own words seem to imply that his exile interrupted his work on the poem and prevented him from putting the final touches to it. The same conclusion is reinforced by another consideration. In the poem addressed to Augustus, as we have just seen, our author expressly affirms that he had dedicated the Fasti to Augustus, but in that work, as we have it, the dedication is not to Augustus but to Germanicus. The only reasonable explanation of this anomaly, as modern editors have seen, appears to be that after the death of Augustus the author cancelled the original dedication and substituted a dedication to Germanicus in the hope that the clement and popular prince, himself a poet, would be moved by the compliment to intercede with the reigning Emperor Tiberius in order to procure the poet’s pardon, or at least a mitigation of his sentence. Whatever the motive, the change of dedication suffices to prove that during the later years of his exile Ovid was engaged in the revision of the Fasti; but, so far as the substitution of Germanicus for Augustus in the place of honour is concerned, the revision appears not to have extended beyond the first book, for in the remaining five books it is the dead emperor and not the living prince at whom the poet aims the shafts of his flattery and praise. But other traces of revision may be seen in the veiled allusions to his exile which Ovid has let fall in some of the later books of the Fasti.49
While the poet was thus filing and polishing the Fasti down to near the end of his life, we have no direct evidence as to the time when the work was begun. However, the author’s own declaration to Augustus, quoted above, seems clearly to imply that the poem was nearly completed at the date of the writers exile in A.D. 8 when he was about fifty years of age. We may conclude, then, that the Fasti was a work of Ovid’s maturity, when the poet was at the height of his intellectual powers and a passed master of his art. The subject was happily chosen, for it offered him full scope for the display not merely of his fancy and eloquence but of his learning, which was very considerable. The matter of the poem falls, roughly speaking, into three sections, the historical, the astronomical, and the religious, which form, if we may say so, the three threads out of which the artist has woven the web of the Fasti.
The historical section comprises a considerable portion of the legends and annals of Rome, so far as these were attached to definite dates in the calendar. Thus, for example, the author seizes the traditional date of the foundation of Rome on the twenty-first of April as a peg on which to hang the legend of that momentous event in the history of the world50; the Ides of February recalls the march out and final destruction of the three hundred heroic Fabii, which the poet recounts at full length51; the notice of the foundation of the temple of Fortune on the eleventh of June furnishes the author with an opportunity of telling the story of the foul murder of the popular king Servius Tullius and the infamous conduct of his unnatural daughter52 the Flight of the King, which the calendar placed on the twenty-fourth of February, allows the poet to relate in graphic detail the crime which led to the downfall of Tarquin the Proud and the expulsion of the kings from Rome.53 And soon with page after page of legend and story; in a sense the Roman calendar was an epitome of Roman history, and Ovid’s poem is an illuminated edition of that epitome, in which the bare mention of an event is often expanded into a beautiful picture aglow with all the rich colours of poetic fancy.
The astronomical section of the poem, which the author puts prominently forward in his exordium, is much less valuable than the historical. The notices of the rising and setting of the constellations, which were the hinges whereon the ancient calendars revolved, are often very inaccurate in the Fasti, and while Ovid pays a warm tribute to the genius and lofty character of the ancient astronomers,54 he seems not to have learned even the elements of their science. Indeed, he has fallen into the strange mistake of mentioning an entirely fictitious constellation, that of the Kite,55 which seems to have owed its imaginary existence to the blunder of some ignorant Roman calendar-maker, who, finding in a Greek calendar the notice of the arrival of the kite in spring, converted the first appearance of that migratory bird into the rising of a constellation of the same name. However, the mention of the constellations furnishes our author with a reason, or an excuse, for relating some of their myths in his usual agreeable style.56
The religious section of the poem embraces the notices and explanations of those fixed festivals and sacred rites which were recorded in the calendar. This is for us moderns by far the most interesting and valuable part of the work, for our knowledge of Roman religion is comparatively meagre and fragmentary, and in the absence of more detailed and authoritative expositions, such as were doubtless to be found in some of the lost books of Varro, the Fasti of Ovid must always rank as a document of the first importance. To note only a few of the festivals on which the poet has thrown light that we could ill afford to spare, we may mention the quaint ritual of the Festival of the Dead (the Lemuria) in May57; the no less curious rites in honour of the God of Boundaries58 and of the Goddess Mildew59; the Shepherds’ Festival of the Parilia, with its leaps over three fires and the driving of the flocks through the smoke and flames60; the enigmatic rites of the Lupercalia with its strange mode of conferring the blessing of offspring on women61; the merry revels in the flower-decked boats floating down the Tiber on Midsummer Eve62; and the very different rite in the month of May when Father Tiber received those rush-made effigies of men which were cast from the old wooden bridge into his yellow stream, apparently as a toll to compensate the river-god for the loss of the human beings who now passed dryshod over the bridge instead of being drowned at the ford.63 These and many other sacred rites are described by Ovid in the Fasti, and if we cannot always accept his explanations of them, we ought always to be grateful to him for having recorded the facts.
A work embracing such a mass of varied information must have entailed a considerable amount of research, but Ovid mentions none of his authorities by name, contenting himself with saying briefly that he had drawn his materials “from annals old.”64 He had probably read some of the early Roman historians, such as the poet Ennius and the old annalist Quintus Fabius Pictor, and it is possible that he may have inspected the official Annales Maximi compiled by the pontiffs, which formed the real basis of authentic Roman history. He must certainly have known and used, though he does not mention, the great work of his contemporary the historian Livy, as his narratives of the tragedy of Lucretia and of the defeat and death of the Fabii suffice to prove. He naturally also consulted the official Roman calendar, of which a number of versions, for the most part fragmentary, have come down to us and afford invaluable help to a commentator on the Fasti by enabling him to check and control the statements of his author as to the dates of festivals and the foundation of temples.65 For the most part the records of these calendars confirm the poet’s evidence and strengthen our confidence in the general accuracy of his testimony on matters for which other witnesses are lacking. He seems to have had some knowledge also of the local calendars of various Latin and Sabine towns, to which he repeatedly refers.66 On questions of Roman antiquities and religion we cannot doubt that he conned and drew freely on the vast stores of the great antiquary Varro, whose existing works, scanty and fragmentary as they are, often serve to illustrate the topics treated of by Ovid in his poem. He may also have known the writings of the learned grammarian Verrius Flaccus, whose treatise on the signification of words, though it survives only in the abridgements of Festus and Paulus Diaconus, is of itself almost a commentary on the Fasti.67
It has been suggested that Ovid may have borrowed the idea of writing the Fasti from the Aitia or “Causes” of Callimachus, an elegiac poem in four books, in which the learned Alexandrian poet set forth many myths and legends explanatory of Greek customs and rites. The Aitia as a whole is lost, but in recent years some considerable fragments of it have been recovered from Egyptian papyri.68 The last book of the elegies of Propertius, in which that poet relates a number of Roman legends, may have served as the immediate model of the Fasti.
§ 3. Editions of the Fasti
Of the older editions of the Fasti the most valuable is still that of the Dutch scholar, Pieter Burman, published at Amsterdam in 1727 and forming part of the third volume of his complete edition of Ovid’s works; it contains entire the learned commentaries of the early editors, above all the commentary of the great scholar, Nicolaus Heinsius, who, by collating many manuscripts and correcting many of their errors with the help of his wide learning and critical acumen, placed the text of the Fasti on a sound basis. Many of his conjectural emendations have been accepted by later editors and are reproduced in the text of the present edition.
Of editions published in the nineteenth century the most important for the constitution of the text is that of R. Merkel (Berlin, 1841), which contains a copious critical apparatus drawn partly from the collections of Heinsius, partly from the editor’s own examination of manuscripts or from collations made for him by others. In learned Latin prolegomena prefixed to his edition Merkel discusses many questions concerning the sources, the successive recensions, and the manuscripts of the Fasti. He subsequently edited two editions for the Teubner series in which he made many changes in the text. The critical edition of A. Riese (Leipzig, 1874) contains a full collation of the important Vatican manuscript Codex Reginensis which was made for the editor by H. Keil.
Of explanatory editions of the Fasti published in the nineteenth century the most useful are those of G. E. Gierig with a Latin commentary (Leipzig, 1812); Thomas Keightly, with English notes (First Edition, London, 1839; Second Edition, London, 1848); F. A. Paley, with an English commentary (London, no date); and Hermann Peter, with a concise but adequate and judicious German commentary (Second Edition, Leipzig, 1879; Third Edition, Leipzig, 1889; Peter’s edition has a critical as well as an exegetical value, for he collated several manuscripts, including the important Munich manuscript Codex Mallersdorfiensis; the principal results of his collations are contained in his dissertation De P. Ovidi Nasonis fastis disputatio critica (Meissen, 1877). An edition of the Fasti adapted for use in schools was published by Mr. G. H. Hallam at London in 1881 and has often been reprinted. A separate edition of the Third Book with an Introduction and Commentary has been published by Mr. Cyril Bailey (Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1921). A critical recension of the text by R. Ehwald and F. W. Levy appeared at Leipzig in the Teubner series in 1924. The latest critical edition of the Fasti is that published in the Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum Paravianum (Turin, Milan, etc., 1928) under the editorship of the Italian scholar, C. Landi, who for the purpose of this edition has collated afresh the two chief Vatican codices (A and U) and many inferior Italian manuscripts, and has prefixed a useful bibliography of modern works bearing both on the text and on the interpretation of the Fasti.
The text and translation of the present edition are reproduced from the large edition in five volumes which I published with a commentary and illustrations in 1929 (Macmillan&Co., London). The notes have been specially written for this Loeb edition by my friend. Dr. W. H. D. Rouse, who has also selected and abridged from my commentary the passages which are printed as an Appendix to the present volume. I thank him for kindly sparing me the labour of reducing my large edition to a scale more commensurate with the needs of readers of the Loeb Classical Library, for whose use the book was originally intended. At the same time I take this opportunity of renewing my grateful thanks to my friend. Dr. James Loeb, for the ready and generous permission he gave me to transfer the publication of the complete edition to Messrs. Macmillan & Co. so soon as it appeared that in the process of composition the work had outgrown the limits imposed by the plan of the Loeb Classical Library. I desire also to thank Messrs. Macmillan & Co. for their courtesy in giving leave to reproduce the selections from my commentary which are printed at the end of this volume.
§ 4. Manuscripts of the Fasti
Manuscripts of the Fasti are very numerous; the British Museum alone possesses fifteen of them, of which the oldest is believed to date from the twelfth or early thirteenth century.
The text of this as of my large edition is based mainly on the evidence of six manuscripts, of which I append a list, with the symbols by which I designate them. Of all six manuscripts I procured complete photographs (rotographs), which are now preserved in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. My collations of the manuscripts, made chiefly from the photographs, are printed in full in my large edition, to which I must refer readers desirous of detailed information on the subject. In the present edition the evidence of the manuscripts is cited only in a few passages of special difficulty. The six manuscripts are as follows:
A = the Vatican manuscript. No. 1709, known as Codex Reginensis sive Petavianus. This is a manuscript of the tenth century written in the Carolingian script it contains the first four books of the Fasti, but the last two books are wanting, with the exception of the first twenty four lines of the Fifth Book. It is generally esteemed the oldest of the existing manuscripts of the Fasti, and is usually taken as the basis of the text, so far as it exists. But it is the work of a very careless and ignorant scribe and swarms with gross and palpable blunders, many of which have been corrected by a later hand. A full and generally accurate collation of the manuscript is published, as we have seen, in A. Riese’s edition of the Fasti.
U = the Vatican manuscript. No. 3262, known as Codex Ursinianus. This manuscript was written in the eleventh century at the monastery of Monte Cassino; the script is that called Lombard. It contains the six books of the Fasti, with the curious exception of the last twelve lines of the Second Book, which are omitted without any sign of a lacuna. The manuscript as a whole is much more correctly written than A, but it has been to a considerable extent corrected and even rewritten by two later hands. A careful and generally accurate, but by no means complete, collation of the manuscript has been published by Mr. Gordon J. Laing, who distinguishes the readings of the three different hands.69
D = the Munich manuscript. No. 8122, of the Royal Library at Munich, known as Codex Mailersdorfiensis sive Monacensis. This is a manuscript of the twelfth or, according to Halm, of the thirteenth century; it contains the six books, except that the first seventy lines of the First Book are wanting. The manuscript abounds in abbreviations which often create a difficulty, for the scribe uses the same abbreviation in different senses, with a resulting ambiguity which can only be resolved by a comparison with other manuscripts. A full collation of this manuscript is given by R. Merkel in his edition of 1841, and the codex has since been again collated by H. Peter and R, Ehwald.
X = the Brussels manuscript, Codex Bruxellensis sive Gemblacensis, No. 5369 in the Royal Library at Brussels. It was brought to Brussels from the abbey of Gembloux at the time of the French Revolution in 1794. The manuscript has been assigned to the eleventh or possibly to the end of the tenth century. The writing is a round minuscule, large, bold and clear, with comparatively few abbreviations. The first 504 verses of the First Book are wanting in the manuscript, but otherwise, with the exception of a few verses (v. 365- 366 and the doubtful lines vi. 271-276, 739-740), the poem is complete. The manuscript is undoubtedly one of the oldest and best codices of the Fasti, but its value and importance were ignored till Mr. E. H. Alton called attention to it in 1926.70 My own attention was first drawn to this important manuscript by Professor M. A. Kugener of the University of Brussels, who has made a special study of it. I collated many of the readings at Brussels in January 1928 and have given a fairly full collation of the manuscript from the photograph in my large edition of the Fasti. The manuscript has a number of notes written in the margin which contain excerpts from ancient authors, such as Gellius, Valerius Maximus, Servius, Hyginus, and Macrobius. These have been edited and their authorities identified by Mr. E. H. Alton.71
M = the Paris manuscript, Codex Galliens Mazarinianus, No. 7992 in the National Library at Paris. It is a manuscript of the fifteenth or sixteenth century and contains the whole of the six books of the Fasti beautifully written in a large, clear Italian hand, with few abbreviations, very few erasures, and no corrections by a later hand. The variants written in the margin or between the lines appear to be all in the handwriting of the original scribe. The reputation of this manuscript seems not to stand high, perhaps on account of its late date, but I have found it excellent, generally in agreement with the best tradition and possessing the rare merit of being almost everywhere perfectly legible. In his critical edition of 1841 Merkel cites this manuscript under the symbol g, but he seems to have known little or nothing about it; there are no such lacunae in it as he speaks of.
m = the Oxford manuscript. Codex Oxordensis sive Mazarinianus, Auct. F. 4. 25, in the Bodleian Library. It belongs to the early fifteenth century and contains the whole of the six books of the Fasti; there are many variants written in the margin or between the lines; some of them are by the hand of Nicolaus Heinsius. There seems to be a special relation between this Oxford manuscript and the Brussels manuscript (X); for not only do the readings of the two manuscripts often agree, but in both of them the same long passage (vi. 33-294) has suffered a curious displacement of several hundred lines, without the least sign that the copyist was aware of the disorder. Mr. E. H. Alton inclines to believe that this Oxford manuscript is “a copy of a comparatively early (possibly ninth or tenth century) minuscule original.”72
Besides these six manuscripts I have sometimes in my large edition referred to the readings of a few others, for a knowledge of which I am dependent chiefly on the collections of Merkel in his large critical edition of 1841, whose notation of them I follow. They are as follows:
F = the Cambridge manuscript, No. 280, in the library of Pembroke College, Cambridge, to which it came from Dover Priory. According to Dr. M. R. James, the manuscript dates from the twelfth century and the writing closely resembles that of Christ Church, Canterbury.73 It is a small volume in vellum, with many interlineal and marginal notes. I inspected it in the library of Pembroke College, and through the kindness of Mr. Attwater, the librarian, procured a complete photograph of the manuscript. Circumstances have, to my regret, prevented me from making any use of the photograph, but it is now kept, with the other photographs of Ovid manuscripts used by me, in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge.
G = a manuscript at Gottingen, thought by Schneidewin to be not later than the twelfth century. Heinsius judged it to be older, but of little value. Merkel used a collation of it made for him by W. Müller and E. von Leutsch, and found a few good readings in it.
B = a manuscript at Leyden, Codex Vossianus sive Arundelianus, of the thirteenth century. It contains all six books. Heinsius assigned it to the tenth century. It has been collated by H. Peter and R. Ehwald.
C = the collation of a lost manuscript (Codex Vossianus) inserted by Isaac Voss in an edition of the Fasti published at Amsterdam in 1630. The volume is in the library at Leyden. H. Peter examined it and made a copy of Voss’s collation.74
My references to other manuscripts, designated by the general symbol ς, are derived from Merkel’s edition of 1841 and from the Ehwald-Levy edition of 1924.
J. G. FRAZER
April 1931
Tristia, iv. 10.
Amores, ii. 16. 1-10.
Fasti, iv. 81 sqq.
Amores, iii. 15. 5 sq.; Tristia, iv. 10. 7 sq.
Tristia, iv. 10. 9-18.
Tristia, iv. 10. 19-22.
Tristia, iv. 10. 23-26.
Tristia, iv. 10. 27-36.
Tristia, iv. 10. 41-54.
Amores, iii. 9.
Tristia, iv. 10. 51 “Vergilium vidi tantura.” Among the intimate friends of Ovid was the grammarian C. Julius Hyginus, the head of the Palatine library. See Suetonius, De grammaticis, 20.
Tristia, i. 2. 77.
Ex Ponto, ii. 10. 21-44.
Tristia, iv. 10. 69-74.
Ex Ponto, iii. 1. 43 sq.
Tristia, iv. 10. 75 sq.
Fasti, vi. 219-234.
Tristia, iv. 10. 53 sqq.
Metamorphoses, xv. 871-879.
Tristia, iv. 8. 33, iv. 10. 93-98.
Tristia, iv. 10. 97 sq., 109 sqq.
Tristia, ii. 207, 211 sq.
Tristia, ii. 207-210.
Tristia, i. 3. 37 sq., iii. 1. 51 sq., iii. 6. 25 sq., iv. 10. 89 sq.
Tristia, ii. 103-106; compare Tristia, iii. 5. 49 sq. “In scia quod crimen viderunt lumina plector, //peccatumque oculos est habuisse meum.”
Suetonius, Augustus, 65. 1.
Tristia, i. 3.
Tristia, i. 11. 3 sq.
Tristia, i. 4. 1-20.
Tristia, i. 10. 9-23, i. 11. 1-10.
Fasti, i. 389 sq.
Tristia, ii.
Ex Ponto, ii. 1, iv. 8. 21 sqq.
Tristia, iii. 10.63 sq., iv. 1. 77, 84, v. 7. 15 sq.; Ex Ponto, i. 2. 15 sq., iii. 1. 25 sq., iv. 7. 11 sq., 36, iv. 9. 83, iv. 10. 31.
Ex Ponto, ii. 1. 65 sq.
Tristia, iv. 1. 73 sqq.
Ex Ponto, iii. 2. 40.
As to the scenery of the country round Tomi see Ex Ponto, i. 2. 23, iii. 1. 5-24.
Ex Ponto, iv. 13. 19-38.
Ex Ponto, iv. 13. 17 sq.
Ex Ponto, i. 2. 24.
Ex Ponto, iv. 7. 7-10, iv. 9. 85 sq.
Tristia, v. 7. 9-20.
Ex Ponto, iv. 9. 87-104.
Ex Ponto, iv. 14. 47-62.
Jerome, in Eusebius, Chronic., ed. A. Schoene, vol. ii. (Berlin, 1866), p. 147, under the year of Abraham 2033, “Ovidius poeta in exilio diem obiit et iuxta oppidum Tomos sepelitur.”
Fasti, iii. 57 sq., 199 sq., v. 147 sq.
Tristia, ii. 549 sqq.: “Sex ego Fastorum scripsi totidemque libellos, // cumque suo finem mense volumen habet, // idque tuo nuper scriptum sub nomine, Caesar, // et tibi sacratum sors mea rupit opus.”
Fasti, iv. 81 sqq., vi. 666.
Fasti, iv. 807 sqq.
Fasti, ii. 193 sqq.
Fasti, vi. 569 sqq.
Fasti, ii. 685 sqq.
Fasti, i. 297 sqq.
Fasti, iii. 793 sqq.
See for example Fasti, ii. 79 sqq. (the Dolphin); ii. 153 sqq. (the Bear); v. 493 sqq. (Orion).
Fasti, v. 421 sqq.
Fasti, ii. 639 sqq.
Fasti, iv. 905 sqq.
Fasti, iv. 721 sqq.
Fasti, ii. 267 sqq.
Fasti, vi. 773-790.
Fasti, v. 621 sqq.
Fasti, i. 7, iv. 1.
The remains of these ancient Roman calendars, whether preserved in inscriptions or in manuscript, have been collected and published, with valuable commentaries by Theodor Mommsen and Christian Huelsen, in the second edition of the first part of the first volume of the great Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. For the sake of brevity the volume is commonly referred to as C.I.L. i2. It is indispensable to the serious student of the Fasti, The English student should not fail to consult the late Mr. W. Warde Fowler’s learned and suggestive work Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic, which is itself almost a commentary on Ovid’s poem.
Fasti, iii. 87 sqq., vi. 57 sqq.
This valuable work is now accessible to students in a handy edition accurately edited by Professor W. M. Lindsay (Leipzig, 1913, in the Teubner series of classical texts).
See A. W. Mair’s edition of Calhmachus (London, 1921), pp. 183 sqq. (in the Loeb Classical Library). As to the Aitia see further A. Couat, Alexandrian Poetry under the first three Ptolemies, translated by James Loeb (London, 1931), pp. 127 sqq., 549 sqq.
Gordon J. Laing, “The three principal manuscripts of the Fasti of Ovid, Reginensis 1709 (or Petavianus), Vaticanus 3262 (or Ursinianus), and Monacensis 8122 (or Mallerstorfiensis N. 2),” American Journal of Archaeology, Second Series, vol. iii. (1899, Norwood, Mass.), pp. 212-228.
E. H. Alton, “The Zulichemianus, Mazarinianus, and other MSS. of the Fasti of Ovid,” Hermathena, No. xliv. (Dublin and London, 1926), pp. 301 sqq.
E. H. Alton. “The mediaeval commentaries on Ovid’s Fasti,” Hermathena, No. xliv. (1926), pp. 128-151.
E. H. Alton, “The Zulichemianus, Mazarinianus, and other MSS. of the Fasti of Ovid” Hermathena, No. xliv. (1926), p. 105.
M. R. James, Catalogue of Manuscripts in the Library of Pembroke College, Cambridge (Cambridge, 1905), p. 255.
H. Peter, De P. Ovidi Nasonis fastis disputatio critica (Meissen, 1877), p. 5.