Ovid’s Fasti, his elegiac poem on the Roman calendar, begins where his Metamorphoses leaves off, in present, imperial time. The Fasti has sometimes simply been plumbed as a random source of historical or anthropological knowledge. But as a poem about Rome and its complex imperial present as well as its past, the Fasti offers important insights into the mentality of Roman society at a crucial juncture of cultural development in the late Augustan age. Indeed, it raises questions that remain important today, for the poem explores the authority of the sources by which national myths are constructed and time and speech are controlled.

The Fasti has often been read as a work of national celebration, the product of some thirty years of Augustan peace. Yet the latter part of Augustus’ éegime was hardly the ‘golden age’ projected by Virgil in the Aeneid. Beset by dynastic troubles, military failures abroad and discontent at home, Augustus had begun to place restrictions on freedom of speech. As Denis Feeney has argued, the very title of the poem, Fasti, advertises its concern with the conditions for lawful (fas) speech. The Fasti demonstrates its acute awareness of the political pressures that beset investigation into national history and custom in the late Augustan period; it provocatively foregrounds the ideological management of ‘truth.’ The Fasti invites us to ask not only how we read, but why, perhaps, it matters.