The Fasti is Ovid's six-book elegy on the first six months of the Roman calendar; it brings the ancient city to life in a way that few other texts achieve. Nevertheless there has been no previous Oxford Classical Text of the poem. This new edition is founded on thorough re-examination both of the medieval manuscript tradition and of the poet's style and heritage. Besides the text itself, it focuses on providing information about the manuscripts and their readings; editorial judgements are explained in a companion volume, along with broader discussion of the manuscripts.The Fasti was conceived as a sister poem to the Metamorphoses, as is shown in the first two books of Ovid's Tristia (poems from exile). Each reflects on time from creation to the poet's own day through multiple narratives: whereas the epic has a meandering flow from beginning to end, the elegiac poem breaks its stories into disconnected units, day by day. Direct and implicit references to exile show that the poet wants us to see the poem as written in Rome and in Tomis, before exile and years later, after the death of Augustus. Tristia 2.549–50 tells us that books 7–12 were drafted; their absence from the transmitted work points to a reluctance to celebrate the imperial regime by writing of July and August. The political edge such elements give to the poem has appealed to modern readers, which has attracted rich scholarly attention in recent decades. But there has been no new independent edition since 1978.Although published under Tiberius, the earliest copy of the Fasti belongs to the 10th century, and even that survives for just over four books. We are mainly dependent on the more than thirty copies dating from 1050 to 1250, a period when there was intense interest in the poem, spreading from the great Benedictine abbeys: it was a source of information on ancient myth, history, and the calendar. This edition focuses on 22 of these, outlining the value of each in the preface, and using them to establish the critical apparatus. A few humanistic copies complete the picture.
