Ovid: Fasti, Book 4, Vol. 4

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by Ovid,

Edited by Elaine Fantham

Cambridge University Press

Due/Published June 1998, 301 pages, paper

ISBN 0521449960

Ovid's Fasti, begun in or soon after AD I, was to have celebrated the calendar and associated legends of the Roman year, but probably had reached no further than June before his exile in AD 8. Book IV, the book of April, honours the festivals of Venus, Cybele, Ceres and their cult, as well as the traditional date of the foundation of Rome and many religious and civic anniversaries. Elaine Fantham accompanies her commentary with a revised text and a deliberately extended introduction. Besides including surveys of language, style, versification and textual transmission, the introduction looks at the shifting generic traditions of Greek and Roman elegy, and situates Ovid's composite poem in its Augustan literary and historical context.