The astronomical material in Ovid's Roman calendar, the <I>Fasti</I> has been inadequately treated in past scholarship, and is neglected by contemporary scholars. In my dissertation I deal comprehensively with this material, which forms between one quarter and one third of the total volume of the poem. My approach to the <I>Fasti</I> through its stars aims to combine recent genre-based or "programmatic" reading with a broad culture-historical perspective. I do not study Ovid's stars using the technical methods of mathematical astronomy. The importance of astronomy to the <I>Fasti</I> is not so much scientific as generic. The stars serve to tie the <I>Fasti</I> with hexameter didactic poetry as much as with elegiac models. A primary didactic ancestor is the <I>Phaenomena</I> of Aratus, an astronomical poem written in the C 3<SUP>rd</SUP> BC. The main task of my thesis is to test the scholarly assumption, never fully explored, that the astronomy in the <I>Fasti</I> is influenced by Aratus' <I>Phaenomena</I>. The first four chapters take up this task. My findings, gained through a comprehensive comparison of the astronomical material in the <I>Fasti</I> with corresponding material from the <I>Phaenomena</I>, indicate that the connection between the two poets is not readily quantifiable in terms of direct echo, but inheres in a broader symbolic relationship. Aratus is a poet of Stoicism and of order, Ovid of mythology and shifting political ground. Comparison of these two different entities produces meaning by both their similarity to and divergence from one another. In the final two chapters of my thesis I take the <I>Fasti</I> and its Aratean model out of the purely literary frame and into contemporary politics. The astronomy in the <I>Fasti</I> can be seen to be in keeping with ideas of cosmic empire, in which Greek learning was appropriated to express Roman political domination. At the same time, the stars bring the <I>Fasti</I> into line with the universe of the <I>Metamorphoses</I>, in which catasterism (translation to the stars) is amoral and part of a fluid world-view which is not consonant with political determinism. Through its astronomy, the <I>Fasti</I> both takes on and resists the impulse towards Augustan universalist panegyric.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:599344 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Gee, E. R. G. |
| Publisher | University of Cambridge |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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