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FASTI HORATIANI: HORACE'S AUGUSTAN APPROPRIATION OF THE CALENDAR
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 March 2023
Abstract
This article argues that Horace's incorporation of festivals does more than reflect his lived reality and add a Roman veneer to Greek lyric. Horace's festivals weave the poet and his life into publicly shared Roman time. His celebration of private events on public holidays mirrors the kind of penetration of public and private we see in imperial appropriation of the fasti. Just as 28 April, the start of the Floralia, gains new significance with the addition of feriae celebrating the transfer of Vesta's temple to Augustus’ house, so also 1 March comes to signify both the Matronalia as well as the divine rescue of Horace the bachelor. Horace's inclusion of private festivals in his monumentum allows him to create a parallel calendar, one which perhaps competes with the imperial fasti. This exploitation of the fasti plays a key role in Horace's ability to immortalize himself and what he cared most about.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association
Footnotes
This article began its life as a paper presented at the conference, ‘Celebrating the Divine: Roman Festivals in Art, Religion, and Literature’, hosted by the University of Virginia Department of Classics and the IHGC Lab in Dissecting Cultural Pluralism (30–31 August 2019). I wish to thank the organizers, John Miller and Anke Walter, for their invitation, for a stimulating conference, and for their enthusiastic support, as well as everyone in attendance for all their helpful suggestions and correctives. I am also deeply grateful to Ivana Petrovic and the anonymous reader whose careful reading of previous drafts has shepherded this project along. It is much improved. Any errors, omissions, or shortcomings that remain are my own.
References
1 Scullard, H. H., Festivals and Ceremonies of the Roman Republic (London, 1981), 201Google Scholar (emphasis mine).
2 See Woodman, A. J., ‘Now That April's There: Horace, Odes 3.18’, G&R 67 (2020), 247–53Google Scholar, for the relevant evidence as well as for the suggestion that we read Apriles for Decembres in line 10. Woodman is chiefly concerned with bringing the date of the festival into accordance with the poem's springtime imagery without the kinds of interpretive gymnastics to which critics have sometimes resorted. Additional points are made in his recent commentary, Woodman, A. J., Horace, Odes III (Cambridge, 2022), 269–72Google Scholar.
3 J. Griffin, ‘Cult and Personality in Horace’, JRS 87 (1997), 57.
4 Griffin (n. 3), 54–5.
5 The earliest reference to a festival is to the Terminalia at Epodes 2; the latest occurs in Epistles 1.5, when Augustus’ birthday on the following day will allow Horace and his guests to sleep in after a long night of drinking.
6 This is the position of Griffin (n. 3), the fullest treatment of Horatian festivals, as is clear from the explicit connection made in the opening paragraph between his 1997 article and his earlier monograph, Latin Poets and Roman Life (London, 1985).
7 For a reassessment of the festival's social function, see F. Dolansky, ‘Reconsidering the Matronalia and Women's Rites’, CW 104 (2010–11), 191–209, who also provides a good overview of the primary evidence for the festival.
8 Scullard (n. 1), 87: ‘1 March must have been a lively day in Rome: dancing processions, a celebration perhaps at the ancient altar of Mars in the Campus Martius, women going to a women's festival at the temple of Juno Lucina or else staying at home, dressed up to receive presents, and perhaps a general feeling of jollity.’
9 There is yet another reference at 3.4.27: devota non extinxit arbor (‘nor did the accursed tree snuff me out’). For a good discussion of the tree episode, see especially M. C. J. Putnam, ‘Horace's arboreal anniversary (C. 3.8)’, Ramus 25 (1996), 27–38.
10 Whether this is a first anniversary or not is a matter of some debate; K. Quinn, Horace. The Odes (London, 1980) ad loc. thinks the first anniversary is the ‘natural assumption’, whereas R. G. M. Nisbet and N. Rudd, A Commentary on Horace. Odes Book III (Oxford, 2004), 244, deny any such implication. Woodman 2022 (n. 2) thinks it must be the first; if not, it is hard to explain Maecenas’ surprise.
11 Woodman 2022 (n. 2), 188 n. 52, raises this point, but suggests Maecenas may be squeezing it in while the women were performing ritual activities from which their husbands may have been excluded.
12 3.8.14–15: vigilis lucernas / perfer in lucem (‘draw out the wakeful lamps till daybreak’).
13 Woodman 2022 (n. 2), 193: ‘hic underlines the “substitution” of H's anniversary for the Matronalia.’ Griffin (n. 3), 58, notes some of the tension created by this juxtaposition: the poem ‘exploits the established festival…to point up the poet's own avoidance of marriage’. J. Henderson, Writing Down Rome. Satire, Comedy, and Other Offenses in Latin Poetry (Oxford, 1999), 140–1: ‘this is odd – fun, impropriety, dissonance – not just because what had originally been the first day of the Roman year is now a re-birth day in one Roman's household, but because it will coincide with everybiddy's Matronalia’ (emphasis original).
14 Though, as Woodman 2022 (n. 2) ad loc. notes, Neptune had feast days on the anniversary of Actium and on Augustus’ birthday. See also A. Bradshaw, ‘Horace's Birthday and Deathday’, in T. Woodman and D. Feeney (eds.), Traditions and Contexts in the Poetry of Horace (Cambridge, 2002), 1–16, who thinks that Horace has in mind not the Roman calendar, but the Athenian, and argues for a reference to Horace's birthday on 8 December, which would have corresponded to Poseidon's festival day in his own month.
15 For an attempt to explain Horace's curious reticence on the festival setting, see G. Davis, ‘Festo quid potius die: locus of performance and lyric program in Horace, Odes 3.28’, in B. Delignon, N. Le Meur, and O. Thévenaz (eds.), La poésie lyrique dans la cité antique. Les « Odes » d'Horace au miroir de la lyrique grecque archaïque : actes du colloque organisé les 6–8 juin 2012 par l'ENS de Lyon, HiSoMA (UMR 5189) et l'Université de Lausanne (Lyon, 2016), 275–84.
16 E. A. Schmidt, Zeit und Form. Dichtungen des Horaz (Heidelberg, 2002), 225, rightly sees the answer to the opening question as ‘der Inhalt der Ode: Das Beste am Neptunsfest ist die Liebesfeier mit Lyde’, though he too sees this as the appropriate thing to do: ‘Die Ausgangssituation des Gedichts ist nicht die Frage der geliebten an den Liebenden…sondern das Fest des Gottes Neptun und die angemessene Feier dieses Festes durch den Liebenden und die geliebte Frau’ (emphasis mine). But why is this particularly appropriate for this particular festival to Neptune?
17 Woodman 2022 (n. 2), 352: ‘It seems that the poet has been preparing to celebrate a divinity's feast day, preparations which Lyde has evidently questioned.’
18 See Nisbet and Rudd (n. 10), 173–4, for their discussion. For arguments in favour of the Neptunalia, see L. and P. Brind'Amour, ‘La fontaine de Bandusie, la Canicule, et les Neptunalia’, Phoenix 27 (1973), 276–82. For a response in support of the standard view that it is the Fontinalia, see F. Cairns, ‘Horace, Odes, III,13 and III,23’, AC 46 (1977) 523–43. E. A. Schmidt argues for the festival of the Camenae on 13 August: ‘Das horazische Sabinum als Dichterlandschaft’, A&A 23 (1977), 97–112. L. Morgan, ‘The One and Only fons Bandusiae’, CQ 59 (2009), 132–41, takes the lack of specific reference to any festival to mean that Horace does not intend us to think of public festivals here. It is also possible, as Woodman 2022 (n. 2), 232, suggests, that this festival, like the one to Faunus in 3.18, was a local one.
19 For a brief history of the debate and arguments in favour of a spring in Venusia, see Morgan (n. 18).
20 E. Oliensis, Horace and the Rhetoric of Authority (Cambridge, 1998), 99.
21 Nisbet and Rudd (n. 10), 338. They begin their discussion with the claim that Horace is following Hellenistic precedents in setting his poem on a festival day; as a parallel, they cite Theocritus 15. This, however, highlights just how different Horace's poem is from Theocritus’: Gorgo and Praxinoa actually attend the festivities of the Adonia.
22 Griffin (n. 3), 59.
23 For example, Scullard (n. 1), 201, on Horace's festival to Faunus in Odes 3.18: ‘Here we have the essence of true Roman country religion’. Griffin (n. 3) is full of such claims, e.g. 55: ‘In his Third Book Horace gives us a series of apparently casual glimpses of himself living an ordinary Roman existence.’
24 On the poem as Horace's epitaph, see T. Woodman, ‘exegi monumentum: Horace, Odes 3.30’, in T. Woodman and D. West (eds.), Quality and Pleasure in Latin Poetry (Cambridge, 1974), 115–28, and T. Habinek, The Politics of Latin Literature. Writing, Identity, and Empire in Ancient Rome (Princeton, 1998), 110–12. See A. Kirichenko, ‘How to Build a Monument: Horace the Image-Maker’, MD 80 (2018), 121–63, for a similar emphasis on Horace's poetry as a public monument.
25 Whatever event is to be understood by dum Capitolium scandet cum tacita uirgine pontifex (‘while the Pontifex climbs the Capitoline in the company of the silent Vestal’; 3.30.8–9), even if it signifies any number of events, the occasion, or occasions, on which a pontifex climbed the Capitoline in the company of a Vestal Virgin must surely have been public and religious in nature. Woodman 2022 (n. 2) ad loc. refers to an unpublished paper by J. G. F. Powell, which makes the intriguing suggestion that Horace had in mind the announcements made by the pontifces on the Capitoline hill on the Kalends of every month (see Varro, LL 6.27). For perceptive remarks on this line, see M. Lowrie, Writing, Performance, and Authority in Augustan Rome (Oxford, 2009), 120 and n. 70.
26 For similar points, see Kirichenko (n. 24) 135–6. See also D. Feeney, ‘Horace and the Greek Lyric Poets’, in N. Rudd (ed.), Horace 2000. A Celebration. Essays for the Bimillennium (Ann Arbor, 1993), 57–60.
27 See M. Beard, ‘A Complex of Times: No More Sheep on Romulus’ Birthday’, PCPhS 33 (1987), 1–15, on the Roman calendar as a pageant of Rome and Romanness; she rightly stresses that the significance and meanings of the festivals could and did change. See also D. Feeney, Caesar's Calendar. Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History (Berkeley, 2007), 158–60, on the identity and ‘sameness’ of a given day from year to year.
28 See, e.g., A. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Time for Augustus: Ovid, Augustus, and the Fasti’, in M. Whitby, P. Hardie, and M. Whitby (eds.), Homo Viator. Classical Essays for John Bramble (Bristol, 1987), 221–30; Beard (n. 27); Feeney (n. 27).
29 J. Rüpke, Pantheon. A New History of Roman Religion (Princeton, 2018), 204.
30 For the dating, see A. Degrassi, Inscriptiones Italiae, Vol. XIII. Fasti et elogia (Rome, 1963), 29–46.
31 For a similar connection between the official celebration of Augustus’ dies natalis (along with the nascent imperial cult) and the proliferation of birthday poems during that time, see K. Argetsinger, ‘Birthday Rituals: Friends and Patrons in Roman Poetry and Cult’, ClAnt 11 (1992), 191.
32 quae cura patrum quaeve Quiritium / …tuas, / Auguste, virtutes in aevum / per titulos memoresque fastus / aeternet… (‘what care should the senate and the people of Rome…take to immortalize your virtues for all time through inscriptions and the fasti that remember…?’). R. Thomas, Horace Odes Book IV and Carmen Saeculare (Cambridge, 2011), ad loc. imparts a wider sense to fasti here (‘historical record’), following Ps.-Acro (fasti = annales). But surely – and especially when paired with tituli – we are meant first and foremost to think of the calendar, as Thomas himself implies in his note on 13.14–16 describing Lyce's personal fasti: ‘these fictional fasti, modelled on consular or triumphal fasti, are records of Lyce's precise age and also perhaps her res gestae over the years, there for all to see. This sets up a pointed contrast to the real thing, coming up at 14.4…’ (emphasis mine).
33 See Feeney (n. 26), 149.
34 For a thorough discussion of this passage and its significance for Ovid's poem, see Barchiesi, A., The Poet and the Prince. Ovid and Augustan Discourse (Berkeley, 1997), 133–40Google Scholar.
35 Beard (n. 27), 9 (emphasis original).
36 Barchiesi (n. 34), 130. For discussions of this same dynamic in other odes as well, see Henderson (n. 13), 140–3, and Feeney, D., Literature and Religion at Rome. Cultures, Contexts, and Beliefs (Cambridge, 1998), 134–5Google Scholar.
37 See, e.g., Feeney (n. 36), 5–6.
38 ut tamen noris, quibus advoceris / gaudiis, Idus tibi sunt agendae / qui dies mensem…/ findit Aprilem /…quod ex hac / luce Maecenas meus adfuentis / ordinat annos (‘So that you know to what celebrations you are invited, the Ides is to be celebrated, the day which splits the month of April…because from that day my Maecenas reckons up his affluent years’). On the formula, quod eo die, see Rüpke, J., On Roman Religion. Lived Religion and the Individual in Ancient Rome (Ithaca, 2016), 118CrossRefGoogle Scholar: ‘Already in the Augustan period, the calendar of festivals was filled with a vast quantity of imperial data, from birthdays and days of accessions to power, to weddings and victories…Usually, these new dates…were marked by the addition of short explanations for the new legal character of the day: feriae, quod eo die…’.