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THE POLITICS of TEMPORA the Last Years of Augustus' Life and Those

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THE POLITICS of TEMPORA the Last Years of Augustus' Life and Those CHAPTER ONE THE POLITICS OF TEMPORA The last years of Augustus’ life and those just after his death, the years during which Ovid’s Fasti was composed and revised, found Rome poised on the brink of a new definition of her future and a re-reading of the past that brought her to that point. If in earlier years Augustus’ gradual negotiation and adjustment of his own posi- tion in relation to the Republican past and the dictatorship of Caesar had been at center stage, now the steadily growing importance and uncertainty of the succession found Rome also concerned with the future, and with the assurance of continuity and stability.1 Janus, the Fasti’s first divine informant and a god of programmatic importance for the Fasti,2 seems to stand at this historical point, looking before him and behind him at once: Iane biceps, anni tacite labentis origo,/solus de superis qui tua terga vides [Two-headed Janus, font of the silently slipping year, the only god who can see his own back] (1.65–66). As the god of each new beginning, but one who “sees his back” as well, Janus provides a link between past, present and future. The poet addresses to him a prayer for the continuance of the “worry- free peace” provided by Rome’s present leaders, her duces, who are now plural as a new one succeeds to the first. Janus might seem an unlikely candidate for a guarantor of stability—his old name, after all, was Chaos—but his description of the means by which chaos gave way to the present order is telling: me Chaos antiqui (nam sum res prisca) vocabant: aspice quam longi temporis acta canam. lucidus hic aer et quae tria corpora restant, ignis, aquae, tellus, unus acervus erat. 1 Cf. Hardie, “Mutability of Rome,” 61; P. Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, trans. A. Shapiro (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 192–238. 2 On Janus as an emblem of the Fasti itself, or of the position of the poet vis- à-vis his material: Hardie, “Janus episode;” Barchiesi, The Poet and the Prince, 229–37; Newlands, Playing with Time, 6–7. 22 chapter one ut semel haec rerum secessit lite suarum inque novas abiit massa soluta domos, flamma petit altum, propior locus aera cepit, sederunt medio terra fretumque solo. [The ancients (for I am an antiquity) called me Chaos: behold, how long-passed are the deeds I sing. This bright air and the three remain- ing elements, fire, water, and earth, used to be a single heap. When, all at once, by the conflict of its own elements, this mass separated and, dissolving, departed for new abodes, the flame sought the heights, a nearer place received the air, and the land and sea settled at ground level.] (1.103–10) In this cosmogony, it is the lis itself, the disagreement and tension between the elements, that orders the world, giving each thing its proper place.3 The Fasti’s cosmogony, which is also the story of Janus’ ‘birth,’ points to the particular ideology of the late-Augustan period which emphasized stability and concord, but was underlain with tensions both civil and familial. In addition, this balancing act of warring elements which does not settle conflict, but rather uses its tensions to build order, might stand as an emblem of the com- plexities of Augustan ideologies of time and history.4 In particular, we find in the Augustan period a multiplicity of meanings assigned to the past which, though logically contradictory, converge to build stability and continuity for the future.5 This chapter explores how 3 The significance of the wording here is most clear when compared with the cosmogony of the Metamorphoses (1.5–75). Conflict, which is the instrument of order in the Fasti, is figured in the Metamorphoses as the defining characteristic of the chaotic state (non bene iunctarum discordia semina rerum [1.9]; obstabat [1.18]; pugnabant [1.20]); the settling of the conflict (Hanc deus et melior litem natura dirimet [1.20]) is the birth of the cosmos, though this settlement is, of course, far from permanent (cf. R. Tarrant, “Chaos in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its Neronian Influence,” Arethusa 35 [2002]: 349–60). On the diverse philosophical background of the Metamorphoses’ cosmogony: K. S. Myers, Ovid’s Causes: Cosmogony and Aetiology in the Metamorphoses (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 41–43. On the “stoic orthodoxy” concerning discordia concors as a principle of universal order: M. Roberts, “Creation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Latin Poets of Late Antiquity,” Arethusa 35 (2002): 403–15. 4 N. Mackie, in a reading of a second cosmogony/theogony in the Fasti (5.11–52), has pointed to the political potential inherent in cosmogonies to comment on the present order by describing its origins: “Ovid and the Birth of Maiestas,” in Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus, ed. A. Powell (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1992), 83–97. 5 Cf. K. Galinsky, Augustan Culture: An Interpretive Introduction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), who sees this multivalence as a characteristic and consti- tutive element of Augustanism..
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