CHAPTER THREE

VENUS’ MONTH

Fasti 4 offers a particularly appropriate testing ground for the expec- tations raised by the complex relationship I have been arguing for between the poem’s calendrical materia and its poetics. ’s book on opens with an extensive proem, comprised of a program- matic conversation between the narrator and Venus and a discourse on the etymology of the month’s name, including a genealogy of the Iulii and hymnic praise of Venus as genetrix omnium, reminiscent of the proem to Lucretius’ De rerum natura. As we shall see, the ’s Venus proem is constructed to organize the remainder of the book, but has scarcely been treated in relationship to the entirety of the book it introduces. The cohesion suggested by the proem is rein- forced by a cycle of closely related agricultural festivals in the latter part of April, including the , , , , and . Examination of the poetic strategies by which Ovid represents and reinforces the overlapping meanings of these cults, and also of the links he builds between less clearly related god- desses who are worshipped in April will bring to light the means by which the literary structures of the book support and indeed perform the connections between rites that were part of the ritual experience of the Roman year, both ‘true’ (i.e., historically and developmentally traceable) connections and ones that are ‘imaginary’ (but no less culturally significant).

“The poet and the month are yours...”

The Venus-proem of Fasti 4.1–132 has received a good deal of atten- tion from literary critics, and for good reason.1 The passage stands

1 The most extensive and thorough treatment is Barchiesi, The Poet and the Prince, 53–60, on whose observations I build throughout. See also Green, “Varro’s Three Theologies,” 79–83; E. Fantham, ed. and comm, Ovid, Fasti IV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ad 4.1–18. venus’ month 127 in the center of the work as we have it, a position often given pro- grammatic significance in Roman poetry;2 this proem does not dis- appoint our expectations. In conversation with Venus, who is offended by his neglect of her (i.e., of erotic poetry), the poet places the Fasti in relation to his earlier elegy, most particularly by allusion to the close of the Amores. Surprised at the poet’s invocation of her, Venus asks, ‘quid tibi mecum? certe maiora canebas’ [‘What’s your business with me? Surely you were singing of bigger matters’] (Fast. 4.3). Ovid claims never to have deserted the goddess’ standards, and that she is always his opus (4.7–8). At the end of the Amores, Ovid had taken his leave of Venus and of elegiac verse in order to pursue the greater glory of tragedy: corniger increpuit thyrso graviore Lyaeus:/pulsanda est mag- nis area maior equis./inbelles elegi, genialis Musa, valete [Horned Lyaeus has banged his heavier staff: a bigger field needs big horses to thun- der over it. Unwarlike elegies, merry Muse, farewell] (Am. 3.15.17–19).3 Amores 3.15 opened with a farewell to the goddess: Quaere novum vatem, tenerorum mater Amorum! [Seek a new poet, mother of the tender Loves!]; the first line of Fasti 4 greets Venus with a similar address: ‘Alma, fave’, dixi ‘geminorum mater Amorum’ [‘Greetings,’ I said, ‘nourishing mother of the twin loves’].4 The Fasti passage, by denying in an ele- giac poem that the poet ever left the standards of Venus, reconfigures the terms of generic discussion posited in the Amores. A choice between big themes and elegy is no longer the question—Ovid has found his area maior without abandoning the elegiac form. The question is now whether the form fits the new subject, and whether this sort of elegy still has any connection to erotic elegy, and to Venus.5 In this first exchange, Ovid’s narrator assures Venus that he has come to the fourth month, one in which the goddess receives a lot of ritual attention: quo tu celeberrima mense (4.13). The exaggeration of this line has been noted—Venus only shows up three times in the

2 G. B. Conte, “Proems in the middle,” in Beginnings in Classical Literature, edd. F. M. Dunn and T. Cole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 147–59. Cf. Barchiesi, The Poet and the Prince, 56. 3 Cf. also: nunc teritur nostris area maior equis (Fast. 4.10). 4 For fuller discussions of the two passages see Miller, Elegiac Festivals, 29; Hinds, Metamorphosis, 118 and 162, n. 7; “Arma—Part I,” 85–87. On gemini Amores as a pos- sible reference to the double edition of Ovid’s Amores, see Miller, Elegiac Festivals, 152, n. 76. 5 Cf. Harries, “Causation,” 174–75.