Assiduo sono and furiosa tibia in Ovid’s Fasti

This paper focuses on three religious processions, in each of which (images of) deities participate in the cortege: the pompa circensis at Rome and processions of the cults of both Mater Magna and Isis. It is not a new study (after many) of these processions as religious facts. The aim of this contribution is to propose to investigate the role music plays in the Latin and Greek narratives that inform us, since we have hardly any other evidence, besides a few images like that of the exergue. My argument is that the musical ambiance depicted in these narratives, each of which stages a different divine figure that has been granted an officially recognised Roman public status, is first and foremost a device for drawing out a particular religious identity through the use of musical signs; thus it has only a tangential concern with the religious specificities of these cults. Music stands as a benchmark, the more so in such subtly rhetorical constructions

Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Identity (music) · Literature · Musical · Narrative · Rhetorical question · Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology and History · Classical Antiquity Studies · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome

• Displaying Rituals

  Katherine A Crawford•Journal of Urban Archaeology•2022

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