The Regal Period in Ovid’s Fasti

It is with Ovid that we encounter most forcefully the problem of irony and politics in the interpretation of Augustan literature. Wide acceptance of the historical model of the poet oppressed by autocracy has, speaking generally, imparted a lack of ambiguity to the interpretation of irony. While the subtlety of Ovidian irony is not in question, doubt tends not to be expressed about the object or intention of that irony, universally thought to be a flippant or subversive attitude to Augustus. Although the simplistic division between pro- and anti-Augustan is now becoming obsolete, it has not been replaced by a sophisticated way of interpreting irony, but instead by an interest in the workings of subversion, attempting to ground literary interpretation in historical circumstance. In its newest manifestation, this involves reconstructing the possible pluralism of Ovid’s original readership. More adventurously, Barchiesi has recently made the continuity of Augustan ideology a central issue.

Aesthetics · Ambiguity · Art · Epistemology · Ideology · Interpretation (philosophy) · Irony · Linguistics · Literature · Political science · Politics · Subversion · Byzantine Studies and History · Classical Antiquity Studies · History · Law · Organic Chemistry Synthesis Methods · Philosophy

• Juno in the proemium of Ovid’s Fasti 6

  Beatrice Poletti•Acta Antiqua Academiae…•2017

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