Postscripts from the Edge: Exilic Fasti and Imperialised Rome

Fasti is Ovid's prime exilic work. Begun at the same time as Metamorphoses it is yet the last of Ovid's poems, rewritten in exile to juxtapose past and present, centre and periphery, tradition, religion, time and their ideological appropriation and abuse. Ovid's carmen ultimum, it joins Epistulae ex Ponto in straddling the principates of Augustus and Tiberius and bearing witness with Epistulae to the factuality of dynastic succession and the consolidation of imperial power. There is no evidence that any of Fasti was recited, or otherwise made public, before Ovid's departure for Tomis; indeed the only reference to Fasti outside itself is the second Tristia's description of the rupturing of the work (opus ruptum, Tr. 2.552) by Ovid's exilic ‘fate’ (sors). Pre-exilic and exilic strata exist in the poem, as many critics have too frequently noted, but, since they were never read in separate contexts but always within the frame of Ovid's exile, their dynamic interplay serves only to enrich and to deepen the exilic nature of Fasti's discourse.