Fasti / Ovid

Beneath a 'patriotic' façade, Ovid's final poem is deliciously subversive of the values and propaganda of the emperor who sent him into exile. One of the fullest and most enjoyable sources of information on Roman myth and religion, the Fasti is both a calendar of daily rituals and a witty sequence of stories recounted in a variety of styles and genres, comic, tragic, elegiac, epic and erotic. Yet many of them are shot through with uncomfortable political echoes. Augustus tried to control his subjects by imposing his own version of history and annual cycle of festivals on them, but Ovid - banished to the Black Sea - brilliantly debunks the official heroes and power structures. (After celebrating the emperor in his preferred image of Jupiter-on-earth, for example, he deliberately juxtaposes a story showing the king of gods as a savage rapist.) Endlessly playful, this is also a work of real integrity and courage, a superb climax to the career of one of Rome's greatest writers.