Ovid, Aratus and Augustus

The astronomical material in Ovid's Fasti has been overlooked by the current trend of scholarly interest in the poem. It is this material which is the subject of this book. The author does not study Ovid's stars using the techniques of mathematical astronomy. Rather she aims to combine the methodology of recent 'programmatic' or genre-based readings with a broad cultural perspective. Arguing that the stars serve to align the Fasti with hexameter didactic poetry, she first tests the assumption that the Fasti is influenced by the Phaenomena of Aratus. A second task is to assess the value of such writing in Augustan Rome: the Fasti and its Aratean model may be removed from the literary-historical sphere and placed in the political setting of the later Augustan Principate, in which the stars had been appropriated to express the powerful connection between the Julian family and the cosmos.