dational act by an individual (if that is in fact what the dative denotes) are always
liable to be swallowed up by the cyclical and corporate momentum of the docu-
ment. As Rüpke himself acknowledges, a genuinely historical notice should look
something like “On this day in the consulship of A and B, this temple was dedicated
to god C by personage D.”^82 This, however, is not at all what we see. What the
Republican calendar shows is “First day of January: to Aesculapius, on the island”:
this is an enduring day, the same every year, that repeats at the same place every
year, a day that belongs to the god and the people, not to any individual. [2 near here.]
With the coming of the Principate, which has its own new fastiin the form of
Julius Caesar’s reformed calendar, including a month that now bears his name, a
revolution in the style as well as the calendrical content of the fastitakes place:
“every few days, another imperial anniversary, another commemoration of the
princepsand his family, a positive invasion, a planned and systematic act of intru-
sion which has the cumulative effect of recasting what it means to be Roman.”^83
After centuries in which no human being was named on the calendar, the imperial
family is now everywhere, with specific year dates often attached to their various
doings. Births, deaths, apotheoses, assumptions of power, accessions to priest-
hoods, comings of age, dedications of temples, victories in battle — the fastiof the
Roman people take on an increasingly crowded and fussily annotative look.^84 Fig-
ures 13 and 14, showing Degrassi’s drawing and transcript of the Fasti Praenestini
for 6 – 15 January, convey a vivid impression of the way in which the imperial fam-
ily have transformed the old calendar with the new battery of commemorative
material. Contemporaries immediately saw the point. In 13 b.c.e.Horace addresses
Augustus with an ode in which he asks how the Senate and People will make his
virtues live forever into the future “through inscriptions/titles and the memory-
preserving/memory-endowed fasti” (tuas, Auguste, uirtutes in aeuum/per titulos
memoresque fastus, Carm.4.14.3 – 4). The word titulirefers both to the “inscrip-
tions,” including fasti,on which he will appear, and to the “titles,” including espe-
cially the name “Augustus,” which will denote him there;^85 the fastiwill remember
Augustus and preserve his memory with their welter of citations of his name and
deeds. Horace is perhaps alluding in particular to the Augustalia of 12 October,
instituted six years earlier in 19 b.c.e., the first Roman festival ever to be named
after a historical human being and, so far as we know, the first new large-letter fes-
tival to be incorporated into the calendar since its original publication.^86 Horace ’s
phrasing looks distinctly prophetic of the most conspicuous way in which the fasti
would preserve the name of Augustus, through the renaming of the month Sextilis
five years after this poem was published. Pa[lce Fgiures 13 and 14 neahr ere.]
Augustus’s Calendrical Year. 185