time or culture, or the asserted “likeness” of any two elements in simile. Recent
studies of Ovid ’s Fastihave concentrated productively on this issue, analyzing the
many different effects Ovid achieves as he compares and contrasts the “same” day
in contemporary Rome andback in whatever past time frame it links up with
through aetiological connection.^132 As these scholars suggest, if Augustus may
often be read as trying to assert an identity and continuity of values across the gulf
of centuries between the Roman past and present, then Ovid regularly opens up
the fissures and reveals the gaps between the two sides of the comparison. A telling
example comes on the first day of May, when Ovid is looking for the old Lares
Praestites, whose day this is.^133 He can no longer securely identify their images,
however, so worn are they by the lapse of time (Fast.5.131 – 32, 143 – 44). Instead,
Ovid finds, the old Lares have been ousted by the new Lares Augusti, so that the
day, with its cult, are no longer the same: what Augustus might construe as a
restoration of a link is presented by Ovid as an obstruction of access to the past.^134
In Ovid ’s case, the pressure on the issue of continuity and discontinuity is very
strong, since it is an issue inextricable from his key concern, aetiology, whose link-
ing of the past and present always causes as many explanatory problems as it
solves.^135 Yet the question acquires extra power in a calendrical context, where the
supposed identity of the day in each recurrent year is presented as a plain fact by
the very format of the inscription.
Apart from Ovid ’s Fasti,the most powerful laboratory for testing the “same-
ness” of Roman anniversary days is Virgil’s Aeneid8, in which Aeneas arrives at
the site of (future) Rome. This book is Virgil’s most sophisticated time machine,
and the anniversary is the best way to begin investigating the rich effects he pro-
duces as he works with the two opposite poles of mythical and contemporary time,
structured by the book’s recurrent antitheses of “now” and “then/once.”^136 The
poem as a whole is interested in forging links between these time perspectives,
explaining how this present was generated out of that past, and how that past is to
be understood in the light of this present; at the same time, the poem constructs
powerful discontinuities between the past and the present, as it opens up the per-
haps unbridgeable disjunctions between the modern empire and the rustic roots to
which it nostalgically harks back.^137 In book 8, when Aeneas is on the site of Rome,
the reader is juggling these two time perspectives all the way through, working on
the problems of identity and difference in the process; at times the two perspectives
are collapsed together, as we see Aeneas walking on the same significant ground as
Augustus, and doing so on days that continue to be the “same”; for on the site of
the city the significance of time and of space prove to be mutually self-defining.
- Years, Months, Days I: Eras and Anniversaries