saepe tibi pater est, saepe legendus auus,
quaeque ferunt illi, pictos signantia fastos,
tu quoque cum Druso praemia fratre feres.You will recognize sacred rites dug out from old annals, and what each day
is entitled to be marked by. There you will find in addition the festivals of
your house; often your father and grandfather are to be read there, and the
rewards that they bear, picked out in the painted calendar, you too will bear
with Drusus your brother.The first of the quoted lines (7) refers to Ovid ’s sources, including older com-
mentaries on the fasti;the second line (8) refers to the calendar itself, with the
strong implication that the days marked are the ones marked in the old calendar,
since the following lines are signaled by the new material of the new imperial fasti,
introduced by “there you will find in addition.. .” At the beginning of book 2,
when he addresses Augustus, Ovid describes the fastias “your names, your titles”
(tua... nomina,... titulos... tuos,15 – 16).
By writing themselves into the fastiin this way, the imperial family are behaving
like the first king, according to Ovid, who represents Romulus as a proto-Augustus,
putting his family into the calendar. Romulus named March (the first month
according to him) after his father, Mars, and the “second” month, April, after
Venus, the mother of the race through Aeneas (1.39 – 40).^87 The second king,
Numa, does not follow this precedent but puts Janus and the month of the ancestral
shades, February, in first and second place (1.43 – 44). The power of the use of the
fastias a venue for honorific work was, then, clear from the start. It attracted much
adverse comment from critics such as Tacitus, who delivers himself of a number of
mordant comments about “the befouling of the fastiby flattery” (fastos adulatione
foedatos, Hist.4.40.2).^88 The emperor Tiberius himself turned down a proposal that
September should be given his name, and October that of his mother, Livia;^89 typ-
ically, he asked the Senate what they would do if there were thirteen Caesars.^90
The process had begun with the honors voted to Julius Caesar by the Senate for
his various victories in the civil wars, and his new calendar provides a new venue
for innovation within an increasingly structured system of honors: the late Repub-
lic had seen experiments with statues, funerals, crowns, and so on, but only with
Caesar and his new calendar do the fastithemselves become part of the honorific
“language of power.”^91 Various imperial fastirecord the addition offeriae publicae,
marked with NP,on the anniversaries of the victories at Munda (17 March), Alex-
- Years, Months, Days II: Grids of the Fasti