Mars himself is able to indulge complacently in a description of spring at the
“right” moment, when he speaks to the poet at the beginning of his own month of
March (3.235 – 42); since spring is now beginning, all of Mars’s description is dot-
ted with “now,” instead of “then”: nuncfecundus ager, pecoris nunchora creandi,/
nuncauis in ramo tecta laremque parat(3.241 – 42). The month of Mars is also pre-
sented as an ideal place for the Roman year to start for reasons other than those of
natural congruence with the seasons. At the beginning of the book, when Ovid
begins telling the story of how the Vestal Silvia became pregnant with Mars’s sons
Romulus and Remus, he asks a loaded question: quid enim uetat inde moueri?
(“What prevents me from starting from here?” 3.11). As Barchiesi has pointed out,
if we think of our Ennius, where the rape of Silvia is the beginning of the Roman
foundation story in epic, then “Why don’t I take this as my starting point?” be-
comes a very powerful question.^166 Under one interpretation of what being a
Roman is all about, for the Roman year to start with the month of Mars is appro-
priate ideologically and historically as well as from the point of view of the sea-
sons. Mars’s month used to come first, put there by his son Romulus, but it has
since been displaced, by Greek science, which taught the Romans that there were
actually twelve months in the year, not ten (3.97 – 102).^167 In the first two books
Ovid has already given us snippets of the Romulus and Remus story, but the
beginning of book 3 gives the proper beginning of their narrative at last, with their
conception and birth — except that this foundational narrative of origins is no
longer at the beginning of the year, or the poem. Ovid creates the idea that calen-
dar time and seasonal time and narrative time ought to be in harmony, and he
insinuates that at Rome they used to be more in harmony, in the beginning.
Caesar’s calendar, for all its success in creating a harmony between the city’s time
and nature ’s time, is continuing to preserve disharmonies of other kinds at the
same time. Overall, the main effect of reading the poem continuously is one of
contingency, not of harmony, as the reader experiences the utter unpredictability
of moving through something that is grounded in nature but that is continually
having unmotivated juxtapositions flung upon it, as one day of the fasti,with all
its possible connotations and associations, follows without natural rhyme or rea-
son after another.^168
Ovid presses harder yet on the categories of civil and natural as they relate to
the representation of time in the calendar. As we have already seen, the tempora
that Ovid announces as his subject in the first line of the Fastiare for the most part
not natural, since they have human causes. In the second line of the poem, he says
he will in addition treat of celestial phenomena, “constellations/signs, their set-
The Civil and the Natural. 205