FASTI HORATIANI: HORACE'S AUGUSTAN APPROPRIATION OF THE CALENDAR

Abstract

This article argues that Horace's incorporation of festivals does more than reflect his lived reality and add a Roman veneer to Greek lyric. Horace's festivals weave the poet and his life into publicly shared Roman time. His celebration of private events on public holidays mirrors the kind of penetration of public and private we see in imperial appropriation of the fasti. Just as 28 April, the start of the Floralia, gains new significance with the addition of feriae celebrating the transfer of Vesta's temple to Augustus’ house, so also 1 March comes to signify both the Matronalia as well as the divine rescue of Horace the bachelor. Horace's inclusion of private festivals in his monumentum allows him to create a parallel calendar, one which perhaps competes with the imperial fasti. This exploitation of the fasti plays a key role in Horace's ability to immortalize himself and what he cared most about.

If on the Nones of December a Roman…had sought relief by a trip into the countryside, he might have encountered a pleasing sight, made famous by one of Horace's most attractive Odes (3.18)…This annual festival was held in the pagi and not in Rome, so that it is not registered in the calendars, but it is included here because it must have played an important part in the lives of many Romans, especially in the early days.¹

The festival to Faunus on the Nones of December which serves as the occasion for Odes 3.18 is unattested; Horace's poem is our only source. Scholars assume, therefore, that it was a local town festival – Scullard imagines a quaint village celebration involving Horace and those who lived near his Sabine farm. That assumption is reasonable enough, of course, and we have no reason whatsoever to doubt what Horace says about it.² Scullard's inclusion of Horace's local Faunalia is, however, illustrative of several points I wish to make here. That an otherwise unattested rural festival should find itself included in a standard scholarly work on Roman festivals and the calendar alongside such major ‘official’ celebrations as the Parilia and the Liberalia is a testament to what Horace could achieve by exploiting the fasti in the way he does. Through the power of his poetry, Horace has ensured for his local festival (and other celebrations, as we shall see) a place in the calendar – and therefore a legitimacy for it. Indeed, Horace's Faunalia owes its inclusion in Scullard first and foremost because the poet tied his festival to a calendrical date and included it in the monumentum of his poetry book. Horace, like Augustus, understood the commemorative potential of the fasti and the power of the definite date. In Horace's lifetime, the princeps began exploiting that potential by transforming private and personally significant events, such as his victory at Naulochus or his birthday, into public feriae. Horace's use of festivals, I argue, his incorporation of private, local, or personally significant celebrations into his ‘public’ poetic monument, mirrors in several respects Augustus’ contemporary exploitation of the fasti.

References to Roman festivals and the festival calendar, both explicit and implied, are common in Horace, and several poems occur on, or anticipate, various festal occasions. There is a marked clustering of these in Odes Book 3, where, as Griffin puts it, ‘Horace comes out of cover and makes unambiguous use of the calendar’.³ Indeed, Griffin sees this engagement with the calendar as the distinctive feature of the third book.⁴ The marked increase in Horace's use of the fasti in Odes 3 is a point to which I shall return toward the end, where I will suggest that it might correspond to an increase in Augustan holidays; it is worth stressing, however, that Horace's interest in the calendar runs throughout his corpus.⁵ The general view, when Horace's festivals receive due notice, is that they are primarily a way for Horace to add local colour, a Roman touch to his otherwise Greek poetry, details which ground the poet's experience in a lived reality.⁶

But there is more we can say here; for while many poems take festivals, or the anticipation of them, as their dramatic occasions, a persistent feature of these poems is Horace's tendency to shift focus away from the public festival occasions themselves, and to focus on matters of private importance. Odes 3.8 is a particularly striking example. The poem begins with Horace's surprised question to a surprised Maecenas, who is apparently wondering why Horace is celebrating during the Matronalia, a festival on the Kalends of March during which matronae were given gifts by their husbands and household, and which was sometimes called the ‘women's Saturnalia’.⁷ Other celebrations were also occurring on that date: those for the anniversary of the temple of Juno Lucina on the Esquiline, and feriae in honour of Mars.⁸ Horace, however, says nothing at all about any of this. That he has the Matronalia most in mind is ensured by the ode's second word: he is a caelebs, a bachelor, and thus has no matrona to honour. And yet, here he is celebrating anyway. We learn in the second stanza, perhaps with some surprise, that he is instead celebrating something else entirely: he was ‘nearly killed by a falling tree’. The four-word allusion prope funeratus arboris ictu (3.8.7–8) directs us back to Odes 2.13, where Horace had told us about the whole affair, and to 2.17, where he linked his rescue with Maecenas’ recovery from illness.⁹ Here, in Odes 3.8, Horace is celebrating the anniversary of that escape from arboreal death.¹⁰ The ode is a charming one, and justly well-liked by critics. It begins with this humorous aetiology about why Horace is celebrating on the Matronalia, and it ends with the familiar carpe diem theme as the poet urges his patron to put aside concerns for matters of state and join him in celebration.

We should not, however, let the poem's humour obscure what Horace is doing here; he has brought the public holiday of the Matronalia into the poem only to turn sharply away. Its sole purpose is to provide the occasion for an entirely different, deeply personal, religious celebration. This celebration, I should add, allows a professed bachelor to celebrate on a day in honour of married women, and (in Horace's mind) allows Maecenas, who ought perhaps to be celebrating the Matronalia with his wife, to spend time toasting Horace instead, or at least in addition.¹¹ The party, after all, is to last all night.¹² It is worth pointing out, since critics rarely do, that Horace was by no means forced to mention the date, however true it may have been that the escape happened on the Kalends of March; he did not do so in any of the other poems which mention the tree incident. Nor was he at all obligated, once he chose to mention the date, to mention his bachelor status. Indeed, the juxtaposition between a public festival honouring matronae and a private celebration honouring bachelor Horace's rescue, their concurrence in the calendar, and Horace's substitution of the private for the public one, seems to be precisely the point.¹³

Odes 3.28 exhibits a similar strategy, again juxtaposing Horace's individual, private celebration with the wider context of a public festival. To most, the phrase festo…die / Neptuni is a clear reference to the Neptunalia on 23 July.¹⁴ Festus tells us that leafy huts were constructed in place of tents; Ovid's reference to similar huts during the festival of Anna Perenna has encouraged the view that the Neptunalia was a similar kind of affair – people drinking outside, taking shelter from the summer sun under shade of the huts, carousing and having sex. If so, there seems to be nothing of the sort in Horace; there is, to be sure, a clear suggestion of sex with the mention of Venus at the end of Horace's and Lyde's shared song, but there is no sense here that they are outside, in public, and there are no leafy huts anywhere.¹⁵ The proposed song itself mimics the movement of the poem; it too begins appropriately with Neptune, but it also quickly veers away, like the poem, from the god and his special day to Venus and Nox. Nisbet and Rudd, in their comment on the second line, claim that after Horace has aroused our curiosity with the opening question, ‘what better thing should I be doing on Neptune's festival day?’, he at once gives the ‘appropriate answer’. Appropriate for Horace, maybe, but, much like Odes 3.8, I suspect his answer – in this case, the rest of the poem – was meant to be somewhat unexpected and perhaps even comical.¹⁶ After all, if Horace's proposed celebration is indeed the appropriate course of action on Neptune's day, why does Lyde apparently disagree?¹⁷

In some poems, Horace appears to celebrate country festivals (like the festival to Faunus in Odes 3.18 that so captured Scullard's imagination), or perhaps urban festivals but in a rural setting, likely on his Sabine farm. The occasion for Odes 3.13, for example, is by most accounts the eve of the Roman festival to Fons, the god of springs, the Fontinalia on 13 October; but regardless of the festival concerned – and almost everyone accepts a festival context – Horace uses the occasion to sacrifice to and celebrate the tiny, totally obscure Fons Bandusiae.¹⁸ We do not know what spring Horace has in mind, though the leading candidates (a spring on his Sabine estate or the local spring of his hometown, Venusia) are likely enough.¹⁹ In any case, by sacrificing to his local fons on a festival occasion and celebrating that future sacrifice in song, Horace aims to set this tiny obscure spring among the Arethusas, the Castalias, and the Hippocrenes of the world. But Horace's move here is doubly remarkable, since this reverses the conventional power dynamics, as Oliensis notes: ‘Instead of deriving his authority from a famous spring, Horace claims to confer renown upon his own source; the local spring is ennobled by the famous poet, not the poet by the spring.’²⁰

All of the odes which take place on or anticipate festival occasions make similar kinds of moves; either Horace celebrates the festival in a different way, or he chooses instead to celebrate something private, personal, local, or rustic. If they comment on the shift from public to private at all, critics generally see it in light of Horace's broader tendency to privilege private over public. So, Nisbet and Rudd on 3.28: ‘though the Neptunalia provides the backdrop for our poem, Horace's celebration is typically private and discreet.’²¹ More suggestively, Griffin connects this same impulse with Horace's similarly typical distaste for whatever the vulgus likes. As he says of 3.28: ‘[Horace] celebrates on the same occasions, and in a way that resembles theirs, but in a style whose refinement transfigures the commonplace…’; and the opening line, in his view, ‘gives the point of contrast with the cruder entertainments of the masses’.²² More broadly, the shift away from public festivities in these poems no doubt accounts for the persistent view that the chief function of Horace's use of festivals is to give us a glimpse of the private life of an individual Roman.²³

To be sure, this is one important function festivals perform; but this view privileges the private quality of these poems at the expense of their public nature. If we see Horace's inclusion of specific calendar dates simply as a way to enhance the realistic picture of the poet going about his day-to-day life, then we miss the broader picture of how Horace is drawing on contemporary interest in the commemorative power of the fasti. Setting Odes 3.8 on the Kalends of March, for example, fixes Horace's rescue in real time, a time that is communally shared, and a time that repeats – for all to know. And by calling the Odes his monumentum aere perennius (3.30.1), a ‘monument more lasting than bronze’, he urges us to see his book as a monumental work, in the truest sense, as a physical object, just as commemorative as any statue or tomb, and just as public.²⁴ Moreover, when Horace goes on to claim that a great part of him will live on after death, he ties that claim to the continuation of a particularly Roman religious act; but to do so is to tie his claim to the continuation of Roman time.²⁵ The power, therefore, that the Odes have to allow Horace to avoid death and total oblivion depend, in his mind, on the yearly round of Roman religious time. Horace surely understood that one reason why a great part of himself would be untouched by the succession of years (series annorum; 3.30.5) was not simply because he included intimate glimpses of ‘himself’ in his poetry, but also precisely because he had woven himself into the fasti, into Roman time.²⁶ And because he did so, that series annorum has in many ways become the series fastorum, the uncountable successions of years that are always somehow the same festival year.²⁷ In this way, the very series annorum – a force which usually destroys all things – will in fact be one important way in which Horace's memory will be preserved. As long as the memory of Roman time lasts, 1 March will mark the day on which Horace was saved from death; and when the year returns (hic dies anno redeunte festus; Odes 3.8.9), anyone who wishes can celebrate the anniversary of Horace's rescue as he himself had done.

An awareness of this power of the fasti to commemorate even in the face of the relentless march of time is something Horace shared with Augustus; indeed, the latter may even have provided the inspiration. As is well known, the fasti saw considerable changes during Horace's life; not least of these was the incorporation into the calendar of important events in the life of the princeps, and later, his family.²⁸ As Rüpke notes, ‘by the end of the reign of the first Augustus…the Senate had approved some thirty new feriae’.²⁹ Even if we cannot pinpoint when many of these were incorporated ‘officially’, the process surely begins as early as 30 bc, to judge by the fasti of the Arval Brothers, which contains the earliest references to imperial feriae.³⁰ It seems likely enough that this was an ongoing process; and, speculative though it may be, the marked increase in Horace's explicit engagement with the fasti in Book 3 of the Odes might reflect a real-time response to an increase in Augustus’ ‘intrusions’ into the calendar.³¹ It is not unreasonable to suppose that the official incorporation of some feriae pertaining to Augustus may also have been granted, along with the other honours accorded to him during, or in the run up to, the settlement of 23 bc – the same year to which the publication of Odes 1–3 is ascribed. In any case, there were enough of these intrusions for Horace to comment on the fact ten years later in Odes 4.14.³²

While the overlap of public festivals with celebrations of events of private significance (or anniversaries of these events) such as we see in Horace was both inevitable and harmless enough,³³ we are surely right to see the insertion into the public calendar of events of importance in the life of the princeps as somehow different, as an important shift: these private events gain public significance, and they could sometimes overshadow the more traditional festivals. For instance, the entry for the Floralia in the Fasti Praenestini illustrates vividly how Flora's festival gets crowded out by another event, the dedication of an altar to Vesta in the Domus Augusti on the Palatine:

Ludi Florae. Feriae ex S(enatus) C(onsulto), quod eo di[e signum] et [ara] / Vestae in domu Imp. Caesaris Augu[sti, po]ntif(icis) max(imi), / dedicatast Quirinio et Valgio co(n)s(ulibus)

Games in honour of Flora. Feriae by decree of the Senate, because on that day a signum and an ara were dedicated to Vesta in the house of Imperator Caesar Augustus, Pontifex Maximus, in the consulship of Quirinius and Valgius.

Arguably, a republican festival with one hundred and fifty years of tradition behind it needs no comment, whereas the relatively new feriae do; and yet the disproportionate amount of space devoted to the Augustan entry at least gives the visual impression that the latter is the more important. Indeed, Ovid's treatment of the Floralia shows that some Romans understood Augustus’ calendrical appropriation precisely this way; Fasti 4.947–54 playfully enacts the visual dynamics of the Praenestini inscription, as he orders Vesta to steal the day away from Flora along with the poetic show:³⁴

exit et in Maias sacrum Florale Kalendas:

tunc repetam, nunc me grandius urget opus.

Aufer, Vesta, diem: cognati Vesta recepta est

limine; sic iusti constituere patres.

Phoebus habet partem: Vestae pars altera cessit:

quod superest illis, tertius ipse tenet.

… aeternos tres habet una deos.

Flora's festival extends into the Kalends of May; I'll seek it then, now a grander work presses me. Take the day away, Vesta: Vesta was received into her relative's house; thus the just Fathers decreed. Apollo has part; another falls to Vesta, he himself the third has what remains…one house holds three eternal gods.

This encroachment of Augustus’ life into the public calendar naturally had significant consequences. As Beard says of the calendrical coincidence of the Liberalia and the announcement of Caesar's victory at Munda, ‘[t]his did not necessarily wipe out the previous associations of the day, but it did offer an alternative. Performing the Liberalia, thinking the Liberalia, gained a new layer of historical evocation’.³⁵ So too Barchiesi, noting how Ovid in the Fasti uses the Festival of Anna Perenna on the Ides of March to bring up the assassination of Caesar and the dead at Philippi killed in recompense: ‘Which would you prefer’, he asks, ‘a jolly picnic in the open air…with food, wine, and lovemaking, or the slaughter of the conspirators? The calendar guarantees that the two options will always be open, on every new 15^th of March.’³⁶

Because Horace employs the fasti in the way he does, because he has inscribed their dates – and what he does on those dates – in his monumentum, his celebrations too can take on public significance. One might feel that in Odes 3.8, for example, Liber steals the day away from Juno, and a caelebs steals the day away from matronae. It is telling that the very observations that Beard and Barchiesi have made about the consequences of Augustus’ insertions into the calendar can just as well be said of Horace: Which would you prefer, a celebration honouring Juno Lucina and matronae and the integrity of the Roman family, or one honouring Liber and bachelor Horace's divine rescue? With the publication of Odes 1–3, the calendar now guarantees – in quite the same way – that the two options will always be open, on every new 1 March. That is, for Horace, and for all readers of Horace, thinking the Matronalia from now on means also thinking Horace's rescue.

Horace's engagement with the fasti is thus more than simply a way to sound a distinctly Roman note on his Greek lyre. It does real poetic work, and it plays no small role in how Horace imagines his memory might be perpetuated. But it also represents a reaction and response to changes the princeps was making to Roman time – and not just the calendar reforms themselves (which make possible many of the games Horace plays with time), but the incorporation of imperial feriae in particular. And so we should see Horace's engagement with the fasti not (or not only) as a typically Horatian turn from public to private, but rather as an intentional (and typically Augustan) penetration of the private and personal into the public (even if we acknowledge – as we should – how fluid and intermingled these oppositions were or could be for Romans).³⁷ In this way, Horace's use of festivals and the festival calendar mirror Augustus’ own use. Horace could not, of course, get his celebrations inserted into the real fasti as Augustus could, but he could engage in the same kinds of calendrical play in his own monumentum by creating (and asking his readers to create), if only on a small scale, a parallel, or perhaps competing fasti, the Fasti Horatiani if you will. Indeed, in at least one instance, Horace appears to mimic the very language of calendar commentary: Maecenas’ birthday notice at Odes 4.11.13–20 comes complete with a phrase which, if poetic, is syntactically equivalent to the standard quod eo die we see in inscribed fasti, ready to be inserted seamlessly along with the other festivals on the Ides of April.³⁸ But we hardly need such prompting; the inclusion of festival dates ensures that this kind of insertion could readily be done. One could, for instance, make the following notation on the Nones of December: feriae Fauno in pago, haedus immolatur, which in his own way is precisely what Scullard did with Odes 3.18. So, if Augustus could immortalize his virtues by exploiting the power of tituli and the memores fasti, Horace could just as well do the same for himself, and the places and people he cared most about: his divine rescue, the birthday of his patron, his tiny little fons, a country festival to Faunus we would otherwise know nothing about.