SAVE OUR COWS? AUGUSTAN DISCOURSE AND ANIMAL SACRIFICE IN OVID’S FASTI

Extract

The interaction between Roman religion and Ovid’s ostensibly religious poem, Fasti, has only begun to be appreciated in the past twenty years or so. Before this time, scholars were typically either uncritical of Ovid’s poem – taking it at face value as a quarry from which to mine reliable gems of information on Roman religion – or far too critical, chastizing the poet for what they saw as errors from a man ignorant of his own national religion. From the mid 1980s, however, there has emerged a better understanding of the complex nature of Roman religion. Scholars now stress the fundamental role of exegesis (multiple interpretation) in a religion which has no underlying orthodoxy. As such, it is argued that Roman religion was not something concrete, tangible, and external, to which literature related faithfully or otherwise, but that literature had a central role in articulating the dynamics of the religious experience of the Romans.

One can now duly expect and appreciate, therefore, a variety of contrasting views on Roman religious activity presented in Fasti, without resorting to arguments about Ovidian ignorance or the apparently incomplete state of the poem itself.