Ambiguity and Religion in Ovid's Fasti: Religious Innovation and the Imperial Family

Ovid's Fasti offers multifocal views of Augustan religion to convey ambivalences, inconsistencies and paradoxes in the imperial family's religious agenda. Darja Sterbenc Erker explores Ovid's irreverent and ambiguous presentations of calendrical aeitiologies, deifications and imperial gods that humorously call to mind Arachne's tapestry depicting faulty gods and that stand in sharp contrast to the poet's more serious discussions of the values he cherishes, such as freedom and poetic immortality. Especially in the exilic revisions of the poem, Ovid emphasises the motif of bestowing divine honours upon mortals through poetry. For him, the stars in the heavens do not represent deified statesmen but immortal authors.