My fascination with Ovidâs praise of Augustus, which the poet counters with ironic comments or witty remarks made me conduct further inquiries. Although imperial religious innovations were a serious matter because they modified the religion of the political community of ancient Rome significantly, Ovid presents the integration of imperial festivals into the city calendar in a playful and humorous way. During my research I realised that it is very important to take into account the alterations of the Fasti the poet undertook in his exile in Tomis. This makes it possible to grasp various layers of meaning that the revisions added to this highly sophisticated poem. The shift from the princeps Augustus to Germanicus as the primary addressee of this elegiac commentary on the Augustan calendar, as well as the religious innovations introduced by Tiberius and Livia, testify to the emergence of the new concept of political power in Rome: the religious-political influence exerted by the imperial family.
Many scholars have helped me in numerous and different ways. I warmly thank Professor Andreas Heil (Vienna) for reading and commenting upon the whole manuscript. His interest in my research and kind suggestions encouraged me in the last year of writing this book, which was marked by social distancing due to COVID, thus I really appreciate his engagement with my project. Equally, I am grateful to Dr. Roland Baumgarten (Berlin) and Dr. Marika Rauhala (Oulu) for their reading of some of the chapters of the manuscript. Also, I am indebted to Professor Celia E. Schultz (Ann Arbor), Professor Riemer Faber (Waterloo), Dr. Joy Littlewood (Oxford), Dr. Martin T. Dinter (London) and Dr. Eva MarÃa Mateo Decabo (Berlin) for discussing with me some ideas which are examined in this book. Furthermore, I wish to thank Professor Ulrich Schmitzer for his support that enabled me to conduct my research project smoothly at the Department of Classical Philology of the Humboldt University Berlin. Also, my thanks go to the students of that department who attended my seminars and discussed my ideas about Ovidâs Fasti enthusiastically. Moreover, I thank Professor Fritz Mitthof for inviting me to teach Ovidâs Fasti for historians as a visiting professor at the Department of Ancient History, Antiquities, Papyrology and Epigraphy at the University of Vienna from October to December 2019.
For financial support I am grateful to the German Research Foundation for funding my research project âReligious legitimation of Augustus in the mirror of Ovidâs Fastiâ. A part of the book was written with financial support of the Slovenian Agency of Research, which financed the project âEmpire and Transformation of Genre in Roman Literatureâ (J6-2585). I am grateful to Professor Marko MarinÄiÄ who hosted me as visiting professor at the University of Ljubljana in the last phase of writing this book. I also wish to acknowledge the financial support that I received from the Funds for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (Frauenförderung) of the Department of Classical Philology of the Humboldt University Berlin for their financial support for the language check of some of the bookâs chapters.
I have presented the first chapter at the conference on âInventing Origins: The Function of Aetiology in Antiquityâ at the University of Leiden in November 2016 and at seminars of Classics at the University of Ljubljana and Princeton University. I wrote the first draft of the third chapter as a presentation for the âIntermediality Workshopâ held in June 2018 at the Morphomata Kolleg of the University of Cologne and expanded it for the conferences âComparing Roman Hellenismsâ at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in September 2018 and for the FIEC conference in London in July 2019. The fourth chapter began its âlifeâ as a paper first delivered at the ERC-conference âStories told, memories uttered: The role of narratives in Lived Ancient Religionâ at the Schloss Ettersburg Weimar/Erfurt in January 2014, then at the conference âXIV A.D. Saeculum Avgustum: The Age of Augustusâ at the Lisbon University in September 2014. The draft of the fifth chapter was presented at the conference âAuthority Beyond the Lawâ at the Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, Oxford, in December 2016 and its revised version was discussed at the conference âCultural Memory in the Early Roman Empireâ at the Université Paris-Est Créteil in June 2017. I presented a draft of the sixth chapter at the conference âPower of the Priests: Political Use of Religious Knowledgeâ at the University of Kiel in December 2018. I discussed a paper from which the seventh chapter evolved at conferences on âGlobalizing Ovid: An International Conference in Commemoration of the Bimillennium of Ovidâs Deathâ at the Shanghai Normal University in June 2017 and at the ERC-conference âLaw, Governance and Space: Questioning the Foundations of the Republican Traditionâ at the University of Helsinki in September 2019. I warmly thank all the organisers for inviting me to present my research on Ovidâs Fasti and the respective audiences for their comments on the papers.
I also wish to thank Dr. Ulrike Stephan, a dear colleague who died much too young, Dr. Orla Mulholland, Tamerlane Camden-Dunne, Dr. Madeleine Tulip, Marc Korrmann and Nina King for proofreading drafts of the chapters. Dr. Carson Bay took care of the final copy editing of the entire book manuscript. I also thank Paul M. Kaever for his second check of the references in several chapters and Giulia Moriconi, the Associate Editor at Brill, for her helpful and kind way of manoeuvring my manuscript into this book.
I am very grateful to my husband Carsten to whom I dedicate this book for his overall support and sharing my passion for interpreting ancient literature and religion. Carsten and our son Mitja are very enthusiastic about discovering new ideas and places, thus they have both been encouraging me to continue with my research.
Many populist politicians all over the world offer contemporary parallels for Augustusâ self-display and his deceitful messages. I admire profoundly all authors who continue to question misleading news or to write ambiguous praise similar to Ovidâs in order to lead the reader to think about the inconsistencies of public images conveyed by political leaders and their actual workings. I do hope for a kind of Ovidian peace as discussed in the chapter on the Pax Augusta for the entire world. Equally, I expect politicians to address real problems by using correct vocabulary and appropriate measures to solve emerging societal issues. There could be many possible comparisons between Ovidâs acute analysis of the religious and political transformations that Augustan Rome underwent and the erosion of democracy in our contemporary world. The following chapters do not encourage explicitly such comparisons. I leave this task to the reader since I think that the ambiguous style of Ovidâs Fasti has not lost any of its relevance.