Ceres, Liber and Flora: Georgic and Anti-Georgic Elements in Ovid's Fasti

Abstract

The Georgics stand at the threshold of Augustan literature, the Fasti at its end, but despite Ovid's respect for Rome's first great didactic poem, Lucretius' De rerum natura, and despite all the intervening achievements of Augustan poets in incorporating national and aetiological themes into other poetic genres, Ovid's poem repeatedly acknowledges by echoes of form and theme the primacy of the Georgics as model for his aetiological work. This paper attempts to measure Ovidian response to the Georgics at two levels, the level of formal, verbal allusion and the level of themes and values. I have been led to focus on Ovid's treatment of Ceres/Demeter (and less prominently Liber/Bacchus) because Ceres as teacher of agriculture and benefactor of men is central to Virgil's representation of evolving human culture. But Ceres is equally important to the Fasti (although her sober personality makes her unappealing as a candidate for interview by the poet) as a major deity in the largely rural Roman calendar, as a symbol of the didactic principle, and for her very centrality in the Virgilian poem that Ovid is emulating.