Festivals feature prominently in Latin literature, even in works that are not explicitly dedicated to festive days like Ovid’s Fasti. This book explores the role of festivals in elegiac, lyric, and epic poetry, as well as historiography. In all of these, festivals play a more pervasive role than has so far been realized. Tibullus’ elegiac oeuvre rests on an interplay between amatory and festive poetics, and Propertius uses festivals in his fourth book of elegies to question, from an amatory perspective, the memory associated with Roman festivals. In the poetry of Sulpicia and Ovid’s Tristia, festivals allow voices that are otherwise marginalized to shape their own commemoration. Horace’s Odes and the Carmen saeculare rest on an intriguing interplay of festivity in the private sphere, which forms but a fleeting moment, and the monumentality of public festivals. Post-Vergilian Latin epicists use festivals to explore the fragility of human identity in a world dominated by the gods, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and to question the commemoration connected with festive days, undermining the foundational importance of festivals in the Aeneid. In Livy’s ab urbe condita and Tacitus’ Histories, festivals both provide structure and capture long-term developments in Roman history, while situating both works in broader historiographical and intertextual dialogues. The book sheds new light on these works, uncovering their unique ‘festive poetics’. It demonstrates that Latin literature adds important new aspects to our understanding of festivals, which offer even richer avenues of creating meaning and shaping or questioning commemoration than is often assumed.
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