The Fasti or Fausti , sometimes translated as The Book of Days or On the Roman Calendar, is a six-book Latin poem written by the Roman poet Ovid and published in A.D. 8. Ovid is believed to have left the Fasti incomplete when he was exiled to Tomis by the emperor Augustus in 8 AD. Written in elegiac couplets and drawing on conventions of Greek and Latin didactic poetry, the Fasti is structured as a series of eye-witness reports and interviews by the first-person vates with Roman deities, who explain the origins of Roman holidays and associated customs—often with multiple aetiologies. The poem is a significant, and in some cases unique, source of fact in studies of religion in ancient Rome; and the influential anthropologist and ritualist J.G. Frazer translated and annotated the work for the Loeb Classical Library series. Each book covers one month, January through June, of the Roman calendar, and was written several years after Julius Caesar replaced the old system of Roman time-keeping with what would come to be known as the Julian calendar.
“There is a god within us.
It is when he stirs us that our bosom warms; it is
his impulse that sows the seeds of inspiration.”
Est deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo:
impetus hic sacrae semina mentis habet.
VI, lines 5-6; translation by Sir James George Frazer
Fasti (The Festivals)
“The mind, conscious of rectitude, laughed to scorn the falsehood of report.”
Conscia mens recti famae mendacia risit
IV, 311. Compare: "And the mind conscious of virtue may bring to thee suitable rewards", Virgil, The Aeneid, i, 604
Fasti (The Festivals)
