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A Roman Hecale: Ovid Fasti 3.661–741
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
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This is one of the identities offered by Ovid for the goddess Anna Perenna, whose festival falls on the Ides of March. Ovid's lines give us the following information about this version of Anna: she was a poor but industrious old woman living in the suburbs of Rome, her benevolent baking and distribution of cakes provided much-needed sustenance for the plebs during their secessio on the Mons Sacer, and the plebs repaid this service when peace was restored by dedicating a cult-statue to her, so founding the cult of Anna Perenna. This Anna is thus a minor character, otherwise unknown, associated with a cult of obscure origin and with a major historical event, the first secessio plebis to the Mons Sacer usually dated to 494 B.C. This alone would make it likely that Ovid is inventing her here as circumstantial detail. When we consider that wo are told that she lived at Bovillae, some twelve miles south-east of Rome (orta… Bovillis surely indicates residence as well as place of birth), and that the Mons Sacer was located three miles north-east of the city, any probability of Ovid's story being a fully historical report vanishes; Anna of Bovillae was simply in the wrong place to purvey cakes to the plebs on this occasion, unless she ran a modern-style delivery service over a thirty-mile circuit. The possibility remains that there was an otherwise unknown cult of Anna Perenna at Bovillae to which Ovid refers, since the association of Anna with Bovillae must have come from somewhere, especially as it here seems to introduce an unwanted inconsistency.
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2 A fictional origin for Ovid's description of Anna is also suggested by the appearance of a cake-baking poor woman in an unknown context in Eratosthenes' Hermes (fr. 10 Powell): ᾗ χερντις ἔριθος φ' ὑψηλο πυλενος / δενδαλδας τεὑχουσα καλοὐ ἤειδεν ἰοὑλους.
3 No commentary on the Fasti mentions the link with Hecale, and it is not to be found in the very useful index of later allusions and imitations in the excellent recent edition of the Hecale by Hollis, A. S. (Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar. On Callimachus and the Fasti see the important treatments by Miller, J. F. in ANRW 11.30.1 (1982) 400–412Google Scholar, in Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History III, Deroux, C. (ed.) [Collection Latomus 180] (Brussels, 1983), 156–92Google Scholar, and in Arethusa 25 (1992) 11–32Google Scholar.
4 TheHecale is clearly extensively quarried in Books 2 and 8 of the Metamorphoses: on the former cf. Keith, A. M., The Play of Fiction: Studies in Ovid's Metamorphoses Book 2 (Ann Arbor, 1992) 9–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on the latter Hollis, A. S., Ovid Metamorphoses VIII (Oxford, 1970), 106–28Google Scholar. Lesser allusions are also found elsewhere in Ovid: cf. Hollis, , op. cit. (n. 3), 33–4Google Scholar.
5 On the location of the deme Hecale cf. Hollis, , op. cit. (n. 3), p. 7 n. 10Google Scholar.
6 For the apparent brevity of the description of Theseus’ defeat of the Marathonian bull in the Hecale cf. Hollis, , op. cit. (n. 3), 215Google Scholar.
7 Cf. Yavetz, Z., Plebs and Princeps (Oxford, 1969), 83–102Google Scholar.
8 Res Gestae 4.4 ‘consul fueram terdeciens, cum scribebam haec, et eram septimum et tricensimum tribuniciae potestatis’. For reference to years of tribunicia potestas on Augustan coins cf. conveniently Sutherland, C. H. V., Roman History and Coinage (Oxford, 1987), 14 and 25Google Scholar.
9 For similar sentiments addressed to Tiberius and Germanicus cf. Fasti 1.67–70; for similar praise of Augustus cf. Horace Odes 1.12.49, 3.14.14–16, 4.5.17–4O, 4.14.43–4, Epistles 2.1.2 with Brink's note.
10 For this Augustan view of the Fasti cf. e.g. Williams, G. W., Change and Decline (Berkeley, 1978), 83–6Google Scholar, McKeown, J. C. in Woodman, Tony and West, David (edd.), Poetry and politics in the age of Augustus (Cambridge, 1984), 174–87Google Scholar. For a powerful exposition of a more subversive reading cf. Hinds, S. E., Arethusa 25 (1992), 81–153Google Scholar, and for a good account of the problems involved in deciding between these two opposite interpretations cf. Wallace-Hadrill, A. in Whitby, L. M., Hardie, P. R., and Whitby, M. (edd.), Homo Viator: Classical Essays for John Bramble (Bristol, 1987), 221–30Google Scholar.
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