Feste rurali e mondo contadino nei Fasti : fra arcaismo e modernità

In Ovid’s Fasti great attention is devoted to holidays of rural origin. In these festivals the countryside is presented in two different and opposite ways: on the one hand, it is part of contemporary age, whose values (especially peace) it shares; alternatively, it is a crude and archaic world, populated by farmers who are, surprisingly, free of any wisdom, committed more to the weapons than to the exploitation of fields. The first two rural festivals in Ovid’s Fasti are exemplary for this opposition: Sementiua, in the first book, and Fornacalia, in the second. An analysis of these two extracts, regarding their literary models and their inclusion into the context of the calendar poem, leads to connect deeply world of the fields and rural rituals to urban Augustan Rome.