Religious legitimation of Augustus' in the mirror of Ovid's Fasti

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Dr. Darja Sterbenc Erker
• Subject Area: Greek and Latin Philology
• Term: from 2014 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 253287618

The project analyses the literary representations of Augustan religion in Ovid's Fasti which refer to the historical change of religion. The religious-historical background is centered around the Augustan renewal of religion. New rituals served Augustus to display and legitimate his power and exceptional position. Public staging of rituals was an important means of Augustus' religious self-fashioning; through this kind of symbolic communication with the gods Augustus sought to influence the public opinion in Rome in a positive way and to display himself as a person chosen by the will of gods for his outstanding political role. Augustus' performance of the new or expanded traditional rituals and festivals had an enormous impact on literature; it instigated literary descriptions of rituals and their aitiological exegesis appealing to mythic-historical past in the Augustan literature. This projects analyses the change of the medium of communication starting with the performance of Augustus' rituals and leading to their literary representations.The project proposal focuses on literary representations of Augustus' performance of rituals. The project aims at re-evaluating Augustan religion, in which theatrically staged rituals, together with their aitiologies, act as important media of the ruler's religious legitimisation. The project will elaborate on how Ovid in his Fasti poetically describes different strategies of Augustus' religious legitimisation and in which ways he reflects upon Augustan discourses by treating the central media of religious legitimisation of power such as new festivals and rituals, legends about divine assistance to extraordinary humans, divine signs (prodigia, mirabilia), definition of the religious tradition, temples and gods.The project aims at an overall analysis of Augustus' religious legitimisation in the mirror of Ovid's Fasti, which will be achieved by combining methodology of religious studies and classical philology. Religious leitmotifs in the Fasti will be comprehensively studied as well as their references to the traditional and Augustan festivals. To attain this goal, the pretexts of Ovid's Fasti will be analysed as well as the intertextual allusions on the Fasti in different literary genres (historiography, antiquarian literature, biography) which tackle on Augustus' religious self-fashioning. Such an analysis will elucidate the individual perspectives of ancient authors which modify the literary representations of Augustus' religion, the influence of the genre and the narrative contexts.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants