Fasti

The Fasti is the Roman poet Ovid's own Latin poem on the Roman calendar, composed in the early first century CE, narrating the mythological origins of festivals month by month, and this Loeb Classical Library edition presents the Latin text facing an English translation, the standard scholarly format for classical texts. As Ovid's own poem it is the correct primary source for how Roman festival mythology was told in his own literary rendering. Its limit is twofold, the surviving text covers only January through June, the second half was apparently never completed or is lost, and Ovid was a court poet writing with his own poetic and political purposes under Augustus, so a claim needing a neutral ritual manual account of a festival should be checked against an epigraphic or antiquarian source alongside Ovid's literary version.