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Molly Pasco-Pranger

Ovid's Fasti must be understood as participating in both the Callimachean tradition of learned poetry and the Augustan and later Tiberian negotiations of a new order for Rome and its empire. The poem presents the Roman calendar as a... more
Ovid's Fasti must be understood as participating in both the Callimachean tradition of learned poetry and the Augustan and later Tiberian negotiations of a new order for Rome and its empire. The poem presents the Roman calendar as a tool for building this order and engages as much with calendrical modes of organizing the world as with poetic ones. In the Fasti, both Ovid and the political calendar-builders (Romulus, Numa, Caesar and Augustus) act as conditores anni, as Ovid equates the foundation of the calendar with poetic composition, and particularly with the composition of the Fasti. In addition, the poem's didactic structure, mimetic of the year's progress, allows the graphic conventions of the epigraphical calendars to interact with our expectations of unity, continuity and discontinuity in poetic composition. This interaction, in combination with the poem's representation of the calendar as both an ideological tool and a literary composition, help Ovid build a poetic model by which to explore and interpret the ways in which the calendar organizes the experience of the Roman year, asking its readers to build meanings among the various rites and commemorations it includes. The final chapters of the dissertation test and explore the expectations raised by this poetic model of the year through a study of Book 4's representation of the relationship between the rites of April, organized by the portrait of Venus in the proem, and a discussion of Ovid's treatment of the new Julio-Claudian festivals. Many of the poetic connections the Fasti draws between old and new rites, as well as among the new dynastic holidays are encouraged, but not dictated, by the calendrical structure, skillfully put to ideological use by Augustus and his heir.Ph.D.Ancient historyClassical literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/131069/2/9825319.pd
... Molly Pasco-Pranger. ... The study includes chapters on Book 4 and the rites of April, on the addition of Julio-Claudian holidays to the calendar, and on the final two books of the poem as shaped by the renaming of the months... more
... Molly Pasco-Pranger. ... The study includes chapters on Book 4 and the rites of April, on the addition of Julio-Claudian holidays to the calendar, and on the final two books of the poem as shaped by the renaming of the months Quintilis and Sextilis for Julius Caesar and Augustus. ...
This book gives serious consideration to the relationship between Ovid’s Fasti and the Roman calendar. The poem treats the calendar, recently revised by Caesar and Augustus, as its most important cultural model and as a quasi-literary... more
This book gives serious consideration to the relationship between Ovid’s Fasti and the Roman calendar. The poem treats the calendar, recently revised by Caesar and Augustus, as its most important cultural model and as a quasi-literary 'intertext.'
In this book seventeen leading scholars examine the interaction between historiography and poetry in the Augustan age: how poets drew on — or reacted against — historians’ presentation of the world, and how, conversely, historians... more
In this book seventeen leading scholars examine the interaction between historiography and poetry in the Augustan age: how poets drew on — or reacted against — historians’ presentation of the world, and how, conversely, historians transformed poetic themes for their own ends.
This article explores the early history of Roman exemplary literature through the case study of the elder Cato’s account of his imitation of the parsimony and self-sufficiency of M’. Curius Dentatus. I reconstruct from Cicero, Plutarch,... more
This article explores the early history of Roman exemplary literature through the case study of the elder Cato’s account of his imitation of the parsimony and self-sufficiency of M’. Curius Dentatus. I reconstruct from Cicero, Plutarch, and other sources a Catonian prose text that unified the exemplary narrative of Curius’ refusal of a bribe from Samnite emissaries with an evocative location at the hearth of a humble Sabine farmstead, an approving “audience” in Cato himself, and a model for the replication of Curius’ virtue. The narrative itself served as the monumentum for the exemplum, and its details are often evoked in place of the exemplary deed itself. I argue that this narrative is both a very early instance of exemplary literature and a self-conscious reflection on the power of literature to transcend temporal and spatial limitations and to extend cultural models for the familial replication of elite virtues to a broader audience.
In teaching Ovid’s Metamorphoses, sometimes from a translation that perversely breaks the poem into distinct narrative episodes, I often μnd myself hard pressed to convince my undergraduate students that the poem is, in fact, a ‘carmen... more
In teaching Ovid’s Metamorphoses, sometimes from a translation that perversely breaks the poem into distinct narrative episodes, I often μnd myself hard pressed to convince my undergraduate students that the poem is, in fact, a ‘carmen perpetuum’, that it must be taken seriously as a continuous poem. The μrst three chapters of this book make the argument for me with clarity, simplicity, and, at times, ingenuity by addressing the question, ‘How does the poem continue?’ Wheeler distinguishes his approach from a tradition of scholarship that looks for the poem’s continuity (or, better, its unity) in overarching structures or thematic ties visible only from a distance. W. works instead from the poetic μction that presents the Metamorphoses as a continuous performance and considers the narrative dynamics that allow the poem to keep going. In Chapter I, ‘Repetition’, W. argues that the repetitiveness of the Metamorphoses’ narrative patterns both uniμes and gradually advances the poem. Using the μrst two books as a case study, he illustrates the repetitiveness of the cosmogonic and catastrophic stories of the creation, the ·ood, and Phaethon’s wild ride. He o¶ers interpretations of the repetitions as he works through the books and concludes with an overarching interpretation which, though a bit pat, is unobjectionable: the repetition demonstrates that natural history is cyclical; it subsumes multiple traditions concerning the origin and nature of humanity; and it establishes chaos as a central theme of the epic. The second chapter (‘Narrative Continuity’) is more interesting, arguing that Ovid complements the dynamic of repetition by linking together di¶erent kinds of episodes in sequences that are narratively continuous, even though not always contiguous. W. moves again through the second half of Book 1 and the beginning of Book 2, focusing this time on the construction and interweaving of extended narrative sequences. This approach argues against the assumption that Ovid’s often tenuous transitions between episodes are nothing but ingenious grafting. Thus, for example, W. takes the transition between the story of Daphne and that of Io (other rivers go to visit Daphne’s father, Peneus, to console or congratulate him on his daughter’s transformation; only the river Inachus is absent, since he is mourning the loss of his own daughter, Io [1.568– 87]) as a serious indication that these stories are to be read together as a continuing drama of father, daughter, and lover. He does much from there, and quite convincingly argues that the whole μrst book and a half of the poem is similarly narratively continuous. W. posits in his third chapter a grand narrative, extending through the entire epic, based on tales of Jupiter and Juno. This chapter builds on both of the previous ones in that both repetition and narrative continuity play a rôle in allowing the reader to recognize the gradual shifts in focus in the repeated narrative pattern of Jupiter’s erotic transgression, Juno’s vengeance, and the beloved’s rescue through transformation. In the latter part of the poem, this pattern μnds some narrative resolution as Juno’s anger    65
This study traces the epithets and agnomina regularly assigned to the elder Cato in the late Republican and early imperial sources, in part to distinguish him from his illustrious great-grandson. The elder Cato’s most frequently used... more
This study traces the epithets and agnomina regularly assigned to the elder Cato in the late Republican and early imperial sources, in part to distinguish him from his illustrious great-grandson. The elder Cato’s most frequently used “names” (Sapiens, Senex, Censorius) structure his position as a moral exemplar in distinct ways and develop in relation to the career and emerging mythology of the younger Cato, whose “names” (Praetorius and Uticensis) are also addressed. The elder Cato’s names (much more than those of Cato Uticensis) emphasize the present’s continuity with the Republican past.
... on Augustan themes he turns to the language of vaticism:4 nunc volo subducto gravior procedere vultu, nunc aliam citharam me mea Musa docet. ... work" is likewise most often in the form of interviews with divine informants, he... more
... on Augustan themes he turns to the language of vaticism:4 nunc volo subducto gravior procedere vultu, nunc aliam citharam me mea Musa docet. ... work" is likewise most often in the form of interviews with divine informants, he also gives us glimpses of a more pedestrian sort of ...
This paper explores the dynamics of women's public nudity in the early Roman empire, centering particularly on two festival occasions—the rites of Venus Verticordia and Fortuna Virilis on April 1, and the Floralia in late April—and on... more
This paper explores the dynamics of women's public nudity in the early Roman empire, centering particularly on two festival occasions—the rites of Venus Verticordia and Fortuna Virilis on April 1, and the Floralia in late April—and on the respective social and spatial contexts of those festivals: the baths and the theater. In the early empire, these two social spaces regularly remove or complicate some of the markers that divide Roman women by sociosexual status. The festivals and the ritual nudity within them focus attention on the negotiations of social boundaries within these spaces, and the occasions for cross-class identification among women they provide.
... 144 MOLLY PASCO-PRANGER ... 50)', CP 64 (1969), 169–73 at 171–2; P. Pucci, 'Il carme 50 di Catullo', Maia 13 (1961), 249–56 at 255; K. Quinn, Catullus: The Poems (Macmillan, 1970), 239; HP Syndikus, Catull: eine... more
... 144 MOLLY PASCO-PRANGER ... 50)', CP 64 (1969), 169–73 at 171–2; P. Pucci, 'Il carme 50 di Catullo', Maia 13 (1961), 249–56 at 255; K. Quinn, Catullus: The Poems (Macmillan, 1970), 239; HP Syndikus, Catull: eine Interpretation (Darmstadt, 1984), 253–4; DFS Thomson ...