Poetry

Fasti

by Ovid

Ovid’s calendar of the Roman year in verse, month by month, with the festivals, the stars and the stories behind them. He had reached June when Augustus exiled him to the Black Sea for “a poem and a mistake”, and the second half was never written. It is the best guide there is to how the Romans kept their holidays.

The librarian

Read it in the Library After Dark Or read it as plain text

Reading time

About 6 hr 10 min

Where to find it

The Latin Reading Room

Edition

Project Gutenberg, eBook #8738. In the public domain in the United States.