About the author
To find out about Ovid's life and works,
click here.
English Translations
The Anthology extract comes from a Ovid's Fasti (Bk III, lines 523-540), a large, unifinished poem about the Roman year and it's festivals. This modern, literal translation is by Tony Kline.
Ovid's Fasti is a good read, full of mythological stories and facts about Roman customs. Dip in and out of Penguin's lively translation.
Analysis
This poem is written in a poetic form or "meter" known as
elegiac couplets.
Find out more in the section
LATIN POETRY: Meters, Rhythms & Scansion on the
Verse Authors page.
A Roman fresco from a
columbarium (burial chamber) in the grounds of Villa Pamphili in Rome portraying revellers.
Now in the British Museum.
See also this other
fresco from a columbarium found in Rome.
Now in the Museo Nazionale Romano.
There's more celebratory images below!
Straightforward Wikipedia entry that summarises much of Ovid's lines in Fast.
More substantive article on Anna Perenna.
In 1999 in Rome, workmen digging the foundations of a new parking garage under the Piazza Euclid, a spot near the ancient Via Flaminia nearly 2 miles north of Roman Forum, uncovered a Roman fountain. The 2nd-century AD dedication pictured in this link reveals that the fountain was rebuilt and sacred to "to the nymphs of Anna Perenna." This is where those drunken revels of 15th March took place!
Here's a Google photo/map showing its
location; zoom out to place in context.
Italian website with
more information including pictures and visiting hours.
Glastonbury - the mother of all camping-out festivals! I bet it didn't rain as much at Anna Perenna's festival!
A map showing the course of the River Tiber from its
source at Monte Fumaiolo in the Apennine Mountains, some 300 miles north of Rome, a spot marked by this commemoratative
pillar.
Click for more info on the
River Tiber.
King of Pylos in Greece, Nestor was famed for his great age. Best known through Homer's Iliad, he was the oldest and wisest of all the Greek kings. This photo is from the movie Troy, and shows Nestor (John Shrapnel) in the centre between Odysseus (Sean Bean) and Tecton(?) (Mark Lewis Jones).
Sybil was the name given to a prophetess who under divine guidance, usually from Apollo, uttered oracles, which foretold future events.
The Cumaean Sibyl at Cumae near Naples in Italy was infamous due to her excessive old-age; having been granted immortality by her lover Apollo, she forgot to ask for perpetual youth - and so she lived and lived and lived, shrinking into withered old age.
This image is from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican painted by Michelangelo in 1510.
The Roman writer Petronius (died AD 66) wrote some famous lines about the Sibyl in his novel Satyricon - you can see them in this link. In 1922 the poet T.S.Eliott used them as the epigraph at the start of his famous work The Waste Land.
Famous painting entitled "The Bacchanal of the Andrians" painted by Titan, 1523-25. Now in the Prado Museum, Madrid.
Painting "The Dance" by Matisse. 1910; in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia.
Tipsy dancing in modern times in the worship of Football!