Yet the louche poet of lewd verse was never allowed (for reasons unknown) to redeem his reputation as a good citizen in the eyes of Augustus or Tiberius. He was banished before its completion, but after the death of Augustus he revised and re-dedicated it to Germanicus in the hope that it would mitigate his sentence. The poet himself claimed that the Fasti was his gift to the Augustan state. It has become the fashion of much current literary criticism of Ovid’s Fasti (represented by e.g., Barchiesi, Hardie, Feeney, Harries, Hinds) to judge the poem a record of a cynical, ambivalent, defiant, or even subversive Ovidian stance vis-à-vis the Augustan regime.
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