John Lydus: On the Months

festivals and significant dates seems to have been coalescing as a literary genre in the late Republic and early Empire, as one specific branch of antiquarian research.⁹⁵ Varro demonstrates multiple approaches: he explained time-related words, including festival names, from the linguistic perspective;⁹⁶ described the year with specific reference to significant times for agriculture;⁹⁷ devoted a book of his Antiquitates rerum divinarum (Antiquities of Divine Matters) to an account of festivals;⁹⁸ and most likely treated different time divisions, such as days, months, and years, in successive books of his Antiquitates rerum humanarum (Antiquities of Human Matters).⁹⁹ The Augustan grammarian Verrius Flaccus, however, was responsible for the inscribed calendar with accompanying explanations (possibly the inscriptional version of a written book) known as the Fasti Praenestini.¹⁰⁰ This account served as one of Ovid's sources. Beyond the discussion attached to specific dates, it included accounts of the months' names, as well as technical aspects of the Roman system such as Kalends (the first day of the month), Nones (the fifth or seventh day), and Ides (the middle of the month). From that point on, as inscribed calendars proliferated in the early Empire, various names also appear in the record as authors of accounts of the Roman festival calendar, although none of these works now survives intact.¹⁰¹ In the later Empire, some accounts of the calendar including only festal days, rather than all the days of the year, survive. These are termed ferialia (lists of holidays) rather than fasti.¹⁰² The paucity of evidence for full calendars is more than likely due to the vagaries of transmission,

95. For the earliest developments of written / inscribed calendars at Rome, see Rüpke, Roman Calendar, pp. 44-67, 87-108. Rüpke (Roman Calendar, p. 124) notes the upsurge of calendrical activity in the aftermath of Julius Caesar, making Augustus' reign the "most productive phase in calendar production," with concomitant writing of antiquarian works. For antiquarian research more generally, see E. Rawson, Intellectual Life in the Late Roman Republic (Baltimore, 1985), pp. 233-49.
96. De lingua Latina 6.2.3-6.4.34.
97. De re rustica 1.27-28; for the agricultural calendar, cf. Pliny, NH 18.lvi-lxxiv — including observations on stars and weather — and cf. also Columella, De re rustica 11.2.
98. Book 8: fr. 76-79 Cardauns. The following books similarly dealt with Ludi (Games).
99. See Mirsch's edition, pp. 37-9, with fragments on pp. 119-29. The specifics of the contents are debatable. Censorinus, De die natali 16-24, however, provides a good parallel with more development in this respect; although he does not go through the year's festivals, he offers sections systematically discussing different time measures—ages, "great" years, years, months, days, and hours. Cf. Rawson, p. 236 n. 18; K. Sallmann (ed.), Die Literatur des Umbruchs, HLL 4 (Berlin, 1997), p. 248 (§441.B.3); and see further discussion below about possible connections to Suetonius.
100. Suetonius, De gramm. fr. 17 (with Kaster's commentary); further see Appendix A below.
101. See Mastandrea, Cornelio Labeone, pp. 19-20. Note the definition appearing in Festus (p. 78 Lindsay) for this sort of work, cited by Mastandrea, p. 20: fastorum libri appellantur in quibus totius anni fit descriptio (they are called books of fasti in which a description of the whole year is made). For further details on this literature, as well as translation of some important comparanda, see the Appendix A.
102. Note especially R. O. Fink, A. S. Hoey, and W. F. Snyder, "The Feriale Duranum," Yale Classical Studies 7 (1940), pp. 1-222.