EPILOGUE: Ovid and Broken Form: Three Views

exile, a symbolic death, broke the Fasti (Tr. 2.549–52, cf. 555–60, 9 CE): “This work, Caesar [Augustus], written under your name and dedicated to you, my fate has broken [hoc . . . /. . . mea sors rupit opus].” The fractured Fasti reflects this “death,” because it lacks the completion that the “living” author—present in Rome—might give it.¹ Yet, by revising the Fasti in his last years, Ovid looks back to a point prior to “ death,” that is, to his fantasized Roman origin. Here three views suggest how Ovid’s Fasti communicates as a half-dead,