Two men meet on a battlefield; it is getting late, towards the close of a long day's fighting, the first since Achilles deserted the Greeks. The catalogue of this day's deadly confrontations, which has filled much of Books 4 and 5, looks as if it is about to get another victim's name appended to it. Homer introduces the episode at 6.120 by setting the scene as if for a duel, but ends it not only without a fight but with what appears to be a reconciliation, when they finally (6.232) leave their chariots to shake hands. This, if nothing else, has made the meeting of Glaucus and Diomedes famous; with its amiable, irenic outcome, and its unique emphasis on mutual understanding, the scene is widely regarded as an oasis of common decency amid the war-ethos of the surrounding books.

The occasional role played in Ovidian poetry by noble Roman families and their contemporary representatives has naturally received much less attention than the recurring and often ambivalent presence of Augustus. A case of special interest is that of the Fabii, whose antiquity and military prowess are accorded special attention in the Fasti, while the penultimate consul the gens produced was a correspondent of Ovid's from Pontus. I propose to examine the ways in which the fortunes of this house become a complex theme in Fasti 2, partly to justify a sophisticated reading of the poem and partly to encourage a similar approach to the theme of the princeps himself.

Two artistic competitions in the Metamorphoses, those between the Muses and the daughters of Pierus (5.250–678) and between Arachne and Minerva (6.1–145), are now widely recognised as exploiting familiar generic differentiations. Ovid's treatment of these differentiations is further seen to have a bearing on establishing the elusive poetic identity of the whole poem, and to locate that identity firmly within the Roman response to Alexandrian poetics. The significance of these sections for the literary programme of the Metamorphoses has been persuasively argued by H. Hofmann and E. W. Leach for the Arachne competition, and more recently by Hofmann and S. Hinds for the Pierides. It is now clear how wide the range of literary forms represented at this pivotal point in Metamorphoses actually is, at the close of the first pentad and at the start of the second. Each of the episodes spanning this juncture has its winning and losing side, and there is an obvious way in which the positive and negative judgements in an artistic competition refine the reader's literary discrimination: the outcome of the contests encourages us to see in the competition itself at least an implicit comment on the relative qualities of the participants.

The two central themes of Fasti are twice (1.1, 4.11) linked in this way. The association, which at once gives the poem the appearance of having a literary ancestry in the aetiological tradition, might have seemed inevitable: any verse narrative account of a festival is very likely to contain an αἲтιоν of it. Callimachus' hymns illustrate this assertion, and there are clearly defined hymnic elements in Fasti to bear out the comparison, for example the listing of Venus' ⋯αεтαί and Πρáξεις at 4.91ff. and the instructions to the devotees of Pales at 4.731–48. 4 To state the obvious fact that the poem combines Roman antiquities with Alexandrian aetiology, a blending of which more straightforward examples are to be found in the fourth book of Propertius, is only a prelude to establishing what Ovid really achieves in Fasti. Traditional elements are, as I hope to show, cunningly exploited to create ‘counter–effects’ and to subject the material to the constantly varying and wide–ranging influences of the poet's literary background. Though the notion of causa is central to Fasti, the poem is much more than an amalgam of such influences as the aetiological prose works of Varro and (possibly) Verrius Flaccus with the aetiological poetics of Propertius 4.5 These sources combined to provide material for the foundation of the finished structure, which was to be the creative manipulation of these antiquarian and literary stimuli directed at providing a vehicle for the regular themes of the Ovidian persona.