the floralia, or: flora, mother of flowers

excerpts from ovid's fasti, book five

Here is a translation I set out to do way back in February but didn’t get around to starting until this past week. My procrastination ended up working out in my favor—this spring-filled poem explicitly teeters on the border between April and May, and getting it out into the world just as plants are exploding into flowering bloom feels right.

Unlike other poem translations I have shared in the newsletter, this is not a line-by-line translation, but rather a trio of excerpts. The source is Ovid’s Fasti, or “The Book of Days.” This is an extraordinary work that goes through the Roman calendar month by month and explains various holidays, their associated customs, and their surrounding mythology, often in an interview format as the unidentified poet-guide converses with relevant deities. As a full work, however, the Fasti is sadly incomplete. We have only the first six books, corresponding to January through June. It’s not uncommon for ancient texts to be fragmentary or only partially extant, but historians generally agree that the Fasti was never complete to begin with—Ovid mentions working on it during his exile in Tomis,¹ but he presumably died before finishing the remaining six books (July through December) and/or putting them into circulation.²

The excerpts in this post are from Book Five of the Fasti,³ centered on the month of May; and the focus is on Flora, goddess of flowers and spring. Her festival, the Floralia, was held on April 28, but Ludi Florae, the games in her honor, went on until May 3. I am clearly squeezing in under the wire here.

I have translated Ovid before, but this was my first time translating the Fasti, and I did it with just the Loeb edition and my devoted dictionary in hand—no editorial notes or other commentary. In another spectacular display of procrastination, I also did most of it last night. As always but especially this time, any clumsy phrasings or grammatical misunderstandings are entirely on me!

Fresco of Flora from Villa Arianna at Stabiae, close to Pompeii

The Flora section of the Fasti begins with the goddess making an appearance to discuss her origins.

“Come here, Mother of Flowers, so that we can honor you with joyful games!
Last month I postponed these duties owed to you.
You begin in April and pass into May’s domain:
one month holds you as you leave, the other as you come.⁴
Since the months’ borderlines are yours and yield to you,
both are suitable times for your praises.
The circus games occur in this month, with victory celebrated by the crowd:
let my song fly, too, along with those spectacles of the circus.
Tell me, in your own words, who you are. The judgements of men are untrustworthy,
and you will be the best author of your own identity.”
So I spoke, and so the goddess answered my questions—
as she spoke, her mouth breathed out springlike roses.
“I am called Flora now, and was Chloris before:
a Greek letter in my name was corrupted by the Latin language.⁵
I was Chloris, a nymph from those happy fields where you hear
there was once a society of happy people.
It’s hard to modestly speak of the beauty I had,
but it found a god as a son-in-law for my mother.
It was spring, and I was wandering. Zephyrus⁶ caught sight of me and I left.
But he chased after me as I fled—he was stronger,
and Boreas⁷ had given his brother every right for rape
by daring to carry off a prize from the house of Erechtheus.⁸
Still, he makes amends for his violence by making me his bride,
and I don’t have any complaints in his bed.
I enjoy an eternal spring: the season always shines the most brightly,
the trees have their foliage, and the ground always provides nourishment.
I have a lush garden in the fields as part of my dowry:
the wind nurtures it, and it’s bathed by a fountain of clear water.
My husband filled it with noble flowers
and said, “Goddess, be mistress of the flowers.”
I often wanted to count all the different colors there,
but I could not: their abundance was greater than any number.
The first time the dewy frost is shaken from the leaves
and the diverse foliage has been warmed by the rays of the sun,
the Hours come together, draped in colorful clothes,
and they gather my gifts in slender wicker baskets.
Right away, the Graces come forward, and they weave crowns
and garlands to circle their heavenly hair.
I was the first to scatter new seeds among countless people:
before then, the earth was one color.
I was the first to make a flower from Therapnaean blood,⁹
and a lament remains inscribed on its petals.
[…]¹⁰
Perhaps you think I only rule over tender garlands—
but my divinity also touches farmers’ fields.
If the crops have prospered well, the threshing floor will be rich with grain;
if the vines have prospered well, there will be wine;
if the olive trees have prospered well, the year will shine brightly,
and the fruit will have its yield at the proper time.
Once the bloom has been damaged, the vetches¹¹ and beans die,
and the Nile’s imported lentils die too.
Wines also bloom, painstakingly collected in vast cellars,
and mist covers the surface of the jars.
Honey is my gift: I summon the winged honey-makers
to violets and clover and grey thyme.
I do the same thing then as when, in youthful years,
spirits run riot and bodies themselves are flourishing.”
[...]¹²
She is not gloomy; she does not claim to be lofty—
she wants her rites to be open to the common crowd,
and she warns us to use life’s beauty while it blooms:
the thorn is despised when the rose has fallen.
But why is it that, while white garments are given out at the festival of Ceres,¹³
it’s fitting for Flora to be dressed in so many colors?
Is it because the harvest is whitened by ripe ears of corn,
but there is every color and appearance in flowers?
She nodded her assent, and flowers fell with the movement of her hair,
as a rose might fall when tossed onto a table.
There still remained the lights, whose purpose escaped my notice,¹⁴
when the goddess thus relieved my uncertainty:
“Lights are thought to be suitable for my festival days,
either because the fields are illuminated with bright flowers
or because neither flowers nor flames are dull in color,
and the splendor of both attracts the eyes;
or because the night’s freedom is fitting for my pleasure.
The third reason comes close to the truth.”
“There is one more brief thing that remains for me to ask about,
if I am allowed,” I said; and she said, “It is allowed.”
“Why are peaceful deer and cautious hares
caught in your nets, instead of Libyan lionesses?”
She responded that forests did not fall to her, but gardens
and fields did, where no combative wild animals could go.
And so all had ended, and she vanished into thin air,
but her fragrance remained: you would know it was a goddess.

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Thanks for tagging along! I am genuinely delighted to recieve translation requests, so please feel free to shout out (in the comments here or via social media) if there are any pieces of Latin literature you’d especially like to see.

1. Ovid was exiled to Tomis in 8 CE by the emperor Augustus. We will likely never know exactly why; Ovid only says it was due to carmen et error, “a poem and a mistake.” The poem was probably Ars Amatoria, “The Book of Love,” basically an instruction manual for men on How To Do Sex Good. (Augustus was kind of a prude.) Tomis, a city on the Black Sea, is modern Constanța in Romania, but to a metropolitan Roman it was the middle of buttfuck nowhere: not just exile but a miserable one. Ovid lived there, miserable the whole while, for ten years and died there, too, around 18 CE.

2. Writing during his exile, Ovid says that he had finished the entire work but had only finished revising the first six books—the ones that went into circulation before his exile and are still around today as January-June. If the remaining six books were indeed finished at one point, I think it’s unlikely they ever left Ovid’s hands and made it to Rome for wider distribution. A great deal of Latin literature is lost but still mentioned or quoted in other ancient sources, and this is not the case for books 7-12 of the Fasti: July-December are not mentioned anywhere by any other authors.

3. For interested parties, the specific lines are 5.183-224, 261-274, 351-376.

4. Celebrations for the Floralia began on April 28 and ended on May 3.

5. This line is odd. In Greek mythology, Chloris was a nymph associated with spring and flowers, but the Roman Flora pretty clearly has linguistic roots in the Latin noun flos, flower (the plural is flores). The Romans were obsessed with portraying themselves as successors to the Greeks and that may be what’s happening here.

6. The god of the west wind.

7. Zephyrus’s brother, the god of the north wind.

8. Boreas had previously abducted Oreithyia, the daughter of Erechtheus. The “every right” here is not explicit permission, but rather a case of “my brother already got a wife by kidnapping so it’s fine for me to do it, too.”

9. The hyacinth.

10. I’ve skipped about 36 lines here, going over how Flora helped the goddess Juno conceive her son, the god Mars.

11. I have never in my life seen the word “vetch” before. The Latin is vicia and every dictionary I consulted just said, helpfully, that the appropriate English equivalent is “vetch.” If you are also mystified, Wikipedia says that a vetch is “a species of flowering plant, part of the legume family.”

12. I’ve skipped 76 more lines here, most of them going over the political origins of the Floralia’s games at the request of our poet-guide.

13. The goddess of agriculture and crops, especially grain.

14. Our poet-guide wants to know why lights (presumably torches or open fires) are used to illuminate public pathways during the Floralia’s nighttime celebrations.