Ovid, the Fasti and the stars

According to Quintilian, poetry cannot be fully understood without a good knowledge of the stars. As one example he cites the fact that poets frequently indicate the time of year by the rising and setting of stars and constellations, a device familiar to us from Hesiod onwards.1 For Quintilian, who had the benefit of a stable civil calendar, there may have seemed little reason beyond a desire for poetic expression to specify the date in this manner: but before Caesar’s calendar reforms in 45 BC, the appearance and disappearance of certain stars just before sunrise and just after sunset provided a much more regular guide to the year than the erratic calendars of Greece and Rome, which were often out of step with the solar year.2 It is therefore not surprising to find the same method of specifying the date in prose authors too;3 and lists of these stellar phenomena, arranged in various calendar-like formats, are found in both texts and inscriptions. These lists, known as parapegmata, can be traced back to fifth century Greece, but the tradition may be considerably older.4 Whatever our reaction to Quintilian’s claim, it is certainly the case that a good knowledge of the stars is important for a full understanding of Ovid’s calendar poem, the Fasti. To a large extent the poem presents itself as a poetic version of the Roman calendar: each book covers a different month, and as the year and the work progress, Ovid marks the dates of various religious festivals and historical events, as in the real fasti. However, unlike many of the extant fasti, Ovid combines this material with material from the parapegmatic tradition, giving dates for the rising and setting of various stars and constellations, and for the journey of the sun through the zodiac. The inclusion of the constellations – and of the aetiological tales explaining their presence in the sky – enables Ovid to introduce a variety of Greek myths into the Roman calendar, where they would otherwise have no place

The Timaeus on Types of Duration

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Cosmological Parameters: do we already know the final answer ?

Some of the arguments which support the strong concensus for an $\Omega_o$ = 0.3, $\lambda_o$ = 0.7 model are reexamined. Corrections for Malmquist bias, local flow and metallicity suggest a revised value for $H_o$ of 63 $\pm$ 6 km/s/Mpc, improving the age problems for an $\Omega_o$ = 1 universe. The latest CMB results may require a high baryon density and hence new physics, for example a strong lepton asymmetry. Difficulties for the $\Omega_o$ = 1 model with cluster evolution, the baryon content of clusters, and the evidence from Type Ia supernovae favouring low $\Omega_o$, $\Lambda > 0$ models, are discussed critically.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures. To appear in 'IDM2000: 3rd International Workshop on Identification of Dark Matter', ed N.Spooner (World Scientific

Cultural Rights and Internal Minorities: Of Pueblos and Protestants

This article considers the question: should rights extended to cultural communities to help them preserve themselves include the right to discipline dissident members who violate cultural norms? The case of the Pueblo Protestants is employed to consider two important defenses of cultural rights (revisionist liberal and cultural communitarian) that offer conflicting answers. Both are found unsatisfactory because of their implicit reliance on “cultural monism” (that is, the assumption that individuals identify with only one cultural community). An approach to defining cultural rights is then outlined that avoids this assumption and its application is illustrated with respect to the Pueblo case