Ovid and the Ara Pacis

summary: This paper challenges the general impression in previous scholarship that Ovid’s commemoration of the Ara Pacis Augustae at Fasti 1.709–22 does not engage with the visual display of the monument itself. My reading argues that the iconography of the Altar is an abiding intertext in Ovid’s eulogy of Pax, as he reflects upon festive procession, imperial family, the goddess herself, and the dialectic between war and peace in Augustan Rome.