CARMENTIS AND THE POET: DEIFICATION AND EXILE IN OVID'S FASTI

In Fasti 1, the festival dedicated to Carmentis, a prophetess (vates) named after carmen, "song" itself has strong programmatic implications for Ovid's own song and his vatic persona. Harking back to Aeneid 8, where Carmentis is mentioned in passing Ovid presents her in a new light: as a vates of exile and deification. Carmentis both prophesies and prefigures what will become an entire chain of deifications of members of the house of Augustus, and she is deified herself. She strikingly contrasts with the poet Ovid, who will not receive similar honors. Instead, his own fate is mirrored in Carmentis' first speech, on the topic of exile. We can recognize a ring structure with strong closural force: the prophecies of the very first vates, Carmentis, foreshadow the birth of "gods" that were so powerful that they could send Ovid into exile and silence Rome's most recent lutes. Ovid's exile thus becomes more than a personal mishap. It marks the completion of a circle of events that began once the first vates set her foot on Italian soil.