Find the word definition

The Collaborative International Dictionary
Fasti

Fasti \Fas"ti\, n. pl. [L.]

  1. The Roman calendar, which gave the days for festivals, courts, etc., corresponding to a modern almanac.

  2. Records or registers of important events.

Wiktionary
fasti

n. 1 The calendar in Ancient Rome, which gave the days for festivals, courts, etc., corresponding to a modern almanac. 2 record or registers of important events.

Wikipedia
Fasti
For the poem by Ovid, see Fasti (poem); for the inscribed versions of the calendar, see Roman calendar.

In ancient Rome, the fasti ( Latin plural) were chronological or calendar-based lists, or other diachronic records or plans of official and religiously sanctioned events. After Rome's decline, the word fasti continued to be used for similar records in Christian Europe and later Western culture.

Public business, including the official business of the Roman state, had to be transacted on dies fasti, "allowed days". The fasti were the records of this business. In addition to the word's general sense, there were fasti that recorded specific kinds of events, such as the fasti triumphales, lists of triumphs celebrated by Roman generals. The divisions of time used in the fasti were based on the Roman calendar.

The yearly records of the fasti encouraged the writing of history in the form of chronological annales, "annals," which in turn influenced the development of Roman historiography.

Fasti (poem)

The Fasti (traditionally known in English as the "Book of Days") is a six-book Latin poem written by the Roman poet Ovid and published in 8 AD. Ovid is believed to have left the Fasti incomplete when he was exiled to Tomis by the emperor Augustus in 8 AD. Written in elegiac couplets and drawing on conventions of Greek and Latin didactic poetry, the Fasti is structured as a series of eye-witness reports and interviews by the first-person vates ("poet-prophet" or "bard") with Roman deities, who explain the origins of Roman holidays and associated customs—often with multiple aetiologies. The poem is a significant, and in some cases unique, source of fact in studies of religion in ancient Rome; and the influential anthropologist and ritualist J.G. Frazer translated and annotated the work for the Loeb Classical Library series. Each book covers one month, January through June, of the Roman calendar, and was written several years after Julius Caesar replaced the old system of Roman time-keeping with what would come to be known as the Julian calendar.

The popularity and reputation of the Fasti has fluctuated more than that of any of Ovid's other works. The poem was widely read in the 15th–18th centuries, and influenced a number of mythological paintings in the tradition of Western art. However, as one scholar has observed, throughout the 20th century "anthropologists and students of Roman religion … found it full of errors, an inadequate and unreliable source for Roman cultic practice and belief. Literary critics have generally regarded the Fasti as an artistic failure." Subsequently, from the late 1980s, the work has enjoyed a revival of scholarly interest, and has been published in several new English translations. Ovid was exiled from Rome for his subversive treatment of Augustus, yet the Fasti continues this treatment —which has led to the emergence of an argument in academia for treating the Fasti as a politically weighted work.

Usage examples of "fasti".

Where the mind mutinies, the spirit stands fasti Those were the words of Captain Standish, the great dwarf general.