The Fasti, a Calendar with the Reasons Attached

The Fasti works through the Roman year month by month, stopping at each festival to explain where it came from, and it is one of the best witnesses there is to Roman religious practice because it records rites whose meaning had already become obscure to Romans. At the Lemuria the head of the household rises at midnight, washes his hands, walks barefoot through the house throwing black beans over his shoulder without looking back, says nine times that with these he redeems himself and his, and then bangs bronze and tells the shades to leave. At the Parentalia the family attends to its own dead. At the Terminalia the boundary stone is garlanded and a sacrifice is made over it.

What makes the poem a good source is its habit of offering several explanations for one custom and refusing to choose. Ovid asks the gods, asks antiquarians, reports incompatible etymologies, and lets them stand. That is a nuisance for anyone wanting a single answer and a gift for anyone studying how a living religion carries practices it can no longer account for. Six books survive, covering January to June. Whether the second half was written and lost, or never finished, is not known, and the poem as we have it breaks off at midsummer.