Salve Nantonos

Fasti, as I think you may know already, refers to those days on which religious law, fas, allowed people to perform any form of work. Holidays, days of religious festivals, were marked as nefas, or with "NP" for nefas publica. Certain work that was necessary was allowed on these days, and there were some commentaries on what kind of work would be allowed. In general, you could perform work on a day of nefas that, if not performed, would cause a considerable loss to the wealth of an estate. Thus when the crop was ripe you could harvest it no matter if it was a nefas day.

Among the days of fas was a subcategory when the various comitia could meet. The inscribed calendars that we call Fasti are civil calendars, noting these comitia days. This presumes another religious calendar that was kept by the pontifices. In the earliest times, the pontifices would announce on the kalends, that is at a New Moon, when the Nonae would appear. The Nonae corresponded with the First Quarter of the Lunar cycle. The formality for this, according to Varro, was for the pontifex maximus or another pontifex to proclaim the Nonae to Juno by saying, "Die te quinti kalo Iuno Covella", or else, "Septimi die te kalo Iuno Covella". It was on the Nonae then that the Regina Sacrorum would offer sacrifice to Juno, and the Rex Sacrorum offered sacrifice, probably to Faunus, and proclaimed the month's festivals. Unlike the civil calendar, the religious calendar was not of fixed dates until late in the Republic, when we think the civil and religious calendars were united. Certainly with Caesar, as pontifex maximus and dictator, the two became synomynous.

The rustic calendars is another matter. They seem to have been a traditional calendars, and while the pontifices controlled fixing the date of some rustic festivals, the praetores were responsible to fixing the dates of other festivals. We do not really know whether or if there was some connection between the rustic calendars and that of the pontifices. You can get some information on the rustic calendars in my post on that subject, and I expanded on it further in an article you can find at my domus.

The Fasti Guidizzolenses is so designated by modern historians, accepted as one of the civil calendars rather than as a rustic calendar. There are many differences between the various Fasti, giving no end to historians arguing over their significance. For example, only F. Guidizzolenses, I now think, mentions Epona, or only Fasti Antiates Maiores mentions "Juno Sospita, Mother and Queen" having a festival on the kalends of February. Some are more annotated than others. The dates for some festivals vary. It is unfortunate that the matter of the Fasti has not been revisited in more recent years, and I know of no study of the Augustan Fasti as Fowler and Scullard attempted to reconstruct for the Republican Fasti. And those are reconstructed studies, since their main evidence comes from the Augustan period. Offical Fasti continued to be published after the Augustan Restoration, and this can account for some of the discrepencies between them. One of the last inscribed Fasti dates to 387 CE under Theodosius and therefore neglects to include any of the traditional pagan festivals. Ovid is valuable in the additional information he offers, and unfortunate that he did not go further than June. He includes some information on rustic and plebeian festivals that were not part of the official Fasti. He also mentions some festivals introduced by Augustus. At the same time he neglects other Augustan festivals. Then, too, even before the end of the Republic there were introduced some festivals of the mystery religions that only later came to be accepted as official parts of the Fasti. The cultus of Magna Mater was one such official adoption into the cultus civile and Catullus mentions some of its festivities in his time that does not appear in any of the Fasti. Then we have the Isidis Navigium in March, between the kalends and Nonae, which, although not part of the traditional religious calendar, took on some significance in the imperial period. There is still fertile ground for someone to make a study of the Fasti and how it evolved in the imperial period.