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IN THE PROEM TO HIS FASTI, DESCRIBING THOSE ELEMENTS THAT ARE Constant throughout the calendar" (totis haerentia fastis, Fast. 1.61), Ovid mentions that "there is also [the day] that always returns on a rotation of nine" (est quoque, qui nono semper ab orbe redit, 1.54). This is Rome's nundinae, the market day whose eight-day cycle (or nine-day cycle, by the Romans' inclusive reckoning) long predated the seven-day week adopted officially under Constantine.
Ovid's mention is brief, but this cannot be taken as evidence that the nundinal cycle was any less significant in the Roman experience of time than the festival calendar foregrounded in his poem. On the contrary, the traces of the nundinae across Roman literature and material culture, however sporadic, prompt the same questions for us as Ovid's major festival days with their elaborate meanings. In her influential 1987 article on the Roman calendar, Mary Beard noted the copious aetiologies supplied by Ovid and other ancient authors for such festivals as the Parilia (April 21, Rome's birthday) and argued that "[t]he ritual calendar and the exegesis that went with it . . . offered a pageant of what it was to be Roman" (1987: 12); each day, rather than sustaining a singular cultural meaning within the syntax of the year, served as a "complex of times," with different strata from Roman myth and history superimposed in one occasion. The nundinal cycle also, I argue, offered its own pageants of Roman identity. In texts ranging from antiquarian accounts of Rome's rustic origins to inscriptions in Italian towns, we have an opportunity to witness the role this temporal framework played both in constructions of the past and in negotiations of the present.
There are some important aspects of the nundinal cycle pursued elsewhere that I will draw upon below but will not discuss in depth, such as its place in the economic history of Roman markets. I also do not aim to reproduce a full dossier of ancient references to the nundinae, although the sources cited below are representative of what survives.4 I am concerned, rather, with identifying the most prominent meanings ascribed to the nundinae in different surviving representations, and showing how these meanings shaped, and were shaped by,...