Performing Foundation: the Gendered Role of Baking in Ovid’s Fasti

Abstract

Ovid’s Fasti suggests that in Rome’s early times, the baking and sharing of bread and cakes, traditionally the most domestic of activities, offered a model of matronal authority that not only honoured the gods but emphasised the fundamental value of hospitality towards strangers and the needy; ritual and communal acts of giving and sharing bread demonstrated the social and religious power of women, young and old, humble and elite, within the state. Such female cults offer alternative foundation narratives to the violent origins promulgated through the better- known legends of Aeneas, Romulus and Remus, and Mars and Ilia, and in the Fasti they always have a political dimension.