Description: In the context of recent challenges to long-standing assumptions about the nature of Ennius' Annals and the editorial methods appropriate to the poem's fragmentary remains, this volume seeks to move Ennian studies forward on three axes. First, a re-evaluation of the literary and historical precedents for and building blocks of Ennius' poem in order to revise the history of early Latin literature. Second, a cross-fertilization of recent critical approaches to the fields of poetry and historiography. Third, reflection on the tools and methods that will best serve future literary and historical research on the Annals and its reception. Adopting different approaches to these broad topics, the fourteen papers in this volume illustrate how much can be said about Ennius' poem and its place in literary history independent of any commitment to inevitably speculative totalizing interpretations.
Brief description: Cynthia Damon is a Professor in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is an expert in historiography and an editor and translator of Latin texts. She has published on Tacitus - Histories 1 (Cambridge, 2002), Agricola (2017) and Annals (2012) - and Caesar's Civil War - Caesar's Civil War (with Will Batstone, 2006), an Oxford Classical Text (2015), and a Loeb Classical Library edition (2016).