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This chapter examines the classical and medieval sources of Petrarch in writing his epic poem Africa. It brings to the fore the role of Dante's epic in Petrarch's poem and suggests that the prominence of poet characters such as Ennius and Homer, and the link between poet and hero parallel the role of poet characters such as Virgil and Statius in the Divina Commedia. It also provides evidence that Africa was influenced by Virgil's work.

This chapter discusses the retranslation of Greek epic poetry and argues for its importance in understanding how literary traditions shape the translation scenario. First, it treats the epic adaptations and translational practices of Roman authors, with particular focus on Ennius and Virgil. It also treats lesser-known translations of Greek epic from Roman times, and outlines the continuing history of Latin translation during the Renaissance, which was very influential for the burgeoning literatures of Western Europe. Then it details how this Latin tradition still informs the ‘classic’ English translations of George Chapman, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and William Cowper, who still read their Greek under the strong influence not only of Latin literary values, but also of Latin translational practices. While the Latin tradition was highly influential in shaping European retranslation of Greek epic, that tradition itself effectively produced no translation on a par with Chapman's Homer or Dryden's Virgil.

This chapter focuses on the benchmark metre in ancient poetry, the heroic hexameter. Three poetic forms embodying a contradiction of the epic ethos embodied by the hexameter are considered: saturnians, satirical hexameters, and elegiacs. Saturnians, the celebratory medium displaced by hexameters by Ennius, are probed for their capacity to convey resistance to the hellenization represented by hexameters, and similar implications attach to Lucilius' decision to adopt the hexameter as the default form for satire, but a hexameter which is a travesty of the magnificent vehicle of epic: later satirists offer interesting twists to this combative relationship with their own form. Finally, elegy has an ambivalent relationship with epic hard-wired into it by the uneasy combination of a dactylic hexameter and pentameter in the elegiac couplet, and poetry by a range of elegiac poets is used to show the creative potential of this metrical combination.

Analysis of mediality in Callimachus, Ennius, Lucretius, and Catullus maps the traditions inherited by the Augustan poets. While Callimachus embraces song and its association with divine inspiration but still presents his writing practices realistically, the early Roman poets assume that they are writers and gradually adopt song when reaching for greater sublimity. A discussion of the reception of the disputed carmina conuiualia in Horace and Vergil concludes this section on background.

This chapter examines Cicero’s struggles with Roman anxieties about philosophy and situates them within a broader contemporary discourse that tries to expand the field of acceptable activity to include the intellectual. The discussion draws on the prefaces to Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae and Bellum Iugurthinum and the preface to the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, along with the criticisms that Cicero claims are leveled against his project. The chapter presents a broader picture of the resistance to intellectual activity that characterized the Roman elite and that Cicero was trying to anticipate. It also considers Cicero’s engagement with a quotation from Ennius that advocates a limited involvement with philosophy, as well as the issue of the mos maiorum and philosophy’s relationship to tradition, which is central to Cicero’s self-presentation.

This chapter discusses the Virgilian paradox, an epic of drama and pathos that goes back to the origins of modern debate on Virgil in the Romantic period, where the supposed natural primitivism and fresh naivete of Homer was commonly and unfavourably contrasted with the more artificial and sophisticated Virgilian epic. It argues that Virgil too sensed from the beginning that the naturalness and noble simplicity of Homer was essentially irrecoverable in the cultural context of the first century BC, but that he had the opportunity to create a Homer for his own times. The chapter also charts the quintessential ambiguity of the Aeneid, both reflecting the traditionally nationalistic ideology of Roman epic in the steps of Naevius and Ennius, and showing an extraordinary empathy with the focalisations and feelings of individual characters, many of whom represent a point of view at odds with the direction of the nationalistic plot.

This chapter first sets the critical and aesthetic context for Pope's engagement with Homer and then moves on to his earliest Homeric translation ‘The Episode of Sarpedon’ before confronting his management of the main fable of the Iliad involving the anger of Achilles. It is argued that Pope harmonises his translation with the neoclassic aesthetic he shared with Vida but in such a way as to bring a concentrated emphasis and vigour to the resulting version. The method and artistry of Augustan translators are illuminated in a series of comparisons made between passages of Homer imitated by Ennius and refined by Virgil, and the translations of these passages by Dryden and Pope. The refinement of the Augustans — Roman and English — is thrown into relief in contrast to previous translators in this tradition including Chapman. Finally, the strengths and limitations of Pope's Augustan style are then tested in relation to the Odyssey.

The postscript concludes by looking briefly at Ennius’ post-textual afterlife. It recaps the overall argument of the book and revisits the issue of fragmentary texts and the possible distortions of reception, arguing for the importance of entertaining hypothetical contexts for the fragments even as we accept that they must remain necessarily provisional. It ends with some suggestions for completing the story.

This chapter begins with earliest form of Latin verse, the Saturnian, dating from the early centuries after Rome’s founding; little is known about it, however. A native tradition of written verse was established when Ennius created a Latin equivalent of the Greek hexameter, and there is evidence of public performances of his epic verse. During the Late Republic, the two major poets were Lucretius and Catullus, the former inviting a reader imbibing versified philosophy on the page, the latter inviting performance in a convivial setting—but also incorporating performance in the verse itself. Cicero, in the same period, provides testimony to the practice of having skilled readers at symposia. The two poets who dominate the Augustan era, Virgil and Horace, also represent opposing attitudes to performance, the former embracing it, the latter professing to abhor it. Allusions by Ovid and Propertius to poetic performance are also discussed.

Chapter 1 surveys what little we can say with reasonable certainty about Vitruvius’s life and the circumstances surrounding De architectura’s publication. Our knowledge of the historical Vitruvius is occluded by a lack of contemporary external testimony, by his declared attitudes toward representation, and by a particularly complex reception tradition both within and outside of Classical scholarship. This chapter focuses in particular on the second of these factors. First, I examine how the work’s dedicatory preface, with its open interest in “representing” Augustan auctoritas, exemplifies the basic difficulties presented by Vitruvius’s rhetoric in the absence of external testimony. I also examine Vitruvius’s attitudes toward texts through close readings of the prefaces to books 7 and 9. The presence of Ennius in the latter of these has confounded scholars, but his appearance there in conjunction with references to the simulacrum and figura poetae compels analogy to ancestral imagines. Next, I turn to Cicero’s Pro Archia, which also compares the commemorative power of text and image with recourse to Ennius. I suggest that Vitruvius’s strategies of self-representation portray him as a close adviser who appropriates the glory of an imperator for the populus Romanus. Comparisons with Horace’s persona in his Satires and apparitorial scribae remain useful, even if Vitruvius’s scribal status is not assured. But Vitruvius’s self-effacing pose should also be understood as an iteration of an earlier model, the Ennian “good friend.”

Specific adaptation takes place within a stylistic framework provided by author or period. The ‘pointed style’ illustrates a stylistic framework taken by Latin from Greek, but commonly a Greek author is adapted into a quite different way of writing. Ennius' and Seneca's reworkings of Euripides illustrate frameworks and procedures that differ between the Latin authors and periods. Cicero's rendering of the Timaeus shows him moulding Plato into his own style. The overall conception of Cicero's Timaeus displays an interest in recasting Plato's own mingling of Greece and Italy.

Ennius referred in his Annales to Naevius’ earlier poem on the Punic War as written ‘in the verses which of old the Fauns and prophets chanted’. This chapter explores what Fauns and prophets were, as a way of identifying elements of the pre-literary Roman world that were still remembered in the second century BC. Fauni were prophetic deities of the wild; human prophets were familiar figures at Rome as late as the first century AD, important as sources of knowledge for the majority of Roman citizens who did not read books. The title of Ennius’ Annales probably has less to do with the year-by-year annals of the Republic than with a thousand-year conception of Roman history from the foundation (Romulus as Aeneas’ grandson) to the triumph of M. Fulvius Nobilior in 187 BC.

The introduction sets out the lie of the land: after a brief history of scholarship on the text of Ennius’ Annales, it addresses the problems and limitations that remain in dealing with fragments. The argument of the book as a whole is summarized and its theoretical bases set out, in particular, the question of the intersection between intertextuality and cultural memory in Roman historical epic that, it is argued, underwrites the relationship between the two poems and characterizes the central dynamic at work in Virgil’s competition for Ennius’ ‘shaggy crown’ of the Roman past.

This chapter lays the foundation of the discussion by analysing the evidence for the position of Ennius’ Annales in Roman reading culture before and shortly after the appearance of the Aeneid. Examining evidence ranging from inscription to quotation, it becomes clear that, in Horace’s words, the poem was ‘open in our hands and sticking in our heads’ at the centre of the Roman canon as a widely familiar school text. More importantly, the ways in which the epic was read and quoted also show that, when it came to his epic, Ennius—originally a ‘half-Greek’ from Messapian Rudiae—increasingly became a fundamental transmitter of Roman cultural memory.

This chapter deals with issues of antiquity and modernity. Stephen Hinds influentially argued that Roman epic, above all in the hands of Virgil and Ennius, engages in a series of ‘Hellenizing revolutions’, each of which wipes out the achievements of previous epic by declaring the new poem’s fundamental modernity. Looking in more detail at the two poets’ self-fashioning, and re-examining their use of archaism, the chapter argues that alongside a dynamic of competition based on claims to modernity and Greekness the Annales and the Aeneid are fundamentally involved in a competition for the claim to Roman antiquity.

Epic poetry too was performed to an audience, under the Muse’s inspiration; the Romans used the same word, uates, for a poet as for an inspired prophet. Ennius composed his Annales to be ‘famous throughout wide peoples’, and in other poetic genres his impersonation of Greek authors like Euhemerus, Epicharmus, and Archestratus, and his personal style of ‘satire’ (satura), were also a performance. In prose, Cato’s history celebrated ‘the deeds of the Roman People’, who must have been able to hear it, and Polybius took for granted an audience of listeners for history, as well as educated readers of texts. There is good but neglected evidence that Lucilius and Varro, writing satire in the polarized politics of the Gracchan and post-Sullan periods, delivered it directly to the People, from the stage.

The introduction establishes premodern ways of knowing the Capitoline Hill, from the poetry of Ennius and Vergil and the antiquarian writings of Varro, Servius, and Justus Rycquius to the historiography of Q. Fabius Pictor, Livy, and late antique chronicles. What made the mountain holy was its association with gold as a symbol of Roman military supremacy, a physical realization of Vergil’s iconic appellation of the hill as the Golden Capitol. The loss of the Capitol’s gold and its tropic quality of goldness led Bracciolini, Niebuhr, Lanciani, and Gatteschi either to opine the loss of Rome’s grandeur or to search for the hidden treasures of the hill or attempt to reconstruct its lost monumentality. This nostalgia set up a paradigm for the dismissal of the postclassical Capitoline Hill as a pile of insignificant ruins, thus obscuring the vitality of the hill for the social and intellectual life of the late empire.