The Past in Fragments: Ennius鈥� Annals, Cato鈥檚 Origins, and the history of Rome
Professor Jackie Elliott
Wednesday, April 20, 7:00听p.m.
Hale Science Building Room 230
Free and Open to Public
Download Poster
ABSTRACT
The early Roman poet Ennius (239 鈥� 169 BCE) and his contemporary, the statesman and censor Cato (234 鈥� 149 BCE), each wrote groundbreaking accounts of the Roman past: Ennius by adapting the Greek hexameter鈥� the meter in which Lucretius鈥� On the Constitution of the Universe, Vergil鈥檚听Aeneid, Ovid鈥檚听Metamorphoses, and much else was subsequently to be written鈥攁nd fitting to it an account of Roman history from its beginnings to his own present day. Cato鈥檚 narrative of the Roman past, the听翱谤颈驳颈苍别蝉听(鈥淥rigins鈥�), was the first prose history of Rome to be written in the Latin language. Each of these works had听a profound influence on how Romans thought about the past in relation to their contemporary identity and on how that past was subsequently imagined in the genres of epic and historiography. Today, however, they each survive only in fragments: that is, as quotations or vaguer references relayed by later ancient authors, whose own dates stretch from the first century BCE to the ninth CE and even later. This talk describes some of the challenges and rewards of getting to grips with early Roman fragmentary material.听
Jackie Elliott (Ph.D. Columbia 2005) studies the history of Roman literature from its inception, specializing in the epic and historiographical traditions of republican Rome. Her first monograph,听 (Cambridge, 2013) retraces what we think we know of Rome鈥檚 first and massively influential but now fragmentary hexametric epic to its ancient sources. This study was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement (4 June, 2014) and won several awards, including the Society for Classical Studies鈥櫶�. She is also the author of (Leiden, 2022), an introduction to the fragmentary record of Roman poetry from its origins through roughly the first hundred and twenty years of its existence. She has received fellowships from the Humboldt Foundation, the American Academy at Rome, the Loeb Foundation, and has contributed articles to the Zeitschrift f眉r Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, the Classical Quarterly, Histos, and the American Journal of Philology. Currently, she is working on a project on Cato鈥檚 Origines informed by exploration of the work鈥檚 early reception and transmission history; a commentary on the Annales with a literary bias and a focus on the text's ancient reception in later works of literature; and a project on the transmission and early reception of Lucilius.听
听