Latin Literature

These have been good years for Ennius perennis. A couple of years on from his Loeb renewal, two superb books keep the lifeblood pulsing. Ennius’ Annals. Poetry and History, edited by Cynthia Damon and Joseph Farrell, is a masterclass of a conference volume. The lucid introduction, a sort of ‘Whither Ennius?’, powerfully situates it in the receding wake of Otto Skutsch's monumental edition and the fresher waves of Ennius and the Architecture of the Annals, Jackie Elliott's powerful challenge to ‘Virgiliocentric’ reconstructions of this fragmentary text. As those studies made plain enough in their different ways, reception and interpretation of the Annals are interlocked to a special degree, and the fourteen chapters in this book (plus afterword by Mary Jaeger) roam nicely around and between both.