Shaggy Crowns

Abstract

Abstract Quintus Ennius was once the monumental epic poet of Republican Rome and considered 'the father of Roman poetry'. But around 150 years after his epic, Annales, first appeared, it was decisively replaced by Virgil's Aeneid and now survives only in fragments. Almost a century after Eduard Norden's primarily textual study, Ennius und Vergilius (Leipzig, 1915), this is the first book-length study since Norden's of the relationship between Rome's two great epic poems. Until the Aeneid appeared, the Annales had been at the heart of the Roman literary canon, embedded in the school curriculum as part of the cultural franchise you needed to have in order to become 'Roman' and linked with the memory of the Roman past. More than an intertextual study, therefore, this monograph investigates the key issue of the intersection between intertextuality and the appropriations of cultural memory: how, in the use of archaism, the presentation of landscape, embedded memories of the Punic Wars, and fragments of exempla, the new poem appropriates and rewrites the myths and memories which the old had enshrined in Roman epic. Not just a newer and slicker 'New Poet', Virgil constructs himself as an older 'Archaic Poet' of the deepest memories of the Roman past competing for Ennius' 'shaggy crown'.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Oxford University Press eBooks, 2013 · DOI ↗