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Shaggy Crowns: Ennius' Annales and Virgil's Aeneid

Goldschmidt, N.

Authors



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’.

Citation

Goldschmidt, N. (2013). Shaggy Crowns: Ennius' Annales and Virgil's Aeneid. Oxford University Press

Book Type Authored Book
Online Publication Date Dec 12, 2013
Publication Date 2013-11
Deposit Date Nov 28, 2012
Publisher Oxford University Press
Series Title Oxford Classical Monographs
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1124183
Publisher URL http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199681297.do
Related Public URLs https://academic.oup.com/book/36254