The boom in Ennian studies continues with these revised dissertations, one focusing on the Annales, the other on its reception. Both contribute in useful ways to the interpretation of the poem as more than just a collection of fragments; to do so, both rely heavily on Skutsch's reconstruction, which has recently been fundamentally challenged (J. Elliott, Ennius and the Architecture of the Annales (2013)). Whether, and to what extent, the challenge will undermine these and similar interpretive efforts remains to be seen.
Fabrizi argues that the Annales is deeply informed by an ethical perspective that emphasizes constant innovation within a traditional context. This thesis is developed over five chapters, each focusing on a moment of enlightened self-definition on the part of the Roman state. Such moments, which span the entire poem in its original, fifteen-book form, include Aeneas' dealings with the inhabitants of Latium, several occurrences during Romulus' régime, the entirety of Rome's epochal encounter with King Pyrrhus, the experience of the Punic War period, and subsequent Roman operations in Ambracia and against Antiochus. F.'s choice of these focal points is hardly surprising, but that fact does not lessen the interpretive insight that she brings to them all.
F. reads the Annales as the story of how the Romans transformed themselves from defeated Trojan refugees and victims of the victorious Greeks into a nation more capable and fit to rule than the descendants of those who had defeated their ancestors. Her interpretation emphasizes the moral and ethical elements of the story: Roman success is the result of maintaining the pax deorum, conducting faithful diplomacy and relying on intelligent perspicacity, rather than on mere military force. This perspective is especially striking in episodes that concern Aeneas, who (as F. argues in ch. 1) established himself in Italy without warfare, and especially Romulus (ch. 2), whom later authors tend to remember primarily as a bellicose figure. Were they misrepresenting the Ennian Romulus, or depending on some other tradition? Although the uncertainties are many, F. has no difficulty supporting her argument with perceptive readings of the text; still, many conflicting forces influenced the pattern of survival. We owe the famous auspication episode (Ann. 72–91 Sk), for instance, like most longer, securely placed fragments, not to chance but to the fact that quoting it served someone's interest; and it is not difficult to see why Cicero in De divinatione might cherry-pick a passage from Ennius celebrating Romulus as an augur instead of a soldier. Briefer passages that survive in the lexicographical tradition, even if firmly assigned to a book, are usually more difficult to associate with a particular episode, and one must be wary when F. accepts Skutsch's confident verdict that a fragment which survives because of Nonius' interest in the archaic adverb fortunatim (Ann. 102–3 Sk) ‘almost certainly’ concerns a pact between Romulus and Titus Tatius. Nevertheless, even if Skutsch's interpretation is already breathtaking in its specificity, F. manages to expand upon it by bringing to bear additional supporting evidence (99–101) in the form of an episode in Livy (40.46.9–10) which cites the pact between Romulus and Tatius as a precedent for the reconciliation of Ennius' patron Fulvius Nobilior with a political enemy, M. Aemilius Lepidus. This is typical of F.'s contribution: while generally basing her analysis on Skutsch, she does not merely accept his (or anyone else's) reconstruction in particulars, but often strengthens it with new information of both philological and literary-critical import.
Especially impressive is F.'s discussion of Ennius' intergeneric engagement with epic and tragedy in connection with Pyrrhus. The king of Epirus and descendant of Aeacus enters the Annales as the Romans' ‘primo nemico d'oltremare’, ennobled and burdened by the ambiguous Aeacid legacy of Ajax as would-be successor of Achilles in the Epic Cycle, in Pindar and in tragedy. In contrast to Pyrrhus as a hereditary throwback to avatars of physical heroism who ultimately fail, an emphasis on sapientia — already, on F.'s argument, crucial to Ennius' conception of Romulus (138) — aligns the Romans with a more successful Odyssean paradigm.
Chs 4 and 5 concern the Punic War period and after, and stress the extent to which the second half of the epic becomes more explicitly Homeric, rather than less so, as one might have expected. Illuminating is F.'s discussion of the specifically epic pedigree of Ennian Discordia (155–63) as an overture to this development, which she sees as continuing in the subsequent introduction (in Book 8 or 9, according to Priscian) of an explicitly Cyclopean figure plausibly identified as Philip V of Macedon (Ann. 319–20 Sk) (172–7), and in Book 15, particularly in the famous passages that Ennius modelled on the defence of the Greek ships by Polypoetes and Leonteus (Il. 12.127–53; cf. Ann. 15 fr. 4 Sk) and (again) by Ajax (Il. 15.102–11; cf. Ann. 391–98 Sk), but also in the apparent identification of an actual rainbow as the mythological Iris (Ann. 399 Sk) (cf. 192–8). The point of these unexpectedly hyper-Homeric gestures in Ennius' treatment of events that occurred within his own lifetime is precisely, F. argues, to drive home the completeness with which the Romans have reversed the situation in which their Trojan ancestors found themselves when the story began, and the completeness with which Ennius himself has supplanted Homer in telling that story.
F.'s chief contribution is a compelling interpretation of the Annales not merely as a formal artifact, but as a story with a moral and ethical point, and not necessarily the one that later representations of Ennius' epic would have suggested as the most obvious one. Her arguments, while seldom if ever actually dispositive, are always coherent, never (in my view) implausible and often persuasive. As an interpretation of the Annales as reconstructed by Skutsch, they both make sense and present a more interesting conception of the poem than one finds in, for instance, Skutsch himself, Flores et al. and the standard literary-historical accounts.
Goldschmidt's contribution is not really a study of Ennius per se, but an intertextual analysis of the Annales and the Aeneid. This can obviously not be a straightforward essay of its kind. As G. observes, any Vergilian would give a lot to be in a position to do for Ennius what Knauer has done for Homer and Nelis for Apollonius, but the highly fragmentary state of the Annales simply does not permit such a totalizing perspective. Therefore, she writes, ‘this book attempts something fundamentally different’ (7). In one way, that is true: the book does not present a single, unified conception of this crucial poetic relationship, but rather a series of essays on different aspects of the relationship. Nevertheless, when it comes to specific episodes and other elements, G. generally does proceed almost as if we knew just as well as Vergil what Ennius' poem was like. Her working assumptions, which she lays out in ch. 1, ‘Reading Ennius in the First Century B.C.’, are two. First, and more conventionally, she accepts Eduard Norden's effort to reconstruct parts of the Annales on the basis of Vergil's imitation, and Skutsch's extension of that effort, almost as written. This, in theory, permits the critic to focus directly on how Vergil engaged with his model in particular instances. Second — and this is where some of the more interesting implications of reception theory come into play — G. argues that even if there is a lot about the Annales itself that we do not know, we have a good deal of information about how the poem was regarded in the first century b.c.; and, she infers, it was presumably to this conception of the Annales that Vergil was reacting, as well as to the poem itself. In respect of the first assumption, of course, the possibility of falling into circular argumentation is an almost constant threat. G. is aware of that, but addresses the issue in a manner that seems to me more apotropaic than convincing. In contrast to F., for instance, she brings little new information to bear on the likely form of the poem that Vergil was imitating. And in respect of the second assumption, even if I agree (as I do) that Vergil is likely to have been reacting to earlier readings of Ennius as well as to Ennius himself, I am not so confident that we can reliably tell the difference between them, or in some cases even be very specific about what these readings were. For these reasons, I find the general premises of this study more than usually open to question.
Still, there is value in particular lines of approach, or at least in some of them. Chs 2 and 3, on ‘“Archaic” Poets’ and ‘Sites of Rome’, seem to me the most successful parts of the book. In the former, G. takes up the familiar issue of poetic succession and gives it a new spin. Taking her bearings from Hardie on literary parricide and Hinds on projected obsolescence, she points out complementary instances in which Vergil ‘appropriates … Ennius’ “oldness”' (65) to fashion the Aeneid as an ‘“archaic” poem’, but one ‘endowed with a new, more urbane, antiquity’ (66). The following chapter begins by discussing Ennian interactions with Roman and Italian lieux de mémoire and continues with a suggestive and original discussion of Vergil's Ennian Tiber. The tour of the Palatine that concludes this chapter is somewhat less rewarding, perhaps just because one has taken this tour so many times already. The final two chapters are more of a mixed bag, and are neither as original nor as persuasive as the previous two. The one (ch. 4, ‘Punica’) considers Ennian reflections of the wars with Carthage, but the section on Sicily is as much about Naevius as Ennius in a way that momentarily blurs the usually clear focus of G.'s argument; and the sections on Aeneid 7 and 9, when they try to venture beyond a synthesis of previous work, are the most speculative parts of the book. The last section, however, on Ennius, Turnus and Zama, triangulates Ennius, Vergil and Silius in an interesting and attractive way. Ch. 5, ‘Epic Examples’, accesses recent work on exemplarity, builds on the observation that the Annales deals with many figures (Horatius Cocles, the Decii Mures, Q. Fabius Maximus et al.) who became mainstays of the exemplary tradition, and finds in this evidence that Vergil's emphasis on exempla is in dialogue with that of his great epic predecessor. This must be true, but G. was not able to go very far beyond this basic observation in what I found a rather weak final instalment to a book that is usually stimulating, if not always convincing.
To return in conclusion to the question I raised at the beginning, if it becomes necessary to revise the prevailing opinion about the form of the Annales, how will the impact of these two books be affected? I believe that, on balance, F.'s general conclusions are likely to stand, or at least to serve as a continuing point of reference for others interested to understand and explain the ethos of the Annales. As I have noted, she does something actually to strengthen one's sense that Skutsch's conception of the passages with which she deals is likely to be right; and if in some cases it is not, F.'s ethical conception of the poem is by no means entirely dependent on specific formal considerations, certainly not in all its aspects. G.'s interpretations on the other hand, even at their most interesting, are also more open to question — even if most readers continue to equate the poem with Skutsch's reconstruction of it. Nevertheless, they are definitely worth taking seriously. Different readers will no doubt assess this or that argument in either of these books more or less favourably than I, but scholars of Ennius (and of Vergil and of Latin poetry in general) will find things to admire in both. For the rest, may this aetas Enniana long endure!
