Jackie Elliott – författare

Ennius' Annales, which is preserved only in fragments, was hugely influential on Roman literature and culture. This book explores the genesis, in the ancient sources for Ennius' epic and in modern scholarship, of the accounts of the Annales with which we operate today. A series of appendices detail each source's contribution to our record of the poem, and are used to consider how the interests and working methods of the principal sources shape the modern view of the poem and to re-examine the limits imposed and the possibilities offered by this ancient evidence. Dr Elliott challenges standard views of the poem, such as its use of time and the disposition of the gods within it. She argues that the manifest impact of the Annales on the collective Roman psyche results from its innovative promotion of a vision of Rome as the primary focus of the cosmos in all its aspects.

Ennius' Annales, which is preserved only in fragments, was hugely influential on Roman literature and culture. This book explores the genesis, in the ancient sources for Ennius' epic and in modern scholarship, of the accounts of the Annales with which we operate today. A series of appendices detail each source's contribution to our record of the poem, and are used to consider how the interests and working methods of the principal sources shape the modern view of the poem and to re-examine the limits imposed and the possibilities offered by this ancient evidence. Dr Elliott challenges standard views of the poem, such as its use of time and the disposition of the gods within it. She argues that the manifest impact of the Annales on the collective Roman psyche results from its innovative promotion of a vision of Rome as the primary focus of the cosmos in all its aspects.

This analysis explores select aspects of the extant fragmentary record of early Roman poetry from its earliest accessible moments through roughly the first hundred and twenty years of its traceable existence. Key questions include how ancient readers made sense of the record as then available to them and how the limitations of their accounts, assumptions, and working methods continue to define the contours of our understanding today. Both using and challenging the standard conceptual frameworks operative in the ancient world, the discussion details what we think we know of the best documented forms, practitioners, contexts, and reception of Roman drama (excluding comedy), epic, and satire in their early instantiations, with occasional glances at the further generic experimentation that accompanied the genesis of literary practice at Rome.