Robinson Ellis – författare

The title of this work literally means The Book of Catullus of Verona and is a careful perusal by Robinson Ellis of the oeuvre of the Roman poet, who is generally thought to have lived between 84 and 54 BCE. In this second edition of 1878, Ellis (1834-1913), whose monumental Commentary on Catullus is also reissued in this series, demonstrates the ancestry of the text of the poems established by Renaissance scholars from the surviving manuscript variants, supplying a text with suggested readings and emendations and a nearly complete listing of citations or references that have been made to Catullus throughout the centuries, and engaging with the work of fellow scholars Ribbeck and Westphal. Ellis offers a detailed reading of the construction of the poet's engaging verse and supports the identification of the 'Lesbia' of whom Catullus writes so glowingly and passionately with Clodia Metelli.

This 1876 work is the magisterial commentary by the Oxford scholar Robinson Ellis (1834-1913) on the life and oeuvre of the Roman poet Catullus, whose work illuminates the closing years of the Roman Republic. Our knowledge of Catullus' life derives almost entirely from his own writings. Three manuscripts survive which contain a collection of poems that are ascribed to him, and all three date from the fourteenth century. Ellis considers the research that has already been undertaken on the poet and his environment but mostly draws on his own work in assessing the value of the Renaissance Italian commentators who established the generally accepted poetic canon. He traces the Greek influences that Catullus was exposed to and discusses his use of different metres, while also speculating on the identity of his beloved Lesbia, a controversial question still unresolved in the twenty-first century.

Classical scholar Robinson Ellis (1834-1913) studied at Balliol College, Oxford, under Benjamin Jowett, before becoming a Fellow of Trinity and, in 1893, Corpus Professor of Latin. His 1876 Commentary on Catullus (also reissued in this series) publicised the Codex Oxoniensis but overlooked its significance and was criticised by other scholars in the field. Nevertheless, his commentaries became standard texts, including this 1881 publication of Ovid's Ibis. A vitriolic invective poem, written in exile, aimed at an enemy whose identity remains unclear, and invoking Callimachus' lost poem of the same name, it is probably Ovid's least-known work. This edition, including text, scholia, and Ellis's prolegomena and critical apparatus, illuminates nineteenth-century traditions of classical scholarship.

Ovid’s rarely studied Ibis is an elegiac companion-piece to the Tristia and Ex Ponto written after his banishment to the Black Sea in AD 8. Modelled on a poem of the same name by the Hellenistic poet Callimachus, Ibis stands out as an artistically contrived explosion of vitriol against an unnamed enemy who is characterised in terms of the Egyptian bird with its unprepossessing habits. Based in a tradition of curse-ritual, it is the most difficult of Ovid’s poems to penetrate. Robinson Ellis’s edition remains an indispensable – if typically eccentric – platform for the study of the poem’s obscurities. Indeed Ellis deserves the primary credit for bringing Ibis back from obscurity into the light of day.This reissue of Ellis’s 1881 edition includes a new introduction by Gareth Williams setting the edition in the context of earlier and later developments in scholarship. Ellis’s edition not only made a significant contribution to research into the Ibis, it is an important representative of a particular vein of scholarship prevalent in nineteenth-century Latin study.

The pseudo-Virgilian Aetna poem has fascinated textual critics for centuries on account of its badly corrupted state. But it is fascinating for its content as well. It appears to date from the first half of the first century AD sometime prior to 79, for it describes Vesuvius as extinct. The highly original account of a volcano with scientific, if eccentric, views of volcanic activity, is enlivened by vivid imagery and digressions such as a section in praise of physical science and the tale of two brothers who rescued their parents from an eruption. A vigorous and enthusiastic poem, it repays further study within the didactic tradition. Robinson Ellis, according to The Times the 'greatest English Latinist' of his age, worked on the poem for decades, and his 1901 edition, which includes a translation and full commentary, constitutes a significant contribution to the study of the poem. His work remains of interest today, both to scholars working on the poem and to historians of classical scholarship.In her new introduction to this reissue of the complete Latin text and translation of the poem with Ellis's commentary, Katharina Volk discusses Ellis’s achievement in the context of his career and as part of the history of critical engagement with the Aetna. She also provides an overview of work on the poem since Ellis's edition, and a bibliography.