In another book review in Classical Review some years ago I suggested that even Hadrian, who reportedly preferred Ennius to Virgil (SHA, Hadr. (1) 16.5–6), would be surprised that the Annales of Quintus Ennius had garnered so much scholarly attention (CR 65 [2015], 426–7). Now I must confess I am surprised that Ennius has continued to be the subject of such intense scholarly work. Another collection of essays on Ennius’ Annals has recently appeared (C. Damon and J. Farrell [edd.], Ennius’ Annals: Poetry and History [2020]), and N.'s Ennius Noster: Lucretius and the Annales is the subject of this review. The book is a welcome addition to the burgeoning scholarship on the Annales, particularly to the other book-length studies of the reception of the Annales (J. Elliott, Ennius and the Architecture of the Annales [2013] and N. Goldschmidt, Shaggy Crowns: Ennius’ Annales and Vergil’s Aeneid [2013]).
N. contends that Lucretius chose Ennius as a model for the De rerum natura not out of default, but rather to criticise and correct the value system that he assigns to the Annales, regardless of what Ennius wrote. Lucretius, according to N., attacks three values that he tendentiously reads in the Annales: the importance of history, the cosmological significance of Rome and poetic authority constructed by appeals to literary history. Lucretius implies the importance of these values in Ennius by means of alluding to passages that may or may not be repurposed to deconstruct the validity of the world view presented in the Annales. I find N.'s overall thesis to be convincing and likely to stimulate new research on Lucretius and earlier Latin hexameter poets. The book consists of four chapters and a shorter introduction. I will withhold my discussion of the introduction until the end of my review for reasons that will become clear.
The first chapter deals with the assumption, often repeated in handbooks, that Republican Latin epic was so heavily influenced by Ennius that the hexameter poems that came after the Annales were unreflective imitations. Here N. capably demonstrates that the poetic successors of Ennius could, and did, allude to the older poet tendentiously, thereby distorting the context of the source text to serve their own purposes. Moreover, he raises the possibility that hexameter poetry after the Annales owed little to Ennius. I use ‘possibility’ because the evidence is especially meagre for Latin hexameters between Ennius and Lucretius, thereby rendering the latter claim in this chapter a convergent thesis more than a proof.
The second chapter treats Lucretius’ use of passages from the Annales that suggest the older poem was deeply concerned with cosmology and philosophy. N.'s point that Lucretius attached cosmic significance to fragments that were likely transitions without any such significance is especially good. The real pay-off of this chapter is the observation that Lucretius changes the role of the natural imagery in similes in the Annales from vehicle to tenor, a reversal that implies that Rome is not so much a cosmological force as an example of yet another part of the natural world that will meet its dissolution in an Epicurean universe.
The third chapter presents a Lucretius who deconstructs the value of historical epic and history in general in terms of an Epicurean world view that does not see reality as historically or geographically bounded. N. argues (convincingly) that Lucretius alludes to historical exempla to suggest the futility of the accomplishments of famous men such as Scipio Africanus. He also offers a detailed discussion of the complicated exemplum of Pyrrhus in the Annales, whom, he argues, Lucretius presents as a man who is much more influenced by religion than his Ennian counterpart, as a means of implicitly criticising the belief that the gods are concerned with the affairs of men. What is more, he claims that Lucretius alludes to Ennius in his anthropological narrative, which eschews history, as a means of implicitly criticising the teleological nature of the narrative form of the Annales that presents Rome as designated by the gods to be the centre and ruler of the world.
N. saves his best chapter for last, where he tackles the apparent contradiction of Lucretius’ use of mythical and poetic material, some of it demonstrably from Ennius, in a poem that dismisses the possibility of historical causation or the role of the gods in the affairs of men. In a major intervention on the problem of this apparent contradiction in the De rerum natura, he argues that Lucretius uses poetic imagery to construct ‘provisional argumentation’, that he will deconstruct later in the poem using the same mytho-historical material, a satisfying solution to this paradox. On N.'s reading, the presentation of Ennius and Homer as poetic forebears of Lucretius is an example of provisional argument that will be dismantled in Book 3, when Lucretius refutes the idea of metempsychosis, a key metaphor for constructing literary history that Ennius almost certainly employed. Moreover, he suggests that we can understand the allusions to Ennius as an illustration of the recombination of letters that Lucretius analogises to atoms in Book 2 rather than illustrations of historical teleology.
As good as N.'s arguments are, the introduction to the book made a great deal of work for me as a reader, and I have saved it until the end of my review because in many ways it is influenced by general trends in Classics, including an enigmatic subtitle for the book, the misuse of terminology from fields outside of Classics, and 67 pages of appendices that would have been more helpful if the data was presented in the introduction in a digestible form. By referring to the appendices at the back to make his points about specific features of Ennian verse, for example, the argument not only becomes elliptical, but also relies on a small sample of what must have been in the Annales, rather than providing a few examples that could have achieved the same effect while introducing the reader to these features and their use in Ennius.
Perhaps the statement that N.'s book is not about Ennius in the introduction prompted him to deal with Ennius in the appendices, but I hope I may be forgiven for asking why a book that is not about Ennius, as N. states twice in the introduction, bears the name Ennius and the reference to the Annales in the title. Here more exposition would have helped. The polysemy of noster Ennius is wonderfully suggestive, as it could mean ‘Lucretius’ Ennius’, the fragmentary Ennius that we have in order to appreciate what Lucretius does with him, or even the Ennius of the late Republic, who would be an entirely different poet than he was in his lifetime, but readers are left to work that out on their own.
The use of terminology from other fields is inconsistent. N. nuances the terms intertextuality and allusion well, but the term ‘collocation’ is misapplied. N. states that per tener- (DRN 2.146) is a collocation, but corpus linguistics defines a collocation as a frequent combination of lexical roots, whose meaning is more than the sum of its constituents. The rarity of the phrase, therefore, does not signify a collocation as N. implies. A more involved discussion might have noted that the similarity of aurora (DRN 2.144) and aer (DRN 2.146), a word that Ennius glosses (Ann. 139–40 Skutsch), in Lucretius to auras in Ennius (Ann. 18 Skutsch) likely suggests an allusion to the Annales.
Despite my criticisms, N. cannot be blamed for being part of a field that is characterised by such tendencies in my opinion. I will not venture to suggest if such tendencies are good or bad for the field. I will, however, state that the field is much better off because of this monograph.
