If the emperor Hadrian truly preferred Ennius to Virgil (SHA Hadrianus 16.6), his dismay at the loss of the text of the Annales would surely be somewhat mollified by the two collections of essays on Ennius in the last decade (Arethusa 39.3 [2006] and W. Fitzgerald and E. Gowers [edd.], Ennius Perennis: the Annals and Beyond [2007]) and the four books on the Annales in the last two years (V. Fabrizzi, Mores veteres novosque: rappresentazioni del passato e del presente di Roma negli Annales di Ennio [2012], J. Elliott, Ennius and the Architecture of the Annales [2013], J. Fisher, The Annals of Quintus Ennius and the Italic Tradition [2014], and the subject of this review). Of the four books, G.'s treatment of the Annales is the most accessible to those who do not specialise in Ennius because it is in dialogue with E. Norden's Ennius und Vergilius: Kriegsbilder aus Roms grosser Zeit (1915), perhaps still the most widely-known treatment of the relationship between Ennius and Virgil. Although G. owes much to Norden as she herself states, her monograph breaks much new ground and thereby produces a book that is useful and stimulating to both experts on Ennius and Virgil and readers unfamiliar with the relationship between the two.
In the introduction, G. briefly introduces Ennius, the recent scholarship on the Annales and the key concepts that she marshals in order to support her thesis that Virgil is competing with Ennius not only for the central place in the Roman epic canon but also for Ennius' ‘shaggy crown – his ability to speak of the Roman past’, an original thesis that I find convincing.
In Chapter 1, G. presents a synthesis of the various mainstream treatments of the reception of the Annales interspersed with some criticism of these previous studies and an occasional original contribution. Although little of the chapter will be new to experts on Ennius, such an account will be welcome to the reader who is not well versed in the bibliography.
In Chapter 2, G. challenges S. Hinds's thesis that Roman poets are wont to present their poetry as ‘new’, but the work of their predecessors as ‘archaic’. As G. rightfully observes, Augustan works of art in other media did not dispense with what had come before, but rather appropriated their archaic features for new uses in order to generate novelty. G. proceeds to demonstrate that Ennius himself blends the new and the old in the fragments of the Annales. Furthermore, she argues that Virgil's use of the title vates and other forms of archaic language is tantamount to a claim of traditional authority.
In Chapter 3 G. makes her most interesting and compelling points about the role of the Annales in the Aeneid. As many have before her, she points out that Rome is filled with sites or places of memory, and that these memories carry over into the work of Roman authors who employ these settings, including Ennius. G.'s real contribution to the use of Ennian memory in the Aeneid, however, comes when she metaphorically excavates Books 7 and 8 of the Aeneid for fragments of diction from the Annales, most of which are attributed to Book 1 by ancient sources, a book where Ennius presented his own prehistory of the Romans and the arrival of Aeneas in Italy. G. argues that Virgil poetically pre-empts the Annales by appropriating motifs such as the prophetic dream from the Annales, a motif that appears in one of the few substantial fragments that survives from Ennius' poem. G. suggests that Virgil is ‘pre-writing’ the Annales by appropriating the motif of Ilia's prophetic dream for a dream of Aeneas in a mythical time long before the birth of Romulus and Remus. Moreover, G. illustrates the ‘planting’ of the Aeneid ‘first’ in the landscape of Rome by means of Aeneas' tour of future sites of memory in Rome in the settlement of Evander long before the foundation of the city by Romulus described by Ennius in the Annales.
In the first part of Chapter 4, G. argues that the setting of Sicily in Book 5 of the Aeneid evokes the treatment of the First and Second Punic Wars in the poetry of Ennius and Naevius, the author of the Bellum Poenicum and Ennius' immediate epic predecessor. In the second part, she suggests that the war in Italy in the later books of the Aeneid alludes to the narrative of the Second Punic War in the Annales. Although I am less convinced by the individual arguments in this chapter than those of the previous chapter, I agree with G. in principle that Virgil's appropriation of earlier epic narratives of the Punic Wars allows him to ‘pre-write’ these earlier poems.
After a discussion of Roman exempla in general and their uses in the Annales in Chapter 5, G. argues that Virgil borrows a number of famous Roman exempla directly from the Annales, including Fabius Cunctator, Decius Mus and Horatius Cocles, and ‘clears space for itself as the new repository of exempla’. Not all of the suggested Ennian exempla are equally compelling, but the general argument of the chapter holds up.
In addition to her stimulating discussion, G. adds an appendix of possible allusions to the Annales in the Aeneid. Even if not all of her parallels are as certain or even as likely as others, the appendix alone makes the book a worthwhile endeavour and will no doubt encourage more discussion of the use of Ennius in Virgil in the future.
As sound and convincing as G.'s argument is, I do have two general quibbles. The theoretical excurses distracted me from the overall argument, perhaps because I am familiar with most of G.'s conceptual tools. Furthermore, G.'s argument at times moved into territory that was unnecessarily speculative in my opinion.
To be fair, G. acknowledges that her argument will sometimes be speculative, but some of that speculation might have been avoided by adjusting the thesis to include Naevius. The discussion of the role of the First Punic War in the Aeneid as it stands in Chapter 3 makes many connections to Naevius that are far less tenuous than those to the Annales. Moreover, some of the exempla that G. identifies as taken directly by Virgil from Ennius may simply be part of a standard repertory of exempla in the collective memory of the Roman Republic rather than poetic allusions. I am especially uncomfortable with accepting the line Moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque (Ann. 156) as a reference to Manlius Torquatus on the basis of a book number alone. Nor am I convinced that Livy's treatment of Horatius Cocles alludes to the Annales in spite of O. Skutsch's arguments (The Annals of Quintus Ennius [1985], pp. 184–5).
I also wish that G. had turned a more critical eye towards the accepted narrative of the ancient reception of the Annales in Chapter 2. In spite of the assumptions held by many that Virgil's audience had read the Annales in its entirety, there is no direct evidence that anyone besides Virgil did so nor is the indirect evidence necessarily indicative of a substantial readership beyond a few exceptional readers such as Cicero and Varro. Additionally, there are alternative scenarios that could be imagined whereby a reader might have become familiar with the exempla and episodes that Virgil appropriated from the Annales.
These perceived shortcomings are nothing compared with the book's strengths. The thesis of the book is well argued and I wish very much that I had had the opportunity to read it before I finished my own book on Ennius.
