Dispensing once and for all with the idea that Ennius’ Sacra historia was an exercise in Scipionic propaganda, this chapter argues that that prose text was integral to Ennius’ vision of Roman history and authorial self-fashioning. Despite the opacity of their transmission by Lactantius, the fragments of the Sacra historia reveal their author as an interpretative innovator exploiting linguistic effects only possible in translation. The way that this text mediates between Greek and Roman antiquities through multilingual interpretes, moreover, reveals a characteristic but underappreciated aspect of Ennius’ creative persona.

This pithy Introduction justifies the existence of the volume and explains why its contributors do not apply the term “minor works” to Ennius’ corpus. It then provides an overview of the diversity of this corpus, zooming in on the remains of his comedy as an example of what is not quite lost, and briefly shows that Ennius deeply influenced the Roman literary tradition as a multiform author (not just as an epicist). The Introduction closes by explaining the dispensation of the volume and what its contributors achieve.

It is well known that Ennius stands out among the early Roman writers by being active in a variety of literary (mainly poetic) genres. It is also obvious that there are clear distinctions in form and themes between the different types of works in line with their generic identity; at the same time, some stylistic features, motifs, and concepts may be observed in works assigned to different literary genres. This chapter explores such items in Ennius’ corpus and discusses the respective role of generic distinctions. Such a study contributes to identifying typical aspects of Ennius’ output as a whole as well as to describing specific generic manifestations.

This chapter takes a new look at Ennius’ Andromacha and particularly at her self-description as arce et urbe orba sum (23 TrRF II). Scholarship has well explicated how the formulaic words arce et urbe characterize Andromacha, to quote Jocelyn, as “a stateless person in terms of Roman law” (Jocelyn 1967). But scholarly focus on the religious formula has obscured the equally poignant allusion encoded in her choice of verb. Orbus is a word whose primary definition is of a child deprived of their parents or, conversely, of a parent who has lost a child. This chapter explores how Ennius boldly harnesses these familial connotations to create an arresting metaphor that totalizes Andromache’s loss. In doing so, he subtly genders Andromacha’s meditation on the loss of her recent past as well as significantly prefiguring the greater loss that the audience (but not yet Andromacha) knows is coming by the tragedy’s end, the tossing of Astyanax from the arx of Troy.

This chapter offers an analysis of the reception of Ennian tragedy in republican Latin poetry, focussing on Pacuvius, Accius, Lucretius, and Catullus. The main methodology employed is that of intertextual analysis. The main thesis advanced is that, while Ennian tragedy seems to have retained its generic distinction and importance in subsequent tragic poetry of the second century bce, by the late Republic, Ennius seems to be more important because of what he has come to represent as a poetic figure and as a repository of poetic material than as a tragedian or epicist.

This chapter argues that Ennius began his epic poem, the Annales, by boasting about his non-epic literary accomplishments, in particular his Saturae. It proceeds to corroborate this view by demonstrating that Ennius’ non-epic and non-tragic corpus – his Saturae, Sacra historia, Scipio, Sota, Epicharmus, and Hedyphagetica – continued to be read and engaged with by important Latin figures (e.g., Terence, Virgil, Apuleius, Lactantius) for hundreds of years. Multiplicity was key, therefore, both to Ennius’ self-representation and to his long Roman reception.

Contemporary scholarship has taken such pains to remove the label poeta cliens from the reputation of Ennius and to dissociate his Annales from the praise of any one individual that the apparent fixation on Scipio Africanus, much praised in the epigrammatic fragments and subject of the deeply problematic work bearing his name, can come as a shock. What is going on? How do we reconcile the testimony of these works with what we think the Annales preserves of the poet’s loyalties and civic ideology? This chapter explores the nature of praise in early Roman literature in the hope of casting at least a little light on this problematic aspect of Ennius’ career.