Considering Ennius’ Hedyphagetica in its contexts of sympotic celebration, this chapter contends that some later Roman authors – namely, Lucilius, Horace, Catullus, Lucretius, and Persius – think of Ennius as a seafood specialist. They have, it suggests, an eye on his Hedyphagetica’s relationship with his Annales as one whereby both poems come packaged together in the reception of the older mainland Italian poet.

If we go by editions of the Annales, Ennius included a series of striking self-references in his epic. These lines’ nature, number (or rate of survival), and their proximity to self-referential comments made by prose historians make them extraordinary in the context of epic. Thus, they shape our sense of the ambitions the Annales housed and the sorts of generic experimentation its author was prepared to engage in. Ennius’ reference to his advanced age, unparalleled in the epic tradition as we know it, is securely attested for one of the later books of the epic. But often, Ennian self-referential lines are not attributed to a specific work by their sources. Like other lines now conventionally assigned to the Annales, these lines could plausibly have originated in a different Ennian work. In particular, the Saturae present themselves as the most likely candidate. This chapter explores the range of possibilities allowable for Ennian self-references beyond the Annales and sketches the difference that reading this subset of lines in non-epic Ennian contexts would make.

The importance of music is conspicuously evident in Cicero’s responses to Ennian tragedy: he refers to connoisseurs who could identify characters from single notes played in the tibia and to accompanied performance. The metres used in the fragments of Ennius’ tragedies reveal that Ennius made the Greek tragedies he adapted considerably more musical, and that music contributed significantly to the plots and emotional tone of the plays and to Ennius’ portrayal of character. In his Medea, for example, Ennius appears to have added music to Medea’s initial address to the chorus (90 TrRF II), to the agon between Jason and Medea (92 TrRF II), and to Medea’s final farewell to her children (97 TrRF II).

Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians contains instruction for women to veil their heads when praying or prophesying in the assembly (ekklēsia). In this chapter, I argue that, like other women in the first-century Mediterranean world, Corinthian women most likely veiled and unveiled for a variety of reasons having to do with beauty, comfort, status, virtue, and piety, not solely for theological, exegetical, or liberative purposes.

The third-century Christian writer Origen of Alexandria used the image of the veil to describe the relation between the “letter” of the biblical text and its hidden, spiritual meaning. Origen constructed an allegorical theory of biblical interpretation that relied on the imagery of the veil to illustrate the hiddenness of truth. His biblical interpretations consistently privileged the unveiled Christian “spirit” of the text over what he called the Jewish “letter” – the veiled “flesh” of the text.

The treatment of Rome and its history in Ennius’ Annales has received significant scholarly attention in recent years. This work has shown well that the epic sets the city at the centre of a widening Roman world, thereby making it a cosmic hub of space and time. Such epic transformations also transform perspectives on the past and the present. What of Rome in the rest of Ennius’ wide-ranging literary output? How does the tri- or quadrilingual former Rudian approach his new unelected home and its socio-cultural practices in genres beyond epic? Taking into consideration the representation of (urban) space, monuments, social practices (especially ritual acts, praise, and elite self-presentation), and intersectional conceptions of Roman identity, this chapter examines the ways in which Ennius’ writings construct and reflect Rome qua city and set of cultural values and perspectives. The Scipio, Ambracia, and Sabinae anchor the chapter, but the contribution also uncovers key themes in less expected places, with some comment on the epigrams, Hedyphagetica, and philosophical works.

Jacques Derrida’s contribution to the book Veils, jointly authored with his friend Hélène Cixous, is, in part, a meditation on his tallit – the Jewish prayer shawl – that was given to him as a boy. Derrida turns to the tallit as a contrast to the veil. The tallit opens an avenue for him to critique the traditional and widespread trope of truth as that which is veiled and that which calls out for unveiling. This epilogue focuses on Derrida‘s affectionate description of his tallit–the yellowing, familiar, soft, singular tallit that resists knowing.

Against received opinion, this chapter argues that Ennius does not primarily figure as a stalwart of ancient Roman values within Varro’s Menippean Satires: the Ennius of these understudied late-republican texts is rather a boldly experimental and multiform poet, a model for Varro’s own modernist project. Particular attention is paid to Varro’s Bimarcus, in which a “new” fragment of Ennius’ Saturae is tentatively discovered.

This chapter examines the representation of textiles, curtains, drapery, and other architectural veils in early Christian art from the earliest Christian frescoes to the catacombs and sarcophagi of the fourth and fifth centuries, to the mosaic programs of sixth-century Ravenna and Rome. I argue that one of the ways that veiling increasingly signified in late antiquity and early Byzantium was to intimate mystery, sacrality, and hiddenness while hinting at the promise of revelation and discovery.