This analysis explores select aspects of the extant fragmentary record of early Roman poetry from its earliest accessible moments through roughly the first hundred and twenty years of its traceable existence. Key questions include how ancient readers made sense of the record as then available to them and how the limitations of their accounts, assumptions, and working methods continue to define the contours of our understanding today. Both using and challenging the standard conceptual frameworks operative in the ancient world, the discussion details what we think we know of the best documented forms, practitioners, contexts, and reception of Roman drama (excluding comedy), epic, and satire in their early instantiations, with occasional glances at the further generic experimentation that accompanied the genesis of literary practice at Rome.
Jackie Elliott, Ph.D. (2005), Columbia University, is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is the author of Ennius and the Architecture of the Annales (Cambridge 2013).
"da questo punto di vista, il libro si raccomanda come introduzione rivolta non solo “to […] newer to or more distant from the material in question”, ma anche agli addetti ai lavori, che dalle pagine di Elliott potranno utilmente avere un aggiornato e ragionato stato dell’arte sulle innumerevoli questioni lì trattate. [...] E, in una mole così grande di dati, risulterà tanto più notevole la cura meticolosa con cui il testo è stato dato alle stampe: un ulteriore elemento che contribuisce a rendere il libro di Elliott un’utilissima e affidabile guida, e non solo per i principianti, nel difficile campo della poesia latina arcaica in frammenti." Alessandro Russo, BMCR 2023.06.13
Early Latin Poetry Jackie Elliott
Abstract Keywords
1 Introduction: Origins
2 Approaching Fragmentary Material: Method and Access in the Modern Era
3 Questions of Audience, Circulation, and Performance
4 Genre
5 Poets
6 Reception
7 Reflection
Acknowledgments
References
Those interested in the origins of Latin literature (or of literatures more broadly); those seeking an introduction to the challenges of this particular fragmentary field.