Shored Against Our Ruins

Abstract

These are exciting times for the study of Roman literature. New editions of the fragmentary poets and prose writers either have appeared or are in preparation, while renewed interest in the nature and character of the early Roman audience, and in the development of Roman literature itself, has sought to explain the larger context in which these writings arose and were read. Monographs and commentaries on early writers and genres have appeared in profusion, with four volumes on Ennius' Annals alone published within two years, at least one of which has raised serious questions of what we can and cannot know of the structure, orientation and contents of a poem that was (uniquely) influential on both later poetry and history.