Cato’s de Agricultura was an important source for Pliny’s Naturalis Historia. Cato himself appears sixteen times in Pliny’s lists of sources, and in the text proper (Pliny tells us explicitly more than eighty times that he is reproducing Catonian material; most of it comes from the de Agricultura. A dozen or so passages are or purport to be direct quotations, but most are paraphrases; Catonian content in Plinian words. The present paper is a study of the linguistic features of Cato’s text that Pliny rewrites. Especially interesting features include cases in which concrete expressions are replaced by abstract nouns, simple verbs become compound (or the compounding prefix changes), a term is replaced by a synonym or synonymous expression, or the syntax is made more compact. Pliny’s adaptations of Cato’s language is read in light of his several general remarks about Cato’s style: he comments, for example, on Cato’s verbosity, diction and habitual censoriousness. The discussion shows how one ancient reader reacted to Cato’s early Latin.

The desire to situate Catullus and his poems at the tumultuous midpoint of first-century bc Rome is both hard to resist and hard to satisfy. The basic problem can be glimpsed through a confrontation of two scholarly positions represented in a collection of influential papers on Catullus.

In the present paper I explore the Annals looking for demonstrations of historiographical authority. More specifically, I look for traces of a historiographical response to the crisis of authority created by the existence of conflicting stories about the past. I begin by reviewing the the poem’s expressions of dubiety, to see whether any of them reflects narrative uncertainty. I then turn to the intractable historiographical uncertainties involved in recounting the reign of Numa, an episode of Rome’s long history made newly topical by an event contemporary with the composition of the Annals: the discovery, investigation, and destruction of books purporting to have been written by Numa. I ask whether the poet made use of historiographical dubiety to bolster his authority in the face of the unknowable, and if not, how else he might have validated his material, concluding that if Ennius’ Annals counted as Roman history for Cicero or Lucretius or even Livy, it was because his version of the maxima facta patrum was useful to them, not because it was taken to be a reliable guide to what could be known about the past.

The fourteen papers in this volume take advantage of advances in the study of Ennius’ Annales that have occurred in the generation since Otto Skutsch published his monumental edition and commentary on the poem, while also taking advantage of Jackie Elliott's recent provocation to question the most basic assumptions that underlie Skutsch’s work. The result is a collection of essays as diverse in their individual interests and objectives as we believe Ennius and his Annals also were. The essays are organized under four rubrics, namely (1)Innovation, (2) Authority, (3) Influence, and (4) Interpretation. An afterword reflects on the findings of the volume as a whole, with equal emphasis on new questions that the individual papers raise and on solutions that they propose, while raising additional points that should provoke further research.