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Relatively few works of ancient literature survive intact. Many more are known only as fragments or through the testimony of other authors. How should literary history acknowledge the fact and the consequences of such extensive loss? This chapter reviews the difficulties in identifying and presenting the evidence for lost works, explores what (besides their hypothetical reconstruction) can be learned from their remains, and considers how accommodation of the lost and the fragmentary challenges historians of literature to rethink the objectives and the methods of their enterprise.
A calculated use of language for deliberate stylistic effects, intended to distinguish epic diction from contemporary speech, characterised formal Latin poetry from the very beginning. This review of early epic language aims to explore the main sources, mechanisms and effects of these first experiments in the creation of a Latin epic style. It is a fact that the epic poets’ record of achievement is obscured by its survival in merely fragmentary form, by the close congruence of epic and tragic styles, and by our own uncertainty about the relative popularity of those two genres and their contemporary influence. Consequently, this study deals less with specifics of epic language than with the process that generated it, as poets experimented with archaisms, calques and neologisms, built upon the practice of their Greek models, and responded to the example of their Latin compatriots. In striving to develop a style worthy of epic, they brought to the task the same confident, competitive spirit that typified all their endeavours, building consciously on the achievement of their predecessors, and in the process leaving something of great value to a wide range of successors.
If readers determine the fate of books, we might think the Annals of Quintus Ennius enjoyed but ephemeral success. Its fragments are few, its original audience and intent unclear. In this paper I ask how so vast a monument became such a ruin, and what the evidence of its survival reveals about the process of its destruction. Those who knew the poem best are among that handful of Romans – Cicero and Vergil prominent among them – whom we know best. What did “ordinary” Romans know, pretend to know, or could they be expected to know of it? Close attention to the poem’s reception suggests that it was best known through favored extracts and that the idea of the Annals was more firmly fixed in the Roman literary consciousness than the poem itself.
Terence's Hecyra raises social, literary and theatrical issues of great interest to modern students of Roman comedy and, indeed, of Roman culture more broadly. The play pays strikingly close attention to the domestic problems of women and experiments boldly with traditional comic forms, not only in its creation of anticipatory suspense, but through its variations on traditional situations and roles and its metatheatrical qualities. In addition, Terence's response in his prologues to the play's two putative failures is important, if tendentious, evidence for the mechanics of theatrical performance in the second century, especially the conjunction of theatrical and gladiatorial shows. This edition opens the play's many interpretive challenges to wider scrutiny while remaining attentive to the linguistic needs of students at all levels.
Edited by
Brian W. Breed, University of Massachusetts, Amherst,Elizabeth Keitel, University of Massachusetts, Amherst,Rex Wallace, University of Massachusetts, Amherst