Ennius Noster: Lucretius and the Annales by Jason Nethercut

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 335 with the concerns of the separate homicide courts, where both litigants and witnesses had to swear that their side’s case was true. Her speculative explanation is that the homicide laws, which were the oldest in Athens, were enacted primarily to replace retaliatory murders (the common response to homicide before written laws) and thus had to produce verdicts that were factually credible to the victim’s relatives. When the popular courts were established more than a century later, the same circumstances no longer prevailed. I would add one other factor to her account, namely that the popular courts were established by the new democratic government led by Cleisthenes, and democratic ideology required that the courts consider justice in their decisions. The eight contributions in this volume cover a wide range of topics. All are interesting and valuable in their own right, but only the Roman law papers really address issues concerning law and fact. University of Texas at Austin Michael Gagarin Ennius Noster: Lucretius and the ANNALES. By Jason Nethercut. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021. Pp. 260. These are happy times for the study of Latin literature’s first few hundred years: dusty, “archaic” poets are starting to appear fresh and exciting;1 republican genres that once were thought to have died young now seem to have lived into ripe, imperial old age;2 and the contours of Roman literature’s very “beginning” have received renewed and probing attention.3 It might not be an overstatement to say that the history of Latin poetry, ca 240 to 40 b.c.e., is in the process of being rewritten. Enter Jason Nethercut. The first book-length study of the relationship between Lucretius and the Annales in any modern language, Ennius Noster does more than fill a “gap”: this is a bold and important work of scholarship, with provocative things to say about Lucretius, Ennius, and Latin literary history writ large. Though not every reader will buy everything on offer, Ennius Noster is sure to become a major point of reference over the coming decades. Scholars of republican literature will need to have it on their shelves, and I, at least, will be keeping it within arm’s length of my laptop. The book’s central thesis is tidy and easy to summarize: Lucretius systematically alludes to the Annales in order to dismantle the worldview that he attributes to that poem; Ennian ideology thus stands as the unenlightened foil to Lucretius’ vera ratio— Epicureanism. Nethercut argues this credible thesis over a lucid and to-the-point introduction , four chapters, a conclusion, and five valuable appendices. The prose style is punchy and readable, and the text has been carefully copy-edited throughout. It is a real pleasure to encounter scholarship written with so much love and labour. Chapter One, “Ennius and the Tradition of Republican Epic,” sets the stage. Reconsidering the hexametrical poetry written between the Annales and De rerum natura, 1 For Ennius, see J. Elliott, Ennius and the Architecture of the Annales (Cambridge 2013); for Livius Andronicus and Naevius, see T. Biggs, Poetics of the First Punic War (Ann Arbor 2020). 2 On republican comedy’s afterlife, see M. Hanses, The Life of Comedy after the Death of Plautus and Terence (Ann Arbor 2020); C. Polt, Catullus and Roman Comedy: Theatricality and Personal Drama in the Late Republic (Cambridge 2021). 3 D. Feeney, Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature (Cambridge, MA 2016). 336 PHOENIX Nethercut here argues that Ennius’ influence on second-century b.c.e. epic was much less pronounced than is currently believed and that, consequently, Lucretius’ appropriation of Ennius in the mid-first century was unexpected. A version of this argument has already appeared in a recent volume on the Annales, which I reviewed in the last issue of Phoenix.4 So, I will be brief: this chapter does well to criticize the stale scholarly narrative that second-century Rome was full of Ennianisti, writing cookie-cutter imitations of the Annales. Yet the new story that it tells—that Ennius’ influence on epic before Lucretius was slight—seems to me little better, predicated, as it is, on significant omissions (e.g., Nethercut...