Chapter 14 - Commenting on the Annals: Steuart, Skutsch, and Ennius

Summary

This paper considers the various approaches one might take to commenting on a text as fragmentary as the Annals. I begin with some general remarks about fragments and look at their specific implications for Ennius. I then focus on some details from the two English language commentaries on the Annals to date, those of Otto Skutsch and his precursor, Ethel Mary Steuart. Comparing sample notes and larger structures in the two commentaries, showing how both commentators were seduced – to varying degrees – by a desire for completeness and copia, and how the poems that emerge from these commentaries differ. Though Steuart was rigorously trained in the same basic stable as Skutsch, her work is too far inferior – in accuracy and in sophistication of methodology – to his and to other available editions of the Annals to stand up against them. But it is also the work of a learned scholar with a different voice and a heterodox vision of the poem, a useful presence in a world where Skutsch’s Ennius may no longer be our Ennius.