Chapter 10 - Livy’s Ennius

Summary

This paper explores the various roles Ennius plays as source and programmatic model in Livy’s Ab urbe condita, as a way of situating epic more fully within the range of models available to Roman historians. I address this complex issue here through the lens of citation practices. In the first section I discuss the uncharacteristically explicit quotation of Ennius in the eulogy of Fabius Cunctator and the consequent questions about the invisible intertextual networks that the quotation activates. In the second section I consider impersonal citations of the form fama est (vel sim.), focusing on the story of the Capitoline wolf, where Livy naturalizes Ennius within the dossier of sources with which he is working rather than pulling him out from the crowd. I conclude that Epic had a memorable and distinctive voice, and provided a language for speaking of Rome around and against which other genres could, and by necessity did, array themselves.