Ennius at the Banquet

Sander M. Goldberg, UCLA

Though Ennius’ Annales stood tall in the Roman cultural landscape, what it was and what it became were not necessarily one and the same thing. This paper will explore the poem’s reception in the first century of its existence and how the values of the Republic were either built into its design or later inscribed upon its extensive surface.

There is old material to review and new arguments to consider. The first step is to disentangle Ennius’ poem from the traditions of the so-called carmina convivalia. Those early songs, whatever they were, were not epic. What Cato (ap. Cic. Brut. 75) describes being sung at archaic banquets is not narrative in the epic vein but encomium in the manner of Greek skolia (Goldberg 1995), though the fact of aristocratic banquets in historic times could explain how epic poetry eventually attracted attention (Rüpke 2001). If so, the interest aroused by the epics of Naevius and Ennius was distinct from earlier poetic habits. Our evidence supports this idea. Cato’s complaint about Fulvius Nobilior taking Ennius with him to Aetolia, for example, which Cicero associated with banqueting practices (Tusc. 1.2.3), did not have anything specifically to do with either the archaic carmina or the Annales. What Cicero implies in the first century is not what Cato meant in the second: a central difficulty in understanding early Roman literary history lies in compensating for the late Republican bias of our main sources. Cato’s speech attacking Fulvius, delivered no later than 178 (Malcovati 1955), preceded the writing of Annales 15 (set ca. 172 by Skutsch). His scorn was therefore not for the poem but for the praetexta performed at the controversial games connected with Fulvius’ triumph in 187 (Manuwald 2001). Nor was Cato’s notorious claim that ‘poeticae artis honos non erat’ a reference to epic (ap. Gell. 11.2.5). The rest of that passage, complaining about extravagant dress and the price of cooks, locates Cato’s remark in the sumptuary debates of mid-century and his repeated denunciation of extravagant banqueting customs (e.g. fr. 96 and 175M, cf. Polyb. 31.25.5). Not poetry per se but luxury and the praise that luxury could buy were Cato’s target.

What, then, was different about the Annales? The second step in the inquiry is to examine its last three books as evidence for the poem’s initial reception. The original ending in book 15, which climaxed with Fulvius’ victory in Aetolia and his dedication of the redeveloped Aedes Herculis Musarum, certainly sounds like panegyric of a potentially partisan kind, but the extension of the poem with three more books demands attention. What encouraged Ennius to continue his poem by bringing a different kind of Roman to prominence (the otherwise unknown Caecilii) and immortalizing an event of high politics (the reconciliation of Aemilius and Fulvius) from an unexpected perspective? While the image of Ennius as poeta cliens has already been challenged (Gruen 1990, Goldberg 1995), the focus has usually been on the poet. What does the evolving content of the poem say about the values and concerns of its readers? How did the Annales manage to transcend the taint of partisan politics?

Finally, the paper will consider two recent lines of argument that are difficult to reconcile with current views of Roman aristocratic culture and the reception of epic. One involves the Greek symposium, which Zorzetti (1990, 1991) has used to identify early Roman practice with the aristocratic values of the archaic polis. Recent studies deny the exclusively aristocratic character of the Greek symposium (Fisher 2000, Wilkins 2000), and if that line of argument is right, we cannot automatically infer the existence of an elite Roman sympotic culture from the mere fact of symposia in Italy or align the values of Roman symposiasts with those of Greek aristocrats. A second challenge comes from the deeply problematic implications of Suetonius’ history of early Roman literary study as elucidated by Kaster (1995). Recent work (e.g. Habinek 1998) assumes continuity across the middle years of the Republic as the Roman elite appropriated the means of literary production, but Suetonius tells a story of disruption. He counts the Annales among those ‘carmina parum adhuc divulgata’ which were only rescued from oblivion in the later second century when a man named Q. Vargunteius started giving public readings of the poem (Gram. 2.2). Is it possible that the Roman elite actually lost interest in the Annales and had to be recalled to its possibilities by a grammarian? Does Roman literature, not to mention the eventual politics of Roman literature, owe as much to Hellenistic grammatike as to archaic musike? Squaring that possibility with our abiding sense of the Annales’ importance in shaping the Roman self-image will take some doing, but it will prove worthwhile to reconsider in its full complexity the cultural dynamic that produced the literary legacy of the middle Republic.