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Jackie Elliott has won a College Scholar Award, which she will use to support the completion of the following two projects:
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Ashort, introductory volume onEarly Roman Poetry, for Brill’sResearch Perspectives in Classical Poetryseries. This volume will offeran overview of current scholarship and interpretive trends in the area of early Roman poetry,laying out key questions about the Roman literary record at its origin, and registering the oddity of the fact that a literature developed at Rome at all, when this is by no means a necessary feature of ancient societies. It will detail the pre-literary written record at Rome, as best we can access it, and seek to explain how this record underwrites the features of language that emerge in the fragments of Roman poetry as we encounter them, from the date our record begins (239BCE). It will engage issues of definition and periodicity; lay out the record itself of early Roman poetry, in its unavoidable relationship to prose, and explain the conceptual framework according to which the ancient world categorized and understood that record; it will explain the sources of our knowledge of that record and the ways that these complicate our access to it; and it will define the consequences of those complications for the task of the editor who sets out to present the record of early Roman poetry to the more general reader.
- A monograph:The History of Cato’sOrigines.Cato’sOrigines(“Origins”) was by any account a remarkablework.Writtenby one of the leading Roman statesmen of the mid-second centuryBCE,it was the first prose history of Rome in Latin and wassubsequently construed as the foundation of the tradition of Roman historicalwriting. Thework exists today only as a series of fragments quoted in theworks of later authors of antiquity. Not least for that reason, theOriginespresents us with aseries ofinterpretive puzzles, the answers to which define the parameters of ourreconstructions of the history of Roman historical writing and its placein theintellectual life of the Roman Republic and the Empire that followed. Underlyingthese puzzles, and relevant to our response to each of them, isthe question ofthe ancient transmission, circulation and reception of theOrigines: that is, who read the work, inwhatcontexts, how they interpreted it, and why and how they chose to quote it andthus to pass it on to other readers. This history of ancient readers andofancient reading is in fact traceable: though the surviving evidence only putsus in a position to tell a small part of the full story of a work’s ancientcirculation and reception, such a history is, in fact, the aspect of the workthat our challenging evidence best allows us to address. If carried out indetail,it can provide an invaluable guide through the intricate maze of ourancient evidence, able to illuminate perspectives yet to be explored while alsoshowing why established interpretive avenues or indeed broad assumptions abouta given work mislead. This project on Cato’sOriginesfirst undertakessuch a detailed history of the work’s ancient transmissionand reception; this then informs an exploration of larger questions aboutCato’s self-positioningas author and relationship to his contemporary andsubsequent audiences, with glances across to counterpoised genres, such asepic, that also sought toaddress the relationship of the Roman past to theRoman present as contemporary audiences experienced it.
One of the larger questions atissue in the conversations this project engages is that of the role literatureplayed in spreading the sense of acohesive Roman identity across anat-this-time increasingly far-flung Roman sphere of influence. It is sometimes argued or assumed thatpride of place in this function would have gone to works of Roman prosehistory. The findings of this project to dateregarding how and by whomworks ofhistory were read do not support that notion; the public genre of epic is, inthe view these findings afford, a far stronger candidate forcelebrating Romancollective achievement and for promoting an understanding, able to permeate thestrata of Roman society at large, of what it meant tobe Roman.
Jackie will first work on these two projects in Berlin as a Humboldt Foundation fellowship recipient (2020-21); she will complete them during her fall 2021 sabbatical and her spring 2022 tenure of the College Scholar Award.