Ennius Noster Lucretius and the Annales

Jason S. Nethercut, "Ennius Noster: Lucretius and the Annales"
English | ISBN: 0197517692 | 2020 | 272 pages | PDF | 1363 KB
Consensus holds that Lucretius admired the literary prestige of Homeric epos, the form that Ennius famously introduced to Latin literature. However, some hold that Lucretius disagreed with Ennius' quasi-Pythagorean claim to be Homer reborn, and so uniquely qualified to adapt Homeric poetry to the Latin language. Likewise, received wisdom holds that Lucretius followed in the path of poets writing in the wake of Ennius' Annales, most of whom employed an Ennian style. However, throughout the De Rerum Natura, Lucretius' use of Ennius' Annales as a formal model for a long discursive poem in epic meter was neither inevitable nor predictable, on the one hand, nor meaningful in the simple way that critical consensus has always maintained.