Jackie Elliott explores early Latin poetry in a new book!
This new publication by Jackie Elliott discusses the earliest Roman poetry we can trace, which dates to the late third and second centuries B.C.E. With the exception of Roman comedy, all poetry written at Rome during this period is today fragmentary and available to us only via quotations or references in later ancient authors. Early Latin Poetry describes the surviving record of third and second-century Roman epic, 'serious' drama, and satire, and addresses the methodological problems of engaging with these remains.
Jackie Elliott (Ph.D. Columbia 2005) studies the history of Roman literature from its inception, specializing in the epic and historiographical traditions of republican Rome. Her first monograph, Ennius and the Architecture of the Annales (Cambridge, 2013) retraces what we think we know of Rome’s first and massively influential but now fragmentary hexametric epic to its ancient sources. This study was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement (4 June, 2014) and won several awards, including the Society for Classical Studies’ Goodwin Award. She is also the author of Early Latin Poetry (Leiden, 2022), an introduction to the fragmentary record of Roman poetry from its origins through roughly the first hundred and twenty years of its existence. She has received fellowships from the Humboldt Foundation, the American Academy at Rome, the Loeb Foundation, and has contributed articles to the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, the Classical Quarterly, Histos, and the American Journal of Philology. Currently, she is working on a project on Cato’s Origines informed by exploration of the work’s early reception and transmission history; a commentary on the Annales with a literary bias and a focus on the text's ancient reception in later works of literature; and a project on the transmission and early reception of Lucilius.