Shaggy Crowns is the first book-length study in almost a hundred years of the relationship between Rome's two great epic poems. Quintus Ennius was once the monumental epic poet of Republican Rome, 'the father of Roman poetry'. However, around one hundred and fifty years after his epic Annales first appeared, it was replaced decisively by Virgil's Aeneid, and now survives only in fragments. Looking at the intersections between intertextuality and the appropriations of cultural memory, Goldschmidt considers the relationship between Rome's two great canonical epics. She focuses on how - in the use of archaism, the presentation of landscape, embedded memories of the Punic Wars, and fragments of exempla - Virgil's poem appropriates and re-writes the myths and memories which Ennius had enshrined in Roman epic. Goldschmidt argues that Virgil was not just a slicker 'new poet', but constructed himself as an older 'archaic poet' of the deepest memories of the Roman past, ultimately competing for the 'shaggy crown' of Ennius.

People learn by imitating other people. Authors do the same. This book explains how authors from the earliest stages of Western literature to the present day have imitated each other

Histories of Rome emphasize the ways the empire assimilated conquered societies, bringing civilization to “barbarians.” Yet these interpretations leave us with an incomplete understanding of the diverse cultures that flourished in the provinces. Andrew C. Johnston recaptures the identities, memories, and discourses of these variegated societies.

A New York Times NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR An NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A Publishers Weekly BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A globetrotting, time-bending, wildly entertaining masterpiece hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "Audaciously well written … the book I was raving about to my friends before I'd even finished it." Set in three different eras, and in three different locations—all, coincidentally, named Venice—this “startling, beautiful gem of a book” (NPR) calls to mind David Mitchell and Umberto Eco in its mix of entertainment and literary bravado. The core story is set in sixteenth-century Venice, where, on the island of Murano, the famed makers of Venetian glass were perfecting one of the old world's most wondrous inventions: the mirror. An object of glittering yet fearful fascination—was it reflecting simple reality, or something more spiritually revealing?—the Venetian mirrors were state-of-the-art technology, subject to industrial espionage by desirous sultans and royals world-wide. Thus, for the skilled craftsmen that made them, any attempt to leave the island—to steal the technology—was a crime punishable by death. One man, however—a world-weary war hero with nothing to lose—has a scheme he thinks will allow him to outwit the city's terrifying enforcers of the edict, the ominous Council of Ten . . . Meanwhile, in two other Venices—Venice Beach, California, circa 1958, and the Venice casino in Las Vegas, circa today—two other schemers launch similarly dangerous plans to get away with a secret . . . All three stories weave together into a spell-binding tour de force that is impossible to put down—an old-fashioned, stay-up-all-night novel that, in the end, returns the reader to a stunning conclusion in the original Venice . . . and the bedazzled sense of having read a truly original and thrilling work of art.

Randy and Jebs knew Drowning Creek, for they had already explored its winding black waters and found the old ruins of Chimney Pot House. But their return visit was marred by an invasion of the wild-dog pack that had been terrorizing the Carolina countryside. Where had the wild dogs come from? What gave their shaggy spotted leader his almost human intelligence? Even the boys' friend Sam, the ex-circus giant, nad never seen anything like it.

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. Jason Nethercut posits that Lucretius selected Ennius as a model precisely to dismantle the values for which he claimed Ennius stood, including the importance of history as a poetic subject and Rome's historical achievement in particular. As the first book to offer substantial analysis of the relationship between two of the ancient world's most impactful poets, Ennius Noster: Lucretius and the Annales fills an important gap not only in Lucretian scholarship, but also in our understanding of Latin literary history.