This introductory chapter treats the early history of Rome’s literature, who was interested in the topic and when, and also how they approached the subject. It notes that from the start Roman literature was deeply imitative of Greek, and that the other peoples of the Italian peninsula also played important roles in the creation of a native literature. Indeed, many of the original writers of Rome were non-Romans. Covers the epics of Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and Ennius.

This chapter analyzes Livy’s narrative of the events of 207 BCE, when Roman officials addressed a pressing religious and military crisis by commissioning an innovative musical event – a Greek-style maiden procession with a hymn composed by Rome’s first known poet, Livius Andronicus. Livy’s account asks us to confront the question of how Roman musical and ritual traditions were created and remembered, by inviting the reader to witness a tradition in the very process of being invented. On the one hand, great emphasis is placed on how the hymn’s ritual actors created a collective memory of its success and incorporated it into the religious traditions of Rome. On the other, Livy refuses to record the hymn himself on the basis of its primitive aesthetics, with the paradoxical result that a significant document in the history of Roman music is simultaneously remembered and forgotten. Self-consciously aware of ritual song and narrative history as differently constituted repositories of collective memory, I propose, Livy draws attention to the processes by which his account of Rome’s early song culture shapes his reader’s musical memory.

This chapter investigates the portrayal of carpentum and its prestigious relative, the pilentum, two special carriages sanctioned for use by Roman matrons but frequently portrayed as problematic or dangerous. Through an examination of several stories involving carpentum – most importantly that of Tullia, who famously drove over the corpse of her father, King Servius, in the carriage – it shows how this conveyance served to focalize Roman patriarchal anxieties surrounding women’s conflicting loyalties as daughters and wives. It moves on to analyze accounts of the prohibition of women’s privilege of using carpenta, the attempts of moralizing senators such as Cato the Elder to oppose the repeal of this ban, and the dramatic protest of the women themselves. A concluding section examines how its occasional, but conspicuous use by men is represented as effeminizing, and traces the recurring theme of hybridity in its depictions.

This paper outlines some of the historiographical tools and perspectives the Annals may have received from Livius Andronicus’ Odyssey and Naevius’ Punic War. The topics of allegory and authority structure the discussion. Section 1 explores the Annals’ construction of the past in relation to that of its Latin epic predecessors, particularly their use of allegory in the representation of history. Section 2 argues that Ennius’ unique blend of auctoritas is an expansion of Naevius’ simultaneous evocation of Hellenic historiographical authority of first-hand experience (theōria, empeiria, autoptēs) and divine inspiration from the Muses. The analysis here brings Cato’s Origins into dialogue with the authorizing techniques that are central to the historiographical personae of Rome’s first epicists. I conclude by suggesting that the genealogies outlined in Sections 1 and 2 explain the generic hybridity of Ennius’ res atque poemata.