Chapter 1 sketches the events that transpired in eastern Sicily during the turbulent years leading up to Hieron’s ascension to power, as would-be tyrants and bellicose kings grappled for political and military control of the island.

This paper reexamines the intertextual connection between Lucretius and Ennius from a multi-medial angle. Ennius’ tragedies were regularly revived in the late Republic, and selections from his epic Annals appear to have been recited in public contexts as well. These performances seem to have stood in a relationship of reciprocal influence with wall paintings, as stagings inspired painters, and their artwork influenced actors in turn. Accordingly, Lucretius treats Ennius’ works as particularly influential expressions of a harmful philosophy that threatens Epicurean ataraxia in a variety of contexts. Analyzing familiar points of contact between the two authors in Book One of On the Nature of Things and highlighting a number of as-yet undiscussed allusions, I argue that Lucretius equips his readers with the tools to challenge Ennius in all three of the relevant media, be it on the page, on the stage, or in images.

Contrary to conventional opinion, Hamlet is a major race play in which a white prince dressed in black has a self-serving, improvisational relationship to blackness as a violent, criminal identity. Called upon to avenge his father’s murder, Hamlet designates the fratricidal Claudius a “Moore,” a racial slur for a type that had only recently gained popularity on the stage. Simultaneously, the imperative of the revenge genre requires retributive action, leading the revenger to replicate the original perpetrator’s murderous violence: Hamlet must become a “Moore” like Claudius. Cowardice, Hamlet explains, is the product of contemplation and manifests in bodily paleness, and his affiliation with a black Pyrrhus, drawn from the repertory of the traveling players, compensates for his self-ascribed white cowardice so that blackness in action becomes the revenger’s motivating passion. The theater-aficionado prince is knowledgeable about the traveling company’s repertory of black drama and uses a black Lucianus in the staging of The Murder of Gonzago to truly capture the conscience of the Moor-like king Claudius.

This paper reexamines the intertextual connection between Lucretius and Ennius from a multi-medial angle. Ennius’ tragedies were regularly revived in the late Republic, and selections from his epic Annals appear to have been recited in public contexts as well. These performances seem to have stood in a relationship of reciprocal influence with wall paintings, as stagings inspired painters, and their artwork influenced actors in turn. Accordingly, Lucretius treats Ennius’ works as particularly influential expressions of a harmful philosophy that threatens Epicurean ataraxia in a variety of contexts. Analyzing familiar points of contact between the two authors in Book One of On the Nature of Things and highlighting a number of as-yet undiscussed allusions, I argue that Lucretius equips his readers with the tools to challenge Ennius in all three of the relevant media, be it on the page, on the stage, or in images.

If readers determine the fate of books, we might think the Annals of Quintus Ennius enjoyed but ephemeral success. Its fragments are few, its original audience and intent unclear. In this paper I ask how so vast a monument became such a ruin, and what the evidence of its survival reveals about the process of its destruction. Those who knew the poem best are among that handful of Romans – Cicero and Vergil prominent among them – whom we know best. What did “ordinary” Romans know, pretend to know, or could they be expected to know of it? Close attention to the poem’s reception suggests that it was best known through favored extracts and that the idea of the Annals was more firmly fixed in the Roman literary consciousness than the poem itself.