The Philology of Fragments
By Sander Goldberg
It is a fact universally acknowledged that the edition of a fragmentary work can be no
more reliable than those of the sources upon which it draws. Less widely recognized, but
no less true, is an important corollary: arguments based on the testimony of a fragmentary
work will be no more reliable than the edition on which they are based. So, to take a
simple example, a character in Ennius’ Annales certainly referred to the city’s founding
as some 700 years before his own time (154-5 Sk.), but to say the speaker is Camillus and
Fragmentary Texts, Contradictory Narrative, and the Roman Historical Tradition
By Christopher Simon
Contradictions are scattered across the Roman historical tradition. Some of them are evidentiary,
such as the number of troops or the quantity of spoils recorded for a certain military campaign, while
others comprise features of the (whole) narrative – competing and (apparently) exclusive claims about
events, as well as their order, cause, outcome, interpretation etc. (cf. White 1973). Contradictions of both
sorts can be found not only by comparing the works of different historians, but also by examining the
Fragmentary Furii and Latin Historical Epic
By Jessica H. Clark
“Whole texts are bullies” (Goldberg 1995: v). They are not the only ones; bigger fragments
jostle the smaller, too. Important new work on Cato and Ennius has reaffirmed their importance for
Roman literary and political histories (e.g. Sciarrino 2011; Elliot 2013; Goldschmidt 2013; even
Cicero’s hexameters: Volk 2011). Fragments are more accessible than ever before, as well
demonstrated in this Call for Papers. But it remains the case that most ancient authors are known
When is a Fragment not a Fragment? The Problem of Fragmentary Roman Oratory
By Catherine Steel
Fragmentary oratory raises a specific and challenging set of problems for the classicist. As with other
genres, fragmentary texts pose familiar questions of authorship, ordering and the interpretation of
syntactically and semantically incomplete material. In addition, however, the ambiguous relationship
between oratory as performance and oratory as text generates fresh concerns. The importance of
oratory within ancient historiography makes authorial ascription of ‘fragments’ highly problematic: it