Chapter 9 QUINTUS ENNIUS

The Hellenizing tendency of which N?vius complains was setting in strongly already during his life at Rome. But it was especially the influence of his literary successor, an influence still more strongly tending toward Greek forms and motives, which the unfortunate N?vius mourned from his place of exile and which gave added bitterness to the lament which the sturdy old Roman has left us in his epitaph.

This literary successor was the poet Quintus Ennius, who may almost be said to have met N?vius at the gates of Rome, since he arrived at Rome at about the time when N?vius went into banishment. Ennius was not a Roman citizen at this time, having been born and reared down in the extreme heel of Italy, at Rudi? in Calabria, a section which had for many generations been under Greek influence. He was of good local family, familiar with the rough Oscan speech of his native village, with the polished Greek of neighboring Tarentum, where he was probably at school, and with the Roman tongue, which had become the official language of his district after Rome had pushed her conquests to the limits of Italy. He was wont to say of himself that he had three hearts-Oscan, Latin, and Greek; and certainly by the circumstances of his birth and education he was a good representative of the threefold national influences which were rapidly converging.

Ennius was born in 239 B. C., shortly after the close of the First Punic War; but he comes first into notice as a centurion in the Roman army in Sardinia during the Second Punic War. Here Cato, while acting as qu?stor in the island, found him, and no doubt attracted by the sturdy scholarly soldier, took him to Rome in 204 in his own train. The poet afterward accompanied M. Fulvius Nobilior on that general's expedition to ?tolia, a privilege which he richly repaid later by immortalizing in verse the ?tolian campaign. He obtained Roman citizenship in 184 through the instrumentality of the son of Fulvius. He was most fortunate, moreover, in enjoying the friendship of the great Scipio, with whom he lived on the most intimate terms. For himself, he lived always at Rome in humble fashion on a slope of the Aventine Hill, and gained a modest living by teaching Greek to the youths of Rome. There is a tradition not very trustworthy that it was of him that Cato himself "learned Greek at eighty."

That Ennius was fitted to be a confidential friend to great men of affairs we may well believe if, as Aulus Gellius, who has preserved the passage, would have us understand, the following picture was intended by the poet as a self-portraiture. The passage is from the seventh book of the "Annals," and has a setting of its own, but may well represent the familiar intercourse of the poet with Marcus Fulvius or with Scipio. If this is indeed a portrait, it is a passage of great value, for it pictures the character in great detail.

So having spoken, he called for a man with whom often and gladly

Table he shared, and talk, and all his burden of duties,

When with debate all day on important affairs he was wearied,

Whether perchance in the Forum wide, or the reverend Senate;

One with whom he could frankly speak of his serious matters,-

Trifles also, and jests,-could pour out freely together

Pleasant or bitter words, and know they were uttered in safety.

Many the joys and the griefs he had shared, whether public or

secret!

This was a man in whom no impulse prompted to evil,

Whether of folly or malice; a scholarly man and a loyal,

Graceful, ready of speech, with his own contented and happy;

Tactful, speaking in season, yet courteous, never loquacious.

Vast was the buried and antique lore that was his, for the foretime

Made him master of earlier customs as well as of newer.

Versed in the laws was he of the ancients, men or immortals.

Wisely he knew both when he should talk and when to be silent.

So unto him Servilius spoke in the midst of the fighting....

Lawton.

Ennius died in 169 B. C., and tradition says that his bust was placed in the tomb of the family of his great patron, whereby the poet-soldier and the soldier-statesman were mutually honored. Upon that sarcophagus of Scipio surmounted by the poet's bust might well have been inscribed the saying of Sellar: "Ennius was in letters what Scipio was in action-the most vital representative of his epoch."

Ennius wrote satires and tragedies as we have seen; but it is because of his great epic poem the Annales, the work of his ripe age, that he deserves the high title accorded to him by the Romans themselves-"the father of Roman literature." This work is epoch-making because of its form and because of its important contribution to the development of the Latin language itself. The poet perceived that the native Saturnian verse was rude and unfitted to serve as a vehicle for the highest form of literary expression. His feeling toward this verse is shown in a fragment upon the First Punic War in which he refers to the Bellum Punicum of N?vius:

Others have treated the subject in the verses which in days of old the Fauns and bards used to sing, before any one had climbed to the cliffs of the Muses, or gave any care to style.

Sellar.

From the Saturnian he turned to the hexameter, whose "ocean-roll of rhythm" had resounded in the great epics of Homer. But it was one thing to admire the Greek dactylic hexameter, with its smooth-flowing cadences, and quite another to force the heavy, rough Latin speech into this measure. But this task, difficult as it was, Ennius essayed, and by the very attempt to force the Latin into the shapely Greek mold, he modified and polished that language itself, and handed it down to his literary successors as a far more fitting vehicle of noble expression than he had found it. It is true that in comparison with the hexameters of Vergil and Ovid the lines of Ennius are noticeably rough and heavy; but still it must be remembered that it was the older poet's pioneer labors that made the verse of Vergil and Ovid possible.

The "Annals" of Ennius is an attempt to gather up the traditions of early Roman history and the facts of later times, and present them in a continuous narrative. Ennius was the pioneer in this work, and shows, as he says in the supposed self-portraiture quoted above, a very extensive knowledge of Roman antiquities, as well as a vivid first-hand perception of contemporary men and events. His active service as a soldier in the Second Punic War especially fitted him to write the story of a warlike nation. His descriptions of wars and stirring events are con amore. He breathed the air of victory in the long series of Roman triumphs following the Second Punic War, and infused into his great national poem something of that exaltation of spirit which animated his times, and which raised his work far above the plane which his modest title suggests. The poem sank deep into the national heart, and became a very bible of the race, from which his successors drew freely as from a public fountain.

This poem, the work of the poet's old age, contained eighteen books, of which only about six hundred lines of fragments remain. The first book covers the period from the death of Priam to the death of Romulus. This period is, however, not as long as it is usually represented by tradition, for Ennius passes over the three hundred years of the Alban kings and represents ?neas as the father of Ilia, the mother of Romulus. One of the longest fragments describes the dream of Ilia in which the birth of Romulus and Remus is foreshadowed.

Then follow scattered fragments relating to the birth and exposure of the twins, their nourishment by the wolf, their growth to manhood, a long fragment on the taking of the auspices by which the sovereignty of Romulus over his brother was decided, and at the end a spirited passage from the lamentation of the Romans over the death of Romulus.

The second and third books give a history of the Roman kings after Romulus, with glimpses of the victory of the Horatii, the dreadful death of the treacherous Mettius Fufetius, the disgusting impiety of Tullia, and the rape of Lucretia, which precipitated the banishment of the Tarquins. The fourth and fifth books cover the period from the founding of the republic to the beginning of the war with Pyrrhus, which is described in the sixth book. This contains the fine passage in which King Pyrrhus refuses to accept money for the ransom of captives. He says to the Roman ambassadors:

Gold for myself I wish not; ye need not proffer a ransom.

Not as hucksters might let us wage our war, but as soldiers:

Not with gold but the sword. Our lives we will set on the issue.

Whether your rule or mine be Fortune's pleasure,-our mistress,-

Let us by valor decide. And to this word hearken ye also:

Every valorous man who is spared by the fortune of battle,

Fully determined am I of his freedom as well to accord him.

Count it a gift. At the wish of the gods in heaven I grant it.

Lawton.

The seventh book treats of the First Punic War, which he touches upon but lightly, since this subject had been so fully covered by his predecessor. Then follow, in the remaining books, the Macedonian, ?tolian, and Istrian wars, the history being brought down to within a few years of the writer's death. In the last book the old poet very fittingly compares himself to a spirited horse who has won victories in his day, but now enjoys his well-earned rest in the dignity and inactivity of age.

As we survey these broken fragments, we gain some appreciation of the cruelty of that fate which preserved to posterity the ten tedious books of Lucan's Pharsalia, the seventeen books of Silius' Punica, and the twelve books of the Thebaid of Statius, but swept away this great work of Rome's first genuine poet-a work rendered triply valuable because it was the first Roman experiment in hexameters, because in it the Latin language was just molding into literary form, retaining still much of its early roughness and heaviness, and because of the priceless contribution to Roman antiquities which it could have furnished us.