He lived on terms of intimacy with influential members of the noblest families in Rome, and became the familiar friend of the great Scipio. When he died at the age of seventy, his bust was believed to be placed in the tomb of the Scipios, between those of the conqueror of Hannibal and of the conqueror of Antiochus. He died in the year b.c. 169. The most famous of his works were his Tragedies and the Annals, a long historical poem written in eighteen books. But, in addition to these, he composed several miscellaneous works, of which only very scanty fragments have been preserved.

Among the circumstances which prepared him to be the principal creator of the national literature, his birthplace and origin, the kind of education available to him in his early years, and the experience which awaited him when first entering on life, had a strong determining influence. His birthplace, Rudiae, is called by Strabo 'a Greek city'; but it was not a Greek colony, like Tarentum and the other cities of Magna Graecia, but an old Italian town, (the epithet vetustae is applied to it by Silius) which had been partially Hellenised, but still retained its native traditions and the use of the Oscan language. Ennius is thus spoken of as 'Semi-Graecus.' He laid claim to be descended from the old Messapian kings, a claim which Virgil is supposed to acknowledge in the introduction of Messapus leading his followers in the gathering of the Italian races,

This claim to royal descent indicates that the poet was a member of the better class of families in his native district; and the consciousness of old lineage, which prompted the claim, probably strengthened the high self-confidence by which he was animated, and helped to determine the strong aristocratic bias of his sympathies. He bore witness to his nationality in the saying quoted by Gellius² that 'in the possession of the Greek, Oscan, and Latin speech, he possessed three hearts.' Of these three languages the Oscan, as the one of least value to acquire for the purposes of literature or of social intercourse, was most likely to have been his inherited tongue. Rudiae, from its Italian nationality, from its neighbourhood to the cities of Magna Graecia, and from its relation of dependence on Rome, must have been in the time of the boyhood of Ennius a meeting-place, not only of three different languages,—that of common life, that of culture and education, that of military service—but of the three different spirits or tendencies which were operative in the creation of the new literature. To his home among the hills overlooking the Grecian seas³—referred to in the expression of Ovid,—

and in the phrase of Silius,—

the poet owed the 'Italian heart,' the virtue of a race still uncorrupted and unsophisticated, the buoyant energy and freshness of feeling which enabled him to apprehend all the novelty and the greatness of the momentous age through which he lived. The South of Italy afforded, at this time, means of education, which were denied to Rome or Latium; and the peace enjoyed by his native district for the first twenty years of his life granted to Ennius leisure to avail himself of these means, which he could not have enjoyed had he been born a few years later. In the short account of his life in Jerome's continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle, it is stated that he was born at Tarentum. Though this is clearly an error, it seems probable that the poet may have spent the years of his education there. Though Tarentum, since its capture by the Romans, had lost its political importance, it still continued to be a centre of Greek culture and of social pleasure. Dramatic representations had been especially popular among a people who had drifted far away 'ex Spartana dura illa et horrida disciplina⁴' of their ancestors. From the knowledge of the Attic tragedians displayed by Ennius in his later career it is likely that he had witnessed representations of their works on a Greek stage, before he began, in middle life, to direct his own genius to dramatic composition. The knowledge and admiration of Homer which stimulated him to the composition of his greatest work, might have been acquired in any centre of Greek culture. But the intellectual interests indicated in some of his miscellaneous writings have a kind of local character, distinguishing them alike from the older philosophies of Athens and from the more recent science of Alexandria. His acceptance of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls and the physical fancies expressed in some of the fragments of the Epicharmus probably came to him from the teaching of the Neo-Pythagoreans, who were widely spread among the Greeks of Southern Italy. The rationalistic speculations of Euhemerus, which appear in strange union with the 'somnia Pythagorea' of the Annals, were of Sicilian origin. The gastronomic treatise, which Ennius afterwards translated into Latin, was the work of Archestratus of Gela. The class of persons for whom such a work would originally be written was likely to be found among the luxurious livers of Sicily and Magna Graecia. Thus while the serious poetry of Ennius was inspired by the older and nobler works of Greek genius, the influence of a more vulgar and prosaic class of teachers, transmitted by him to Roman thought and literature, was probably derived from the place of his early education.

His Italian spirit, and the Greek culture acquired by him in early youth, were two of the conditions out of which the new literature was destined to arise. The third condition was his steadfast and ardent Roman patriotism. Born more than a generation after his native district had ceased to be at war with Rome, he grew up to manhood during the years of peace between the first and second Carthaginian wars, when the supremacy of Rome was loyally accepted. Between early manhood and middle life he was a witness of and an actor in the protracted and long doubtful struggle between the two great Imperial States, on the issue of which hung the future destinies of the world:—

Though during that struggle the loyalty of some of the Italian communities was shaken, yet the aristocratic party in every city, and the Greek States generally, were true to the Roman alliance⁶. Thus his political sympathies, as well as his Greek education, would incline Ennius to identify himself with the cause of Rome, and his ardent imagination apprehended the grandeur and majesty with which she played her part in the contest. It was in the Second Punic War that the ideal of what was greatest in the character and institutions of Rome was most fully realised. Her good fortune supplied from among the contingent furnished to the war by her Messapian allies a man of a nature so sympathetic with her own and an imagination so vivid as to gain for the ideal thus created a permanent realisation.

Of the share which Ennius had in the war we know only that he served in Sardinia with the rank of centurion. That he had become a man of some note in that capacity is suggested by the fact that he attracted the attention of the Roman quaestor Cato, and accompanied him to Rome. A certain dramatic interest attaches to this first meeting of the typical representative of Roman manners and traditions and great enemy of foreign innovations, with the man by whom, more than by any one else, the mind of Rome was enlarged and liberalised, and many of her most cherished convictions were most seriously undermined. This actual service in a great war left its impress on the work done by Ennius. Fragments both of his tragedies and his Annals prove how thoroughly he understood and appreciated the best qualities of the soldierly character. This fellowship in hardship and danger fitted him to become the national poet of a race of soldiers. He has drawn from his own observation an image of the fortitude and discipline of the Roman armies, and of the patriotic devotion and resolution of the men by whom these armies were led. There is a strong realism in the expression of martial sentiment in Ennius, marking him out as a man familiar with the life of the camp and the battle-field, and quite distinct from the idealising enthusiasm of Livy and Virgil⁷.

Ennius entered on his career as a writer at a time when the long strain of a great struggle was giving place to the confidence and security of a great triumph. He lived for thirty-five years longer, witnessing the rapid advance of Roman conquest in Greece and Asia, and over the barbarous tribes of the West. He died one year before the crowning victory of Pydna. During all his later life his sanguine spirit and patriotic enthusiasm were buoyed up by the success of the Roman and Italian arms abroad; while his political sympathies were in thorough accord with the dominant influences in the government of the State. At no other period of Roman history was the ascendency of the Senate and of the great houses more undisputed, or, on the whole, more wisely and ably exercised. In the lists of those who successively fill the great curule magistracies, we find almost exclusively the names of members of the old patrician or of the more recent plebeian nobility. At no other period does the tribunician opposition to the senatorian direction of affairs and to the authority of the magistrate appear weaker or more intermittent. It was not till a generation after the death of Ennius that the moral corruption and political and social disorganisation—the ultimate results of the great military successes gained under the absolute ascendency of the Senate,—became fully manifest. It is difficult to say how far the aristocratic and antipopular bias of all Roman literature may have been determined by the political conditions of the time in which that literature received the most powerful impulse, and by the personal relations and peculiar stamp of character of the man by whom that impulse was given.

Along with the military and political activity of the time, during which Ennius lived in Rome, the stirring of a new intellectual life was apparent. Even during the war dramatic representations continued to take place, and the most active part of the career of Naevius, and a considerable part of that of Plautus, belong to the years during which Hannibal was still in Italy. After the cessation of the war, we note in the pages of Livy that much greater prominence is given to the celebration of public games, of which at this time dramatic representations formed the chief part. The regular holidays for which the Aediles provided these entertainments became more numerous; and the art of the dramatist was employed to enhance the pomp of the spectacle on the occasion of a great triumph, or of the funeral of an illustrious man. The death of Livius Andronicus and the banishment of Naevius, which must have happened about the time that Ennius arrived at Rome, had deprived the Roman stage of the only writers of any name, who had attempted to introduce upon it the works of the Greek tragedians. Ennius had, indeed, rather to create than to revive the taste for tragedy. The prologue to the Amphitryo⁸ shows how much more congenial the reproduction of the ordinary life of the Greeks was to the uneducated audiences of Rome than the higher effort to familiarise them with the personages and adventures of the heroic age. The great era of Roman comedy was coincident with the literary career of Ennius. It was then that the best extant plays of Plautus were produced, and that Caecilius Statius, whom ancient critics ranked as his superior, flourished. The quality attributed to the latter in the line of Horace,

indicates a closer affinity with the spirit of Ennius, than the moral and political indifference of the older dramatist. The aim of Ennius was to raise literature from being a mere popular recreation, and to bring it into accord with the higher mood of the nation; to use it as a medium both of elevation and enlightenment. In carrying out this aim he appealed to the temper and to the newly awakened interests of members of the aristocratic class, who were coming into close contact with educated Greeks, and were beginning to appreciate the treasures of art and literature now opened up to them. The career of Q. Fabius Pictor, the first historian of Rome, and the first who made a name for himself in painting, who lived at this time, attests this twofold attraction. The friendly relations which Roman generals, such as T. Quintius Flamininus, established with the famous Greek cities, in which they appeared as liberators rather than conquerors, were the result of intellectual enthusiasm as much as of a definite policy. With the wars of Pyrrhus and the capture of Tarentum, the first stage of the process described in the lines of Horace began⁹: the end of the Second Punic War was the second stage in the process. It is to this period, rather than to the progress of the war, that the words of the Grammarian, Porcius Licinus, most truly apply,

The more frequent and closer contact with the mind of Greece not only refined the taste and enlarged the intelligence of those capable of feeling its influence, but produced at the same time a change in men's deepest convictions. Though the definite tenets of Stoicism and Epicureanism did not acquire ascendency till a later time, the dissolving force of Greek speculative thought and Greek views of life forced its way into Rome through various channels,—especially through the adaptations of the tragedies of Euripides and of the comedy of Menander. All these tendencies of the time acted on Ennius, stimulating his mental activity in various directions. His natural temperament and his acquired culture brought him into harmony with the spirit of his age without raising him too much above it. A poet of more delicacy of taste and perfection of execution would have been unintelligible to his contemporaries. A more systematic thinker would have been out of harmony with the conditions of life by which he was surrounded. Breadth, vigour, a spirit clinging to what was most vital in the old state of things, and yet readily adapting itself to what was new, were the qualities needed to establish a literature true to the genius of Rome in the second century b.c., and containing the promise of the more perfect accomplishment of a later age. And these qualities belonged to Ennius by natural gifts and the experience and culture of his earlier years.

There is no reason to believe that he had obtained any eminence in literature before he settled in middle age at Rome. His genius was of that robust order which grows richer and livelier with advancing years. The Annals was the work of his old age,—the ripe fruit of a strong and energetic manhood, prolonged to the last in hopeful activity. Cicero speaks of 'the cheerfulness with which he bore the two evils of old age and poverty¹⁰.' Wherever the poet speaks of himself, his words reveal a sanguine and contented spirit; as, in that fine simile, where he compares himself, at the close of his active and successful career, to a brave horse which has often won the prize at the Olympian games, and in old age obtains his well-deserved repose:—

In none of his fragments is there any trace of that melancholy after-thought which pervades the poetry of his greatest successors, Lucretius and Virgil. From the humorous exaggeration of Horace,

and from the poet's own confession,

it may be inferred that he belonged to the class of poets of a lusty and social nature, of which Dryden is a type in modern times, who enjoyed the pleasures of wine and good fellowship. The well-known anecdote, told by Cicero, of the interchange of visits between Scipio Nasica and Ennius¹¹, though not a brilliant specimen of Roman wit, is interesting from the light which it throws on the easy terms of intimacy in which the poet lived with the members of the most eminent Roman families. Such testimonies and traits of personal character make us think of Ennius as a man of genial and social temper, as well as of 'an intense and glowing mind.'

It was probably through his position as a teacher of Greek that Ennius first became known to the leading men of Rome. If this position was at first one of dependence, similar to that in which in earlier times the client stood to his patron, it soon changed into one of mutual esteem and admiration. We can best understand the relation in which he stood to men eminent in the state and in the camp, from a passage from the seventh book of the Annals quoted by Aulus Gellius. In that passage the poet is stated, on the authority of L. Aelius Stilo¹² (an early grammarian, a friend of Lucilius, and one of Cicero's teachers), to have drawn his own portrait, under an imaginary description of a confidential friend of the Roman general, Servilius Geminus. The portrait has the air of being drawn from the life, with a rapid and forcible hand, and with a minuteness of detail significant of close personal observation:—

There are many touches in this picture, which suggest the kind of intimacy in which Ennius may have lived with Fulvius Nobilior when accompanying him in his Aetolian campaign, or his bearing when taking part in the light or serious talk of the Scipios. The learning and power of speech, the knowledge of antiquity and of the manners of the day, attributed to this friend of Servilius, were gifts which we may attribute to the poet both on ancient testimony and on the evidence afforded by the fragments of his writings. The good sense, tact, and knowledge of the world, the cheerfulness in life and conversation, the honour and integrity of character represented in the same passage, are among the personal qualities which, in all ages, form a bond of union between men eminent in great practical affairs and men eminent in literature. Such were the qualities which, according to his own account, recommended Horace to the intimate friendship of Maecenas. Many expressive fragments from the lost poetry of Ennius give assurance that he was a man in whom learning and the ardent temperament of genius were happily united with the worth and sense described in this nameless portrait.

By his personal merit he broke through the strongest barriers ever raised by national and family pride, and made the name of poet, instead of a reproach, a name of honour with the ruling class at Rome. The favourable impression which he produced on the 'primitive virtue' of Cato, by whom he was first brought to Rome, was more probably due to his force of character and social qualities than to his genius and literary accomplishment,—qualities seemingly little valued by his earliest patron, who, in one of his speeches, reproached Fulvius Nobilior with allowing himself to be accompanied by a poet in his campaign. But the strongest proof of the worth and the wisdom of Ennius is his intimate friendship with the greatest Roman of the age, and the conqueror of the greatest soldier of antiquity. It is honourable to the friendship of generous natures, that the poet neither sought nor gained wealth from this intimacy, but continued to live plainly and contentedly on the Aventine. Yet after death it was believed that the two friends were not divided; and the bust of the provincial poet found a place among the remains of that time-honoured family, the record of whose grandeur has been preserved, even to the present day, in the august simplicity of their monumental inscriptions.

The elder Africanus may have been attracted to Ennius not only by his passion for Greek culture, but by a certain community of nature. The mystical enthusiasm, the high self-confidence, the direct simplicity combined with majesty of character, impressed on the language of the poet were equally impressed on the action and bearing of the soldier. The feeling which Ennius in his turn entertained for Scipio was one of enthusiastic admiration. While paying due honour to the merits and services of other famous men, even of such as Cato and Fabius, who were most opposed to his idol, of Scipio he said that Homer alone could worthily have uttered his praises¹⁴.

In addition to the part which he assigned to him in the Ninth Book of the Annals, he devoted a separate poem to commemorate his achievements. He has left also two short inscriptions, written in elegiac verse, in which he proclaims in words of burning enthusiasm the momentous services and transcendent superiority of the 'great world's victor's victor'—

and this also,

With many marked differences, which distinguish a man of active, social, and national sympathies from a student of Nature and a thinker on human life, there is a certain affinity of character and genius between Ennius and Lucretius. Enthusiastic admiration of personal greatness is one prominent feature in which they resemble one another. But while Lucretius is the ardent admirer of contemplative and imaginative greatness, it is greatness in action and character which moves the admiration of Ennius. They resemble each other also in their strong consciousness of genius and their high estimate of its function and value. Cicero mentions that Ennius applied the epithet sanctus to poets. Lucretius applies the same epithet to the old philosophic poets, as in the lines of strong affection and reverence which he dedicates to Empedocles,

The inscription which Ennius composed for his own bust directly expresses his sense of the greatness of his work, and his confident assurance of fame, and of the lasting sympathy of his countrymen—

Two lines from one of his satires—

indicate in still stronger terms his burning consciousness of power.

Some of the greatest of modern poets, such as Dante, Milton, and Wordsworth, have manifested a feeling similar to that expressed by Ennius and Lucretius. Although appearing in strange contrast with the self-suppression of the highest creative art (as seen in Homer, in Sophocles, and in Shakspeare), this proud self-confidence, 'disdainful of help or hindrance,' is the usual accompaniment of an intense nature and of a genius exercised with some serious moral, religious, or political purpose. The least pleasing side of the feeling, even in men of generous nature, is the scorn,—not of envy, but of imperfect sympathy,—which they are apt to entertain towards rival genius or antagonistic convictions. Something of this spirit appears in the disparaging allusion of Ennius to his predecessor Naevius:—

The contempt here expressed for the metre employed by the older poet seems to be the counterpart of his own exultation in being the first to introduce what he called 'the long verses' into Latin literature.

Another point in which there is some affinity between Ennius and Lucretius is their religious temper and convictions. There is indeed no trace in Ennius of the rigid intellectual consistency of Lucretius, nor in Lucretius any sympathy with those mystic speculations which Ennius derived from the lore attributed to Pythagoras. But in both deep feelings of awe and reverence are combined with a scornful disbelief of the superstition of their time. They both apply the principles of Euhemerism to resolve the bright creations of the old mythology into their original elements. Ennius, like Lucretius, seems to deny the providence of the gods. He makes one of the personages of his dramas give expression to the thought which perplexed the minds of Thucydides and Tacitus—the thought, namely, of the apparent disconnexion between prosperity and goodness, as affording proof of the divine indifference to human well-being—

and he exposed, with caustic sense, the false pretences of augurs, prophets, and astrologers. His translation of the Sacred Chronicle of Euhemerus exercised a permanent influence on the religious convictions of his countrymen. But while led to these conclusions by the spirit of his age, and by the study of the later speculations of Greece, he believed in the soul's independence of the body, and of its continued existence, under other conditions, after death. He declared that the spirit of Homer, after many changes,—at one time having animated a peacock²², again, having been incarnate in the sage of Crotona,—had finally passed into his own body: and he told how the shade—which he regards as distinct from the soul or spirit—of his great prototype had appeared to him from the invisible world,—

and explained to him the whole plan of nature. These dreams of the imagination may not have been without effect in enabling Ennius to escape from the gloom which 'eclipsed the brightness of the world' to Lucretius. The light in which the world appeared to the older poet was that of common sense strangely blended with imaginative mysticism. He thus seems to stand midway between the spiritual aspirations of Empedocles and the negation of Lucretius. Born in the vigorous prime of Italian civilisation he came into the inheritance of the bold fancies of the earlier Greeks and of the dull rationalism of their later speculation. His ideas on what transcends experience appear thus to have been without the unity arising from an unreflecting acceptance of tradition, or from the basis of philosophical consistency.

II.  His Works.—(1) Miscellaneous Works.

II.  (1)  In laying the foundations of Roman literature, Ennius displayed not only the fervent sympathies and active faculty of genius, but also great energy and industry, and a many-sided learning. The composition of his tragedies and of the Annals, while making most demand on his original gifts, implied also a diligent study of Homer and of the Greek tragedians, and a large acquaintance with the traditions and antiquities of Rome. But besides the works on which his highest poetical faculty was employed, other writings, of a philosophical, didactic, and miscellaneous character, gave evidence of the versatility of his powers and interests. It does not appear that he was the author of any prose writing. His version of the Sacred Chronicle of Euhemerus was more probably a poetical adaptation than a literal prose translation of that work. The work of Euhemerus was conceived in that spirit of vulgar rationalism, which is condemned by Plato in the Phaedrus. He explained away the fables of mythology, by representing them as a supernatural account of historical events. Several extracts of the work quoted by Lactantius, as from the translation of Ennius, look as if they had been reduced from a form originally metrical into the prose of a later era²³. There is thus no evidence, direct or indirect, to prove that Ennius had any share in forming the style of Latin prose. But if verse was the sole instrument which he used, this was certainly not due to the poetical character of all the topics which he treated, but, more likely, to the fact that his acquired aptitude, and the state of the Latin language in his time, made metrical writing more natural and easy than prose composition.

One of his works in verse was a treatise on good living, called Hedyphagetica, founded on the gastronomic researches of Archestratus of Gela,—a sage who is said to have devoted his life to the study of everything that contributed to the pleasures of the table, and to have recorded his varied experience and research with the grave dignity of epic verse. A few lines from this translation or adaptation of Ennius, giving an account of the coasts on which the best fish are to be found, have been preserved by Apuleius. The lines are curious as exemplifying that tone of half-serious enthusiasm, which all who treat, either in prose or verse, of the pleasures of eating seem naturally to adopt, as for instance the Catius of Horace in his discourse on gastronomy²⁴. The language in which the scarus, a fish unhappily lost to the modern epicure, is described as 'the brain almost of almighty Jove,' fits all the requirements of gastronomic rapture:—

He wrote also a philosophical poem in trochaic septenarian verse, called Epicharmus, founded on writings attributed to the old Sicilian poet, which appear to have resolved the gods of the Greek mythology into natural substances²⁵. A few slight fragments have been preserved from this poem. They speak of the four elements or principles of the universe as 'water, earth, air, the sun'; of 'the blending of heat with cold, dryness with moisture'; of 'the earth bearing and supporting all nations and receiving them again back into herself.' The following is the longest fragment from the poem:—

These fragments and a passage from the opening lines of the Annals, where the shade of Homer was introduced as discoursing to Ennius (like the shade of Anchises to Aeneas), on 'the nature of things,' are specimens of that vague curiosity about the facts and laws of Nature, which, in ancient times, supplied the absence of scientific knowledge. Such physical speculations possessed a great attraction for the Roman poets. The spirit of the Epicharmus, as well as of the Sacred Chronicle of Euhemerus, reappears in the poem of Lucretius. Ennius was the first among his countrymen who expressed that curiosity as to the ultimate facts of Nature and that sense of the mysterious life of the universe, which acted as the most powerful intellectual impulse on the mind of Lucretius, and which fascinated the imagination of Virgil.

Another of his miscellaneous works, probably of a moral and didactic character, was known by the name of Protreptica. It is possible that all of these works²⁷, as well as the Scipio, formed part of the Saturae, or Miscellanies, under which title Ennius composed four, or, according to another authority, six books. The Romans looked upon Lucilius as the inventor of satire in the later sense of that word²⁸;—he having been the first to impress upon the satura the character of censorious criticism, which it has borne since his time. But there was another kind of satura, of which Ennius and Pacuvius in early times, and Varro at a somewhat later time, were regarded as the principal authors. This was really a miscellany treating of various subjects, in various metres, and, as employed by Varro, was written partly in prose, partly in verse. This kind of composition, as well as the Lucilian satire, arose out of the old indigenous satura or dramatic medley, familiar to the Romans before the introduction of Greek literature. When the scenic element in the original satura was superseded by the new comedy introduced from Greece, the old name was first applied to a miscellaneous kind of composition, in which ordinary topics were treated in a serious but apparently desultory way; and even as employed by Lucilius and Horace the satura retained much of its original character. The satires of Ennius were written in various metres, iambic, trochaic, and hexameter, and treated of various topics of personal and public interest. The few passages which ancient authorities quote as fragments from them are not of much value in themselves, but when taken in connexion with the testimonies as to their character, they are of some interest as showing that this kind of composition was a form intermediate between the old dramatic satura and the satire of Lucilius and Horace. It is recorded that in one of these pieces, Ennius introduced a dialogue between Life and Death;—thus transmitting in the use of dialogue (which appears very frequently in Horace and Persius) some vestige of the original scenic medley. Ennius also appears, like Lucilius and Horace, to have communicated in his satires his own personal feelings and experience, as in the fragment already quoted:—

Further satire, in the hands of its chief masters, aimed at practical moral teaching, not only by precept, ridicule, and invective, and by portraiture of individuals and of types, but also by the use of anecdotes and fables. This last mode of inculcating homely lessons on the conduct of life is common in Horace. It appears, however, to have been first used by Ennius. Aulus Gellius mentions that Aesop's fable of the field-lark and the husbandman 'is very skilfully and gracefully told by Ennius in his satires'; and he quotes the advice appended to the fable, 'Never to expect your friends to do for you what you can do for yourself':

These miscellaneous works of Ennius were the fruits of his learning and literary industry, rather than of his genius. Such works might have been written in prose, if the art of prose composition had been as familiar as that of verse. It is in the fragments of his dramas, and still more of the Annals, that his poetic power is most apparent, and that the influence which he exercised over the Roman mind and literature is discerned.

(2)  Dramas.

(2)  Before the time of Ennius, the Roman drama, both tragic and comic, had established itself at Rome, in close imitation of the tragedy and the new comedy of Athens. The latter had been most successfully cultivated by Naevius and his younger contemporary, Plautus. The advancement of tragedy to an equal share of popular favour was due to the severer genius of Ennius. He appears however to have tried, though without much success, to adapt himself to the popular taste in favour of comedy. The names of two of his comedies, viz. Cupuncula and Pancratiastae, have come down to us; but their fragments are too insignificant to justify the formation of any opinion on their merits. His admirers in ancient times nowhere advance in his favour any claim to comic genius. Volcatius Sedigitus, an early critic, who wrote a work De Poetis, and who has already been referred to as assigning the third rank in the list of comic poets to Naevius, mentions Ennius as tenth and last, solely 'antiquitatis causa.' Any inference that might be drawn from the character exhibited in the other fragments of Ennius, would accord both with the negative and positive evidence of antiquity, as to his deficiency in comic power. He has nothing in common with that versatile and dramatic genius, in which occasionally the highest imagination has been united with the most abundant humour. The real bent of his mind, as revealed in his higher poetry, is grave and intense, like that of Lucretius or Milton. Many of the conceits, strained effects, and play on words, found in his fragments, imply want of humour as well as an imperfect poetic taste. Thus, in the following fragment from one of his satires, the meaning of the passage is more obscured than pointed by the forced iteration and play upon the word frustra:—

The love of alliteration and assonance, which is conspicuous also in Plautus and in the fragments of Pacuvius and Accius, and which seems to have been the natural accompaniment of the new formative energy imparted to the Latin language by the earliest poets and orators, appears in its most exaggerated form in such lines as the

quoted from the Annals. Many of his fragments show indeed that he possessed the caustic spirit of a satirist; but it was in the light of common sense, not of humour, that he regarded the follies of the world.

The general character of Roman tragedy, so far as it can be ascertained from ancient testimony and the extant fragments of the early tragedians, will be examined in the following chapter. It is not possible to determine what dramatic power Ennius may have displayed in the evolution of his plots or the delineation of his characters. His peculiar genius is more distinctly stamped on his epic than on his dramatic fragments. Still many of the latter, in their boldness of conception and expression, and in their strong and fervid morality, are expressive of the original force of the poet, and of the Roman temper of his mind. Some of them will be brought forward in the sequel, along with passages from the Annals, as important contributions to our estimate of the poet's genius and intellect.

It was certainly due to Ennius that Roman tragedy was first raised to that pitch of popular favour which it enjoyed till the age of Cicero. While actively employed in many other fields of literature, he carried on the composition of his tragedies till the latest period of his life. Cicero records that the Thyestes was represented at the celebration of the Ludi Apollinares, shortly before the poet's death³¹. The titles of about twenty-five of his tragedies are known, and a few fragments remain from all of them. About one half of these bear the titles of the heroes and heroines connected with the Trojan cycle of events, such as the Achilles, Achilles Aristarchi, Ajax, Alexander, Andromache Aechmalotis, Hectoris Lutra, Hecuba, Iphigenia, Phoenix, Telamo. One at least of his tragedies, the Medea, was literally translated from the Greek of Euripides, whom he seems to have made his model, in preference to the older Attic dramatists. Cicero³² speaks of it, along with the Antiope of Pacuvius, as being translated word for word from the Greek; and a comparison of the fragments of the Latin with the passages in the Medea of Euripides shows how closely Ennius followed his original. In one place he has mistranslated his author,—the passage (Eur. Med. 215),