Quintus Ennius

Roman poet

• Born: 239 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Rudiae, Calabria (now in southern Italy)
• Died: 169 (?) b.c.e.
• Place of death: Rome (now in Italy)

Known as the father of Latin poetry, Ennius extended the Latin language into areas previously reserved for Greek, offering explanations for Roman origins. He thus paved the way for the Golden Age of Latin poetry and influenced poets ranging from Lucretius to Vergil.

Early Life

Not much is known concerning the early life of Quintus Ennius (EHN-ih-uhs) aside from the material he included in his own works. Because of the popularity of his writings, it is likely that this information is accurate: His contemporaries could easily have contradicted him. It is clear that Ennius was born in Calabria and that his circumstances were humble. His origins were a point of personal pride that he would conscientiously maintain throughout his life. Even when established at Rome as a teacher and recognized poet, Ennius lived with somewhat awkward simplicity in the wealthy surroundings of the Aventine and employed but a single servant.

Ennius began his career as a soldier rather than as a poet and served with distinction during the Second Punic War. It was, paradoxically, his military talent rather than his skill in writing verse that first brought him to the attention of Cato the Censor, whose surname and hatred for Carthage made him a symbol of stern discipline and morality, even in his own time. It was during these years, while stationed in Sardinia, that Cato, then serving as military quaestor (a post with many of the same duties as quartermaster), tutored Ennius, his centurion, in Greek. Cato introduced Ennius to Scipio Africanus and Fulvius Nobilior; these men would further Ennius’s interests after he went to Rome. Ennius subsequently served on Fulvius’s staff during the Anatolian campaign, and in 184 b.c.e. Fulvius’s son, with the approval of the Roman people, awarded Ennius a lot among the triumviri coloniae deducendae. This award constituted a grant of citizenship, though it brought him no personal wealth. Scipio, too, remained friends with his junior officer, and (at least according to tradition) asked that a bust of Ennius be placed next to his tomb.

Copies of this bust from the tomb of the Scipios may surprise the person who imagines Ennius as an old Roman ascetic. If this bust is, indeed, of Ennius (and some would disagree), he was full-faced, with an aquiline nose, thick lips, and generally provincial features. His hair is close-cropped in the republican mode but with straight locks rather than the “crab-claw,” curled ones found in Imperial sculpture. He wears the expected laurel wreath, but, again unlike Imperial sculpture, the artist has made no attempt to idealize his subject. One should contrast this frank rendering of Ennius with the sensitive, idealized (also suspect) sculptures of his successor Vergil. These are products of Augustan Rome and present Vergil as an idealized poet of an idealized city.

Life’s Work

At first, Ennius supported himself in Rome after his military service by teaching, armed with impressive recommendations from Cato, Scipio, and Fulvius; these were essential to attract good students, and Ennius, no doubt, attracted the best. Even so, Ennius must always have had intentions of making his mark in literature, and he wrote from his first arrival in the city.

Circumstances favored his efforts. The dramatist Livius Andronicus died in 204, and his colleague Gnaeus Naevius retired soon after, thus leaving a place to be filled. Ennius began writing dramas, all penned c. 204-169 b.c.e., primarily on mythic themes related to the Trojan War: Achilles, Aiax (Ajax, 1935), Andromacha (Andromache, 1935), Hectoris lytra (The Ransom of Hector, 1935), and Hecuba. He seems also to have chosen mythic subjects that would allow one to draw moral lessons on the folly of excess and pride: Alexander, Andromeda, Athamas, Erechtheus, Eumenides, Iphigenia, Medea, and Thyestes. Clearly, the Trojan War plays would have been very popular among republican audiences. Rome wistfully traced its uncertain origins to an amalgam of Trojan, Latin, and native Italic stock and consequently saw its history in its myth. Similarly, moralizing was popular in republican Rome; at least, high moral standards were officially privileged. The second group of subjects provided fertile ground for this. Unfortunately, these works (indeed, all of Ennius’s writings) survive only as fragments quoted by subsequent authors. Even order of composition and dates of first performances are uncertain.

What is clear is that Ennius became popular quickly after 204 and that he was versatile. Though he continued to write drama throughout his life, he is best known as an analyst historian, that is, one who chronicled Roman history by using the Annales Maximi, official lists of significant events recorded year by year from the traditional date of Rome’s founding, 753. His own now-fragmentary Annales (204-169 b.c.e.; Annals, 1935) was originally written in eighteen books of verse and spanned Roman history from the legendary period of Aeneas’s arrival in Italy to Ennius’s own day. This work was begun sometime after his success as a playwright and occupied him throughout his middle years until his death.

Its eighteen books were originally circulated in groups of three and almost immediately became a part of the school curriculum. In part, they satisfied a need for material on Rome’s past. They also were elegantly written style models and were patriotic in tone. If the content of the lost sections can be judged from extant passages such as the “Dream of Ilia” (the daughter of Aeneas) and the “Auspices of Romulus and Remus,” each about ten lines, the Annals must have struck a responsive note in the hearts of patriotic Romans. In fact, Ennius’s patriotic themes, combined with his sophisticated use of the Latin language, not only made his works subject matter studied by Roman youth but also won for him the title “father of Latin poetry.” His simple manner of living, even amid the luxury of the Aventine, served to support the popularly held notion of his personal ethos and integrity.

Widespread early acceptance of his works likely encouraged Ennius to write at least one praetexta (a historical drama played in Roman dress), known as Sabinae, on the rape of the Sabine women, and perhaps another, the Ambracia, in praise of Fulvius, though the authorship of these works is open to question. If Ennius did indeed write praetextae, he would then have been trying his hand at a form to that time associated with Andronicus and Naevius. Only a few lines of these praetextae remain, not enough to establish his certain authorship.

Ennius’s prolific writing, accomplished in his comfortable but simple quarters in Rome, kept him for the most part out of the public arena even as it made him a popular literary figure. He never possessed great wealth, though his old Roman simplicity did not prevent his living well. Personal references in his works note his longtime suffering with gout. Unfortunately for those interested in his private life during these middle years, such mundane asides in his works are rare. It is clear, however, that he was struggling at this time, with varying degrees of success, to fashion Latin epic and dramatic meters that could worthily mirror their Greek antecedents. This struggle to make the Latin tongue literary sums up the contradictory impulses of Ennius himself: distrustful of Greeks and all non-Romans, yet an admirer of Greek literature and art, in this sense a grecophile; an innovator in his use of the Latin language, yet one who consistently portrayed himself as an upholder of Roman tradition.

Despite his incontestable patriotism, Ennius was fond of saying that he “possessed three hearts” (that he could speak three languages—Greek, Latin, and Oscan—and was at home in each culture). He saw no particular difficulty in maintaining both his cosmopolitanism and his staunch Roman loyalties. Indeed, Roman audiences took pleasure in his Latin adaptations of the Greek dramatists, and his Annals made him the “Roman Homer.”

Recognition and success in drama and historical epic allowed Ennius to devote considerable energy in the last third of his life to his Saturae (204-169 b.c.e.; Miscellanies, 1935). This work is a collection of miscellaneous poems in various meters on everything from Pythagorean philosophy (specifically that of Epicharmus) and the Pythagorean mythology of Euhemerus to gastronomy and assorted personal reflections. It is in this work and in Ennius’s epigrams that personal content is greatest, though both Miscellanies and the epigrams are fragmentary. What personal information survives concerns Ennius’s early life.

Significance

One of the best known of Quintus Ennius’s epigrams is a panegyric to the Roman military hero Scipio Africanus. Scipio is precisely the kind of personality Ennius would favor, and in a sense he sums up Ennius’s ideas of well-lived Roman life. Ennius, too, made his mark in military affairs, but he made an easy transition to the literary world and used his considerable skills to write sophisticated Latin verse. Though he used Greek models, particularly for his plays, and prided himself on his sophistication, he nevertheless fashioned poetry appropriate to the high morality and ethical standards of the Roman Republic.

Ennius is most associated with Roman history, though Annals is actually a historical epic that inspired subsequent Roman poets as diverse as Lucretius (author of the philosophical epic De rerum natura, c. 60 b.c.e., On the Nature of Things, 1682) and Vergil, whose Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.; English translation, 1553) often quotes, modifies, and improves on Ennian verse.

In the second century b.c.e., the critic Volcacius Sedigitus drew up a list of the ten best poets up to that time. He included Ennius and supposedly did so only because of his antiquity. This action indicates that Ennius was not considered the equal of his fellows in drama. His greatest contribution to Latin literature, recognized in his own times as well, is his historicizing of Roman myth in the Annals. The Roman historian Suetonius called Ennius “semi-Graecus,” because origins and long residence in southern Italy had made Ennius culturally a Hellenized Roman. In spirit, however, as well as in his verse, Ennius could not have been more Roman, even if he had been born within the walls of the city.

Bibliography

Beare, W. The Roman Stage: A Short History of Latin Drama in the Time of the Republic. 3d ed. London: Methuen, 1965. This is a scholarly history of the development of Roman drama with chapters on playwrights and the various genres of dramatic poetry. It discusses Ennius as successor of Livius Andronicus and Naevius and considers the mechanics of drama production as well.

Duff, J. Wight, and A. M. Duff. A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age: From Tiberius to Hadrian. 3d ed. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979. Chapter 3 discusses at some length Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and Ennius, and chapter 5 considers Roman tragedy after Ennius, with emphasis on Pacuvius, Accius, and the praetextae. Analysis of the fragments appears as well as what is known about the lives of the playwrights.

Hose, Martin. “Post-colonial Theory and Greek Literature in Rome.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 40, no. 4 (Winter, 1999): 303-326. Hose addresses the consequences of a defeat of the Romans over Alexander for the history of literature; he discusses the Annals, Ennius, and Ennius’s presentation of Roman history.

Skutsch, Otto. Studia Enniana. London: Athlone Press, 1968. This is a collection, in quite readable English, of previously published articles on all areas of Ennian studies. All were written by Skutsch, and those on the Annals are excellent.

Warmington, E. H., trans. Remains of Old Latin. Vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. This volume, one of four in this set on the earliest Latin writers, contains all the extant Ennian fragments in its first half with English and Latin texts on facing pages.