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Roman poetry, an import from Greece, cultivated for two centuries by provincials and never acclimatised to Rome till the Empire, traced its origin back to ENNIUS, born at Rudiæ in Calabria. His Oscan blood, combined with a Greek education received at Tarentum, and cemented by Roman citizenship conferred in 184 B.C., rendered him a fit founder of so composite a thing as the poetry of Social Polytheism. By a strange freak of fate, he was brought to Rome in 204 B.C., by the elder Cato, who met him as a centurion in the Sardinian army -- the "semi-Græcus" by the great type of aristocratic nationalism. He gained a plain livelihood on the Aventine by teaching Greek and writing poetry of various kinds. In his later years his friendship was sought by many of the leading men of the day, including Scipio Africanus, and M. Fulvius Nobilior, with whom he served on the Ætolian expedition. Six hundred dislocated lines survive of works which covered the whole field of poetry. Comedies from Menander, tragedies from Euripides, satires of native growth were crowned in his old age by the epic of his country's history from the earliest times to the end of the First Punic War, on which his contemporaries and posterity have agreed to rest his fame. By the desire of his patron Scipio Africanus, his remains were deposited in the sepulchre of the Scipios, and his bust was allowed a place in the effigies of the great house. The works of Ennius existed entire so late as the 13th century. He himself wrote his epitaph, foretelling his immortal fame, as one whose word would be repeated from mouth to mouth for ever.
Living in the second aristocratic stage of Roman history, Ennius embodied the full fruits of Rome's native development, with the germ of the new culture in its crudest form. Divining the right road for his country's poetry, he discarded the native metres of Nævius and Livius Andronicus, and presented with much spirit the Greek hexameter and iambic. It was for his successors to soften the harshness of his diction and polish the verse of Virgil.
In matter as in form, Ennius was the first to strike the keynote of Roman civilization -- progress by incorporation. The Roman People is the hero of his epic; its scattered episodes of legend and history are welded by one destiny of universal rule and culture. Like Homer's greater and truer epic; it arose in the young manhood of its country; unlike it, it looked on the future and not on the past.
Enthusiasm for this future enforced itself by order, perseverance, and deep antiquarian research. It extinguished in the poet's mind the dim fetiches of ancient Rome, and, in spite of Pythagorean transmigration, and a few other traces of old beliefs, became the moving religion of his life.
The later poets carried forward the work of Ennius in concentric, though more or less diverging lines. He may be regarded as a rudimentary Virgil.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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