QUINTUS ENNIUS (174 BC)

Epic poet, dramatist and satirist, the most influential of the early Latin poets, rightly called the father of Roman literature.

His epic Annales, a narrative poem telling the story of Rome from the wanderings of Aeneas to the poet´s own day, was the national epic until it was eclipsed by Virgil´s Aeneid.

Because of the place of his birth, he was at home in three languages or had, as he put it, "three hearts": Oscan, his native tongue; Greek, in which he was educated; and Latin, the language of the army with which he served in the Second Punic War.

The elder Cato took him to Rome (204) where he earned a meagre living as a teacher and by adapting Greek plays, but he was on familiar terms with many of the leading men in Rome, among them the elder Scipio.

His patron was Marcus Fulvius Nobilior whose son Quintus obtained Roman citizenship for Ennius. Nothing else of significance is known about his life: Horace´s remark that he never worked at his epic unless well in his cups and St. Jerome´s statement that he died of gout probably stem from Ennius own quip that he never poeticized except when suffering an attack of gout.

Only some 600 lines of the Annales survive. As an epic it lacks unity and suffers from mixing mythological elements with eyewitness accounts of contemporary history.

Ennius also excelled in tragedy. Titles survive of 19 plays adapted from the Greek mostly Euripides; e.g. Iphigenia at Aulis, Medea, Telephus and Thyestes. About 420 lines remain indicating remarkable freedom from the originals, great skill in adapting the native Latin metres to the Greek framework, heightening the rhetorical element and the pathetic appeal (a feature of Euripides that he greatly admired) through skillful use of alliteration and assonance. His plays on Roman themes were Sabinae and if they really were plays Ambrachia (on the capture of that city by Fulvius) ans Scipio.

In the Saturae Ennius developed the only literary genre that Rome could call its own. Four books in a variety of metres on diverse subjects, they were mostly concerned with practical wisdom, often driving home a lesson with the help of a fable. More technically philosophical were two works on the theories of Epicharmus, the Sicilian poet and philosopher. Some epigrams, on himself and Scipio Africanus, are the first Latin elegaic couplets.

Ennius who is credited also with the introduction of the double spelling of long consonants and the invention of Latin shorthand, was a man of wide interests and was conversant with the intellectual and literary movements of the Hellenistic world. He created and did not fall far short of perfecting a mode of poetic expression that reached its greatest beauty in Virgil and was to remain preeminent in Latin literature.

Cicero and others admired the work of Ennius throughout the republican period. Critical remarks appeared in Horace, becoming more severe in Seneca and Martial.