Ennius

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Quintus Ennius (239-169 B.C.) was a Roman poet. Called the father of Latin poetry, he is most famous for his "Annales," a narrative poem relating the history of Rome.

Ennius was born at Rudiae in Calabria. He knew three languages or had, as he said, "three hearts": Oscan, his native tongue; Greek, in which he was educated, possibly at Tarentum; and Latin, which he learned as a centurion in the Roman army. While stationed at Sardinia during the Second Punic War, he met Cato the Elder, whom he taught Greek. Cato took him to Rome in 204 B.C.

At Rome, Ennius lived frugally on the Aventine. He supported himself at first by teaching Greek, then turned to adapting Greek tragedies and some comedies for the Roman stage, and he wrote poetry as well. He was a friend of prominent Romans of that time, especially Scipio Africanus and Marcus Fulvius Nobilior and his son Quintus, who gained for him Roman citizenship. Ennius knew the comic poet Caecilius Statius, and Pacuvius, the Roman dramatist, was his nephew.

Ennius was a very versatile poet although, according to Ovid, he possessed more genius than art. The remains of Ennius's works are fragmentary. Of the Annales, the most important part, some 600 lines or about one-fiftieth of the whole, remains. Some fragments are as long as 20 lines.

Naevius had written a historical epic before Ennius, but the special claim to greatness of his Annales is its meter, the hexameter. Henceforth, much of the greatest Latin poetry would use this meter. The poet's hexameters seem crude and clumsy beside Virgil's, often being heavily spondaic, ignoring caesuras and elisions, and carrying alliteration and assonance to extremes. Nevertheless, they can at times rise to a rugged and powerful dignity.

Euripides was a favorite model for Ennius in his adaptations of Greek tragedy. Of the 22 titles of plays known to be his, 3 are from extant tragedies of Euripides. Fragments of his tragedies number about 400 lines.

As a writer of comedy, Ennius was evidently less successful, for only two titles are known. Lesser works include Satires (Latin satura, medley), a work in varying meters on different topics, including criticism of morals and politics, and the first work of its kind; Epigrams; Hedyphagetica, or The Art of Dining; Epicharmus, a didactic poem on nature; and Euhemerus, a rationalization of Greek mythology.

Ennius's contribution to Roman culture was twofold. First, by adapting Greek tragedies he made Greek ideas current at Rome; and second, he had a direct influence on subsequent writers.

Ennius was of a convivial nature if Horace, who said he always composed in his cups, and Jerome, who said he died of gout, can be believed. He was writing until his death, and his version of the play Thyestes was produced the year he died.

Further Reading

A standard reference work on Ennius is The Tragedies of Ennius: The Fragments, edited by H. D. Jocelyn (1967), a comprehensive volume with a Latin text, full explanatory introduction, and extensive interpretative commentary. For more information on Ennius and his place in Latin literature see H. J. Rose, A Handbook of Latin Literature (1936; 3d ed. with a new bibliography, 1961), and Moses Hadas, A History of Latin Literature (1952).

Ennius, Quintus (239–169 BC), one of the greatest and most versatile of the early Roman poets, born at Rudiae in Calabria; since that was an area of Italy partly Oscan and partly Greek, Ennius spoke Oscan and Greek, as well as Latin. He seems to have been in Sardinia (perhaps as a soldier) when he met Cato the Elder, quaestor there in 204, who took him to Rome. There he won a reputation in the 190s for writing tragedy. In 189 he accompanied M. Fulvius Nobilior on his Aetolian campaign (probably in order to celebrate his patron's achievements) and on his return had Roman citizenship conferred on him. He lived in modest style on the Aventine, teaching and writing. Anecdotes told by Cicero connect him with Scipio Africanus, Scipio Nasica, and Ser. Sulpicius Galba. It was at this time that he began the Annales (‘annals’), which, with his tragedies, constituted his principal work. Ennius also wrote comedies, of which only four separate lines survive; fabulae praetextae; saturae (see SATIRE), four books of mixed verse of which seventy lines are extant; Epicharmus, a poem on the nature of the universe; the Hēdyphagētica (‘of sweet eating’), a mock-heroic poem on gastronomy; and a poem in special celebration of Scipio Africanus. The Euhēmerus was a prose work which adopted the rationalist theory of Euhemerus on the origin of the gods. Of his tragedies some twenty titles are known, of which perhaps twelve are derived from Euripides, perhaps three from Aeschylus, and one from an obscure contemporary of Euripides. The fragments remaining allow interesting comparison with the Greek originals, particularly in the case of Medea. The natural ease of the Greek has been replaced by a rather grand and high-flown style, but Cicero's admiration for it is understandable.

The Annales, an epic poem chronicling Roman history in eighteen books, occupied Ennius up to the time of his death. Fewer than 600 lines survive, which do no more than indicate the general scope of the work. The poem inaugurated a new era in Roman literature, being composed not in the saturnian metre used by Naevius and Livius Andronicus (see METRE, LATIN 1) but in the hexameter of Greek epic (see METRE, GREEK 3). To emphasize the connection with Greek poetry Ennius began his work by recounting a dream in which he had been told by Homer that he was the latter's reincarnation. The Annales presented the history of Rome from the time of Aeneas to the wars of the poet's own day, including a series of descriptions of great Romans. The First Punic War was omitted, having been dealt with by Naevius. The events of living memory seem to have occupied the second half of the work. It was from reading Ennius that Roman schoolboys learned about the heroes of old and the Roman virtues. The famous line on Fabius Maximus Cunctator: unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem, ‘one man by delaying restored the state for us’, was much quoted. Clumsy though the hexameters are, the style is grave and sonorous and suited to the poet's grand conception of his subject. Ennius was regarded by the Romans as the father of their literature; Lucretius and Virgil were considerably influenced by him, Cicero admired and quoted him. He reputedly composed his own epitaph:

nemo me lacrumis decoret neu funera
fletu faxit. Cur? volito vivo' per ora
virum.

(‘Let no one honour me with tears or attend my funeral with weeping. Why? I fly, still living, through the mouths of men.’)

Quotes:

"No sooner said than done -- so acts your man of worth."

Ennius
Born	239 BCE
Died	169 BCE
Nationality	Roman

Quintus Ennius (239 - c. 169 BC) was a writer during the period of the Roman Republic, and is often considered the father of Roman poetry. He was of Calabrian descent^[1]. Although only fragments of his works survive, his influence in Latin literature was significant.

Contents 1 Biography 2 References 3 Further reading 4 External links

Biography

Ennius was born at Rudiae, a Messapian town near Lecce. Here the Messapian, Greek, Oscan, and Latin languages were in contact with one another.

Ennius continued the nascent literary tradition by writing praetextae, tragedies, and palliatae, as well as his most famous work, a historic epic called the Annales. Other minor works include the Epicharmus, the Euhemerus, the Hedyphagetica, and Saturae.

The Epicharmus presented an account of the gods and the physical operations of the universe. In it, the poet dreamed he had been transported after death to some place of heavenly enlightenment.

The Euhemerus presented a theological doctrine of a vastly different type in a mock-simple prose style modelled on the Greek of Euhemerus of Messene and several other theological writers. According to this doctrine, the gods of Olympus were not supernatural powers still actively intervening in the affairs of men, but great generals, statesmen and inventors of olden times commemorated after death in extraordinary ways.

The Hedyphagetica took much of its substance from the gastronomical epic of Archestratus of Gela. The eleven extant hexameters have prosodical features avoided in the more serious Annales.

The remains of six books of Saturae show a considerable variety of metres. There are signs that Ennius varied the metre sometimes even within a composition. A frequent theme was the social life of Ennius himself and his upper-class Roman friends and their intellectual conversation.

The Annals was an epic poem in fifteen books, later expanded to eighteen, covering Roman history from the fall of Troy in 1184 BC down to the censorship of Cato the Elder in 184 BC. It was the first Latin poem to adopt the dactylic hexameter metre used in Greek epic and didactic poetry, leading it to become the standard metre for these genres in Latin poetry. The Annals became a school text for Roman schoolchildren, eventually supplanted by Virgil's Aeneid. About 600 lines survive. A copy of the work is among the Latin rolls of the Herculaneum library, the last 2 acts were recently read.

"The idle mind knows not what it wants." - Ennius

"Amicus certus in re incerta cernitur." - Ennius (quoted by Cicero, Laelius 17.64) Translation: "A sure friend shows himself in an unsure time"

References

1. ^ Smith, William (1854), "Rhudiae", Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography, London, http://artfl.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.9:1:149.geography 
   "That author is repeatedly termed a Calabrian (Her. Carm. 4.8; Ovid. A. A. 3.409; Sil. Ital. l. c.; Acron, ad Hor. l. c.)"

Further reading

• Brooks, R A: Ennius and Roman Tragedy (1981)
• Evans, R L S: Ennius in The Dictionary of Literary Biography: Latin Writers. Ed.Ward Briggs. Vol. 211, 1999.
• Jocelyn, H D:

- The Tragedies of Ennius (1967)
- "The Poems of Quintus Ennius", in H. Temporini (ed.) ANRW I.2 (1972), 987-1026

• Skutsch, O: The Annals of Quintus Ennius (1985)

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ennius

• Fragments of Ennius' Annals at The Latin Library; text from Wordsworth (1874), line numbering from Warmington (1935)

Persondata
NAME	Ennius
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Ennius, Quintus
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Roman poet
DATE OF BIRTH	239 BC
PLACE OF BIRTH	Rudiae, Salento, Italy
DATE OF DEATH	169 BC
PLACE OF DEATH

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