Ennius is not merely "the Father of Roman Poetry;" he held also as a man a peculiar and influential position, which we cannot appreciate, without connecting him with his patron and friend, the great Scipio Africanus. Nearly of an age, united by common tastes and a common spiritual enthusiasm, these two distinguished men wrought together for a common object. Their familiarity with Greek culture and knowledge of Greek religious ideas seem to have filled both with a high sense of their position as teachers of their countrymen. Scipio drew around him a circle of aristocratic liberals. Ennius appealed rather to the people at large. The policy of the elder Scipio was continued by his adopted son with far less breadth of view, but with more refined taste, and more concentrated effort. Where Africanus would have sought his inspiration from the poetry, Aemilianus went rather to the philosophy, of Greece; he was altogether of a colder temperament, just as his literary friends Terence and Lucilius were by nature less ardent than Ennius. Between them they laid the foundation of that broader conception of civilisation which is expressed by the significant word humanitas, and which had borne its intellectual fruit when the whole people raised a shout of applause at the line in the Hautontimorumenos—
"Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto."
This conception, trite as it seems to us, was by no means so when it was thus proclaimed: if philosophers had understood it (apas anthropos anthropo oikeion kai philon.—Ar. Eth. N. lib. 9), they had never made it a principle of action; and the teachers who had caused even the uneducated Roman populace to recognise its speculative truth must be allowed to have achieved something great. Some historians of Rome have seen in this attitude a decline from old Roman exclusiveness, almost a treasonable conspiracy against the Roman idea of the State. Hence they have regarded Ennius with something of that disfavour which Cato in his patriotic zeal evinced for him. The justification of the poet's course, if it is to be sustained at all, must be sought in the necessity for an expansion of national views to meet the exigences of an increasing foreign empire. External coercion might for a time suffice to keep divergent nationalities together; but the only durable power would be one founded on sympathy with the subject peoples on the broad ground of a common humanity. And for this the poet and his patron bore witness with a consistent and solemn, though often irreverent, earnestness. Ennius had early in life shown a tendency towards the mystic speculations of Pythagoreanism: traces of it are seen in his assertion that the soul of Homer had migrated into him through a peacock, [5] and that he had three souls because he knew three languages; [6] while the satirical notice of Horace seems to imply that he, like Scipio, regarded himself as specially favoured of heaven—
"Leviter curare videtur
Quo promissa caadant et somnia Pythagorea." [7]
At the same time he studied the Epicurean system, and in particular, the doctrines of Euhemerus, whose work on the origin of the gods he translated. His denial of Divine Providence is well known [8]—
"Ego deum genus esse dixi et dicam semper caelitum:
Sed eos non curare opinor quid agat humanum genus.
Nam si curent, bene bonis sit, male malis, quod nunc abest."
Of these two inconsistent points of view, the second, as we should expect in a nature so little mystical, finally prevailed, so that Ennius may well be considered the preacher of scepticism or the bold impugner of popular superstition according to the point of view which we assume. In addition to these philosophic aspirations he had a strong desire to reach artistic perfection, and to be the herald of a new literary epoch. Conscious of his success and proud of the power he wielded over the minds of the people, he alludes more than once to his performances in a self-congratulatory strain—
"Enni poeta salve, qui mortalibus
Versus propinas flammeos medullitus."
"Hail! poet Ennius, who pledgest mankind in verses fiery to the heart's core." And with even higher confidence in his epitaph—
"Aspicite, o cives, senis Enni imagini' formam:
Hic vostrum panxit maxima faeta patrum.
Nemo me lacrimis decoret nec funera fletu
Faxit. Cur? volito vivu' per ora virum."