Studies in the Poetry of Italy, Part I. Roman

by Frank Justus Miller

Ennius wrote satires and tragedies as we have seen; but it is because of his great epic poem the Annales, the work of his ripe age, that he deserves the high title accorded to him by the Romans themselves—"the father of Roman literature." This work is epoch-making because of its form and because of its important contribution to the development of the Latin language itself. The poet perceived that the native Saturnian verse was rude and unfitted to serve as a vehicle for the highest form of literary expression. His feeling toward this verse is shown in a fragment upon the First Punic War in which he refers to the Bellum Punicum of Nævius:

Others have treated the subject in the verses which in days of old the Fauns and bards used to sing, before any one had climbed to the cliffs of the Muses, or gave any care to style.

Sellar.

From the Saturnian he turned to the hexameter, whose "ocean-roll of rhythm" had resounded in the great epics of Homer. But it was one thing to admire the Greek dactylic hexameter, with its smooth-flowing cadences, and quite another to force the heavy, rough Latin speech into this measure. But this task, difficult as it was, Ennius essayed, and by the very attempt to force the Latin into the shapely Greek mold, he modified and polished that language itself, and handed it down to his literary successors as a far more fitting vehicle of noble expression than he had found it. It is true that in comparison with the hexameters of Vergil and Ovid the lines of Ennius are noticeably rough and heavy; but still it must be remembered that it was the older poet's pioneer labors that made the verse of Vergil and Ovid possible.

The "Annals" of Ennius is an attempt to gather up the traditions of early Roman history and the facts of later times, and present them in a continuous narrative. Ennius was the pioneer in this work, and shows, as he says in the supposed self-portraiture quoted above, a very extensive knowledge of Roman antiquities, as well as a vivid first-hand perception of contemporary men and events. His active service as a soldier in the Second Punic War especially fitted him to write the story of a warlike nation. His descriptions of wars and stirring events are con amore. He breathed the air of victory in the long series of Roman triumphs following the Second Punic War, and infused into his great national poem something of that exaltation of spirit which animated his times, and which raised his work far above the plane which his modest title suggests. The poem sank deep into the national heart, and became a very bible of the race, from which his successors drew freely as from a public fountain.

This poem, the work of the poet's old age, contained eighteen books, of which only about six hundred lines of fragments remain. The first book covers the period from the death of Priam to the death of Romulus. This period is, however, not as long as it is usually represented by tradition, for Ennius passes over the three hundred years of the Alban kings and represents Æneas as the father of Ilia, the mother of Romulus. One of the longest fragments describes the dream of Ilia in which the birth of Romulus and Remus is foreshadowed.

Then follow scattered fragments relating to the birth and exposure of the twins, their nourishment by the wolf, their growth to manhood, a long fragment on the taking of the auspices by which the sovereignty of Romulus over his brother was decided, and at the end a spirited passage from the lamentation of the Romans over the death of Romulus.

The second and third books give a history of the Roman kings after Romulus, with glimpses of the victory of the Horatii, the dreadful death of the treacherous Mettius Fufetius, the disgusting impiety of Tullia, and the rape of Lucretia, which precipitated the banishment of the Tarquins. The fourth and fifth books cover the period from the founding of the republic to the beginning of the war with Pyrrhus, which is described in the sixth book. This contains the fine passage in which King Pyrrhus refuses to accept money for the ransom of captives. He says to the Roman ambassadors:

Gold for myself I wish not; ye need not proffer a ransom.
Not as hucksters might let us wage our war, but as soldiers:
Not with gold but the sword. Our lives we will set on the issue.
Whether your rule or mine be Fortune's pleasure,—our mistress,—
Let us by valor decide. And to this word hearken ye also:
Every valorous man who is spared by the fortune of battle,
Fully determined am I of his freedom as well to accord him.
Count it a gift. At the wish of the gods in heaven I grant it.
Lawton.

The seventh book treats of the First Punic War, which he touches upon but lightly, since this subject had been so fully covered by his predecessor. Then follow, in the remaining books, the Macedonian, Ætolian, and Istrian wars, the history being brought down to within a few years of the writer's death. In the last book the old poet very fittingly compares himself to a spirited horse who has won victories in his day, but now enjoys his well-earned rest in the dignity and inactivity of age.

As we survey these broken fragments, we gain some appreciation of the cruelty of that fate which preserved to posterity the ten tedious books of Lucan's Pharsalia, the seventeen books of Silius' Punica, and the twelve books of the Thebaid of Statius, but swept away this great work of Rome's first genuine poet—a work rendered triply valuable because it was the first Roman experiment in hexameters, because in it the Latin language was just molding into literary form, retaining still much of its early roughness and heaviness, and because of the priceless contribution to Roman antiquities which it could have furnished us.