they give examples of almost the whole range of beauty of which the Latin language is capable. Two quotations may show his manner as a translator. The first is a fragment of question and reply from the prologue to the Iphigenia at Aulis, one of the most thrilling and romantic passages in Attic poetry—
Agam. Quid nocti videtur in altisono
Caeli clupeo?
Senex. Temo superat
Cogens sublime etiam atque etiam
Noctis iter.
What is singular here is not that the mere words are wholly different from those of the original, but that in the apparently random variation Ennius produces exactly the same rich and strange effect. This is no accident: it is genius. Again, as a specimen of his manner in more ordinary narrative speeches, we may take the prologue to his Medea, where the well-known Greek is pretty closely followed—
Utinam ne in nemore Pelio securibus
Caesa cecidisset abiegna ad terram trabes,
Neve inde navis inchoandae exordium
Coepisset, quae nunc nominatur nomine
Argo, quia Argivi in ea dilecti viri
Vecti petebant pellem inauratam arietis
Colchis, imperio regis Peliae, per dolum:
Nam nunquam era errans mea domo ecferret pedem
Medea, animo aegra, amore saevo saucia.
At first reading these lines may seem rather stiff and ungraceful to ears familiar with the liquid lapse of the Euripidean iambics; but it is not till after the second or even the third reading that one becomes aware in them of a strange and austere beauty of rhythm which is distinctively Italian. Specially curious and admirable is the use of elision (in the eighth, for instance, and even more so in the fifth line), so characteristic alike of ancient and modern Italy. In Latin poetry Virgil was its last and greatest master; its gradual disuse in post-Virgilian poetry, like its absence in some of the earliest hexameters, was fatal to the music of the verse, and with its reappearance in the early Italian poetry of the Middle Ages that music once more returns.
It was in his later years, and after long practice in many literary forms, that Ennius wrote his great historical epic, the eighteen books of Annales, in which he recorded the legendary and actual history of the Roman State from the arrival of Aeneas in Italy down to the events of his own day. The way here had been shown him by Naevius; but in the interval, chiefly owing to Ennius' own genius and industry, the literary capabilities of the language had made a very great advance. It is uncertain whether Ennius made any attempt to develop the native metres, which in his predecessor's work were still rude and harsh; if he did, he must soon have abandoned it. Instead, he threw himself on the task of moulding the Latin language to the movement of the Greek hexameter; and his success in the enterprise was so conclusive that the question between the two forms was never again raised. The Annales at once became a classic; until dislodged by the Aeneid, they remained the foremost and representative Roman poem, and even in the centuries which followed, they continued to be read and admired, and their claim to the first eminence was still supported by many partisans. The sane and lucid judgment of Quintilian recalls them to their true place; in a felicitous simile he compares them to some sacred grove of aged oaks, which strikes the senses with a solemn awe rather than with the charm of beauty. Cicero, who again and again speaks of Ennius in terms of the highest praise, admits that defect of finish on which the Augustan poets lay strong but not unjustified stress. The noble tribute of Lucretius, "as our Ennius sang in immortal verse, he who first brought down from lovely Helicon a garland of evergreen leaf to sound and shine throughout the nations of Italy," was no less than due from a poet who owed so much to Ennius in manner and versification.
It is not known when the Annales were lost; there are doubtful indications of their existence in the earlier Middle Ages. The extant fragments, though they amount only to a few hundred lines, are sufficient to give a clear idea of the poet's style and versification, and of the remarkable breadth and sagacity which made the poem a storehouse of civil wisdom for the more cultured members of the ruling classes at Rome, no less than a treasury of rhythm and phrase for the poets. In the famous single lines like—
Non cauponantes bellum sed belligerantes,
or—