Nemo me lacrumis decoret, nec funera fletu
Faxit—cur? volito vivus per ora virûm[162].”
The lines formerly quoted[163], which were written by Nævius for his tomb-stone, express as high a sense of his own poetical merits as the above verses; but there is in them something plaintive and melancholy, quite different from the triumphant exultation in the epitaph of Ennius.
To judge by the fragments of his works which remain, Ennius greatly surpassed his predecessors, not only in poetical genius, but in the art of versification. By his time, indeed, the best models of Greek composition had begun to be studied at Rome. Ennius particularly professed to have imitated Homer, and tried to persuade his countrymen that the soul and genius of that great poet had revived in him, through the medium of a peacock, according to the process of Pythagorean transmigration. It is to this fantastic genealogy that Persius has alluded in his 6th satire:—
“Cor jubet hoc Enni, postquam destertuit esse
Mæonides Quintus, pavone ex Pythagoreo.”
From the following lines of Lucretius it would appear, that Ennius somewhere in his works had feigned that the shade of Homer appeared to him, and explained to him the nature and laws of the universe:—
“Etsi præterea tamen esse Acherusia Templa
Ennius æternis exponit versibus edens;
Quo neque permanent animæ, neque corpora nostra,