His epic was an exposition of the text he himself devised so effectively:
Moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque:
And it was Ennius who more than any one else kept Roman society upon that foundation.
We happen to be able to test his influence by what he did with the portrait of Pyrrhus. Only a generation before Ennius was born this picturesque enemy of Rome had had a friendly alliance with the Messapian tribe to which Ennius himself belonged. The poet, therefore, had heard much about the king. Pyrrhus, in fact, had some very sympathetic traits of character, a remarkable chivalry, and a certain sense of honor and loyalty such as is often found in the chieftains of primitive folk. These qualities stand out in the characterization of him that Ennius has left us; and these are the outstanding traits that we find in all the later Roman references to Pyrrhus. That Ennius should have responded to these qualities is not strange, but that all the rest of the Romans should thus enthusiastically have lauded an enemy who nearly wrecked Rome is less to be expected. The explanation is of course that what Ennius wrote colored the historic conceptions of all who followed. This becomes evident when we read Plutarch, a Greek, and his biography of Pyrrhus. When drawing upon Roman sources for the Italian campaign of the king, Plutarch paints the same picture as Ennius, but when he draws upon Greek authors in describing the Greek campaigns, he reveals the fact that the knightly hero of the Roman historians had a less charming side which certain close observers at home were well aware of. Like all historians Ennius had his enthusiasms, and he had such power of portraiture that not a trait blurred.
He was also fair. Pyrrhus got his meed of praise, but the opponents of Pyrrhus, Fabricius and Appius Claudius, were characterized with equal sympathy. Of his own contemporaries, Fabius the Slow-goer was effectively portrayed as we have seen, and Cato “in caelum tollitur,” as Cicero affirms, although Scipio Africanus, who was bitterly opposed by these conservatives, became, as he deserved to be, the outstanding hero of the book.
It was entirely appropriate that, for his heroic narrative, Ennius borrowed the dactylic hexameter of the Greeks, but it was after all a daring thing to do, since meters seldom transplant with success. However, Naevius’ use of the native Saturnian had demonstrated its inability to carry heroic narrative. Imagine Paradise Lost crammed into the primitive English rhythms of Langland! The dactylic hexameter was in Greek regularly associated with the epic. It had one disadvantage in its requirement of a larger proportion of short syllables than normal Latin writing contained, but that was overcome by simply permitting more spondees than Homeric custom had enjoyed. This resulted in a reduction of tempo which after all suited Roman military movement. There was another difficulty which was more serious. While Greek verse needed to give little attention to word accent, the Latin word accent was jealous of attention. With the relative fixity of the accent, it was impossible to write Latin dactyls based both upon quantity and word-accent. Ennius nevertheless ventured upon an experiment. That he had a very delicate ear for the demands of the Latin language is proved by the careful adjustments in his dramatic senarii, where adjustments were not easy to make. He would not have foisted impossible dactyls upon Rome. The fact that he wrote quantitative dactyls and continued to write them, and that his Annals lived for centuries is proof that he did not overstep the bounds of good taste. The explanation of his success is probably that the word stress in the Latin of his day was so moderate that a conflict with the ictus was not fatal to aesthetic pleasure if only it fell upon long syllables, and also that during the forty years of dramatic performances at Rome, the ears of the audiences had become trained under the influence of music to disregard such conflicts in the many lyric rhythms, including dactyls. By his sensible modification of the Homeric line, Ennius created as great a resource for Latin poetry as Chaucer did for English poetry, and shaped for Vergil’s use “the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man.”
Ennius began to write tragedies about 200 B.C. at the very time when philhellenism was at its height. Being a man of wide culture who knew his Greek well he readily responded to the general demand for things Greek. Though he produced one play (The Rape of the Sabine Women) on a Roman theme, and a pageantry play called the Ambracia to commemorate the victory of a friend during the war with Aetolia, he seems to have striven chiefly to reproduce on the Roman stage the effects of Euripides’ tragedies. And now that the restraints of poverty had become somewhat relaxed, and the drama had continued long enough to foster a certain amount of skilful talent for its interpretation, he was freer to present his tragedies more nearly in the old Greek manner. It has accordingly been plausibly conjectured[4] that it was Ennius who reintroduced the chorus so that the Greek plays might be given without cutting. There is no reason for supposing that the choral song in the Thyestes (written in bacchiacs) or the one in the Medea (octonarii) or the one in the Iphigenia (septenarii) were recited by a single singer. It is clear from the fragments that in several of his plays, notably in the Achilles, the Eumenides, the Hector, and the Hecuba, choral groups were actually participants in the plays as they had been in the Greek originals. And since in the plays of his successor, Accius, it can be demonstrated that a chorus sang, we ought to accept the reasonable interpretation of the Ennian fragments and attribute to this philhellenist the importation of choral song into Roman tragedy. Ennius, however, deferred to Roman taste so far as the rhythms were concerned. He adhered largely to the lyric meters which Livius and Naevius had popularized, and seldom attempted to employ the more intricate systems of the Greeks.[5] That Ennius was as successful in his tragedies as in his epic is adequately proved by the fact that many of his plays were still being produced a century after his death and were avidly read by men like Cicero.
Pacuvius, the nephew and successor of Ennius, did not write many plays. From the little that remains of his work we should judge that he preferred themes somewhat off the beaten track and that in choosing plays that contained heterodox discussions of ethical themes, he, too, felt the influence of the new Greek learning and kept in mind the interests of the intellectualist at Rome. The grammarians have also noticed the fact that his lyric meters paid more attention to Latin word stress than those of his predecessors.[6] They cite particularly his care in composing anapaests with caesuras in such a way that long initial syllables fell under the ictus. These anapaests in fact read like dactyls with an anacrusis of two shorts at the beginning. This innovation decidedly proves that the poet had a precise ear and desired to attain harmonious effects. His successors showed that they appreciated his innovation, but they occasionally used the old turbid lines to express emotional excitement.
The most successful of the writers of tragedy was Accius, a poet who spanned the era between the Gracchans and the Social War. We have fragments of more than forty tragedies from his busy pen, and many of his plays were re-staged in Cicero’s day. He was the favorite of the great actors, Aesopus and Roscius. He did not depart far from the customs laid down by Ennius in respect to meters, music, and chorus, but the fact that he freely readapted the Greek plays which furnished themes to his predecessors can only mean that he used the same liberty in giving his own interpretation to old plots that Euripides had used in treating anew the myths that had been staged by Aeschylus and Sophocles. We happen to know from the remarks of Terence that convention did not permit the staging of more than one paraphrase of any given Greek play. When, therefore, Accius writes plays upon familiar themes we must assume that he is offering something essentially original in his interpretation of the old plot. In fact we find good evidence of his original treatment in the fragments. So, for instance, in his Antigone he changed the personnel of the chorus (as Ennius had done in the Iphigenia), which implies that the purpose of the play was altered. It is also clear that Accius made free to disregard the conventional unities of place and time, for in the Brutus there are scenes laid in Gabii, in Ardea, and in Rome.