Versibu', quos olim Fauni vatesque canebant,
Quum neque Musarum scopulos quisquam superarat
Nec dicti studiosus erat[20].
The contempt here expressed for the metre employed by the older poet seems to be the counterpart of his own exultation in being the first to introduce what he called 'the long verses' into Latin literature.
Another point in which there is some affinity between Ennius and Lucretius is their religious temper and convictions. There is indeed no trace in Ennius of the rigid intellectual consistency of Lucretius, nor in Lucretius any sympathy with those mystic speculations which Ennius derived from the lore attributed to Pythagoras. But in both deep feelings of awe and reverence are combined with a scornful disbelief of the superstition of their time. They both apply the principles of Euhemerism to resolve the bright creations of the old mythology into their original elements. Ennius, like Lucretius, seems to deny the providence of the gods. He makes one of the personages of his dramas give expression to the thought which perplexed the minds of Thucydides and Tacitus—the thought, namely, of the apparent disconnexion between prosperity and goodness, as affording proof of the divine indifference to human well-being—
Ego deum genus esse semper dixi et dicam caelitum,
Sed eos non curare opinor, quid agat humanum genus;
Nam si curent, bene bonis sit, male malis, quod nunc abest[21]:
and he exposed, with caustic sense, the false pretences of augurs, prophets, and astrologers. His translation of the Sacred Chronicle of Euhemerus exercised a permanent influence on the religious convictions of his countrymen. But while led to these conclusions by the spirit of his age, and by the study of the later speculations of Greece, he believed in the soul's independence of the body, and of its continued existence, under other conditions, after death. He declared that the spirit of Homer, after many changes,—at one time having animated a peacock[22], again, having been incarnate in the sage of Crotona,—had finally passed into his own body: and he told how the shade—which he regards as distinct from the soul or spirit—of his great prototype had appeared to him from the invisible world,—
Quo neque permaneant animae neque corpora nostra