Ennius

Quintus Ennius was an author of Latin poetry and prose who lived and wrote between the second half of the 3rd century and the first half of the 2nd century bce (apparently 239–169 bce). He was born in the trilingual Messapian city of Rudiae, where Latin, Greek, and Oscan were spoken concurrently (as apparently did Ennius himself: cf. Gellius, Attic Nights 17.17). Tradition has Ennius follow Cato the Elder to Rome in 204 bce, after meeting him in Sardinia while serving in the army during the Second Punic War. In Rome, Ennius distinguished himself for his literary and scholarly production in Latin, in which he mastered a cultural and linguistic fusion between the Greek tradition and the fledgling Roman literature. All of Ennius’s works have been lost and only fragments of them have been preserved, all indirectly transmitted within the corpora of other authors’ works; we also have references by other authors to works of which we do not have any fragments at all. His first major achievements seem to have come with the public staging of his tragedies, mostly set in Greece and having original Greek tragedies as models (these were called fabulae cothurnatae). He also wrote praetextae, that is, tragedies of Roman setting and subject, but we have fewer fragments for these than we have for the cothurnatae, and only two titles—Ambracia and Sabinae. Even less is known about his comedies, which do not seem to have been held in high consideration (cf. Volcacius Sedigitus’s canon of comedy), and about whose titles and contents very little information has been preserved. Most of the information we still possess regards Ennius’s last and longest work, the Annals, an eighteen-book epic poem that covered the national history of Rome and its wars from the mythological founding of the city until the contemporary reality of the Punic Wars, with the title Annals (Lat. Annales) possibly alluding to the year-by-year approach of the ancient tradition of Roman annalists. Ennius was the first author to choose hexameter, the Greek meter of epic, to compose a Latin epic poem (the former traditional meter being Saturnian), and for this reason was considered the “father” of Latin epic poetry, thus influencing all following authors (Lucretius, Cicero, Virgil, etc.) by whom he was either praised and taken as a model, or more or less fiercely rejected for his “archaic” language and taste in favor of a more modern style. Apart from plays and epic, Ennius also cultivated many other genres in works that are traditionally referred to as Minor Works.