CHAPTER VI. EPIC POETRY. ENNIUS—FURIUS (200-100 B.C.)

We must now retrace our steps, and consider Ennius in the capacity of epic poet. It was in this light that he acquired his chief contemporary renown, that he accredits himself to posterity in his epitaph, and that he obtained that commanding influence over subsequent poetic literature, which, stereotyped in Virgil, was never afterwards lost. The merit of discerning the most favourable subject for a Roman epic belongs to Naevius; in this department Ennius did but borrow of him; it was in the form in which he cast his poem that his originality was shown. The legendary history of Rome, her supposed connection with the issues of the Trojan war, and her subsequent military achievements in the sphere of history, such was the groundwork both of Naevius's and Ennius's conception. And, however unsuitable such a consecutive narrative might be for a heroic poem, there was something in it that corresponded with the national sentiment, and in a changed form it re-appears in the Aeneid. Naevius had been contented with a single episode in Rome's career of conquest. Ennius, with more ambition but less judgment, aspired to grasp in an epic unity the entire history of the nation; and to achieve this, no better method occurred to him than the time-honoured and prosaic system of annals. The difficulty of recasting these in a poetic mould might well have staggered a more accomplished master of song; but to the enthusiastic and laborious bard the task did not seem too great. He lived to complete his work in accordance with the plan he had proposed, and though, perhaps, the manus ultima may have been wanting, there is nothing to show that he was dissatisfied with his results. We may perhaps smile at the vanity which aspired to the title of Roman Homer, and still more at the partiality which so willingly granted it; nevertheless, with all deductions on the score of rude conception and ruder execution, the fragments that remain incline us to concur with Scaliger in wishing that fate had spared us the whole, and denied us Silius, Statius, Lucan, “et tous ces garcons la.” The whole was divided into eighteen books, of which the first contained the introduction, the earliest traditions, the foundation of Rome, and the deification of Romulus; the second and third contained the regal period; the fourth began the history of the Republic and carried it down to the burning of the city by the Gauls; the fifth comprised the Samnite wars; the sixth, that with Pyrrhus; the seventh, the first Punic war; the eighth and ninth, the war with Hannibal; the tenth and eleventh, that with Macedonia; the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth, that with Syria; the fifteenth, the campaign of Fulvius Nobilior in Aetolia, and ended apparently with the death of the great Scipio. The work then received a new preface, and continued the history down to the poet's last years, containing many personal notices, until it was finally brought to a close in 172 B.C. after having occupied its author eighteen years. [1] “The interest of this last book,” says Conington, [2] “must have centred, at least to us, in the discourse about himself, in which the old bard seems to have indulged in closing this his greatest poem. Even now we may read with sympathy his boastful allusion to his late enrolment among the citizens of the conquering city; we may be touched by the mention he appears to have made of the year of his age in which he wrote, bordering closely on the appointed term of man's life; and we may applaud as the curtain falls on his grand comparison of himself to a victorious racer laden with Olympian honours, and now at last consigned to repose:—

  'Sicut fortis equus, spatio qui saepe supremo 
  Vicit Olimpia, nunc senio confectus quiescit.'“