Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/468

Rh 448 ENNIUS poem, in which he seems to have given various details of his personal history, he mentions that he was in his 67th year at the date of its composition. He compared himself, in contemplation of the close of the great work of his life, to a gallant horse which, after having often won the prize at the Olympic games, obtained bis rest when weary with age. A similar feeling of pride at the completion of a great career is expressed in the memorial lines which he composed to be placed under his bust after death, &quot; Let no one weep for me, or celebrate my funeral with mourning ; for I still live, as I pass to and fro through the mouths of men.&quot; From the impression stamped on his remains, and from the testimony of his countrymen, we think of him as a man of a robust, sagacious, and cheerful nature (Hor. Ep. ii. 1, 50; Cic. De Sen. 5); of great industry and versatility ; combining imaginative enthusiasm and a vein of religious mysticism with a sceptical indifference to popular beliefs and a scorn of religious imposture; and tempering the grave seriousness of a Roman with a genial capacity for enjoyment (Hor. Ep. . xix. 7). We may realize the nature of his relation to such men as Fulvius Nobilior, and his personal bearing towards them, by a passage quoted from his Annals (Gell. xii. 4), in which he is said, on the authority of the grammarian yElius Stilo (a contemporary of Lucilius, and one of Cicero ; s teachers), to have drawn his own portrait under the figure of a confidential friend of the Roman general Servilius. This friend is introduced as being sent for by Servilius during a battle, and is described as one &quot; whom he (Servilius) gladly made the sharer of his table, his talk, and his cares, when tired out with speaking on great affairs of state in the broad forum and august senate, one with whom he could frankly speak about Berious matters or jest about trifles, to whom he could safely confide all that he cared to utter, with whom he had much hearty entertainment alone and in society, one whose nature could never be prompted to any baseness through levity or malice, a learned, loyal, pleasant man, contented and cheerful, of much tact and courtesy, choice in his language, and of few words, with much old buried lore, with much knowledge of men, and much skill in divine and human law, who knew well when to speak and when to be silent.&quot; His career as a writer began at a great epoch o the national life, the end of the second Punic war. The self- confident and triumphant spirit produced by the successful result of that struggle may be discerned in the exuberant vitality and animal spirits of the comedies of Plautus, whose period of most vigorous production falls in the years between the end of the var and his death in 184 B.C. Morenearly contemporary with Ennius was CaBcilius Statins, the Tnsubrian Gaul, whom Roman critics ranked as a greater comic dramatist than Plautus or Terence. If weight may be attached to the phrase in which Horace repeats the criticism of the Augustan age, &quot; Vincere Coecilius gravitate,&quot; he must have resembled him in temper also more than the older dramatists. Till the appearance of Ennius, Roman literature, although it had produced the epic poem of Naevius and some adaptations of Greek tragedy, had been most successful in comedy. Nasvius and Plautus were men of thoroughly popular fibre. Nsevius suffered for his attacks on members of the aristocracy, and, although Plautus carefully avoids any direct notice of public matters, yet the bias of his sympathies is indicated in several pass ages of his extant plays. Ennius, on the other hand, was by temperament in thorough sympathy with the domi nant aristocratic element in Roman life and institutions. Und?r his influence literature became less suited to the popular taste, more specially addressed to a limited and cultivated class, but at the same time more truly expressive of what was greatest and most worthy to endure in the national sentiment and traditions. With the many-sided activity which characterized him, he attempted comedy, but with so little success that, in the canon of Vclcatius Sedi- gitus he is mentioned, solely as a mark of respect &quot; for his antiquity,&quot; tenth and last in the list of comic poets. The names of only one or two of his comedies are known. He may be regarded also as the inventor of Roman satire, in its original sense of a &quot;medley &quot;or &quot;miscellany,&quot; although it was by Lucilius that the character of aggressive and cen sorious criticism of men and manners was first imparted to that form of literature. The word &quot; satura &quot; was originally applied to a rude scenic and musical performance, exhibited at Rome before the introduction of the regular drama. The saturse of Ennius were collections of writings on vari ous subjects, and written in various metres, and contained in four or, perhaps, six books. Among these were included metrical versions of the physical speculations of Epichar- mus, of the gastronomic researches of Archestratus of Gela (&quot; Heduphagetica&quot;), and, probably, of the rationalistic doctrines of Euhemerus. It may be noticed that all these writers whose works were thus introduced to the Romans were Sicilian Greeks. Original compositions were also con tained in these satura}, and among them the panegyric on Scipio, to which Horace refers in the phrase &quot; Calabrre Pierides &quot; (Od. iv. 8, 22). The satire of Ennius seems to have resembled the more artistic satire of Horace in its record of personal experiences, in the occasional introduc tion of dialogue, in the &amp;gt;;-? made of fables with a moral application, and in the didactic office which it assumed. But the chief distinction of Ennius was gained in tragic and narrative poetry. He was the first to impart to the Roman adaptations of Greek tragedy the masculine dignity, pathos, and oratorical fervour which continued to animate them in the hands of Pacuvius and Accius, and which, when set off by the acting of yEsopus, called forth vehement applause in the age of Cicero. The titles of about twenty-five of his tragedies are known to us, and a considerable number of fragments, varying in length from a few words to about fifteen lines, have been preserved. These tragedies were for the most part adaptations and, in some cases, translations from Euripides. One or two were original dramas, of the class called &quot;prsetextatre,&quot; i.e., dramas founded on Roman history or legend. The heroea and heroines of the Trojan cycle, such as Achilles, Ajax, Telamon, Cassandra, Andromache, were prominent figures in some of those adapted from the Greek. Several of the more important fragments are found in Cicero, who expresses a great admiration of the manly fortitude or dignified pathos (&quot; O poema tenerum et moratum atque molle &quot;) of the passages which he quotes. Although it is more difficult to judge, from unconnected fragments, of the genius of a dramatic than of any other kind of poet, yet in these remains of the tragedies of Ennius we can trace indica- tionsof strong sympathy with the nobler and bolder elements of character, of vivid realization of impassioned situations, and of sagacious observation of life. The frank bearing, fortitude, and self-sacrificing heroism of the best type of the soldierly character find expression in the persons of Achilles, Telamon, and Eurypylus; and a dignified and pas sionate tenderness of feeling makes itself heard in the lyrical utterances of Cassandra and Andromache. The language is generally nervous and vigorous, occasionally vivified with imaginative energy. But it flows less smoothly and easily than that of the dialogue of Latin comedy. It shows the same tendency to aim at effect by alliterations, asson ances, and plays on words. The rudeness of early art is most apparent in the inequality of the metres in