Studies in the Poetry of Italy, Part I. Roman

nfluence of his literary successor, an influence still more strongly tending toward Greek forms and motives, which the unfortunate N?vi

Calabria, a section which had for many generations been under Greek influence. He was of good local family, familiar with the rough Oscan speech of his native village, with the polished Greek of neighboring Tarentum, where he was probably at school, and with the Roman tongue, which had become the official languag

n train. The poet afterward accompanied M. Fulvius Nobilior on that general's expedition to ?tolia, a privilege which he richly repaid later by immortalizing in verse the ?tolian campaign. He obtained Roman citizenship in 184 through the instrumentality of the son of Fulvius. He was most fortunate, moreover, in enjoying the friends

following picture was intended by the poet as a self-portraiture. The passage is from the seventh book of the "Annals," and has a setting of its own, but may well represent the

called for a man with

nd talk, and all h

day on important af

the Forum wide, or

ld frankly speak of

jests,-could pour

rds, and know they we

e griefs he had shar

cr

whom no impulse

r malice; a schola

peech, with his own

season, yet courteo

d antique lore that wa

earlier customs a

as he of the ancient

when he should talk

s spoke in the midst

wt

-soldier and the soldier-statesman were mutually honored. Upon that sarcophagus of Scipio surmounted by the poet's bust might well ha

r of Roman literature." This work is epoch-making because of its form and because of its important contribution to the development of the Latin language itself. The poet perceived that the native Saturnian verse was

of old the Fauns and bards used to sing, before any one had

ll

o this measure. But this task, difficult as it was, Ennius essayed, and by the very attempt to force the Latin into the shapely Greek mold, he modified and polished that language itself, and handed it down to his literary successors as a far more fitting vehicle of noble ex

vid first-hand perception of contemporary men and events. His active service as a soldier in the Second Punic War especially fitted him to write the story of a warlike nation. His descriptions of wars and stirring events are con amore. He breathed the air of victory in the long series of Roman triumphs following the Second Punic W

Priam to the death of Romulus. This period is, however, not as long as it is usually represented by tradition, for Ennius passes over the three hundred years of the Alban kings

eir growth to manhood, a long fragment on the taking of the auspices by which the sovereignty of Romulus over his

piety of Tullia, and the rape of Lucretia, which precipitated the banishment of the Tarquins. The fourth and fifth books cover the period from the founding of the republic to the beginning of th

ish not; ye need no

ht let us wage our w

sword. Our lives we

mine be Fortune's ple

ide. And to this wo

who is spared by th

I of his freedom a

the wish of the gods

wt

the remaining books, the Macedonian, ?tolian, and Istrian wars, the history being brought down to within a few years of the writer's death. In the last book the old

he twelve books of the Thebaid of Statius, but swept away this great work of Rome's first genuine poet-a work rendered triply valuable because it was the first Roman experiment in hexameters, because in it th