Bronze Bust Of A Poet, from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. Long identified as Seneca, it is now generally
regarded as an imaginary portrait of Hesiod; but a recent theory sees it as Ennius (239-169bc), the first great epic
poet in Latin. The statue on which it is based evidently belonged to the second century B.C.
Ennius was a more versatile writer than Plautus or Terence, composing tragedies, comedies, satires, and a number of
minor works in addition to his epic Annals; but it was this last work that represented his greatest contribution to
Latin literature. Covering in eighteen books the history of Rome from Aeneas' flight from Troy down to Ennius' own
day, it was written during the last fifteen years or so of his life. We now have about 600 lines, many of them single
lines and not all of them complete, from a work which may originally have had 20,000 or more. The lines which
have survived have done so because they were quoted by later authors, often to illustrate a linguistic point or an
Ennian reminiscence in Virgil. We do not always know their context, and it is often only in the barest outline that we
can hope to reconstruct the sequence of events in a book of the Annals. But enough survives to make us regret keenly
the loss of the rest. Ennius set the tone for Latin hexameter writing in the high style for the next century and a half.
Lucretius and Virgil were considerably influenced by him, and if we had more of his work we should understand
more of theirs.
Ennius' most important contribution was perhaps the hexameter itself, the traditional metre of Greek epic. He was not
the first to write an epic in Latin: Livius Andronicus had written a translation of the Odyssey, and Naevius had
written an epic about the First Punic War towards the end of the third century. But these authors both wrote in the
jerky Saturnian metre. Ennius introduced the more smoothly flowing hexameter into Latin epic, and to go with the
new metre he moulded a poetic diction which served as the basis for the style of his successors.