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ENNIUS THE HELLENISTIC POET
wind-simile is noble and rapid and direct in thought but not in expression
(spiritus Austri imbricitor); his play on nares is ignoble and indirect in expression.
But Ennius was not really aiming to translate Homer; he was a highly
original and eclectic poet. He may pose as Homer in his claim to be the
medium of the Muses, in the general form and texture of his narrative,
in the anthropomorphic presentation of the gods, in his touches of formulaic
diction, 1 and in his similes drawn from Nature; but these were all common coin
current among Hellenistic poets who used the form and expression of Homeric
verse for new purposes. Ennius' frequent editorial comments, direct and indirect,
his didactic tone, the arbitrary pace of the narrative, his stylistic selfconsciousness,
his exploitation of pathos and his gratuitous interest in female
psychology are all features which emphasize the importance of the poeta as the
organizer of his material in an un-Homeric way. He is, as it were, a master of
ceremonies, the priest of the Muses who has both exoteric and esoteric lore to
impart. The first line of the poem (quoted above, p. 68) is constructed of
Homeric tags and has as its literal meaning 'Muses, you who shake great
Olympus with your steps'; but there is also an allegorical meaning, ' Muses,
you who make the great sky vibrate with your steps', an allusion to the
theory of the harmony of the spheres. The Hellenistic poet at play would tell a
tale perhaps trivial or preposterous with a straight face, and with irony and
display. The difference with Ennius is that his subject was of the highest
seriousness and he addressed not only the cognoscenti who knew Callimachus
and Greek philosophy, but also the many.
4. ENNIUS THE ROMAN CITIZEN: HIS VALUES AND APPEAL
The Annales cannot have been an imperialistic poem like the Aeneid. Ennius
died two years before the defeat of Philip of Macedon at Pydna in 167 B.C.; his
adult life did not quite span the whole of that period of fifty-three years, from
220 to 167 B.C., during which Rome rose from obscurity to world power. As
Polybius noted at the beginning of his History, written at Rome in the next
generation, this was one of the most remarkable facts in history (Polyb. 1.1.5);
Polybius already looked back to that time as an age of heroes. Ennius wrote his
Annales in the wake of wars which had caused changes more rapid than was
comfortable or even comprehensible to the Romans: no one in 202 B.C. could
have predicted or looked for the phenomenal successes which Rome had
experienced in world-politics by 188 B.C. It was not the intention or policy
of the Senate to create new provinces or take on commitments outside Italy,
and it was still far from clear during the years when Ennius was writing the
Annales what Rome's precise relationship to the other Great Powers was to be.
1 E.g. olli responJit. . .(i) 33 V =» ROL 31, (2) 119 V = ROL 124, caelum. . .stellis j'ulgentibus
aptum (0 29 V - ROL 59, (3) 159 V - ROL 162 (Macrobius, Sat. 6.1.9).
75
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