Quintus Ennius ( c. 239 – c. 169 BC ) was a writer during the period of the Roman Republic, and is often considered the father of Roman poetry.

A frequent theme was the social life of Ennius himself and his upper-class Roman friends and their intellectual conversation.

Ennius was said to have considered himself a reincarnation of Homer.

First mention was in 200 BC by the poet Quintus Ennius.

No complete early Roman tragedy survives, though it was highly regarded in its day ; historians know of three other early tragic playwrights — Quintus Ennius, Marcus Pacuvius and Lucius Accius.

The author of the abridged life of Cato which is commonly considered as the work of Cornelius Nepos, asserts that Cato, after his return from Africa, put in at Sardinia, and brought the poet Quintus Ennius in his own ship from the island to Italy ; but Sardinia was rather out of the line of the trip to Rome, and it is more likely that the first contact of Ennius and Cato happened at a later date, when the latter was Praetor in Sardinia.

Each author ( and work ) in the Roman lists was considered equivalent to one in the Greek ; for example Ennius was the Latin Homer, the Aeneid was a new Iliad, and so on.

Ennius personified the " Roman fatherland " as Roma: for Cicero, she was the " Roman state ", but neither of these are dea Roma.

A contemporary and intimate friend of Ennius, he was born in the territory of the Insubrian Gauls, probably in Mediolanum, and was probably taken as a prisoner to Rome ( c. 200 ), during the great Gallic war.

Cicero says, " This Livius exhibited his first performance at Rome in the Consulship of M. Tuditanus, and C. Clodius the son of Caecus, the year before Ennius was born ," that is, in 240 BC.

According to his own statement ( prologue to book III ), he was born on the Pierian Mountain in Macedonia, but he seems to have been brought to Italy at an early age, since he mentions reading a verse of Ennius as a boy in school.

The first extensive translation of Aesop into Latin iambic trimeters was done by Phaedrus, a freedman of Caesar Augustus in the 1st century AD, although at least one fable had already been translated by the poet Ennius two centuries before and others are referred to in the work of Horace.

With the rediscovery of the text in first-century Rome ( the play was adapted by the tragedians Ennius, Lucius Accius, Ovid, Seneca the Younger and Hosidius Geta, among others ), again in 16th-century Europe, and in the light of 20th century modern literary criticism, Medea has provoked differing reactions from differing critics and writers who have sought to interpret the reactions of their societies in the light of past generic assumptions ; bringing a fresh interpretation to its universal themes of revenge and justice in an unjust society.

The use of double consonants, which has been already pointed out in the Messapian inscriptions, has been very acutely connected by Deecke with the tradition that the same practice was introduced at Rome by the poet Ennius who came from the Messapian town Rudiae ( Festus, p. 293 M ).

Had he been a semi-Graecus, like Ennius and Pacuvius, or of humble origin, like Plautus, Terence or Accius, he would scarcely have ventured, at a time when the senatorial power was strongly in the ascendant, to revive the rôle which had proved disastrous to Naevius ; nor would he have had the intimate knowledge of the political and social life of his day which fitted him to be its painter.

The town was apparently not established until 177 BC, when a colony was founded here, though the harbour is mentioned by Ennius, who sailed from there to Sardinia in 205 BC under Manlius Torquatus.

He was the nephew and pupil of Ennius, by whom Roman tragedy was first raised to a position of influence and dignity.

Like Ennius he probably belonged to an Oscan stock, and was born at Brundisium, which had become a Roman colony in 244 BC.

The following lines of Ennius would not have been felt admissible by later authors since they both contain repeated spondees at the beginning of consecutive lines:

* Fragments of Ennius ' Annals at The Latin Library ; text from Wordsworth ( 1874 ), line numbering from Warmington ( 1935 )

* Ennius ' Annales: translation of all fragments at attalus. org ; adapted from Warmington ( 1935 )

* Ennius: translation of selected fragments at elfinspell. com ; from Specimens of the Poets and Poetry of Greece and Rome by Various Translators ( 1847 )

9 ) laughs at Ennius for this: it is referred to also by Lucretius ( i. 124 ) and by Horace ( Epist.

Already perhaps he had a basic knowledge of Greek, for, it is said by Plutarch, that, while at Tarentum in his youth, he became in close friendship with Nearchus, a Greek philosopher, and it is said by Aurelius Victor that while praetor in Sardinia, he received instruction in Greek from Ennius.

Livy and Ennius are important sources for historical and poetic information, and Homer specifically is declared an important model by Silius who remarks of him at 12. 788-9, " his poetry embraced the earth, sea, stars, and shades and he rivaled the Muses in song and Phoebus in glory.

He was less productive as a poet than either Ennius or Accius ; and we hear of only about twelve of his plays, founded on Greek subjects ( among them the Antiope, Teucer, Armorum Judicium, Dulorestes, Chryses, Niptra, & c., most of them on subjects connected with the Trojan cycle ), and one praetexta ( Paulus ) written in connexion with the victory of Lucius Aemilius Paullus Macedonicus at the Battle of Pydna ( 168 BC ), as the Clastidium of Naevius and the Ambracia of Ennius were written in commemoration of great military successes.

On his Aetolian campaign he was accompanied by the poet Ennius, who made the capture of Ambracia, at which he was present, the subject of one of his plays.

The statement of Pomponius Porphyrion, the old commentator on Horace, that Florus himself wrote satires, is probably erroneous, but he may have edited selections from the earlier satirists ( Ennius, Lucilius, Varro ).

Here Oscan, Greek, and Latin languages were in contact with one another ; according to Aulus Gellius 17. 17. 1, Ennius referred to this heritage by saying he had " three hearts " ( Quintus Ennius tria corda habere sese dicebat, quod loqui Graece et Osce et Latine sciret ).

** Annales by Quintus Ennius ( Roman History )

Ennius continued the nascent literary tradition by writing praetextae, tragedies, and palliatae, as well as his most famous work, a historic epic called the Annales.

According to Ennius, unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem – " one man, by delaying, restored the state to us.

The main literary sources for Servius ' life and achievements are the Roman historian Livy ( 59 BC – AD 17 ), his near contemporary Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Plutarch ( c. 46 – 120 AD ); their own sources included works by Quintus Fabius Pictor, Diocles of Peparethus and Quintus Ennius.

His epic Annales, a narrative poem telling the story of Rome from the wanderings of Aeneas to the Ennius ' own time, remains the national epic until it is later eclipsed by Virgil's Aeneid ( b. 239 BC )

His epic Annales, a narrative poem telling the story of Rome from the wanderings of Aeneas to the Ennius ' own time, remains the national epic until it is later eclipsed by Virgil's Aeneid

In fact, Cruttwell admits " The ancients, indeed, saw a difference between Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius, but it may be questioned whether the advance would be perceptible by us.

However, it has been noted that later poets like Ennius ( by extension Virgil, who follows him in both time and technique ) preserve something of the Saturnian aesthetic in hexameter verse.

Ennius explicitly acknowledges Naevius ' poem and skill ( lines 206 – 7 and 208 – 9 in the edition of Skutsch, with translations by Goldberg ):

The Roman poet Ennius gives the Roman equivalents ( the Dii Consentes ) as six male-female complements, preserving the place of Vesta ( Greek Hestia ), who played a crucial role in Roman religion as a state goddess maintained by the Vestals.

Cicero called these local innovators neoteroi ( νεώτεροι ) or ' moderns ' ( in Latin poetae novi or ' new poets '), in that they cast off the heroic model handed down from Ennius in order to strike new ground and ring a contemporary note.

The earliest example of the use of hexameter in Latin poetry is that of the Annales of Ennius, which established the dactylic hexameter as the standard for later Latin epic.

One example of the evolution of the Latin verse form can be seen in a comparative analysis of the use of spondees in Ennius ' time vs. the Augustan age.

The fragments of Ennius contain a few couplets, and scattered verses attributed to Roman public figures like Cicero and Julius Caesar also survive.

There are signs that Ennius varied the metre sometimes even within a composition.

" The Poems of Quintus Ennius ", in H. Temporini ( ed.

Quintus Ennius wrote a historical epic, the Annals ( soon after 200 BC ), describing Roman history from the founding of Rome to his own time.

In Roman literature it is found as early as Ennius, who, in a lost passage of his Annals, told how he had seen Homer in a dream, who had assured him that the same soul which had animated both the poets had once belonged to a peacock.