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.

Ennius was born at Rudiae, an old Italian ( predominantly Oscan ) town historically founded by the Messapians.

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

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.

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.

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:

In Roman literature it is found as early as Ennius, who in his Calabrian home must have been familiar with the Greek teachings which had descended to his times from the cities of Magna Graecia.

The examples it includes to illustrate the rules preserve numerous fragments from Latin authors which would otherwise have been lost, including Ennius, Pacuvius, Accius, Lucilius, Cato and Varro.

Quintus Ennius is the poet who is generally credited with introducing the Greek hexameter in Latin, and dramatic meters seem to have been well on their way to domestic adoption in the works of his rough contemporary Plautus.

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 ).

Through the viewing screen of the chronovisor Father Ernetti claimed to have witnessed a performance in Rome in 169 BC of the now-lost tragedy Thyestes by the father of Latin poetry, Quintus Ennius.

Only the titles of three of his plays ( Achilles, Asclepius, and Tantalus ) with a single line of the text, have come down to us, though Ennius freely borrowed from his play about Achilles.

Nothing corresponding to the Greek Anthology is known to have existed among the Romans, though professional epigrammatists like Martial published their volumes on their own account, and detached sayings were excerpted from authors like Ennius and Publius Syrus, while the Priapeïa were probably but one among many collections on special subjects.

* 239 BC – Quintus Ennius, Latin poet and writer, considered the father of Roman poetry ( d. 169 BC )

* Quintus Ennius, Latin poet and writer, considered the father of Roman poetry ( d. 169 BC )

In its earliest form, " grammar school " referred to a school that taught students to read, scan, interpret, and declaim Greek and Latin poets ( including Homer, Virgil, Euripides, Ennius, and others ).

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.

Virgil made use of several models in the composition of his epic ; Homer the preeminent classical epicist is everywhere present, but Virgil also makes especial use of the Latin poet Ennius and the Hellenistic poet Apollonius of Rhodes among the various other writers he alludes to.

In a lost passage of his Annals, a Roman history in verse, Ennius 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.

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.

Additionally, some of these reproduced lines are themselves adapted from works by Virgil's earlier literary models, including Homer ’ s Iliad and Odyssey, Apollonius of Rhodes ' Argonautica, Ennius ' Annals, and Lucretius ' On the Nature of Things.

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.

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 ).

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.

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

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

* 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 )

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

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