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Thus, for instance, "I am for Ennius," says one; "because he confines himself to the style of conversation:" "and I," says another, "give the preference to Pacuvius, because his verses are embellished and well- wrought; whereas Ennius is rather too "negligent."
For Scaevola the double truth of Ennius has grown into a triple truth, and there are no less than three distinct religions: the religion of poets, of philosophers, and of statesmen.
But we judge from partial evidence, and we judge perhaps partially. Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius, and Accius, all great poets, have been lost. Lucretius is in the highest, and Virgil in a very high sense, a creator. The chosen delicacy of expressions of the latter are as a mist of light which conceal from us the intense and exceeding truth of his conceptions of nature. Livy is instinct with poetry.
You will remember 348 as the year of the death of Plato, which we took as marking the end of the Golden Age of Greek. In 218 Ennius was twenty-one. He was the Father of Latin Poetry; as Cato the Censor, seven years his junior, was the Father of Latin Prose.
We have seen how during the second century before Christ no attempt was made to reconcile these two views and how they existed side by side in such a man, for example, as Ennius, who wrote certain treatises embodying the most extraordinary sceptical doctrines, and certain patriotic poems in which the whole apparatus of the Roman gods is prominently exhibited and most reverently treated.
To him literature had been everything. We have seen with what attention he had studied oratory rhetoric rather so as to have at his fingers'-ends the names of those who had ever shone in it, and the doctrines they had taught. We know how well read he was in Homer and the Greek tragedians; how he knew by heart his Ennius, his Nævius, his Pacuvius, and the others who had written in his own tongue.
We find, accordingly, that the earlier masters Andronicus, Naevius, Ennius all wrote comedies as well as tragedies, of the type known as palliata, or "dressed in the Greek mantle," that is to say, freely translated or adapted from Greek originals. After Ennius, this still continued to be the more usual type; but the development of technical skill now results in two important changes.
II. It was, therefore, late before poets were either known or received among us; though we find in Cato de Originibus that the guests used, at their entertainments, to sing the praises of famous men to the sound of the flute; but a speech of Cato's shows this kind of poetry to have been in no great esteem, as he censures Marcus Nobilior for carrying poets with him into his province; for that consul, as we know, carried Ennius with him into Ætolia.
DUO ... SENECTUTEM: Ennius is said to have kept a school in his later days, and to have lived in a cottage with one servant only. ETENIM: this word generally introduces either an explanation or a proof of a preceding statement. Here the words are elliptic, and the real connection with what precedes can only be made clear by a paraphrase. 'Ennius seemed to delight in old age.
TRAGIC POETS. Three separate eras produced tragic poets. In the first flourished Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and Ennius; in the second, Pacuvius and Attius; in the third, Asinius Pollio wrote tragedies, the plots of which seem to have been taken from Roman history. Ovid attempted a "Medea," and even the Emperor Augustus, with other men of genius, tried his hand, though unsuccessfully, at tragedy.
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