llenism and
to reward the poet who sang their own and their ancestors' praises and
even accompanied some of them to the field in the character, as it
were, of a poet laureate nominated beforehand to celebrate the great
deeds which they were to perform. He has himself elegantly described
the client-like qualities requisite for such a calling.(43) From the
outset and by virtue of the whole tenor of his life a cosmopolite, he
had the skill to appropriate the distinctive features of the nations
among which he lived--Greek, Latin, and even Oscan--without devoting
himself absolutely to any cne of them; and while the Hellenism of the
earlier Roman poets was the result rather than the conscious aim of
their poetic activity, and accordingly they at least attempted more or
less to take their stand on national ground, Ennius on the contrary is
very distinctly conscious of his revolutionary tendency, and evidently
labours with zeal to bring into vogue neologico-Hellenic ideas among
the Italians. His most serviceable instrument was tragedy. The
remains of his tragedies show that he was well acquainted with the
whole range of the Greek tragic drama and with Aeschylus and Sophocles
in particular; it is the less therefore the result of accident, that
he has modelled the great majority of his pieces, and all those that
attained celebrity, on Euripides. In the selection and treatment he
was doubtless influenced partly by external considerations. But these
alone cannot account for his bringing forward so decidedly the
Euripidean element in Euripides; for his neglecting the choruses still
more than did his original; for his laying still stronger emphasis on
sensuous effect than the Greek; nor for his taking up pieces like the
-Thyestes- and the -Telephus- so well known from the immortal ridicule
of Aristophanes, with their princes' woes and woful princes, and even
such a piece as Menalippa the Female Philosopher, in which the whole
plot turns on the absurdity of the national religion, and the tendency
to make war on it from the physicist point of view is at once
apparent. The sharpest arrows are everywhere--and that partly in
passages which can be proved to have been inserted(44)--directed
against faith in the miraculous, and we almost wonder that the
censorship of the Roman stage allowed such tirades to pass as
the following:--

-Ego deum genus esse semper dixi et dicam caelitum,
Sed eos non curare opinor, quid agat humanum genus;