soul now inhabiting Quintus Ennius
had previously been domiciled in Homer and still earlier in a peacock,
and then in good physicist style explains the nature of things and
the relation of the body to the mind. Even the choice of the subject
serves the same purpose--at any rate the Hellenic literati of all ages
have found an especially suitable handle for their Graeco-cosmopolite
tendencies in this very manipulation of Roman history. Ennius lays
stress on the circumstance that the Romans were reckoned Greeks:

-Contendunt Graecos, Graios memorare solent sos.-

The poetical value of the greatly celebrated Annals may easily be
estimated after the remarks which we have already made regarding the
excellences and defects of the poet in general. It was natural that
as a poet of lively sympathies, he should feel himself elevated by the
enthusiastic impulse which the great age of the Punic wars gave to the
national sensibilities of Italy, and that he should not only often
happily imitate Homeric simplicity, but should also and still more
frequently make his lines strikingly echo the solemnity and decorum of
the Roman character. But the construction of his epic was defective;
indeed it must have been very lax and indifferent, when it was
possible for the poet to insert a special book by way of supplement
to please an otherwise forgotten hero and patron. On the whole the
Annals were beyond question the work in which Ennius fell farthest
short of his aim. The plan of making an Iliad pronounces its own
condemnation. It was Ennius, who in this poem for the first time
introduced into literature that changeling compound of epos and of
history, which from that time up to the present day haunts it like a
ghost, unable either to live or to die. But the poem certainly had
its success. Ennius claimed to be the Roman Homer with still greater
ingenuousness than Klopstock claimed to be the German, and was
received as such by his contemporaries and still more so by posterity.
The veneration for the father of Roman poetry was transmitted from
generation to generation; even the polished Quintilian says, "Let us
revere Ennius as we revere an ancient sacred grove, whose mighty oaks
of a thousand years are more venerable than beautiful;" and, if any
one is disposed to wonder at this, he may recall analogous phenomena
in the successes of the Aeneid, the Henriad, and the Messiad. A
mighty poetical development of the nation would indeed hav