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. So you see, he came right
upon a Greek cycle; right upon the dawn of what should have been
a new Greek day, with the night of Hellenisticism in between.
And he took, how shall I put it?--the forces of that new day, and
transmuted them, in himself as crucible, from Greek to Roman... A
sort of Channel through which the impulse was deflected from
Greek to Latin...

I think that, thtilled with a patriotism the keener-edged because
it was acquired, he went to work in this way:--He was going to
make one of these long poems, like those (inferior) Greek fellows
had; and he was going to make it in Latin. (I do not know which
was his native language, or which tradition he grew up in.) He
didn't see why we Romans should not have our ancient greatness
sung in epic; weren't we as good as Homer's people, anyhow?
Certainly we were; and a deal better! Well, of course there was
our old Saturnian meter; but that wasn't the kind of way serious
poetry was written. Serious poetry was written in hexameters. If
Greek was his native tongue, he may have spoken Latin all his
life, of course, with a Greek accent; and the fact that he was
sitting down to make up his 'poem' in a meter which no native-born
Latin speaker could hear as a meter at all, may have been
something of which he was profoundly unconscious. But that is
what he did. He ignored (mostly) the stresses and accents
natural to Latin, and with sweet naivete made a composition that
would have scanned if it had been Greek, and that you could make
scan by reading with a Greek rhythm or accent. The Romans
accepted it. That perhaps is to say, that he had no conception
at all of poetry as words framed upon an inner music. I think he
was capable of it; that most Romans of the time, supposing they
had had the conviction of poethood, would have been capable of
it. It was the kind of people they were.

But that was not all there was to Ennius, by any means. A
poet-soul had incarnated there; he had the root of the matter
in him; it was only the racial vehicle that was funny, as you
may say. He was filled with a high conception of the stern
grandeur Romans admired; and somehow or other, his lines
carry the impress of that grandeur at times: t