mperfect
image of the original of Euripides than a comedy of Plautus gave of
the original of Menander.

Moral Effect of Tragedy

The historical position and influence of Greek tragedy in Rome
were entirely analogous to those of Greek comedy; and while, as
the difference in the two kinds of composition necessarily implied,
the Hellenistic tendency appeared in tragedy under a purer and more
spiritual form, the tragic drama of this period and its principal
representative Ennius displayed far more decidedly an anti-national
and consciously propagandist aim. Ennius, hardly the most important
but certainly the most influential poet of the sixth century, was not
a Latin by birth, but on the contrary by virtue of his origin half a
Greek. Of Messapian descent and Hellenic training, he settled in his
thirty-fifth year at Rome, and lived there--at first as a resident
alien, but after 570 as a burgess(42)--in straitened circumstances,
supported partly by giving instruction in Latin and Greek, partly by
the proceeds of his pieces, partly by the donations of those Roman
grandees, who, like Publius Scipio, Titus Flamininus, and Marcus
Fulvius Nobilior, were inclined to promote the modern Hellenism 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 ha