s 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;
Nam si curent, bene bonis sit, male malis, quod nunc abest.-

We have already remarked(45) that Ennius scientifically inculcated the
same irreligion in a didactic poem of his own; and it is evident that
he was in earnest with this freethinking. With this trait other
features are quite accordant--his political opposition tinged with
radicalism, that here and there appears;(46) his singing the praises
of the Greek pleasures of the table;(47) above all his setting aside
the last national element in Latin poetry, the Saturnian measure, and
substituting for it the Greek hexameter. That the "multiform" poet
executed all these tasks with equal neatness, that he elaborated
hexameters out of a language of by no means dactylic structure, and
that without checking the natural flow of his style he moved with
confidence and freedom amidst unwonted measures and forms--are so many
evidences of his extraordinary plastic talent, which was in fact more
Greek than Roman;(48) where he offends us, the offence is owing much
more frequently to Greek alliteration(49) than to Roman ruggedness.
He was not a great poet, but a man of graceful and sprightly talent,
throughout possessing the vivid sensibilities of a poetic nature, but
needing the tragic buskin to feel h