the anti-
national poet. Naevius sought out for the new subject a new form;
Ennius fitted or forced it into the forms of the Hellenic epos. The
hexameter took the place of the Saturnian verse; the ornate style of
the Homeridae, striving after plastic vividness of delineation,
took the place of the homely historic narrative. Wherever the
circumstances admit, Homer is directly translated; e. g. the burial of
those that fell at Heraclea is described after the model of the burial
of Patroclus, and under the helmet of Marcus Livius Stolo, the
military tribune who fights with the Istrians, lurks none other than
the Homeric Ajax; the reader is not even spared the Homeric invocation
of the Muse. The epic machinery is fully set agoing; after the battle
of Cannae, for instance, Juno in a full council of the gods pardons
the Romans, and Jupiter after obtaining the consent of his wife
promises them a final victory over the Carthaginians. Nor do the
"Annals" fail to betray the neological and Hellenistic tendencies of
the author. The very employment of the gods for mere decoration bears
this stamp. The remarkable vision, with which the poem opens, tells
in good Pythagorean style how the 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