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 have set
aside that almost comic official parallel between the Homeric
Iliad and the Ennian

Annals as easily as we have set aside the comparison of Karschin
with Sappho and of Willamov with Pindar; but no such development took
place in Rome. Owing to the interest of the subject especially for
aristocratic circles, and the great plastic talent of the poet, the
Annals remained the oldest Roman original poem which appeared to the
culture of later generations readable or worth reading; and thus,
singularly enough, posterity came to honour this thoroughly anti-
national epos of a half-Greek -litterateur- as the true model
poem of Rome.

Prose Literature

A prose literature arose in Rome not much later than Roman poetry,
but in a very different way. It experienced neither the artificial
furtherance, by which the school and the stage prematurely forced the
growth of Roman poetry, nor the artificial restraint, to which Roman
comedy in particular was subjected by the stern and narrow-minded
censorship of the stage. Nor was this form of literary activity
placed from the outset under the ban of good society by the stigma
which attached to the "ballad-singer." Accordingly the prose
literature, while far less extensive and less active than the
contem