Ennius the Mystic—III

Abstract

These revolutionary conceptions of metre which were encountered in Ennius by his first audience served in the Annales, his most influential work of all, to elevate to a new plane the history of Rome. The word ‘history’ here is important. It is difficult to say in what precise sense the ordinary Greek accepted Homer as history. Certainly Thucydides discusses the Iliad as history, but that is only half of Homer, and even accepting the Iliad with all its gods and goddesses as a literal account of what took place at Troy the listener would be conscious that it was all a very long time ago. But the subject-matter of the Annales was far from being all a very long time ago. Scholars have pointed out that there was precedent in Hellenistic epic for the treatment of historical events in verse, but this is not a subject on which easy generalization is permissible.