[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
Ennius was the fons et origo of all later Latin poets and yet he only survives in fragments. Scholars who have worked hard on his Annales have not accorded the same attention to the rest of his oeuvre, and this book aims to restore the balance. Ennius’ generic range was undoubtedly huge, and even in its fragmentary state it still points to a gigantic achievement. Working on these fragments (often of uncertain origin) is, however, fraught with difficulties, and Jesse Hill speaks for everyone when he asks (p. 94 n. 17): ‘Is it from the Annales or the Saturae? Who speaks? Are they sincere? None of these questions can be answered with certainty’. Robert Cowan tells us (p. 140) that ‘in the gaps between those bleeding chunks, we can only speculate.’ The final chapter of this book strikes a suitably aporetic note with honest admissions such as: ‘the question of where such lines originally belonged within the Ennian corpus is today fundamentally unanswerable’ (p. 304). It is to the credit of the assembled scholars that they make such a good job of this seemingly impossible task.
After a helpful introduction, the opening three chapters look at ‘Multiform Ennius’. Thomas Biggs shows how Ennius writes for and from a multiform city in which he—as an immigrant for whom Latin was his third or even fourth language—was something of an outsider. Rome was a market for everything, including exotic fish, in what Biggs nicely calls ‘ichthyian imperialism’ (p. 19), Greek theogonies (in his Sacra Historia), and Greek legends. Ennius ‘depicts the city in its various lights and … views the urbs from these multiple generically encoded vantages’ (p. 33). Rome is the city of epic heroes—but it is also the ‘city of walks and gardens, of dinners and baths, of memories rarely captured by public monuments’ (p. 33). Gesine Manuwald looks for unity in the multiform generic diversity of Ennius’ work. Here was a Greek-speaking poet adapting Greek sources (and explaining Greek terms and names) for a Roman audience. Philosophy and religion crop up frequently: Telamo mouths some rather Epicurean views on divine non-intervention (fr. 117, see p. 50) while elsewhere we read more traditional views of the gods and the role of fortuna, and Manuwald comments that ‘this ambiguous picture suggests tensions across literary genres between … traditional views … and more rationalistic and “scientific” views of the world’ (p. 51). Sander Goldberg asks: was Ennius a pen for hire? His play Ambracia celebrated Fulvius Nobilior’s Aetolian exploits, and this praise can be seen as promoting virtue rather than bare-faced toadying to the powerful, as Goldberg wisely says (pp. 56–57). That said, Ennius’ link with the Scipios was strong and Sandberg concludes that some works appear to show favour to individuals, which ‘may have served partisan interests’. If this is so, he was not alone as the focus on the ‘extraordinary qualities of extraordinary Romans was from early on the stock-in-trade of Roman poets’ (p. 68).
Alessandro Russo takes on the reception of the Saturae. The process is indeed fascinating: the Saturae were not, it seems, performed as drama or read in schools and yet they survived for several centuries as texts: similarly we only have four measly fragments from the Sotas‚ but Marcus Aurelius had the whole thing three hundred years later. Russo investigates (p. 80) the possible links between Ennius and Terence’s Phormio and the Atellanae of Pomponius. This all raises the question both of both how well-known the Saturae were and how likely the audience of a farce many years later would be to pick up the references.
Jesse Hill contends that Varro’s Menippean Satires reveal an Ennius who is boldly experimental—and a Varro who is happy to help himself to everything Ennian and then mix it up in the smorgasbord of his Satires. Gone is the notion of Varro the ‘romantic conservative’ who used Ennius as the mouthpiece of the good old days: in comes a Varro who can quote epic and tragedy in the same breath (e.g. Men. 225) to show ‘a variety of conflicting Ennian voices’ (p. 95). Above all, Ennius was the inspiration for Varro’s own versatile weaving of poetry and prose and of new metres as reflecting Ennius’ ‘overbrimming multiplicity’ (pp. 98–99) in which the older writer is seen as a stylistic and poetic innovator.
The second major section of the book shifts its focus onto the tragedies. Robert Cowan looks at their corporeality in the light of medical theory. ‘Bodies litter the Ennian stage’ (p. 124) both as suffering humans, but also as the ‘diseased, wounded or fragmentary body that simultaneously emblematizes and symbolizes the precarious nature of the human condition’ (p. 119). Cowan discusses cautiously the clash between the Hippocratic ideas of causation and the supernatural aetiology of suffering (p. 120). Ennius gives us a Hellenization of Roman drama and a Romanization of Greek culture and medicine: the Greek notion of miasma is found in Thyestes’ contagio (Thyestes 303–305), and Cowan well explores Thyestes’ fantasies about Atreus being disembowelled and denied a tomb; Cicero asserted (Tusc. 1.107) that this was illogical as corpses do not feel pain—a point Lucretius also made at DRN 3.870–893.[1] Cowan is right here to call Cicero’s speaker ‘tone-deaf’: denial of a tomb was a standard punishment of the criminal from Homer onwards, and anyway Thyestes is not likely to be thinking straight while he has ‘the undigested chunks of his sons lodged in his intestines’ (p. 134). Ennius also shows us a very Roman ‘field-hospital’ where Eurypylus seeks medical help from Patroclus, and nothing better shows the way he Romanises Greek legend and imagery to promote ‘thinking about the nature of wounds, disease and healing’ (p. 139).
Timothy Moore examines the metrical virtuosity of these plays. Music was clearly important (and remarked on by Cicero), but we can only assess it through the metre. Moore tracks where characters move from a ‘spoken’ metre to a more ‘sung’ rhythm and plots this against the Euripidean originals to show how and where Ennius follows or adapts the Greek original: his conclusion is that Ennius tends to ‘increase the musicality of dialogue scenes’ (p. 154), although he also admits that Ennius stripped the chorus of much of their role, perhaps wishing to replace choral music with the kind of solo singing which Cicero so admired (De Diuinatione 2.113).
Lauren Donovan Ginsberg zooms in on orbitas (bereavement) in the Andromacha. Andromacha’s lament (Andr. 23) became popular, as Cicero (Pro Sestio 121-122) records, and the pathos of female bereavement would always find an appreciative Roman audience. Andromacha’s orbitas is both ‘social death’ in losing her regal status and becoming enslaved and also more literal loss of her city and her husband and Ginsberg shows well that Andromacha uses it of her political orphanhood (‘orphaned of citadel and city’). The surviving fragments do not show her losing her son Astyanax, but it is likely, as Ginsberg tells us, that audience members would be aware of what further pain awaited this grieving queen.
Jason Nethercut looks at the huge field of how Ennian tragedy fed into later Latin. He discusses how little of Ennius there is in the works of Terence as compared to Plautus—although it remains possible that Terence does refer to lines of Ennius which have not survived. He shows the possible links of Accius 358 with both Ennius Medea 95 and two Euripidean sources as well as with Homer (Iliad 3.276–280), but we soon reach the brick wall of saying ‘such speculation is beyond the reach of the evidence’ (p. 205). We are on far stronger ground with Lucretius, who helped himself to the dramatic potential of Ennian tragedy and epic in narrating the sacrifice of Iphianassa (1.80–101)—although he (oddly) does not seem to have made use of Ennius’ play Iphigenia. Lucretius the Epicurean poet presumably had a love-hate relationship with Ennius, who was the enemy peddling mythological and un-Epicurean ideas but also a literary mentor whom he calls Ennius noster at 1.117.
The final section of the book (‘Personal Ennius’) starts with a brilliant chapter on the Sacra Historia. Euhemerus’ ἱερὰ ἀναγραφή is defined by Stephen Blair as an ‘ethnographic travelogue with utopian elements’ (p. 219), complete with a rationalist theology of mortal gods. Many Greeks (such as Callimachus and Plutarch) hated it—as did Jacoby who did not want it included in FGrHist; but Ennius liked it enough to produce his own version and the fragments of this work are (probably) in prose—making it a rival for Cato’s Origines as the earliest Latin prose work and also showing that this polymath really could turn his hand to anything. Blair brings in its political significance in an era where powerful men such as Scipio could flirt with divinisation, although Blair points out that Euhemerus was not espousing the divinity of men but rather the mortality of gods. Furthermore, if there was a model for Scipio’s divinisation it was Hercules rather than any ‘Euhemerized Jupiter’ (p. 225). The man who needed all the Euhemerist help he could get was Romulus, whose apotheosis was possibly an Ennian invention according to Skutsch[2]. Blair suggests that when Ennius has Jupiter rename the Greek αἰθήρ with the Latin Caelum—after his own grandfather—this shows us the writer ‘innovatively mediating between the Greek and Latin cultural worlds’ (p. 228) as well as being a mirror image of Ennius translating Euhemerus’ Greek into Latin. He translates Greek names into their Roman equivalents and he also shows interest in the geography involved, locating theogonic material within the Roman cultural system (p. 231), as Blair shows in the case of Saturn in Latium. There is enough evidence to see Ennius creatively using his Greek sources here to focalise ‘the Hesiodic theogony through the Roman perspective’ (p. 238) and to ‘fuse the cosmically numinous birth of the gods with the familiar sites of the Italian landscape, the cultural patrimony of the Latin language and the weight of Roman history.’ (p. 240)
Anna Chahoud puts the fragments of the Saturae under a philological microscope and shows in detail that the work was polymetric and that it reveals variation of register, style and content, as the poet apes both comic, epic and the new satiric style of writing. Ian Goh picks up the ‘eleven precious verses’ left from the Hedyphagetica. The obvious question here is why (as well as how) Ennius chose to translate this text, and Goh chooses to look at this through the reception of Ennius’ poem in later writers, although he admits that not all mention of fish has one eye on Ennius. Persius’ (6.9–11) quotation may be from the Annales (p. 275), it might not be talking about the place Luna but about the moon, and nothing in Persius is ever straightforward. Further discussion involves oysters—which are mentioned a lot in Latin satires, usually as a sign of the gourmand/glutton—followed by speculation about Lupus in Lucilius’ council of the gods being a sea-bass (rather than a wolf) and about criminals being dragged to their death like fish (p. 287). He ends the chapter with Lucretius 1.370-383, where the poet uses the image of fish moving in water to prove the existence of void.
In the final essay Jackie Elliott looks at those fragments that appear to be speaking in the first-person. Editors usually ascribe epic-derived verses to the Annales but read personal matters such as (e.g.) gout as belonging to the Saturae. This is sensible, and yet Elliott wisely reminds us that we just do not know enough to be sure, and there is always the danger of letting the Annales become what Elliott calls the ‘bully text’ (p. 302). Routinely ascribing fragments to the Annales ‘is unlikely to do justice to Ennius’ capacity as a master-experimenter’—which neatly returns this fine book to where it started.
It is no disrespect to these scholars to say that their work is but the first step on the long road of discovering the value and the riches within the hitherto neglected non-epic writings of this foundational poet. It is to be hoped that this book will inspire them and others to dig ever deeper into the text and the reception of this extraordinary work.
Authors and Titles
Part I. Multiform Ennius:
- Romeing across Genres (Thomas Biggs)
- Generic (Non-)Distinctions in Ennius (Gesine Manuwald)
- Scipio Invicte! Ennius and the Poetry of Praise (Sander M. Goldberg)
- The Reception of Ennius’ Saturae and Varia in Antiquity (Alessandro Russo)
- Varro’s Menippean Ennius (Jesse Hill)
Part II. Tragic Ennius:
- Anatomizing the Ennian Corpus: Medical Theory and the Body in the Tragedies (Robert Cowan)
- Ennian Tragedy as Musical Theatre (Timothy J. Moore)
- Staging Orbitas in Ennius’ Andromacha (Lauren Donovan Ginsberg)
- Ennius Tragicus from Pacuvius to Lucretius (Jason Nethercut)
Part III. Personal Ennius:
- Euhemeristic Translations: Ennius as Interpres in the Sacra historia (Stephen Blair)
- Ennius’ Saturae and the Registers of Personal Poetry (Anna Chahoud)
- Fish Fiddle-de-Dee: The Hedyphagetica and the Poetics of Seafood at Rome (Ian Goh)
- Ille Ego: Ennian First Persons in Epic and Beyond (Jackie Elliott)
Notes
[1] See now also Nathan Gilbert, ‘Cicero’s De Morte’ in: C. Brittain and J. Warren (eds.), Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations (Cambridge 2025), 56-78.
[2] Otto Skutsch, The Annals of Q. Ennius (Oxford 1985), 205 (cited here p. 226).