Annales (Ennius)
Thus Romulus sees that given to himself alone, approved by auspices, were the base and bulwark of a kingdom.Ennius's Annales was the first epic poem that covered the early history of the Roman state.
(The ending to these three books is unclear; Ennius might have concluded with an epilogue, or detailed Rome's campaign against Antiochus III the Great, c. 192 BC.
[3] According to Pliny the Elder in his Historia Naturalis, it was "on [the] account" of Lucius Caecilius Metellus Denter and his unspecified brother—two Romans whom the poet admired—that Ennius penned the sixteenth book.
[2] Suerbaum and Eck cite "the appearance of deities, speeches, aristeiai, similes, ekphraseis, and the subdivision of events in single days" as decidedly Homeric elements that Ennius injected into Roman historiography.
These include its focus on and reference to "factual aspects" (with the aforementioned scholars citing its emphasis on "cavalry and naval battles"), as well as its use of "autobiographical, meta-literary and panegyric elements".
[2] The scope and size of Ennius's poem was at the time of its penning also "unprecedented"; for instance, both Livius Andronicus's Odusia and Naevius's Bellum Punicum were substantially shorter.
[13] Sander M. Goldberg and Gesine Manuwald postulate that Ennius may have started writing a smaller historical poem that grew until it eventually comprised over a dozen books.
A large reason for this is that much of what is preserved of the Annales comes from Virgilian commentators, who were quoting Ennius's work to compare or contrast it to passages in the Aeneid.
[15] Jackie Elliott, however, points out that many of the extant fragments which were not derived from the quotations of commentators do not display the same "epic" style of either Homer or Virgil.
Thus, she argues, "To the extent that the Annales today seem to the modern reader crucial to the epic tradition, they are the creation of Vergil and of the Vergiliocentric sources.
"[16] Put another way, the understanding of the Annales as decidedly "epic" is largely a post facto one, prompted by its recontextualization in "Vergiliocentric" commentaries on the Aeneid.
[16] Expressing a related sentiment, Goldberg and Manuwald write, "Critics have grown more skeptical of a procedure that postulates echoes [in other poems] and then bases reconstructions [of the Annales] upon them.
"[18] Over time, almost all of the work has been lost, and today only around 620 complete or partial lines remain, largely preserved in quotations by other authors (primarily Cicero, Festus, Nonius, and Macrobius).
[22] Consequently, given the relative dearth of fragments from other books—especially that of the climactic book 15—the two write the reconciliation of "scholarly methods and interpretive desires with the inconsistencies and silences of the fragmentary record" is "no easy task.
Goldschmidt, however, argues that the British classicist Otto Skutsch's book The Annales of Ennius (1985) is the "standard" for anyone interested in examining the fragments of the poem.
[29] As a result, the poem was extensively studied in schools around this time,[29] as Ennius himself was viewed as one of Rome's greatest poets, historians, and writers.
Golderg and Manuwald also write that Ennius' reception during this time is indicated by the zeal with which humanists attempted to collect the fragments of the Annales that they could find.
