Ennius

Quintus Ennius (* 239 BC in Rudiae ( Apulia); † 169 BC ) was a writer of the Roman Republic, which is often considered the father of Roman poetry. Although only fragments of his works survive, his influence - especially as a mediator of Greek literature - much of Latin literature: he preferred - in contrast to Naevius ' Saturnian - dactylic hexameter to which was usual by him in the Latin epic.

Life

Ennius grew at least three languages ​​( Latin, Greek and Oscan ). During the Second Punic War, he served as a mercenary in a Calabrian auxiliary troops. In Sardinia, he met Cato the Elder, who persuaded him to go 204 BC to Rome. Here he worked probably as tutor and thereby came into contact with the Greeks friendly circles of the Roman nobility, including Scipio Africanus and the consul Marcus Fulvius Nobilior, who took with him as a " court poet " on his expedition to Aetolia. These influential patrons gave him 184 BC, the Roman citizenship.

Work

Ennius ' tragedies are free adaptations of Greek originals, among other things, by Euripides. His more famous works are Epicharmus, Euhemerus, Hedyphagetica, Saturae and the Annales.

The Epicharmus presents a list of the gods and of the physical processes in the universe. It dreams of poets, he was taken to a place of heavenly enlightenment after his death.

The Euhemerus presents a completely different theological doctrine in seemingly simple prose after the Greeks Euhemerus of Messene and various other religious writers. According to this doctrine were the gods of Olympus no supernatural powers, which actively intervene in the affairs of men, but great generals, statesmen and inventors from ancient times, is their thought after her death in an extraordinary way.

The Hedyphagetica took much of its substance from the gourmet epic of Archestratus of Gela, a work jointly with the Epicureans. The eleven preserved hexameter have prosodic features (ie, accent, pitch, pressure strength ), which are avoided in the more serious Annales.

The fragments of the six books of the Saturae show a considerable variety of metrics: There is evidence that Ennius the metric sometimes changed within a composition. A common theme was the social life of Ennius and his aristocratic friends and their intellectual conversation.

The Annales, his main work in 18 books, is an epic poem covering Roman history from the fall of Troy to the tenure of Cato the Elder as censor in 184 BC. She was a standard text for Roman schoolchildren before she was finally ousted from Virgil's Aeneid.

Since then, the interest of the Romans lost the work of Ennius, so that it is merely survived in fragments.

Expenditure

• John Vahlen (ed.): Ennianae poesis reliquiae. Teubner, Leipzig 1903 digitized 2nd edition 1928, reprint: Hakkert, Amsterdam 1967.
• Henry David Jocelyn (ed.): The Tragedies of Ennius. Univ. Press., Cambridge 1967.
• Otto Skutsch (ed.): The Annals of Quintus Ennius. Clarendon, Oxford 1985.
• Quintus Ennius: Fragments (selection), Latin / German. Selected. , Trans. and ed. Otto Schönberger. Reclam, Stuttgart, 2009. ISBN 978-3-15-018566-7