Introduction - Ennius Over-Annalized

Summary

This pithy Introduction justifies the existence of the volume and explains why its contributors do not apply the term “minor works” to Ennius’ corpus. It then provides an overview of the diversity of this corpus, zooming in on the remains of his comedy as an example of what is not quite lost, and briefly shows that Ennius deeply influenced the Roman literary tradition as a multiform author (not just as an epicist). The Introduction closes by explaining the dispensation of the volume and what its contributors achieve.

The twenty-first century loves Ennius. New monographs, new edited volumes, new commentaries, new editions, new Loebs – perhaps no period since the days of Fronto and Aulus Gellius has seen so many people writing about the father of Latin literature at the same time.¹ And all this attention has been good for him: gone (or at least unfashionable) is Ennius the hirsute versifier; now we are getting to know a New Ennius, a sophisticated, philhellenic revolutionary, more accessible than ever to an Anglophone audience. Yet literary critics of the twenty-first century have focussed overwhelmingly on just one text in the poet’s fragmentary corpus – the epic Annales. Witness, for instance, the three edited volumes on Ennius to appear so far this century (Breed and Rossi 2006, Fitzgerald and Gowers 2007, and Damon and Farrell 2020): all of them excellent, all of them focussed on Ennian epic.² The New Ennius is an Epic Ennius, and the present volume hopes to redress this imbalance, recognizing and celebrating the author in all his idiosyncratic diversity.

Ennius Beyond Epic is the first collection of essays to focus on Ennius as an author of non-epic works. The Annales is obviously a crucial text in the Latin literary tradition and should remain central to our conceptualization of that author. But Ennius was also a tragedian, a satirist, a prose mythographer-historian, a seafood connoisseur, and more; and in fact almost as much text from Ennius’ non-epic corpus survives as from his Annales.³ This volume contextualizes pater Ennius within the wider spectrum of daring literary accomplishments that defined him in Roman antiquity, and that ought still to define him now. Our goal isn’t to de-centre the Annales but to enrich the received picture of its author – to affirm that the New Ennius is best seen as the author of a varied and complex corpus, not just of one epic poem.⁴

The incredible diversity of Ennius’ literary accomplishments is often understated, as modern scholars lump many of his creative experiments together under the title of “minor works,” vel sim. This is a convenient bracketing, and even has some limited precedent in antiquity (note Pliny’s reference to Ennian versiculi at Ep. 5.3.2–6 = T 68), but terms like minora – even with the customary scare-quotes – inevitably marginalize a considerable number of our Ennian fragments and conceal the richness of the author’s creative output. There is no reason to think that Ennius himself saw works like the Saturae or Sacra historia as minor, secondary, or peripheral. Quite the opposite: to the extent that the former was apparently the inaugural work of a long-lived Roman genre and the latter was perhaps even the first prose history in Latin (as Blair tentatively suggests in Chapter 10 of this volume), both of these texts proved to be deeply innovative and influential.⁵ Once the label “minor works” is created as an intellectual category, it generates a suggestion of secondariness and of diminished importance, regardless of the relevant texts’ length: the term has implications about size, substance, intellectual value, and weight of subsequent impact. As a result, the term also limits the potential for sustained scholarly engagement. We cannot be certain how Ennius thought of himself, but we can see that in antiquity his influence was felt in almost every form and genre he attempted and in all of those he created. It’s only because of the fragmentary condition of his corpus that the concept of a “Minor Ennius” has continued to exist. “Minor Ennius” no longer has a place in modern scholarship.⁶

With the exception perhaps of Cicero and Varro, the range of Ennius’ literary output was never equalled by subsequent Latin authors. Some of these works are only hinted at in what survives. As a detailed example, we can consider here Ennian comedy, which is not otherwise discussed in this collection. There is strong evidence that among Ennius’ dramatic works were comedies, likely written in the same decades that Plautus’ plays were first being performed. Two titles survive. One of them, Pancratiastes, is the Greek word for an athlete who competes in the pankration, a kind of mixed martial arts. Plays of this title by the Greek poets Alexis and Philemon were written, and it is likely that Ennius adapted one of these to Latin in the same way that Plautus, Terence, and other authors of fabulae palliatae adapted their plays from Greek originals. Like Terence, Ennius makes the point of preserving the Greek title. One fragment points to a comic routine familiar from Plautus and Terence. We do not know to what extent the comic possibilities of door knocking were exploited (Brown 1995), but there are indications of some engagement with the palliata tradition: quis est qui nostris foribus tam proterviter? (“Who is he who <knocks> so boldly at our door?”, Pan. 3).⁷ The speaker is unknown, and we can only hypothesize that it is the title character who knocks proterviter, a unique word preserved here by Nonius instead of the more familiar proterve (which Plautus uses in a door-knocking scene at Truculentus 256).⁸ As John Wright incisively observed, the palliata tradition expresses itself uniformly across the extant plays and fragments, with Plautus very much embodying the mainstream tradition and Terence introducing radical variation.⁹ But perhaps here, with the hapax adverb proterviter, we can see a flash of Ennius’ love of innovation and variety, which itself might anticipate Terence’s radicalism (cf. other Ennian hapax legomena at, e.g., Alc. 10, Sat. 4 (with Chahoud, Chapter 11 in this volume), Ann. 220).¹⁰

The reconstructed title of the second comedy, Caupuncula, likely refers to a woman working in a tavern. Although often treated as another fabula palliata, the comedy’s Latin title (and not Latinized Greek) and indeed its meaning urge an association with the shadowy Roman genre of fabula tabernaria. Tabernariae (“shop-comedies” or “private-house-comedies”) point to ordinary, working-class situation comedies in an identifiable workplace, and the term seems often to be used as a synonym for fabula togata, a comedy set in Rome and not an adaptation from a Greek original as with the palliata.¹¹ Whether the title character is a dancer or the tavern-keeper, there is humorous potential if it is she that is being described in Com. inc. 5 (Isid. Orig. 1.26.1–2):¹² a woman who makes herself available to all but has a distinct means of flirting with different customers:

quasi in choro pila

ludens datatim dat se et commune facit.

alium tenet, alii adnutat, alibi manus

est occupata, alii pervellit pedem,

alii dat anulum spectandum, a labris

alium invocat, cum<que> alio cantat; adtamen

aliis dat digito litteras.

As if playing with a ball in a group

she offers herself from hand to hand and shares herself freely.

She holds one, nods to another, elsewhere a hand

is busy, one she pinches at the foot,

to another she gives a ring to look at, from her lips

she summons one, and she sings with yet another; still

she makes letters with her fingers for others.

It is a dizzying array of means of seduction, and the straightforward description suggests that it is successful. Isidore’s condemnation of her as quaedam impudica (“some unchaste girl”) might not reflect the original context. Although he cites the passage believing the last line refers to a kind of sign language, if we understood the fragment’s wider context, we might more naturally associate it with the short messages written with the dregs of wine, described by Ovid (Ars Am. 1.571–72):

blanditiasque leves tenui perscribere vino,

     ut dominam in mensa se legat illa tuam.

… and write sweet nothings with a thread of wine,

so on the table she may read that she’s your mistress.

Whoever is being described in Com. inc. 5, she is presented as being in control, a docta puella whose frankness feels sexier and more risqué than almost anything comparable in Plautus or Terence.¹³ These are treasured hints of how Ennius generated humour, even though it was not as a comedian that he established his lasting reputation.¹⁴

By the first century bce, Ennius held a place as the paradigmatic “classic” tragedian and epicist in Latin. Writing to Augustus, Horace begins his catalogue of dramatists: Ennius et sapiens et fortis et alter Homerus (“Ennius, wise and powerful – a second Homer,” Epist. 2.1.50). A revered writer is of course wise, but calling him fortis (powerful or vigorous) seems to blur a quality of his writing with a quality of the man. Pater Ennius is framed in much the same way that Aeschylus is in Aristophanes’ Frogs: hypermasculine, almost a force of nature (cf. Frogs 804, where Aeschylus drops his head and glowers like a bull). The phrase alter Homerus could also be used to describe Aeschylus, to the extent that it recognizes Ennius’ status as a grandfather figure of Roman drama, in the same way that Aeschylus was of Athenian tragedy. This is the view presented in the epitaph of “Pompilius,”¹⁵ which positions that tragedian as the literary grandchild of Ennius, and Ennius as a direct recipient of inspiration from the Muses: Ennius [sc. discipulus] Musarum (“Ennius [a pupil] of the Muses,” Varro, Men. 356 = T 3). It’s as if Ennius’ artistic output had no human predecessor, and by drawing on all the Muses, Ennius recognized no partiality in the genres with which he succeeded. Obviously, neither Aeschylus nor Ennius was actually the first dramatist in their respective language: the legendary Thespis held this place for the Greeks, and Livius did for the Romans (as Horace knew; Epist. 2.1.62). Both Aeschylus and Ennius achieved such a canonical status that the fact that they were not first practically ceased to matter: each playwright’s reception involved the rewriting of literary history.¹⁶

Of course, drama is not the only genre at issue in the passage from Horace: the phrase alter Homerus at Epist. 2.1.50 is clearly a reference to the famous dream that opened Ennius’ Annales, especially given Horace’s mention of somnia Pythagorea at Epist. 2.1.52, and the description of that poet as et sapiens et fortis at Epist. 2.1.50 likewise nods to Ennius’ epic self-representation (cf. Ann. 211–12 and 522–23). Yet when the phrase appears in a passage devoted to the development of drama at Rome,¹⁷ Horace’s hexameters certainly do not present Ennius as an epicist alone. The Ennius of the first century bce was an Ennius beyond epic.¹⁸

Ennius defines the canon of tragic and epic writing; he shapes it and provides a pedigree for those coming after. When literary theorist R. G. Collingwood imagined the intersection of art and accident in 1938, he spoke of the improbability that “if a monkey played with a typewriter … he would produce … the complete text of Shakespeare” (1938: 126). The “infinite monkey theorem” is always framed in English with reference to Shakespeare. For Jorge Luis Borges writing in Spanish, it was Cervantes (“Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,” in 1939). For Cicero, the equivalent point of reference was Ennius the tragic-epic poet, as two anecdotes show.¹⁹ The first ties Ennius to the Annales (Cic. Nat. D. 2.93 = T 32):

… si innumerabiles unius et viginti formae litterarum, vel aureae vel qualeslibet, aliquo coiciantur, posse ex iis in terram excussis Annales Enni ut deinceps legi possint effici; quod nescio an ne in uno quidem versu possit tantum valere fortuna.

… if countless shapes of the twenty-one letters of the alphabet, of gold or whatever, were thrown together in some container, Ennius’ Annals could be constructed and then read from those scattered on the ground. I doubt that chance could have that ability for even a single verse.

The second canonizes Ennius as a tragedian, celebrating his Andromacha (Cic. Div. 1.23 = T 34):

sus rostro si humi A litteram impresserit, num propterea suspicari poteris Andromacham Enni ab ea posse describi?

Should a sow trace the letter A on the ground with her snout, surely you could not therefore suspect that Ennius’ Andromacha could be written out by her?

Whether improbability is framed in terms of the random scattering of letters or the whims of a rooting pig (typewriters and monkeys, mutatis mutandis), the point is that Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Ennius achieve their position within a literary canon being acknowledged over time as the pre-eminent influential poetic voice, and not the haphazard arrangement of atoms. For our purposes, what is significant is the fact that, in the first century bce, Ennius’ distinctive and influential voice was constituted by both his tragedies and his epic.²⁰

Ennius’ tragedies continued to be performed at least into the late Republic, continuing both as literary texts and as part of the performance repertoire. Indeed, another anecdote points to the intimate association that the music might hold for an audience member (Cic. Acad. 2.20 = T 26):

quam multa quae nos fugiunt in cantu exaudiunt in eo genere exercitati, qui primo inflatu tibicinis Antiopam esse aiunt aut Andromacham, cum id nos ne suspicemur quidem.

How much of what escapes us in singing do those hear who are trained in that genre, who at the first notes of the piper say that this is “Antiopa” or “Andromacha,” while we do not have even an idea of this.

The rhetorical point is lost if this is not in some sense literally true, even when framed for the trained ear of the music connoisseur. Today we might be able to identify the opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night” (“one of the most iconic sounds in The Beatles’ output”²¹) because it is distinctive and enigmatic, possessing a haunting imbalance that is euphonious and unique. It’s not clear that the chord will still be familiar and equally distinctive a century from now. The first chord of the fanfare to John Williams’ Star Wars theme is perhaps equally familiar, possessing an orchestration that is recognizable because it has saturated global culture. Does this example explain the familiarity Cicero describes better? If so, the parallel points to the persistence of an Ennian script in the tragic performance repertoire (again, Andromacha, which is here paired with Pacuvius’ Antiopa, another play in the performance repertoire). The parallel also identifies discrete performance factors, including the instrumentation, and the continued presence of the play in the cultural life of the Roman Republic. It would seem that Cicero at least believed he was hearing the same musical setting as had been played when the play was written.

Many mysteries remain. What to make of the claim by Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae (= Origines) that vulgares notas Ennius primus mille et centum invenit (“Ennius was the first to devise 1,100 common symbols,” Orig. 1.22.1 = T 108)? This is written some 800 years after Ennius lived, and it is the only indication of this unfathomable record. Are the vulgares notae “apparently stenographic abbreviations,” as Goldberg and Manuwald suggest?²² They could equally be musical symbols, novel forms of punctuation, or an expansion of Aristarchus’ editorial symbols. Was there a list? Did subsequent writers use these symbols, or was this a private language for Ennius himself? It is not even clear whether we would recognize such a list if we found it. Just a rumour of such a document is informative, however. It demonstrates the perennial appeal of the poet-playwright-satirist-historian-philosopher-miscellanist. It shows another direction in which his mind might have turned, at some point in his career: creating a tool for others to use as well as for himself. Whatever the phrase meant to Isidore, whatever convenience the signs may have provided to those for whom they were intended, and whether or not they even existed, the idea of vulgares notae points to additional layers of meaning that lie under the surviving texts. Hints of greater depth and interpretative richness demand to be deciphered.

The thirteen chapters in this collection provide that interpretative depth. They are grouped into three parts, each of which is defined by different (but overlapping) visions of Ennius the beyond-epic poet. Part I, “Multiform Ennius,” borrows its title from a passage of Fronto, which itself forms something of a leitmotif in this book.²³ These initial chapters attend to a simple but important point: even in its ruined state, Ennius’ literary corpus is characterized by a generic multiplicity virtually unparalleled in Roman literature. Taking stock of this fact, the contributors to Part I discuss Ennius as a hybrid poetic figure. The two opening chapters by Thomas Biggs (“Romeing across Genres”) and Gesine Manuwald (“Generic (Non-)Distinctions in Ennius”) form a natural pair, in that both seek to consider the Ennian corpus in its unruly totality. Biggs elucidates the many different ways in which Ennius constructs the city of Rome, allowing us to see an Ennian urbs that is, like the poet himself, multiple – defined as much by bathhouses and neighbourhood streets as it is by temples and imposing monuments. Manuwald homes in on themes shared across Ennius’ complete poetic output, suggesting, for instance, that religion and natural philosophy are recurrent Ennian interests, from the tragedies to the Annales to Epicharmus. If Biggs makes novel observations about the diversity of Ennius’ corpus, then Manuwald concentrates our attention on certain aspects of unity within it.

There are three more chapters in “Multiform Ennius.” In “Scipio Invicte! Ennius and the Poetry of Praise,” Sander M. Goldberg takes up a new and pressing question: if, as recent scholarship has demonstrated, the Annales celebrated Rome as a pluralistic collective, then what do we do with Ennius’ (earlier?) encomiastic poems which seem more narrowly partisan? Goldberg’s answer looks towards Ennian multiplicity: there is not one ideology in the Ennian corpus, he suggests, but a variety of different, even competing ideologies. Ennius’ encomiastic corpus is marked by ideological variety and growth. Provocatively, Goldberg’s chapter ends with the claim that, whereas the Annales is a poem exceptional in concept and execution, the rest of Ennius’ encomiastic texts are a good deal more conventional – but did Ennius and his republican readers necessarily hold the beyond-epic poems in such low regard? The pair of chapters that closes “Multiform Ennius” suggests not. In “The Reception of Ennius’ Saturae and Varia in Antiquity,” Alessandro Russo powerfully argues that Ennius had in fact opened the Annales by boasting about his non-epic literary accomplishments, in particular his Saturae. Russo demonstrates that these texts continued to be read and engaged with by important figures (e.g., Terence, Virgil, Apuleius, and Lactantius) for hundreds of years. Multiplicity was key, therefore, both to Ennius’ self-representation and to his long Roman reception, a point reinforced in “Varro’s Menippean Ennius” by Jesse Hill. Against received opinion, Hill contends that Ennius does not primarily figure as a stalwart of ancient Roman values within the Menippean Satires: the Ennius of these understudied late-republican texts is rather a boldly experimental and multiform poet, a model for Varro’s own modernist project.

None of the chapters that follow in this volume fully leaves Ennius multiformis behind, but in Part II, “Tragic Ennius,” the particular focus shifts towards Ennius the famous tragic playwright. Robert Cowan (“Anatomizing the Ennian Corpus: Medical Theory and the Body in the Tragedies”) provides a rich and theoretically informed discussion of corporeality in Ennian tragedy, offering close readings of the variously troubled corpora of Thyestes, Atreus, and Eurypylus. Timothy J. Moore then demonstrates how metrical variety is showcased in the surviving tragic fragments: “Ennian Tragedy as Musical Theatre” surveys Ennius’ metrical choices throughout the tragic corpus (with particular attention to Medea, Hecuba, Iphigenia, and Eumenides) and thereby highlights the implications of how metre shapes our understanding of tragic plots.

“Tragic Ennius” closes with a pair of chapters that likewise contrast in subject and method. Lauren Donovan Ginsberg (“Staging Orbitas in Ennius’ Andromacha”) zooms in on the remains of one play in order to analyze the potent metaphor implicit in a single phrase, exploring the nuances of bereavement within the tragic worldview of the Romans. Jason Nethercut (“Ennius Tragicus from Pacuvius to Lucretius”) then tracks the reception of Ennian tragedy tout court and vis-à-vis the Annales through much of the fragmentary record of republican drama and verse (and in the process reminds the reader that republican poets rarely viewed Ennius through the lens of a single genre, a point corroborated by Russo and Hill). Although markedly different, these two chapters are complementary: in drawing attention to the as-yet-undiscovered richness of an Ennian canticum, Ginsberg helps us to understand why, as Nethercut goes on to show, Latin poets continued to engage deeply and prominently with Ennian drama for more than a century after the tragedian’s death.

Part III of this volume, “Personal Ennius,” begins to isolate the poet’s pronounced and idiosyncratic personal voice. Ennius is someone who crafted a number of strikingly novel literary experiments. The chapters by Stephen Blair, Anna Chahoud, and Ian Goh respectively focus on three of these experiments. In “Euhemeristic Translations: Ennius as Interpres in the Sacra historia,” Blair gives what is perhaps the first piece of literary prose in Latin the serious critical attention it deserves. He reads the Sacra historia as a key work of cultural mediation, in which Ennius anchors theogonic material from the Greek world within his own Italian landscape and context. In “Ennius’ Saturae and the Registers of Personal Poetry,” Chahoud provides the fragments of Ennian satire with some of the most intricate philological attention they have ever received. In doing so, she is able to offer new insights about their complex and shifting register and style. In “Fish Fiddle-de-Dee: The Hedyphagetica and the Poetics of Seafood at Rome,” Goh offers a stimulating reading of Ennius’ impossible-to-categorize hexametrical poem, which becomes a kind of playful (and surprisingly influential) exploration of luxury, composed by a veritable and well-known “seafood specialist.”

“Personal Ennius” and the volume as a whole conclude with Jackie Elliott’s “Ille Ego: Ennian First Persons in Epic and Beyond,” which takes as its subject those hexametrical fragments of Ennius that are self-referential in some way but have been transmitted without attribution to a particular work. As Elliott shows, modern editors have routinely attributed these fragments to the Annales, though the grounds for doing so are not always solid. Should we therefore be attributing more of these fragments to, say, Ennian satire? Well, maybe (cf. note 15 in Russo, Chapter 4 in this volume). Or perhaps, as Elliott argues, we ought instead to expend less energy in the business of attribution and get more comfortable with – or at the very least more honest about – the fragility and beyond-epic possibilities of our fragmentary record.

Ennius Beyond Epic therefore revels in the variety and plurality of Rome’s foundational author. Our contributors do not all agree with one another. Case in point: some attribute Op. inc. 1 Sk. = Sat. 19 FRL II to the Saturae; some to the Hedyphagetica; some deny it can be attached to any particular text at all. That is part of the opportunity a collection like this presents: it lays out a range of approaches and interpretative possibilities. Such uncertainty and the conflict that emerges from it are productive, and should, we hope, fuel future discussions. More important than any disagreement between individual chapters is the thread that ties them together: their shared recognition that Ennius is not, and ought not to be seen as, just an epic poet. In fact, for many ancient readers he was not even primarily an epic poet, and the polyvalent picture produced when we consider Ennius in all his diversity is a much richer one. Ennius Beyond Epic looks to capture Ennius’ underemphasized variatio through its own colourful multiplicity.