Ennius, Quintus (kwĭn`təs ĕn`ēəs), 239–169? B.C., Latin poet, regarded by the Romans as the father of Latin poetry, b. Calabria. His birthplace was the meeting point of three civilizations—Oscan, Greek, and Latin—and Ennius learned to speak the languages of these cultures. He served in Sardinia under Cato the Elder, who took him to Rome. Ennius lived there most of his life, teaching and writing. In 184 B.C. he was made a Roman citizen. His ambition was to be a Latin Homer, and his innovations proved important in the development of Latin poetry. He introduced the Latin quantitative hexameter and the elegiac couplet, smoothed the roughness of Latin diction, and gave to Latin poetry a definitive artistic base. A successful tragedian, he also wrote comedies, satires, and epigrams. Fragments amounting to some 400 lines survive from his tragedies, and about 600 lines remain from his masterpiece, the epic Annales, a literary history of Rome. Vergil, Lucretius, and Ovid borrowed freely from Ennius.

Bibliography

See H. D. Jocelyn, The Tragedies of Ennius (1967); R. A. Brooks, Ennius and Roman Tragedy (1981); O. Skutsch, The Annals of Quintus Ennius (1985).

Ennius, Quintus

(born 239, Rudiae, southern Italy—died 169 BC) Roman poet, dramatist, and satirist. The most influential of the early Latin poets, he is considered the founder of Roman literature. His epic Annales, a narrative poem telling the story of Rome from the wanderings of Aeneas to the poet's own day, was the national epic until it was eclipsed by Virgil's Aeneid. He excelled in tragedy, adapting 19 plays from the Greek, of which only about 420 lines survive.