Ennian Poetology and Literary Affiliation in Lucretius

This chapter adduces Ennius’ own metaphors for literary tradition and affiliation, specifically metempsychosis and the heart, in order to suggest that one of Lucretius’ central aims in the DRN is to undermine Ennius’ literary-historical claims by appropriating and destroying the psychological metaphor that Ennius insisted upon. Lucretius complicates this metaphor while making constant reference to Epicurean physics, thereby literalizing Ennius’ metaphors to show that they are incompatible with the nature of things. As a consequence of investigating how Lucretius goes about correcting Ennius, this chapter argues that Lucretius rejects conventional ideas of literary affiliation and poetology and that he articulates this rejection in terms of the physical first principles of Epicureanism. In short, Lucretius uses Ennius against himself in order to assert the insignificance—and, if we extend Lucretius’ arguments to their logical conclusions, the unreality—of any conventional notion of literary tradition.

Lucretius on the Ennian Cosmos

This chapter approaches Lucretius’ engagement with Ennius on Lucretius’ own terms and explores how the Annales serves Lucretius as a model (or a foil, rather) for poetry about the universe. Lucretius makes clear his identification of Ennius and Ennius’ Homer as poets who also write on “the nature of things” when he singles them out by name in the proem to the DRN (1.117–126). Obviously, the whole tradition of interpreting epic poetry from Homer onward as allegorical philosophy is behind these lines. Throughout the DRN, Lucretius recurrently figures his universe as a direct response to the Ennian cosmos in a procedure that involves philosophical polemics as much as poetic polemics. In so doing, Lucretius articulates a universe whose philosophical dynamics are anti-Ennian, precisely because they are emphatically Epicurean.

Ennian Historiography in Lucretius

This chapter meets the Annales on its own narrative terms, arguing that Lucretius responds to the Annales’ conceptualization of history and time in a comprehensively revisionist way. Lucretius alludes repeatedly to historical episodes and personalities from Ennius’ Annales that would appear to valorize Roman hegemony and exemplarity, only to remove whatever value they may have had in their Ennian context. This procedure is, of course, tendentious, because Lucretius both suggests what value these elements had in the Annales and then strips them of it. Lucretius implies that the Annales presents universal history as diachronic and teleological and that individual historical episodes like the wars with Pyrrhus of Epirus and the Carthaginians all build cumulatively to Rome’s imperium sine fine over the cosmos itself. The Epicurean explanations of natural history in the DRN regularly reject this implied Ennian perspective.

Ennius and the Tradition of Republican Epic

This chapter re-examines the influence of Ennius on subsequent Latin epic poetry before Lucretius, showing that this influence is far less apparent and much more nuanced than has been generally assumed. Close analysis of the fragments of post-Ennian Republican epic shows that engagement with the Annales during this period was dynamic and eristic, rather than reflexive and inevitable. In the final analysis, this chapter argues for a new conceptualization of the literary terrain into which Lucretius embarks in writing his poem, one marked by creative engagement with the Annales.

Conclusion

LET ME END where I began: this has not been a book about Ennius’ Annales, but about Lucretius’ reconstruction of Ennius’ Annales. I have expanded our understanding of Lucretius’ relationship to Ennius well beyond what has been argued traditionally. On my analysis, Lucretius’ engagement with Ennius is dynamic and thoroughgoing. Lucretius’ ubiquitous Ennian style serves, on the one hand, to signal to the reader that a passage should be read with Ennius in mind and, on the other, to announce a sort of stylistic reflexive annotation of actual allusions to the content of the ...

Introduction

ENNIUS’ ANNALES WAS one of the most important hexameter epics written before Vergil’s Aeneid, and perhaps the most influential Latin poem of any period. Writing during the Republic, and covering Roman history from the fall of Troy through his own lifetime, Ennius was the first to write Latin hexameters. His ...