quintus ennius was known as the father of roman poetry and wrote annales an epic poem about the history of rome.
quintus ennius was known as the father of roman poetry and wrote annales an epic poem about the history of rome.
who was known as the father of roman poetry and wrote annales an epic poem about the history of rome?
quintus ennius
bullet::::- quintus ennius, roman epic poet, dramatist, and satirist, the most influential of the early latin poets – and often called the founder of roman literature or the father of roman poetry. his epic "annales", a poem telling the story of rome from the wanderings of aeneas to ennius' own time, remains the national epic until it is later eclipsed by virgil's "aeneid".
169 bc
many scholars have declared that ennius's poem functions as "a mediator between homer and vergil"; in other words, it is claimed the "annales" transmits the style of homer into a decidedly latin tradition, which would eventually be used by virgil when it came time for him to pen his own epic poem, the "aeneid". 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". 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." 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". 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."
annales (ennius)