[Sidenote: The Annales.] The most important work of Ennius is his great epic in eighteen books, the _Annales_, in which he told the legendary and actual history of the Romans from the arrival of Æneas in Italy to his own time. In this work, as in his tragedies, he may be said to have followed in the way pointed out by Nævius, but the _Annales_ mark an immense advance beyond the _Bellum Punicum_ of Nævius. The monotonous and unpolished Saturnian metre could not, even in the most skillful hands, attain the dignity or the melodious cadences appropriate to great epic poems. Ennius therefore gave up the native Italian metre and wrote his epic in hexameter verse in imitation of Homer. This was no easy matter, for the laws of the verse as it existed in Greek could not be applied without change to Latin, but Ennius modified them in some particulars and thus fixed the form of the Latin hexameter, at the same time establishing in great part the rules of Latin prosody. Only about six hundred lines of the _Annales_ remain, and many of these are detached from their context, yet from these we can see that Ennius had much poetic imagination, great skill in the use of words, and great dignity of diction. The line _At tuba terribili sonitu taratantara dixit_ shows at once his ability to make the sound of his words imitate the sound he wishes to describe (in this case that of a trumpet) and his liking for alliteration. This last quality is found in many Roman poets, but in none more frequently than Ennius. The _Annales_ continued to be read and admired even after the time of Virgil, though the _Æneid_ soon took rank as the greatest Roman epic. Some of the lines of Ennius breathe the true Roman spirit of military pride and civic rectitude, as _Moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque_,[2] or _Quem nemo ferro potuit superare nec auro_,[3] or _Nec cauponantes bellum sed belligerentes_.[4] Among the existing fragments are several which seem to have suggested to Virgil some of the passages in the _Æneid_, and there is no doubt that Virgil found Ennius worthy of imitation. We may learn something of the character of Ennius from a passage of the _Annales_ in which he is said,[5] on the authority of the grammarian L. Ælius Stilo, to be describing himself: “A man of such a nature that no thought ever prompts him to do a bad deed either carelessly or maliciously; a learned, faithful, pleasant man, eloquent, contented and happy, witty, speaking fit words in season, courteous, and of few words, possessing much ancient buried lore; a man whom old age made wise in customs old and new and in the laws of many ancients, both gods and men; one who knew when to speak and when to be silent.”