The evils, however, of old age and indigence were supported by him, as we learn from Cicero, with such patience, and even cheerfulness, that one would almost have imagined he derived satisfaction from circumstances which are usually regarded, as being, of all others, the most dispiriting and oppressive(156). The honours due to his character and talents were, as is frequently the case, reserved till after his death, when a bust of him was placed in the family tomb of the Scipios(157), who, till the time of Sylla, continued the practice of burying, instead of burning, their dead. In the days of Livy, the bust still remained near that sepulchre, beyond the _Porta Capena_, along with the statues of Africanus and Scipio Asiaticus.(158) The tomb was discovered in 1780, on a farm situated between the Via Appia and Via Latina. The slabs, which have been since removed to the Vatican, bear several inscriptions, commemorating different persons of the Scipian family. Neither statues, nor any other memorial, then existed of Africanus himself, or of Asiaticus(159); but a laurelled bust of Pepperino stone, which was found in this tomb, and which now stands on the Sarcophagus of Scipio Barbatus in the Vatican, is supposed to be that of Ennius(160). There is also still extant an epitaph on this poet, reported to have been written by himself(161), strongly characteristic of that overweening conceit and that high estimation of his own talents, which are said to have formed the chief blemish of his character:— “Aspicite, O cives, senis Ennî imaginis formam; Hic vestrum panxit maxuma facta patrum. Nemo me lacrumis decoret, nec funera fletu Faxit—cur? volito vivus per ora virûm(162).” The lines formerly quoted(163), which were written by Nævius for his tomb-stone, express as high a sense of his own poetical merits as the above verses; but there is in them something plaintive and melancholy, quite different from the triumphant exultation in the epitaph of Ennius. To judge by the fragments of his works which remain, Ennius greatly surpassed his predecessors, not only in poetical genius, but in the art of versification. By his time, indeed, the best models of Greek composition had begun to be studied at Rome. Ennius particularly professed to have imitated Homer, and tried to persuade his countrymen that the soul and genius of that great poet had revived in him, through the medium of a peacock, according to the process of Pythagorean transmigration. It is to this fantastic genealogy that Persius has alluded in his 6th satire:— “Cor jubet hoc Enni, postquam destertuit esse Mæonides Quintus, pavone ex Pythagoreo.” From the following lines of Lucretius it would appear, that Ennius somewhere in his works had feigned that the shade of Homer appeared to him, and explained to him the nature and laws of the universe:—