Quintus Ennius, the first of the great Roman poets, and a figure of prodigious literary fecundity and versatility, was born at a small town of Calabria about thirty years later than Naevius, and, though he served as a young man in the Roman army, did not obtain the full citizenship till fifteen years after Naevius' death. For some years previously he had lived at Rome, under the patronage of the great Scipio Africanus, busily occupied in keeping up a supply of translations from the Greek for use on the Roman stage. Up to his death, at the age of seventy, he continued to write with undiminished fertility and unflagging care. He was the first instance in the Western world of the pure man of letters. Alongside of his strictly literary production, he occupied himself diligently with the technique of composition--grammar, spelling, pronunciation, metre, even an elementary system of shorthand. Four books of miscellaneous translations from popular Greek authors familiarised the reading public at Rome with several branches of general literature hitherto only known to scholars. Following the demand of the market, he translated comedies, seemingly with indifferent success. But his permanent fame rested on two great bodies of work, tragic and epic, in both of which he far eclipsed his predecessors. We possess the names, and a considerable body of fragments, of upwards of twenty of his tragedies; the greater number of the fragments being preserved in the works of Cicero, who was never tired of reading and quoting him. As is usual with such quotations, they throw light more on his mastery of phrase and power of presenting detached thoughts, than on his more strictly dramatic qualities. That mastery of phrase is astonishing. From the silver beauty of the moonlit line from his _Melanippe_-- _Lumine sic tremulo terra et cava caerula candent_, to the thunderous oath of Achilles-- _Per ego deum sublimas subices Umidas, unde oritur imber sonitu saevo et spiritu_ they give examples of almost the whole range of beauty of which the Latin language is capable. Two quotations may show his manner as a translator. The first is a fragment of question and reply from the prologue to the _Iphigenia at Aulis_, one of the most thrilling and romantic passages in Attic poetry-- Agam. _Quid nocti videtur in altisono Caeli clupeo?_ Senex. _Temo superat Cogens sublime etiam atque etiam Noctis iter_. What is singular here is not that the mere words are wholly different from those of the original, but that in the apparently random variation Ennius produces exactly the same rich and strange effect. This is no accident: it is genius. Again, as a specimen of his manner in more ordinary narrative speeches, we may take the prologue to his _Medea_, where the well-known Greek is pretty closely followed--