As a composer of tragedies and epic verse, Ennius succeeded Naevius, but, writing in an era of enthusiastic philhellenism, he came near yielding too much to a great foreign influence. Had he not been a man of remarkable poetic powers his example might well have quenched the spirit of Rome in the rising literature. One of the first Latin authors that we would ask the excavators of Herculaneum to restore to us is Ennius. No single work of his has survived. Of his twenty-five or more tragedies we possess only about four hundred lines; of the eighteen books of _Annals_ a little over five hundred complete lines; of his satires, his _Euhemerus_ and his _Epicharmus_, not enough fragments have survived to give us a very clear idea of the scope of each. All in all we have about three per cent of his work in scraps, but here at least there are several connected passages cited in appreciation of something else than the grammatical usages they illustrate. Ennius too, like Naevius, told Rome’s story in verse. One’s impulse is to discount the accuracy of any history that employs artifice. And one must grant of course that a poet will select his incidents with a view to their dramatic values and picturesqueness. One must remember, however, that poetry had a serious place in all early literature for the reason that, before the day of much writing, all teachable things, even history and philosophy, were put into verse for mnemonic purposes. The works of Solon and Heracleitus would not have contained different matter if they had been put into prose. In Ennius’ day many national histories that purported to be accurate were composed in verse. And Ennius probably did not permit himself to include fictive incidents in his _Annals_, nor has he been proved incorrect at any point.[3] Cicero cited him for the gist of the famous speech of Appius Claudius, and added as a matter of indifference that the original of the speech was in existence. Apparently Ennius’ summary was accurate enough so that it was not necessary to refer to the original text. The influence of his _Annals_ was in its field comparable to that of Homer. From Ennius all schoolboys got their first impressions of what Rome’s great heroes had accomplished. He was unsurpassed as a painter of character. With a few telling strokes he revealed the essential traits of those strong, bold, tireless heroes who made the old Republic irresistible in power, magnificent in tradition, and a saving inspiration in the days of decadence. He was near to these men, and it was as he saw them that they lived on in memory and still live on. He made Roman character memorable in the two lines on Fabius Maximus: Unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem: Noenum rumores ponebat ante salutem. and in the single line on Curius: Quem nemo ferro potuit superare nec auro. His epic was an exposition of the text he himself devised so effectively: Moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque: