Among the circumstances which prepared him to be the creator of a national literature, his birthplace and origin, the kind of education available to him in his early years, and the experience which awaited him when first entering on life, had a strong determining influence. His birthplace, Rudiae, is called by Strabo 'a Greek city;' but it was not a Greek colony, like Tarentum and the other cities of Magna Graecia, but an old Italian town, (the epithet _vetustae_ is applied to it by Silius) which had been partially Hellenised, but still retained its native traditions and the use of the Oscan language. Ennius is thus spoken of as 'Semi-Graecus.' He laid claim to be descended from the old Messapian kings, a claim which Virgil is supposed to acknowledge in the introduction of Messapus leading his followers in the gathering of the Italian races, Ibant aequati numero regemque canebant. This claim to royal descent indicates that the poet was a member of the better class of families in his native district; and the consciousness of old lineage, which prompted the claim, probably strengthened the high self-confidence by which he was animated, and helped to determine the strong aristocratic bias of his sympathies. He bore witness to his nationality in the saying quoted by Gellius[49] that 'in the possession of the Greek, Oscan, and Latin speech, he possessed three hearts.' Of these three languages the Oscan, as the one of least value to acquire for the purposes of literature or of social intercourse, was most likely to have been his inherited tongue. Rudiae, from its Italian nationality, from its neighbourhood to the cities of Magna Graecia, and from its relation of dependence on Rome, must have been in the time of the boyhood of Ennius a meeting-place, not only of three different languages,--that of common life, that of culture and education, that of military service--but of the three different spirits or tendencies which were operative in the creation of the new literature. To his home among the hills overlooking the Grecian seas--referred to in a line of the Annals,-- Ad patrios montes et ad incunabula nostra-- in the expression of Ovid,-- Calabris in montibus ortus-- and in the phrase of Silius,-- Hispida tellus Miserunt Calabri; Rudiae genuere vetustae