There is no reason to believe that he had obtained any eminence in literature before he settled in middle age at Rome. His genius was of that robust order which grows richer and livelier with advancing years. The Annals was the work of his old age,--the ripe fruit of a strong and energetic manhood, prolonged to the last in hopeful activity. Cicero speaks of 'the cheerfulness with which he bore the two evils of old age and poverty[56].' Wherever the poet speaks of himself, his words reveal a sanguine and contented spirit; as, in that fine simile, where he compares himself, at the close of his active and successful career, to a brave horse which has often won the prize at the Olympian games, and in old age obtains his well-deserved repose:-- Sicut fortis equus, spatio qui saepe supremo Vicit Olimpia, nunc senio confectu' quiescit. In none of his fragments is there any trace of that melancholy after-thought which pervades the poetry of his greatest successors, Lucretius and Virgil. From the humorous exaggeration of Horace, Ennius ipse pater nunquam, nisi potus, ad arma Prosiluit dicenda; and from the poet's own confession, Nunquam poetor, nisi si podager, it may be inferred that he belonged to the class of poets of a lusty and social nature, of which Dryden is a type in modern times, who enjoyed the pleasures of wine and good fellowship. The well-known anecdote, told by Cicero, of the interchange of visits between Scipio Nasica and Ennius[57], though not a brilliant specimen of Roman wit, is interesting from the light which it throws on the easy terms of intimacy in which the poet lived with the members of the most eminent Roman families. Such testimonies and traits of personal character make us think of Ennius as a man of genial and social temper, as well as of 'an intense and glowing mind.' It was probably through his position as a teacher of Greek that Ennius first became known to the leading men of Rome. If this position was at first one of dependence, similar to that in which in earlier times the client stood to his patron, it soon changed into one of mutual esteem and admiration. We can best understand the relation in which he stood to men eminent in the state and in the camp, from a passage from the seventh book of the Annals quoted by Aulus Gellius. In that passage the poet is stated, on the authority of L. Aelius Stilo[58] (an early grammarian, a friend of Lucilius, and one of Cicero's teachers), to have drawn his own portrait, under an imaginary description of a confidential friend of the Roman general, Servilius Geminus. The portrait has the air of being drawn from the life, with a rapid and forcible hand, and with a minuteness of detail significant of close personal observation:--