He has been exposed to more serious detraction in modern times, as the corrupter of the pure stream of early Roman poetry. It is alleged against him by Niebuhr, that through jealousy he suppressed the ballad and epic poetry of the early bards. The answer to this charge has already been given. There is no evidence to prove that any such poems were in existence in the time of Ennius. By other modern scholars he is disadvantageously compared with Naevius, who is held up to admiration as the last of the genuine Roman minstrels. Naevius appears indeed to have been a remarkable and original man, yet his very scanty fragments do not afford sufficient evidence to justify the reversal of the verdict of antiquity on the relative greatness and importance of the two poets. The old Roman party, in opposition to whom Ennius and his friends are supposed to have introduced the new taste and suppressed the old, never showed any zeal in favour of poetry of any kind. Cato, their only literary representative, wrote prose treatises on antiquities and agriculture, and in one of his speeches reproached Fulvius Nobilior for the consideration which he showed to Ennius. The evidence of these epic and dramatic fragments which have just been considered, is all in favour of the high verdict of antiquity on the importance and pre-eminence of the author of the Annals. Whatever in the later poets is most truly Roman in sentiment and morality appears to be conceived in the spirit of Ennius. [Footnote 1: Parco admodum sumptu contentus et unius ancillae ministerio.] [Footnote 2: xvii. 17.] [Footnote 3: The line-- Ad patrios montes et ad incunabula nostra, which is quoted by Cicero in a letter to Atticus, and which Vahlen attributed to Ennius, is now generally assigned to Cicero himself.] [Footnote 4: Livy xxxviii. 17.] [Footnote 5: 'When the Carthaginians were coming from all sides to the conflict, and all things, beneath high heaven, confounded by the hurry and tumult of war, shook with alarm: and men were in doubt to which of the two the empire of the whole world, by land and sea, should fall.'--Lucret. iii. 834-7.] [Footnote 6: Mommsen, book iii. ch. 5.] [Footnote 7: The author of Caesar's Spanish War quotes Ennius in his account of the critical moment in the Battle of Munda:--'Hic, ut ait Ennius, "pes pede premitur, armis teruntur arma."'--Bell. Hisp. xxxi.] [Footnote 8: Amphit. 52-3-- Quid contraxistis frontem, quia tragoediam Dixi futuram hanc?] [Footnote 9: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit, etc.] [Footnote 10: De Senectute, 5.] [Footnote 11: De Oratore, ii. 68.] [Footnote 12: 'L. Aelium Stilonem dicere solitum ferunt Q. Ennium de semet ipso haec scripsisse, picturamque istam morum et ingenii ipsius Q. Ennii factam esse.'--Gell. xii. 4.]