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Arethusa 39.3 (2006) 471-488



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The Wisdom of Ennius

University of Southern California

The second-century A.D. scholar Pompeius Festus preserves a fragment of Ennius as follows (Ann. 211–12):

Nec quisquam sophiam sapientia quae perhibetur,
in somnis vidit prius quam sam discere coepit.

Nor has anyone had dreams of sophia, which is called sapientia,
before he has begun to study it.

Scaliger's substitution of sophia for the manuscripts' philosophia makes of the first line, like the second, a dactylic hexameter and has been accepted by all subsequent editors. Festus, together with the epitomator Paulus Diaconus, cites the fragment for its use of sam as the feminine accusative singular of the pronoun is, ea, id. Festus and Paulus (or their source, probably Verrius Flaccus) thus excerpt enough of the Ennian original to complete both the metrical and the grammatical constituents that contain the pronoun sam and its antecedent sophia.1

The fragment has received less attention than it deserves. Otto Skutsch suggests that it be taken as an inversion of the common claim that [End Page 471] dreams correspond to waking activities: people dream of what they do during the day, and don't dream of what they don't do. He takes his lead from Cicero, who claimed that Ennius dreamt of Homer because he thought and spoke about him so much while awake (Rep. 6.10), and further notes that the fragment in question formally resembles a saying attributed to Democritus, namely (Democritus B 59 Diels-Kranz):

Neither craft nor skill is achieved
unless one studies.

In Skutsch's view, Ennius's reference to a dream encounter with wisdom constitutes a defense against those readers and critics, real or anticipated, who take his dream of Homer to imply a claim to poetic authority based exclusively on inspiration as opposed to learning or effort.2 Skutsch rejects Hermann Fränkel's proposal (1932) to emend coepit to coepi and have the fragment announce a programmatic claim to priority in wisdom comparable to Ennius's assertions of literary authority and originality. But in so doing, he misses an opportunity to reflect on the importance of wisdom, or sapientia, to Ennius, instead making of wisdom an almost accidental counterpart to poetry and assimilating the fragment to a Democritean saying to which it bears no resemblance except in form. Ennius's otherwise well-attested interest in dreams and, as we shall see, in wisdom, makes it unlikely that our fragment, whether intended defensively or not, contains an offhand remark or randomly chosen analogy. And the Democritean parallel is surely a false lead, for the issue in the Ennian fragment, as Skutsch notes, is the relationship between dreaming and waking reality and not, as in Democritus, the dependence of achievement on effort.

The pressure to understand sapientia as the subject of a dream is even greater if we accept Maurizio Bettini's alternative interpretation of the fragment as a boast, but of a slightly different sort than the one proposed by [End Page 472] Fränkel.3 Whereas Fränkel has Ennius boast that no one had even conceived of wisdom (at Rome) before him, Bettini takes the fragment to mean that, until Ennius, no one had managed to dream of wisdom without (first) studying it. On Bettini's view, both the dream of Homer and the dream of wisdom (whether recounted as such or not) precede the studying of the relevant material. The interpretations of Skutsch and Bettini are both possible, with the former laying emphasis on the claim to erudition and achievement, the latter more closely aligning the fragment with the mysticism implicit in the claim to be channeling Homer. Whichever we prefer (and I will not attempt to adjudicate here), we are still left to wonder about the larger significance of the fragment in the context of the Annales: why defend—or celebrate—a previous dream by reference to a dream of wisdom (and not of something else)? And why equate sapientia to sophia, especially in this context?

Of the dreaming per se, little can be said with certainty. Dreams figure...

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