Ennius's Fasti in Fulvius's Temple: Greek Rationality and Roman Tradition

1. Ennius and Fulvius: An Introduction

Despite its title, this paper does not claim to have discovered a new Ennian text. The text that is the focus of my study, the fasti in the temple of Hercules Musarum, is unanimously attributed to M. Fulvius Nobilior, not to Q. Ennius. We do, however, know of a personal relationship between the poet and the Roman politician. In the opening of his Tusculan Disputations, Cicero quotes from a speech of Cato the Elder, who reproached M. Nobilior, consul in 189 B.C.E., for taking poets into the provinces, presumably because he objected to a poet celebrating the deeds of a general.

The poet in question, as Cicero does not fail to notice, was none other than Ennius, who accompanied Fulvius on his Aetolian campaign (Tusc. 1.3). The late republican grammarian L. Aelius Stilo interprets the famous "Good Companion" passage of the Annales¹ as a veiled portrait of Ennius and thus, implicitly, views the relationship between the patron and the poet in a more positive light.² These two testimonies demonstrate the spectrum of opinions among ancient writers on the practice of patronage and on the nature of the relationship between the patron and the poet. This issue is still a subject of debate today, and other contributors to the present volume engage more directly with it.³ For the purpose of my study, it is sufficient to remember that Ennius certainly composed the Ambracia, a fabula praetexta that dealt with contemporary Roman history, and more specifically, with Fulvius's Aetolian campaign (Scen. 366–69 Vahlen). Further, he wrote the Scipio, which contained the following programmatic statement: "nam tibi moenimenta mei peperere labores," "for my poetic labors created a monument for you," which is nothing less than the textual equivalent of the statuary offered by the Roman people that "spoke of" Scipio's deeds.⁴

But what was Ennius's role in the making of the fasti in the temple Hercules Musarum? Although it is very significant that these fasti were explicitly offered by and publicly associated with Fulvius, I do not deny that I am going to suggest that Ennius was the "ghostwriter" of the fasti. Yet to prove individual authorship is beyond the scope of this paper, and perhaps altogether irrelevant. Rather, my aim is to contextualize historically and intellectually the undeniably authentic works of Ennius and reread them as testimony of a complex historical development. I hope to show that this contextualization can further our understanding of Ennius's Annales in particular.

Fulvius's fasti are associated with a dedication or rededication of a temple of Hercules. Controversial ancient testimonies and modern interpretations about the occasion that led to the (re)dedication of the temple can be summarized in the following hypothetical reconstruction of events.⁵ When Fulvius returned to Rome with immense booty after the capture of the Aetolian town of Ambracia, he was severely criticized for his sacrilegious (even by Roman standards) plundering of the city's temples (Livy 38.44). Like most Roman generals (see Orlin 1997), he organized splendid and highly innovative games (Livy 39.22.1–2). Further, he displayed a substantial part of his artistic booty, statuary in particular, in his own villas. To many of his fellow senators, this seemed excessive, and in a speech that goes under the significant title Uti Praeda in Publicum Referatur, "Booty Should be Made Public Property," Cato showed his disapproval of Fulvius's behavior.⁶ A decade passed, and only when Fulvius held the censorship together with his former enemy M. Aemilius Lepidus and was able to cooperate with him did he add a portico to an already existing temple of Hercules, probably the temple of Hercules Magnus Custos in the Campus Martius. In the portico, he dedicated the statues of the Muses that he had taken from Ambracia, and so Hercules became...