"Dic si quid potes de Sexto Annali": The Literary Legacy of Ennius's Pyrrhic War

According to Quintilian, when Cicero was asked in court to comment in response to a hostile witness called Sextus Annalis,² he launched into the opening line of the sixth book of Ennius's Annales (164): "Quis potis ingentis oras evolvere belli," "Who can open up the mighty realms of war?"

Virgil admired this line and incorporated it into his internal proem to the aristeia of Turnus at Aeneid 9.528:³ his learned commentators, Macrobius (Sat. 6.1.18) and the augmented version of Servius, recognized its Ennian origin, as did the grammarian Diomedes.⁴ But how many of Virgil's countless readers would have known where this archaic sounding verse originated? The testimonia for this opening line neatly represent the three main types of source for what survives of the Annales: Cicero (here indirectly),⁵ Virgil, as commented upon by his ancient critics, and the separate grammatical and antiquarian traditions of lexicography.

In aiming to "dicere si quid possum de sexto Annali," I have two goals: to reconstruct what we know of this important book from the approximately forty lines identified and preserved,⁶ and to show what kind of use was made of this text by the different citators and how they have contributed to our inadequate knowledge of this great epic. As Werner Suerbaum notes (1995.51), Knut Kleve's exciting identification of PHerc. 21 as containing Ennius's Book 6 has brought no fundamental changes in our knowledge of the text: it has, however, shown that two passages of the Annales which the indirect tradition left incertae sedis actually occur in this book, of which one (Ann. 469–70) uses the topos of inexpressibility to add the emotional intensity of expectation to the narrative, and the other (Ann. 555–56) confirms Jupiter's active involvement and is likely to have followed soon after Annales 203.⁷

We know too little about Rome's war with Pyrrhus, and neither the tedious rhetorical elaborations of surviving excerpts from Dionysius⁸ nor the strange romanticised biography of Plutarch (who depends partly on the third-century Hieronymus of Cardia⁹ and partly on Dionysius of Halicarnassus,¹⁰ and spends far too much time on rivalries between post-Alexandrian condottieri) can compensate for the loss of Livy's twelfth and thirteenth books. To paraphrase and summarize the periochae: after Rome invaded Tarentine territory to prosecute her wars against the Samnites in 281, the democrats of Tarentum called in Pyrrhus of Epirus, who offered to arbitrate with Rome. After rejecting Pyrrhus's offer, Valerius Laevinus, one of the consuls of 280, confronted him in battle at Heraclea and was badly defeated, but persevered, achieving a modest victory near Capua. When the senate sent Fabricius and two other elders to negotiate the recovery of the prisoners, Pyrrhus offered to return them without ransom, probably on condition that the Romans would agree to make peace. However, despite this generous act, when his envoy Cineas came to Rome, the senate was shamed into refusing to make peace by the denunciation of the blind Appius Claudius, and Cineas left empty handed.

The following year, Pyrrhus defeated the consuls P. Sulpicius and P. Decius Mus at Ausculum, but although the Roman casualties were greater, the loss of men to Pyrrhus's expeditionary force was so great that he declared he could not afford another such victory.¹¹ It was probably in this year that Fabricius sent Pyrrhus's treacherous doctor back to the king and warned him of the treachery. But Pyrrhus found his victory so costly in manpower that he left Italy, gratefully accepting an invitation to join the intra- community fighting in Sicily. He would soon find himself unwelcome in Syracuse and returned to Italy to campaign again against Rome, which defeated him at the battle of Beneventum in 275.

Ennius's sixth book, dealing with Rome's...