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C h a p t e r 2 The Annals and the Greek Tradition If later generations emphasized the Greek features of the Annals, they had good reasons to do so. Ennius, after all, seems to have claimed that the soul of Homer lived on in his body.1 Moreover, the dactylic hexameter would have been foreign to the audience of the Annals, since it was unique to the Greek tradition before Ennius. Although Greek meter was familiar to those who attended the performances of Roman comedy and tragedy, the iambic meters of the theater were characterized by a tolerance for substitution in a manner unknown to Greek iambs.2 In contrast, Ennius conformed, with some exceptions, to the rules of prosody and substitution of the Greek hexameter. What is more, the occurrence of other borrowings of Greek words and imitations of Homer throughout the fragments leaves little doubt that the Annals owes a great deal to the Greek epic tradition. Once it is established that the Annals is profoundly influenced by Greek poetry , however, it is easy to identify other elements of the poem as Grecisms that were Greek in origin but that had been fully nativized and were familiar to the original audience of the poem. If one emphasizes the Greek origin of the twelve gods named in Annals 240–41 over the synchronic Roman practice of the lectisternium , for example, such an emphasis can disguise the rich, multicultural texture of the passage. Even the concept of a canonical list of twelve gods in Roman culture may have owed more to Etruscan than to Greek thought. Nor is the duodekatheon the only passage from the Annals where Greek origins threaten to obscure Italic horizons of expectation. I now hope to demonstrate that even the most Homeric passages in the Annals are as deeply engaged with the native, Roman tradition as the poem is with the Greek. Although the Annals consistently engages the Greek language and its poetic tradition, Ennius employs multiple strategies for this single purpose in his poem. On the level of language, Ennius borrows many Greek words, such as Musa and melos (from Greek ࢆๆड़‫ߥڗ‬, “song”), and it is possible that Ennius changes the gender of a Latin noun in order to make it conform to the gender of its Greek equivalent. The Latin masculine noun pulvis, “dust,” for example, 28 The Annals of Quintus Ennius and the Italic Tradition is feminine in the Annals, as is its Greek equivalent ໵ཬဎԆߥ.3 Even if the change in gender is due to the vagaries of Latin grammar in the second century BCE, the phrase vicit Olympia (Ann. 523) is a “clear Grecism,” to be more specific, an adoption of a Greek grammatical construction analogous to a change in gender under Greek influence, according to Skutsch.4 In addition to single words, Ennius also translates and adapts formulae and sometimes entire passages from Homer, such as the one from the Iliad describing Ajax as he is beaten back by the Trojans (Il. 16.102–11). Ennius borrows and adapts this passage in order to describe a Roman tribune in battle against the Histrians (Ann. 391–98). Many, if not all, of these Grecisms are not simply borrowings, however, but rather single elements of a multicultural hybrid form that would continue to characterize Latin poetry. Any use of the Greek language in a Latin text must inevitably generate a linguistic hybrid. Words such as Musae (Ann. 1) and melos (Ann. 293) occur alongside more familiar Latin words such as pedibus, quae (Ann. 1), and pangit (Ann. 293). Even the “clear Grecism” vicit Olympia (Ann. 523) consists of a native Latin word and a Greek toponym in spite of its bold use of a place name with specifically Greek connotations as the object of the verb vinco. The imitation of a Homeric passage to describe the actions of a Roman tribune is so obviously a cultural hybrid that it requires no detailed explanation. In sum, it is simply not possible for a poem that draws its inspiration from one language but is composed in another to be anything but a hybrid. It remains difficult to fully appreciate the hybrid and multicultural nature of the Annals, however, since many of the Roman cultural elements that are mixed in with the Greek elements are not easily recovered. The implicitly invited comparison between Homer and Ennius is doubly pernicious in this respect. On the one hand, the Latin elements of the diction of the Annals...

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