ABSTRACT
Ennius was a 'strong father' for later Roman poets, a model for emulation, an icon of the patriotic glories of a past and simpler age, an alternative model, however problematically so, to the Callimachean ideal and at times a figure of fun. Ennius can seem like the grandfather of Roman poetry, but even grandfathers have relatives. The Satires were in some sense the beginning of the satiric genre, although the Roman grammarian Quintilian saw Lucilius as the founder of the genre which Quintilian famously claimed as 'entirely our own'. Ennius' achievement in the Annals consists all in the Romanisation of Greek poetic sophistication. The titles of most of Ennius' tragedies suggest that they used Greek mythological themes and were based, in some way, on Greek plays. Although Fortune features in the narrative, Polybius is all a rational writer who sees himself as writing 'pragmatic history' and who discerns that the rise of the Romans can be explained logically.
