ABSTRACT
Naevius declares that since he is dead they have forgotten how to speak Latin at Rome. Literary Latin became in time an idiom capable of expressing almost any shade of meaning of any idea; but in acquiring this power it always risked the disaster into which it finally fell, of separation from the living speech amounting to unintelligibility if the common people heard it and an accumulation of conventional usages so great that to master them took years of study even for a native. The exact arrangement of Ennius’ material is uncertain, since we have, for the most part, only short fragments; but there can be no doubt that the bulk of the poem simply related the events in chronological order, with one notable exception; the first Punic War was omitted entirely, apparently, because the newer poet scorned to enter the lists against Naevius.
