Though Ennius's Annales stood tall in the Roman cultural landscape, what the poem was in origin and what it became in retrospect were not necessarily the same thing. Creating a text is neither identical to nor always coextensive with creating "literature." The former task requires the talents of an author. We are told that, at Rome, the latter took some carelessness, in particular the carelessness of Crates of Mallos, the Pergamene scholar who arrived on a diplomatic mission in the early 160s, stepped into a drain, and broke his leg. He spent his convalescence lecturing on the fine points of Greek literary exegesis and, in the process, apparently awakened his Roman audiences to the possibility that they too might have some literature worth studying. Under Crates' influence, says Suetonius, Romans of the later second century were inspired to popularize certain poems that were not yet widely known and, in doing so, both laid the foundations of grammatical study in Latin and cultivated an interest in that special set of socially and aesthetically marked texts that we (and they) call "literature." Prominent among these works was the Annales, which the otherwise unknown Q. Vargunteius brought to public attention through public recitations that attracted large audiences.1 [End Page 427] Suetonius's account of these developments makes for occasionally dubious history: neither the precise service Vargunteius performed for Ennius's poem nor Crates' contribution to that service is at all certain. What matters for our purpose, however, is less the specific nature of Vargunteius's role in popularizing the Annales than the fact that this poem should ever have required that help. Ennius's achievement may itself have limited the appeal or hastened the eclipse of Naevius's Bellum Punicum, the other epic on Suetonius's list of targeted works, but it comes as a surprise to be told that the greatest poem of the Roman republic once languished among carmina parum . . . divulgata. Did its eventual status really owe as much to later scholarly intervention as to original poetic genius? It was no doubt a "classic" for later generations, but what do we know about the Annales' contemporary reception? The testimony is elusive and equivocal. Perhaps the most deflating example of the interpretive problem it presents is a famous passage from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations that appears to suggest that Ennius's epic career originally met with criticism as well as praise (Tusc. 1.3): Sero igitur a nostris poetae vel cogniti vel recepti. quamquam est in Originibus solitos esse in epulis canere convivas ad tibicinem de clarorum hominum virtutibus, honorem tamen huic generi non fuisse declarat oratio Catonis, in qua obiecit ut probrum M. Nobiliori, quod is in provinciam poetas duxisset; duxerat autem consul ille in Aetoliam, ut scimus, Ennium. quo minus igitur honoris erat poetis, eo minora studia fuerunt, nec tamen, si qui magnis ingeniis in eo genere exstiterunt, non satis Graecorum gloriae responderunt. Poets thus received late recognition or welcome from our countrymen. Although we find in the Origines that guests at dinner were accustomed to sing to the pipe about the deeds of famous men, Cato's speech in which he criticized M. Nobilior for taking poets to his province (the consul [End Page 428] had, in fact, as we know, taken Ennius to Aetolia) nevertheless declares that there was no honor in this activity. And so, the less poets were honored, the less attention was paid to them, although those whose great talent enabled them to stand out in that activity nevertheless matched the glory of the Greeks. Cicero is illustrating here what became a commonplace of Roman literary history, that is, that literary culture came relatively late to the Romans' bellicose ancestors.2 The terms of his assertion, however, prevent him from being as clear a witness to that phenomenon as we might wish. The argument in the Tusculans—and it is important to recognize that this is an argument, not an exposition—conflates and distorts what are three quite distinct levels of...
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