of whose writings, as we have seen, more copious fragments remain than from those of his predecessors. The whole works of this poet were extant in the time of Cassiodorus; but no copy of them has since appeared. The fragments, however, found in Cicero, Macrobius, and the old grammarians, are so considerable, that they have been frequently collected together, and largely commented on. They were first printed in Stephen’s Fragmenta Veterum Poetarum Latinorum, but without any proper connection or criticism. Ludovicus Vives had intended to collect and arrange them, as we are informed in one of his notes to St Augustine, De Civitate Dei: But this task he did not live to accomplish571. The first person who arranged these scattered fragments, united them together, and classed them under the books to which they belonged, was Hier. Columna. He adopted the orthography which, from a study of the ancient Roman monuments and inscriptions, he found to be that of the Latin language in the age of Ennius. He likewise added a commentary, and prefixed a life of the poet. The edition which he had thus fully prepared, was first published at Naples in 1590, four years after his death, by his son Joannes Columna572. This Editio Princeps of Ennius is very rare, but it was reprinted under the care of Fr. Hesselius at Amsterdam in 1707. To the original commentary of Columna there are added the annotations on Ennius which had been inserted in Delrio and Scriverius’ collection of the Latin tragic poets; and Hesselius himself supplied a very complete Index Verborum. The ancient authors, who quote lines from Ennius, sometimes mention the book of the Annals, or the name of the tragedy to which they belonged, but sometimes this information is omitted. The arrangement, therefore, of the verses of the latter description (which are marked with an asterisk in Columna’s edition), and indeed the precise collocation of the whole, is in a great measure conjectural. Accordingly, we find [pg A-21]that the order of the lines in the edition of Paulus Merula is very different from that adopted by Columna. The materials for Merula’s edition, which comprehends only the Annals of Ennius, had already been collected and prepared at the time when Columna’s was first given to the world. Merula, however, conceived that while the great object of Columna had been to compare and contrast the lines of Ennius with those of other heroic poets, he himself had been more happy in the arrangement of the verses, and the restoration of the ancient orthography, which is much more antiquated in the edition of Merula than in that of Columna. He had also discovered some fragments of the Annals, unknown to Columna, in the MS. of a work of L. Calp. Piso, a writer of the age of Trajan, entitled De Continenti Veterum Poetarum, and preserved in the library of St Victor at Paris. In these circumstances, Merula was not deterred by the appearance of the edition of Columna, from proceeding with his own, which at length came forth at Leyden in the year 1595. The same sort of discrepance which exists between Columna and Merula’s arrangement of the Annals, appears in the collocation of the Tragic Fragments adopted by Columna, and that which has been preferred by Delrio, in his Syntagma TragoediÆ LatinÆ.

H. Planck published at Gottingen, in 1807, the fragments of Ennius’s tragedy of Medea. These comprehend all the verses belonging to this drama, collected by Columna, and some newly extracted by the editor from old grammarians. The whole are compared with the parallel passages in the Medea of Euripides. Two dissertations are prefixed; one on the Origin and Nature of Tragedy among the Romans; and the other, on the question, whether Ennius wrote two tragedies, or only a single tragedy, entitled Medea. A commentary is also supplied, in which, as Fuhrmann remarks, one finds many things, but not much:—“Man findet in demselben multa, aber nicht multum573.”

Some fine passages of the fragments of Ennius have been filled up, and the old readings corrected, by the recent discovery of the work De Republic of Cicero, who is always quoting from the ancient poets. Thus the passage in the Annals, where the Roman people are described as lamenting the death of Romulus, stands thus in Columna’s edition:—

This fragment may be now supplied, and the verses arranged and corrected, from the quotation in the first book De Republic—

The fragments of the Annals of Ennius, as the text is arranged by Merula, have been translated into Italian by Bernardo Philippini, and published at Rome in 1659, along with his Poesie. I know of no other translations of these fragments.