or--

_Ille vir haud magna cum re sed plenu' fidei_,

or the great--

_Moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque_

Ennius expressed, with even greater point and weight than Virgil himself,
the haughty virtue, the keen and narrow political instinct, by which the
small and struggling mid-Italian town grew to be arbitress of the world;
not Lucretius with his vast and melancholy outlook over a world where
patriotism did not exist for the philosopher, not Virgil with his deep
and charmed breedings over the mystery and beauty of life and death,
struck the Roman note so exclusively and so certainly.

The success of the Latin epic in Ennius' hands was indeed for the period
so complete that it left no room for further development; for the next
hundred years the _Annales_ remained not only the unique, but the
satisfying achievement in this kind of poetry, and it was only when a new
wave of Greek influence had brought with it a higher and more refined
standard of literary culture, that fresh progress could be attained or
desired. It was not so with tragedy. So long as the stage demanded fresh
material, it continued to be supplied, and the supply only ceased when,
as had happened even in Greece, the acted drama dwindled away before the
gaudier methods of the music-hall. Marcus Pacuvius, the nephew of Ennius,
wrote plays for the thirty years after his uncle's death, which had an
even greater vogue; he is placed by Cicero at the head of Roman
tragedians. The plays have all perished, and even the fragments are
lamentably few; we can still trace in them, however, that copiousness of