Pensieri di varia filosofia e di bella letteratura/4457
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These lays are much older than Ennius, (nota 637:
― Scripsere alii rem
Versibu’ quos olim Fauni vatesque canebant:
Quom neque Musarum scopulos quisquam superarat,
Nec dicti studiosus erat.
Horace’s annosa volumina vatum may have been old poems of this sort: though perhaps they are also to be understood of prophetical books, like those of the Marcii; which, contemptuously as they are glanced at, were extremely poetical. Of this we may judge even from the passages preserved by Livy (XXV, 12). Horace can no more determine our opinion of them than of Plautus) who moulded them into hexameters, and found matter in them for three books of his poem; Ennius, who seriously believed himself to be the first poet of Rome, because he shut his eyes against the old native poetry, despised it, and tried successfully to suppress it. Of that poetry and of its destruction I shall speak elsewhere: here only one further remark is needful. Ancient as the original materials of the epic lays unquestionably were, the form in which they were handed down, and a great part of their contents, seem to have been comparatively recent. If the pontifical annals adulterated history in favour of the patricians, the whole of this poetry is pervaded by a plebeian spirit, by hatred toward the oppressors, and by visible traces that at the time when it was sung there were already great and powerful plebeian houses. The assignments of land by Numa, Tullus, Ancus, and Servius, are