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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 April 2014
The aim of this paper is to propose a new and more satisfactory context for a fragment from one of Ennius’ tragedies preserved in Cicero and discussed by a late scholiast on the Ciceronian passage. It will be shown that the scholiast, or more likely the source upon which he drew, had in front of him a bit more of the Ennian passage than the partial line preserved in Cicero and that the scholiast drew a false conclusion concerning the identity of one of the interlocutors from the way in which one speaker addressed the other. Previous scholars have sought to remove the inconsistency in the scholiast's sketch of the scene either by changing the locale of the dialogue or by correcting the scholiast's identification of the out-of-place speaker. It will be shown that a more productive line of investigation is to seek to discover the underlying cause of the scholiast's apparent error. The identification of the cause not only sheds light on the fate of Ennius’ text in Late Antiquity but permits us to restore, by means of conjecture, an additional word to the corpus of Ennius’ tragedies, a word that is a favourite of his in the Annales, but until now has not been attested in a Roman tragedy before the age of Seneca.
In the course of preparing a revised Loeb edition of Sallust, including the fragments of the Histories, my attention was drawn to the problems discussed in this paper. I thank the following scholars for reading and commenting on earlier drafts: D.H. Berry, J. Briscoe, A. Dyck, G. Manuwald and M. Winterbottom. I also thank the anonymous referee for CQ for encouraging me to dig deeper into the problem which forms the subject of this paper and explore more of its facets. These individuals are, of course, not to be held responsible for any of the views expressed, and I take full responsibility for any shortcomings.
1 Fr. 313 Ribbeck3 (Tragicorum Romanorum Fragmenta [Leipzig, 1897]), assigned to Incerta; fr. 173 Valens2 (Ennianiae Poesis Reliquiae [Leipzig, 1903]), assigned to Hectoris Lytra; fr. 167 Warmington (Remains of Old Latin [Cambridge, MA, 1935]), assigned to Hectoris Lytra; fr. 312 Jocelyn (The Tragedies of Ennius [Cambridge, 1967]), assigned to Incerta; fr. 144 Manuwald (Tragicorum Romanorum Fragmenta, vol. 2 [Göttingen, 2012]), assigned to Incerta.
2 e.g. Landgraf, G., Kommentar zu Rosc. Am. (Leipzig, 1914 2), 181Google Scholar; Berry, D.H. (tr.), Cicero. Defence Speeches (Oxford, 2000), 228Google Scholar; Dyck, A., Cicero. Pro Sexto Roscio (Cambridge, 2010)Google Scholar, 155.
3 For the report of this and other textual proposals, I draw my information from the app. crit. of the excellent new edition of Ennius’ tragic fragments by Gesine Manuwald (n. 1), whom I thank for informing me by e-mail that she can discover no basis for Stangl (Ciceronis Orationum Scholiastae [Vienna, 1912], 312) to credit the correction ad Aiacem to Bergk as well as to Orelli. Orelli alone appears to have advanced this solution.
4 Seemingly the solution adopted by Warmington (n. 1), 277 n. c: ‘possibly before he [Ulysses] met Achilles’. In Homer it was, in fact, only thanks to assistance rendered by Ajax that Menelaus was able to evacuate the wounded Odysseus from the battle (Il. 11.485–8).
5 At Il. 13.125–6, Poseidon rallied the Greeks under the leadership of the Greater and Lesser Ajax; at Il. 15.415–16, Ajax is left virtually alone to defend the ships from Hector and the fire; and at Il. 16.114–22, Ajax is the last to give way to Hector, when the latter finally lops off the head of Ajax's spear, thereby rendering it useless.
6 This explains Bergk's tentative suggestion to correct the scholiast's summary of the scene by making Eurypylus, rather than Ulysses, utter the words quoted by Cicero. The words assigned by Ennius to the wounded warrior are reminiscent of Hom. Il. 11.825–7, where the injured Eurypylus states to Patroclus: ‘all who were the foremost warriors lie among the ships, struck with arrow or spear wounds at the hands of the Trojans’.
7 ‘Ennius as a dramatic poet’, in Skutsch, O. (ed.), Ennius: Sept Exposés suivis de Discussions (Geneva, 1972), 41–88Google Scholar, esp. 56–7.
8 For Aristarchus as the undoubted author of the Greek play on which Ennius modelled his Achilles, see Jocelyn, H.D., ‘Imperator histricus’, YClS 21 (1969), 97–123Google Scholar.
9 Apparently an incomplete trochaic tetrameter catalectic (Jocelyn [n. 1], 466). It is entirely normal for Cicero in his orations to quote only as much of a verse as is needed to suit the context, e.g. in Mur. 30, 60; Sest. 102, 118, 120; Cael. 18, and many more examples in the list compiled by Zillinger, W., Cicero und die altrömischen Dichter (Würzburg, 1911), 185–7Google Scholar.
10 All three references are, of course, to King Pyrrhus of Epirus, or Pyrrhus’ stock, who claimed descent from Achilles.
11 Ajax's descent from Aeacus, which made him a cousin of Achilles, was unknown to Homer but well established later: see Roscher, W.H., Ausfürliches Lexikon für griechischen und römischen Mythologie (Leipzig, 1884–90), 1.115.23–30Google Scholar. Ovid (Met. 13.151) treats Ajax's father Telamon and Achilles’ father Peleus as brothers, and the patronymic Aiakides is applied to Ajax by the third-century a.d. epic poet Quintus Smyrnaeus 3.244.
12 Jocelyn (n. 1), 52 points out that the orthography of surviving quotations from Ennius’ tragedies preserve few idiosyncrasies of spellings that are attested for the second century b.c. by inscriptions and the Ambrosian codex (3rd-4th cent. a.d.) of Plautus.
13 There are, admittedly, no traces in extant Latin MSS of the spelling Ai- for Greek names other than ‘Aiax’, but, as John Briscoe has pointed out to me by e-mail, we do find in the third-century b.c. elogia of the Scipios aidilis for aedilis and aides for aedes (CIL 6.1284, 1287). Ennius also clearly employed at times the older spelling -ai, in place of -ae of the first declension genitive singular (see Jocelyn [n. 1], 364). Therefore, it is not far-fetched to suppose that Ennius, or some scribe, may have by analogy spelled Aeacides with Ai-. Extant examples of the vocative with the termination -e, instead of -a, are found in Ovid (e.g. Her. 3.87, Ars am. 1.691) and later poets (Sil. Pun. 13.796; Stat. Achil. 1.932).
14 See Stangl, T., Der sogenannte Gronovscholiast zu elf ciceronischen Reden (Leipzig, 1884), 27Google Scholar.
15 According to Jocelyn (n. 1), 56 ‘the only person after Apuleius [c. a.d. 125 – c. 170 (?)] who can be shown with probability to have handled a roll or codex containing an Ennian tragedy is the early fourth-century grammarian Nonius Marcellus’.
16 To judge from Gell. NA 15.28.4.
