Annales

Ennius's Annales, surviving only in roughly 600 fragmentary lines quoted by later authors including Cicero, Lucretius, and Virgil, was the first Latin epic to abandon the native Saturnian meter for Greek dactylic hexameter, a technical choice that reshaped Latin poetry permanently. Its eighteen books trace Roman history from the fall of Troy through Ennius's own lifetime, treating recent wars like the conflict with Pyrrhus and the Punic Wars with the heroic register earlier reserved for myth. Though never transmitted complete, the poem's phrases and its self-portrait of the poet as a Roman Homer echo throughout Virgil's Aeneid, which effectively absorbed and superseded it as Rome's national epic.