Vecti petebant pellem inauratam arietis
Colchis, imperio regis Peliae, per dolum:
Nam nunquam era errans mea domo ecferret pedem
Medea, animo aegra, amore saevo saucia._

At first reading these lines may seem rather stiff and ungraceful to ears
familiar with the liquid lapse of the Euripidean iambics; but it is not
till after the second or even the third reading that one becomes aware in
them of a strange and austere beauty of rhythm which is distinctively
Italian. Specially curious and admirable is the use of elision (in the
eighth, for instance, and even more so in the fifth line), so
characteristic alike of ancient and modern Italy. In Latin poetry Virgil
was its last and greatest master; its gradual disuse in post-Virgilian
poetry, like its absence in some of the earliest hexameters, was fatal to
the music of the verse, and with its reappearance in the early Italian
poetry of the Middle Ages that music once more returns.

It was in his later years, and after long practice in many literary
forms, that Ennius wrote his great historical epic, the eighteen books of
_Annales_, in which he recorded the legendary and actual history of the
Roman State from the arrival of Aeneas in Italy down to the events of his
own day. The way here had been shown him by Naevius; but in the interval,
chiefly owing to Ennius' own genius and industry, the literary
capabilities of the language had made a very great advance. It is
uncertain whether Ennius made any attempt to develop the native metres,
which in his predecessor's work were still rude and harsh; if he did, he
must soon have abandoned it. Instead, he threw himself on the task of
moulding the Latin language to the movement of the Greek hexameter; and
his success in the enterprise was so conclusive that the question between
the two forms was never again raised. The _Annales_ at once became a