In his advanced years, Naevius took a step of even greater consequence.
Turning from tragedy to epic, he did not now, like Andronicus, translate
from the Greek, but launched out on the new venture of a Roman epic. The
Latin language was not yet ductile enough to catch the cadences of the
noble Greek hexameter; and the native Latin Saturnian was the only
possible alternative. How far he was successful in giving modulation or
harmony to this rather cumbrous and monotonous verse, the few extant
fragments of the _Bellum Punicum_ hardly enable us to determine; it is
certain that it met with a great and continued success, and that, even in
Horace's time, it was universally read. The subject was not unhappily
chosen: the long struggle between Rome and Carthage had, in the great
issues involved, as well as in its abounding dramatic incidents and
thrilling fluctuations of fortune, many elements of the heroic, and
almost of the superhuman; and in his interweaving of this great pageant
of history with the ancient legends of both cities, and his connecting
it, through the story of Aeneas, with the war of Troy itself, Naevius
showed a constructive power of a very high order. It is, doubtless,
possible to make too much of the sweeping statements made in the comments
of Macrobius and Servius on the earlier parts of the _Aeneid_--"this
passage is all taken from Naevius;" "all this passage is simply conveyed
from Naevius' _Punic War_." Yet there is no doubt that Virgil owed him
immense obligations; though in the details of the war itself we can
recognise little in the fragments beyond the dry and disconnected
narrative of the rhyming chronicler. Naevius laid the foundation of the
Roman epic; he left it at his death--in spite of the despondent and
perhaps jealous criticism which he left as his epitaph--in the hands of
an abler and more illustrious successor.

Quintus Ennius, the first of the great Roman poets, and a figure of