Using the chronovisor, Ernetti said that he had witnessed, among other scenes, a performance in Rome in 169 BCE of the lost tragedy, Thyestes, by the father of Latin poetry, Quintus Ennius.
Father Marcello Pellegrino Maria Ernetti stated that he watched Christ dying on the cross, and attended a performance of a previously unknown play by the Roman playwright Quintus Ennius.
These efforts have resulted in restoration of works by Lucretius and Ennius, and relicts of works by ancient comedy writer Caecilius Statius.
Ennius |
Had he been a semi-Graecus, like Ennius and Pacuvius, or of humble origin, like Plautus, Terence or Accius, he would scarcely have ventured, at a time when the senatorial power was strongly in the ascendant, to revive the role which had proved disastrous to Naevius; nor would he have had the intimate knowledge of the political and social life of his day which fitted him to be its painter.
It is regarded as the passage of the Aeneid most imitative of the Annales of Ennius.
There were two existing historical works in Latin, by Naevius and Ennius, but they were in verse, not prose.