If we go by editions of the Annales, Ennius included a series of striking self-references in his epic. These lines’ nature, number (or rate of survival), and their proximity to self-referential comments made by prose historians make them extraordinary in the context of epic. Thus, they shape our sense of the ambitions the Annales housed and the sorts of generic experimentation its author was prepared to engage in. Ennius’ reference to his advanced age, unparalleled in the epic tradition as we know it, is securely attested for one of the later books of the epic. But often, Ennian self-referential lines are not attributed to a specific work by their sources. Like other lines now conventionally assigned to the Annales, these lines could plausibly have originated in a different Ennian work. In particular, the Saturae present themselves as the most likely candidate. This chapter explores the range of possibilities allowable for Ennian self-references beyond the Annales and sketches the difference that reading this subset of lines in non-epic Ennian contexts would make.

This brief paper begins by asking whether examples of hexameter rhythm in Sallust and Livy, two of Tacitus’ principal models, are allusions to, or even quotations from, Ennius’ Annals. After a brief survey of the rhythmical sequences in Tacitus’ Annals, the main focus of the paper is his obituary of Piso the Pontifex (Ann. 6.10.3), which, it is argued, constitutes an allusion to one of Ennius’ most famous fragments, the so-called “good companion” passage. I failed to mention Ennius in my recent commentary on Book 6, but the case for Ennian influence seems stronger than the parallels adduced by Skutsch and has interesting implications for the workings of allusion.