The aim of this paper is to propose a new and more satisfactory context for a fragment from one of Ennius’ tragedies preserved in Cicero and discussed by a late scholiast on the Ciceronian passage. It will be shown that the scholiast, or more likely the source upon which he drew, had in front of him a bit more of the Ennian passage than the partial line preserved in Cicero and that the scholiast drew a false conclusion concerning the identity of one of the interlocutors from the way in which one speaker addressed the other. Previous scholars have sought to remove the inconsistency in the scholiast's sketch of the scene either by changing the locale of the dialogue or by correcting the scholiast's identification of the out-of-place speaker. It will be shown that a more productive line of investigation is to seek to discover the underlying cause of the scholiast's apparent error. The identification of the cause not only sheds light on the fate of Ennius’ text in Late Antiquity but permits us to restore, by means of conjecture, an additional word to the corpus of Ennius’ tragedies, a word that is a favourite of his in the Annales, but until now has not been attested in a Roman tragedy before the age of Seneca.

The Ennian quotation to be investigated is preserved in Cicero's speech Pro Sexto Roscio Amerino (§90), where it is introduced, without attribution, to ornament remarks addressed to the prosecutor Gaius Erucius. It reads as follows:

Cicero incorporates this snippet of Ennius into his claim that the Sullan proscriptions have removed so many of Erucius’ potential rivals at the prosecutorial bar that Erucius has been elevated to greater prominence as a prosecutor than he would otherwise have enjoyed.

The scholiast on this passage (Schol. Gronov. D, pp. 311–12St) sketches a scene that resembles in most respects conditions described in Iliad Books 11–15. Achilles is still sulking in his tent, refusing to join the Greeks in fighting the Trojans because Agamemnon had deprived him of his prize, the girl Briseis; and nearly all of the major Greek heroes (but not Ajax) have been forced by wounds to withdraw from battle, while the Trojan warrior Hector comes ever closer to setting the Greek fleet on fire. The scholiast writes as follows:

Given Ulysses’ stated destination, Achilles is clearly the logical person to whom Ulysses addressed the words quoted by Cicero in the Pro Roscio. However, the scholiast goes on to relate:

Commentators on Cicero's Pro Roscio who discuss the quotation from Ennius are typically content merely to summarize what the scholiast tells us and do not remark on the apparent inconsistency of having Ulysses go to the shelter of Achilles only to be questioned by Ajax instead of Achilles.Footnote ² Some scholars, however, have understandably been troubled by the jarring introduction of Ajax into a scene where Achilles seems to be the logical interlocutor, and they have offered competing solutions. Orelli proposed changing Ulysses’ destination from Achilles’ camp to Ajax's by substituting ad Aiacem for ad Achillen,Footnote ³ while Düntzer and Bergk approached the problem from the other direction and removed the out-of-place Ajax by emending ab Aiace to ab Achille so that Ulysses was answering a question from Achilles.

Of these two corrections to the scholiast's summary of the scene, the one proposed by Orelli appears to be the less plausible for several reasons. First and foremost, while it is makes sense for the wounded Ulysses to go to Achilles in order to try once more to persuade him to come to the aid of his faltering Greek comrades, it is difficult to imagine a motive for Ulysses to go to the shelter of Ajax, which according to the Iliad (8.224–6) was at the opposite end of the Greek encampment from that of Achilles. On top of this, Orelli's emendation fails to address a problem that is already inherent in the scholiast's sketch of the scene according to the paradosis, viz. the necessity of having Ajax, as well as Ulysses, leave the battle in order to have a conversation apart from the fighting. The scene of the conversation was clearly removed from the battle, as we can tell from Ulysses’ use of the word ibi to identify the locale where the Greeks had been wounded by the Trojans (Phrygians). We can also rule out the possibility that the question was addressed by Ajax to Ulysses in the heat of the battle, during the course of Ulysses’ withdrawal,Footnote ⁴ because if that had been the case, the question would have taken the form cur fugeret (‘why he was fleeing’), instead of cur fugisset (‘why he had fled’).

The trouble is this: it seems highly unlikely that Ajax could have left the fighting to converse with Ulysses since traditionally Ajax served as the Greeks’ sole remaining prop after the wounding of the other major Greek heroes. In the Iliad, Ajax nearly single-handedly held Hector at bay and warded off fire from the Greek ships in the absence of Achilles.Footnote ⁵ There was no other Greek warrior of Ajax's calibre to perform that most necessary role. To be sure, Ennius does depart from the Homeric version of events by portraying Ulysses, rather than Eurypylus,Footnote ⁶ as the wounded hero who tried to get word to Achilles of how gravely the Greeks were suffering. Nevertheless, it seems hard to believe that Ennius caused Ajax to depart from the fighting to have a conversation with Ulysses.

Jocelyn, who in his 1967 edition of Ennius placed the fragment under ‘Incerta’ but later argued for assigning it to Ennius’ Achilles,Footnote ⁷ supposes that Ajax was giving vent to his enmity towards Ulysses, which was part of a later, post-Homeric tradition, and that he was holding Ulysses responsible for the utter rout of the Greek forces. This interpretation relies heavily on the unverifiable hypothesis that the fragment does indeed belong to Ennius’ Achilles, an adaption of a play by the fifth-century Attic tragedian Aristarchus.Footnote ⁸ If we follow Jocelyn and suppose that Ajax joined Ulysses in the camp of Achilles to complain of a disastrous rout of the Greek forces, which he blames on the cowardice of Ulysses, one has to wonder who or what was preventing the utter destruction of the Greek forces and ships at the hands of Hector and the rampaging Trojans while Ajax, Achilles and Ulysses chewed the fat.

The rival solution aimed at removing the inconsistency, viz. the proposal of Düntzer and Bergk to substitute ab Achille for ab Aiace so that the question is put to Ulysses by Achilles, has two advantages. First, it removes the necessity of taking Ajax away from the battle where he traditionally was the last bulwark of the Greeks after the wounding of all the other Greek heroes. Second, it assigns to Achilles his logical role as interlocutor in the scene with the wounded Ulysses, who, the scholiast informs us, sought out Achilles. This simple correction, however, while it removes an apparent anomaly from the scholion, begs the question of how the lapse occurred in the first place.

If we ask ourselves what circumstances could have led the scholiast to make the blunder of introducing Ajax into a scene where he is so obviously out of place, a very plausible explanation can be offered. The scholiast, or more likely a source on which he relied, could easily have been misled into identifying Ulysses’ interlocutor as Ajax if in hunting up the quote in the text of Ennius, or in a florilegium, he came across a line in close proximity to Quis ibi non est … in which Ulysses addressed Achilles by his patronymic Aeacides (‘descendant [grandson] of Aeacus). The vocative Aeacida, a choriamb (- ˘ ˘ -), identical in metrical pattern to -ro Phrygio found in the three trochaic metra quoted by Cicero,Footnote ⁹ can easily be accommodated to the meter, and the patronymic Aeacides happens to be attested no fewer than three times in the fragments of Ennius’ Annales (fr. 179 V. / 167 Sk.; fr. 180 V. / 197 Sk.; fr. 275 V. /475 Sk.).Footnote ¹⁰ This is a relatively sizeable number of instances when measured against the scant remains of Ennius’ poetry. Aeacides is obviously a word much favoured by Ennius, and the vocative happens to be found in one of his most familiar lines (179 V.):

There is also one attestation of this patronymic in Roman tragedy, in Seneca's Troades (253), where the gen. sing. Aeacidae, in a speech of Agamemnon, refers to Achilles.

It would be quite easy for a scholiast to process the vocative Aeacida carelessly as if from the root Aiax, Aiacis (Ajax). In fact, since in the scholiast's day both Ajax and Achilles could be described as a ‘descendant (grandson) of Aeacus’,Footnote ¹¹ the patronymic Aeacida could stir in the mind of a not very astute reader a direct connection with the hero Ajax. Furthermore, although we have no evidence for the orthography adopted by Ennius,Footnote ¹² if the text of the passage happened to have employed the Greek spelling Aiacide,Footnote ¹³ then it was but one syllable (-id) removed from the ablative of Aiax, which we find in the scholiast's ab Aiace.

It seems unlikely that the pedestrian Schol. Gronov. D, who wrote in the seventh (?) century a.d.,Footnote ¹⁴ took the trouble to investigate the Ennian context of the quotation in the Pro Roscio or even had access to a text of Ennius at that late date.Footnote ¹⁵ Rather, a late-antique author of that sort can be assumed to have derived his information from some earlier commentator on Cicero, and so that earlier commentator, not the Schol. Gronov., deserves the blame for introducing Ajax into a scene of Ennius where he logically has no place. We cannot say who that earlier commentator was, but we can be fairly certain the error does not go back to Asconius, despite the fact that Asconius appears to have written a commentary on Cicero's Pro Roscio Amerino.Footnote ¹⁶ Asconius can be ruled out as the source on which the Schol. Gronov. drew directly, or indirectly, on several grounds. First of all, the careless blunder of misreading the patronymic Aeacides as a reference to Ajax, rather than Achilles, is completely out of character with Asconius’ careful scholarship. Even more to the point, however, is the fact it is impossible to detect anywhere in the notes of the Schol. Gronov. D on the Pro Roscio the slightest trace of the kind of learned information that we typically find in Asconius. On the contrary, the scholiast makes several glaring prosopographical blunders that undoubtedly would not have occurred if Asconius had been consulted: e.g. the scholiast's likely confusion of Messalla Rufus (cos. 53) with Messalla Niger (cos. 61) in his note on Rosc. Am. 5, and the statement (in his note on Rosc. Am. 125) that the author of the lex Valeria of 82 was a praetor, when in reality he was the ex-consul of 100, L. Valerius Flaccus, who later served as Sulla's magister equitum! These are precisely the sorts of topics that Asconius tends to treat with great precision in his extant commentaries. Furthermore, as we can see from the one extant passage in Asconius where he identifies a short quotation from a tragedy in Cicero's In Pisonem (§82), Asconius’ practice is to give only the name of the playwright and the identity of the interlocutors; he does not include any additional text beyond that quoted by Cicero (Asc. p. 16C).

Therefore, some commentator on Cicero, other than Asconius, is likely to have committed the blunder of seeing the patronymic Aeacida and jumping to the false conclusion that the person questioning Ulysses was Ajax, rather than Achilles. The Schol. Gronov. has tralatitiously passed along this nugget of misinformation, being the sort of writer who is oblivious to the glaring inconsistency of having Ulysses questioned by Ajax after having made his way to Achilles. The scholiast's lack of sound judgement is plainly on display in his misguided explication of the quotation from Ennius, which he transmits with the corruption of enim for ibi and the omission of non, thereby spoiling the metre as well as the sense. With amazing obtuseness, the scholiast draws the absurd conclusion that the quotation from Ennius was intended as an oblique comment on Sulla's shameful lifestyle:

Given all of the evidence presented above, it is possible to see how even a misinformed source such as the Gronovian scholiast can sometimes provide an astute reader with access to valuable information that lies just beneath the surface. The lesson to be learned is that we gain more in this instance from trying to uncover what was most likely the underlying cause of an erroneous conclusion on the part of the writer, or the writer's source, than from rewriting the text to preserve logic. The muddle in the scholiast sheds light on a lost text of Ennius. We can recover by conjecture one more word of an Ennian tragedy, thereby adding a fourth instance of the patronymic Aeacides to the Ennian corpus and restoring sense to the scene sketched by the scholiast. The fragment may henceforth be printed thus: