Among the more puzzling fragments that remain from Book 1 of Ennius’ Annales is one that describes the ebbing and flowing of water in the natural world: desunt riuos camposque remanant (Ann. 5 Skutsch). In one of his most novel suggestions, Otto Skutsch argued that this fragment describes the water cycle and that it belongs to Homer's speech in the Dream that inaugurates the Annales. As a result of this ascription, Skutsch argues that Homer's speech was much closer to Lucretius’ idea of rerum natura (Lucr. 1.126) than had been assumed: according to Skutsch's reconstruction, Ennius’ Homer discussed not only metempsychosis but also the conservation of matter. Almost no one has endorsed this idea.Footnote ¹ In this note, I want to lend support to Skutsch's interpretation by adducing some corroborating, if circumstantial, evidence. Even if Skutsch's own arguments are not in themselves compelling, this additional evidence should at least allow his theory to remain part of the discussion.

The basic facts are these: the fragment is definitively assigned to Annales Book 1 by Festus (pages 354 and 356 Lindsay), and Skutsch's restoration of this fragment to Homer's speech relies on its connection with Lucretius’ description of the water cycle. Skutsch argues that Lucretius clearly alludes to this fragment:Footnote ²

Some difficulties arise at this point, however, owing to the source that preserves this fragment. Both the lemma (Festus: remanant; Paulus: remant) and its gloss (respectively: reptent, variously corrected to replent or repetunt; or repetant) vary in the texts of their sources. And the presence of desunt further emphasizes our ignorance of context here. Skutsch is correct, however, to accept Festus’ remanant over Paulus’ remant, which neither scans nor makes sense. The glosses reptent (Festus) and repetant (Paulus) must be rejected, as a gloss cannot be in the subjunctive if the lemma is in the indicative. We are left, therefore, with an Ennian remanant glossed as either replent (corr. Skutsch) or repetunt (corr. Lindsay).

If we restore Skutsch's line ending -que remanant, questions still remain regarding the subject of this corrupt fragment. Before Skutsch's edition, it was almost universally agreed that this fragment described the flooding of the Tiber valley at the exposure of Romulus and Remus; Flores argues for returning Ann. 5 Skutsch to the place it traditionally has been thought to occupy.Footnote ³ Skutsch argues that we have to reject this interpretation on the grounds that, after the Tiber floods, the waters run into fields but not into streams. In questioning Skutsch's ascription, neither Flores nor Elliott addresses this argument. Flores makes no positive contribution to the discussion, merely rejecting Skutsch's interpretation out of hand as one of his ‘more incredible’ conjectures. Elliott, on the other hand, refutes Skutsch more directly (though not with reference to the topography around the Tiber), arguing that, in privileging the Lucretian characterization of Homer's speech as rerum natura in his ascription of Ann. 5, Skutsch puts ‘the Lucretian cart before the horse of what the fragmentary evidence on its own strengths allows us to establish’.Footnote ⁴ Obviously, Elliott is correct about the flaws in Skutsch's approach. At the same time, we have no positive evidence to connect this fragment with the exposure of the twins, and, in fact, Skutsch's repudiation of this traditional ascription has never been countered on its own terms. The traditional ascription thus rests on equally shaky ground as Skutsch's ascription of the fragment to Homer's speech, if not more so.

Undoubtedly, when Skutsch reads the Lucretian context of this allusion back into the source material in Ann. 5, he makes a circular argument. While we should not insist that Skutsch's ascription is right (for, pace Skutsch, our current evidence for the Annales is not definitive on this point), there is further evidence that corroborates the ascription of this fragment that Skutsch endorses. To assign the passage to Homer's philosophical discourse, Skutsch invokes Lucretius’ two descriptions of the water cycle (Lucr. 5.269 and 6.635) and emphasizes that these are, together with the Ennian fragment, the only three loci where we find the line ending -que remanant in all of Latin literature. On the face of it, such verbal correspondence is powerful evidence that Lucretius was responding to Ennius’ fragment and must be factored into any consideration of this issue. We can add the following evidence to bolster Skutsch's arguments:

(1) Lucretius alludes to Ennius throughout this passage on the water cycle: retroque remanat, 5.269 (cf. camposque remanant, Ann. 5 Skutsch); fluit agmine dulci, 5.271 (cf. leni fluit agmine flumen, Ann. 163 Skutsch); uerrentes aequora, 5.266 (cf. uerrunt … mare, Ann. 377 Skutsch); semper abundare, 5.262 (cf. semper abundantes, Ann. 395 Skutsch); and tollitur in, 5.265 = tollitur in, Ann. 428 Skutsch.Footnote ⁵

(2) In Lucretius we get the line ending retroque remanat and, later, qua uia secta semel liquido pede detulit undas (5.269 and 5.272), both of which emphasize the movement backwards to an original position contained in both of the two potential glosses on Ennius’ remanant: replent and repetunt, which further corroborates the inference that Lucretius is working with this Ennian fragment closely in his own description of the water cycle.

(3) Even more suggestively, Lucretius connects the water cycle passage with its allusion to Ann. 5 Skutsch back to his own account of Ennius’ Dream of Homer (latices manare perennis, Lucr. 5.262; retroque remanat, Lucr. 5.269; perenni fronde coronam, Lucr. 1.118). The adjective perennis here functions as a reflexive annotation of the many allusions to Ennius perennis (a pun first attested precisely in Lucretius’ account of Ennius’ Dream) found in Lucretius’ description of the water cycle. The verbal echoes between Lucretius’ version of Homer's Speech and his description of the water cycle are even more direct if we accept Politian's emendation at 1.122: quo neque permanent.Footnote ⁶

(4) When Lucretius characterizes Homer's speech in the Annales-proem as dealing with rerum natura (Lucr. 1.126), he may be, and in fact almost certainly is, using the phrase tendentiously and for his own purposes: no other ancient source suggests that the philosophical discourse of Ennius’ Homer involved anything other than the doctrine of metempsychosis.Footnote ⁷ The extent of distortion in representing Ennius’ Homer as a natural philosopher, however, remains unclear. Physical allegory was among the more common ways of interpreting Homer, long before Ennius wrote; and while it is perfectly possible that Lucretius exaggerates the extent to which Ennius explicitly represented Homer as a natural philosopher, there is nothing implausible in the idea that he did so.Footnote ⁸ While Homer's main philosophical point in the Annales-proem had to do with the metaphysical topic of the transmigration of souls, there is nothing implausible in his having illustrated the principle by analogy with a purely physical topic, such as the water cycle.

So (5) if Skutsch is correct in placing his fragment 5 in the context of Homer's speech in the Annales, it would make sense (though Skutsch does not make this argument) if the water cycle were introduced primarily as an illustration of the transmigration of souls. After all, the main point of Homer's discourse was that the soul that had once inhabited Homer's own body now resides in the body of Ennius.Footnote ⁹ Therefore, under Skutsch's ascription, Ennius will have introduced the water cycle, according to which water takes different forms as it moves from place to place as river, swamp, flood, rain, and so forth, as an illustration of how a given soul moves between different bodies. This interpretation remains the most likely consequence of Skutsch's identification of the fragment as part of Homer's philosophical discourse in Ennius’ dream.Footnote ¹⁰

Obviously we cannot be certain about this issue, and the fact that there are some technical flaws in Skutsch's argument is perhaps the main reason for us to remain sceptical of his ascription. However, given that (a) the positive arguments Skutsch makes regarding the dynamics of Tiber-flooding have not been countered and (b) Lucretius seems to associate the water cycle with Ennius’ Dream of Homer, I suggest that Skutsch's interpretation should remain very much under consideration, even if, in the absence of further evidence, we cannot be certain that he is right.