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Cicero rejected the claim of the atomists that the universe is the product of chance, saying: I cannot understand why he who considers it possible for this to have occurred should not also think that, if a countless number of copies of the one-and-twenty letters of the alphabet, made of gold or what you will, were thrown together into some receptacle and then shaken out on to the ground, it would be possible that they should produce the Annals of Ennius, all ready for the reader.

What the Roman poet Ennius presented in the 2nd century BC was a refrain that could be heard repeatedly during the subsequent two millennia whenever Europeans encountered this being that so threatened the line separating human and animal.

Dyaus is also in Latin, as it is in Sanscrit, the name of the brilliant sky: “Behold,” exclaims old Ennius, “above thy head this luminous space which all invoke under the name of Jupiter:” “Aspice hoc sublime candens quem invocant omnes Jovem.”

For example, among descriptions selected in illustration of style, we come upon passages from Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius, preserved in Cicero’s De Divinatione and De Naturâ Deorum, followed by epigrams of those elder poets, Valerius Œdituus, Porcius Licinus, and Quintus Lutatius Catulus, embalmed in the antiquarian pages of Aulus Gellius.

It is interesting to note that the Latin poet Ennius, as reported by Cicero, called the heroic metre of one line versum longum, to distinguish it from the brevity of lyrical measures.