"They hate whom they fear"
About this Quote
Hatred, in Ennius's formulation, isn’t a hot-blooded passion so much as a defensive reflex: fear putting on armor and calling it virtue. "They hate whom they fear" is brutal because it demystifies a feeling people love to narrate as principled. It suggests that animosity often arrives after the trembling, not before it - a secondary move meant to disguise vulnerability with certainty.
Ennius, a Roman poet writing in a republic that was steadily hardening into an empire, understood how public emotion gets weaponized. Rome’s story was built on enemies: rival city-states, “barbarians,” internal threats, the always-available scapegoat. Fear makes the other loom larger than life; hate shrinks them back into a manageable caricature. That’s the psychological bargain the line exposes. If you can name your dread as disgust, you don’t have to admit it has power over you.
The elegance is in the pronouns. Not “we,” not “I,” but “they” - a cool, almost anthropological distance that reads like an indictment. It’s a poet’s trick with a senator’s edge: observe the crowd’s emotional alchemy without getting your hands dirty. The line also works as an early diagnosis of political messaging: leaders don’t have to manufacture hatred from scratch. They only need to stoke anxiety, then offer hatred as the socially acceptable outlet.
Ennius compresses an entire cycle of persecution into five words, then lets the listener recognize themselves in the mechanism.
Ennius, a Roman poet writing in a republic that was steadily hardening into an empire, understood how public emotion gets weaponized. Rome’s story was built on enemies: rival city-states, “barbarians,” internal threats, the always-available scapegoat. Fear makes the other loom larger than life; hate shrinks them back into a manageable caricature. That’s the psychological bargain the line exposes. If you can name your dread as disgust, you don’t have to admit it has power over you.
The elegance is in the pronouns. Not “we,” not “I,” but “they” - a cool, almost anthropological distance that reads like an indictment. It’s a poet’s trick with a senator’s edge: observe the crowd’s emotional alchemy without getting your hands dirty. The line also works as an early diagnosis of political messaging: leaders don’t have to manufacture hatred from scratch. They only need to stoke anxiety, then offer hatred as the socially acceptable outlet.
Ennius compresses an entire cycle of persecution into five words, then lets the listener recognize themselves in the mechanism.
Quote Details
| Topic | Fear |
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