Justice & Law Quote by Quintus Ennius

Speech is treated here less as a human faculty than as contraband. Ennius’s line snaps shut the mouth of the “plain citizen” and turns the simple act of speaking into a punishable transgression. The phrasing matters: “open his lips” is almost comically minimal, the smallest physical prelude to dissent, yet it’s enough to trigger the label “crime.” That compression is the point. In a healthy civic culture, talk is cheap; in a brittle one, even the hint of talk becomes expensive.

Ennius is writing in a Roman world where status is an operating system. Who gets to speak in public, in court, in politics, and who gets listened to has less to do with truth than with rank, patronage, and the right accent of authority. “Plain citizen” sounds democratic to modern ears, but in the Republic it’s a category designed to be managed: useful for labor and military service, suspect as a source of opinion. The line’s coldness captures how power polices not just actions but visibility. You can exist; you just can’t narrate your own existence.

As a poet, Ennius also knows that language itself is a technology of rule. Calling speech a crime isn’t merely describing repression; it’s exposing a reflex that survives across eras: elites delegitimize the outsider’s voice by framing it as disorder, insolence, or threat. The subtext lands like a warning: when citizenship is defined by silence, “law” becomes another word for hierarchy.