t in the whole field of intellect not
immediately political, and that the -maitre de plaisir- of the
great public and the schoolmaster in close alliance created
a Roman literature.

Livius Andronicus

In the very earliest Roman author the later development appears, as it
were, in embryo. The Greek Andronikos (from before 482, till after
547), afterwards as a Roman burgess called Lucius(6) Livius
Andronicus, came to Rome at an early age in 482 among the other
captives taken at Tarentum(7) and passed into the possession of the
conqueror of Sena(8) Marcus Livius Salinator (consul 535, 547). He
was employed as a slave, partly in acting and copying texts, partly in
giving instruction in the Latin and Greek languages, which he taught
both to the children of his master and to other boys of wealthy
parents in and out of the house. He distinguished himself so much in
this way that his master gave him freedom, and even the authorities,
who not unfrequently availed themselves of his services--commissioning
him, for instance, to prepare a thanksgiving-chant after the fortunate
turn taken by the Hannibalic war in 547--out of regard for him
conceded to the guild of poets and actors a place for their common
worship in the temple of Minerva on the Aventine. His authorship
arose out of his double occupation. As schoolmaster he translated the
Odyssey into Latin, in order that the Latin text might form the basis
of his Latin, as the Greek text was the basis of his Greek,
instruction; and this earliest of Roman school-books maintained its
place in education for centuries. As an actor, he not only like every
other wrote for himself the texts themselves, but he also published
them as books, that is, he read them in public and diffused them by
copies. What was still more important, he substituted the Greek drama
for the old essentially lyrical stage poetry. It was in 514, a year
after the close of the first Punic war, that the first play was
exhibited on the Roman stage. This creation of an epos, a tragedy,
and a comedy in the Roman language, and that by a man who was more
Roman than Greek, was historically an event; but we cannot speak of
his labours as having any artistic value. They make no sort of claim
to originality; viewed as translations, they are characterized by a
barbarism which is only the more perceptible, that this poetry does
not naively display its own native simplicity, but strives, after a
pedantic and stammerin