ne. 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 stammering fashion, to imitate the high artistic culture
of the neighbouring people. The wide deviations from the original
have arisen not from the freedom, but from the rudeness of the
imitation; the treatment is sometimes insipid, sometimes turgid, the
language harsh and quaint.(9) We have no difficulty in believing the
statement of the old critics of art, that, apart from the compulsory
reading at school, none of the poems of Livius were taken up a second
time. Yet these labours were in various respects norms for succeeding
times. They began the Roman translated literature, and naturalized
the Greek metres in Latium. The reason why these were adopted only
in the dramas, while the Odyssey of Livius was written in the national
Saturnian measure, evidently was that the iambuses and trochees of
tragedy and comedy far more easily admitted of imitation in Latin
than the epic dactyls.

But this preliminary stage of literary development was soon passed.
The epics and dramas of Livius were regarded by posterity, and
undoubtedly with perfect justice, as resembling the rigid statues
of Daedalus destitute of emotion or expression--curiosities rather
than works of art.

But in the following generation, now that the foundations were
once laid, there arose