The first Punic War was ended in 241 B. C. In the following year the first effects of the Hellenic influence upon Roman literature were witnessed, and the first literary work in the Latin language of which we have definite record was produced at Rome. This was by Livius Andronicus, a Greek from Tarentum, who was brought to Rome as a captive upon the fall of that city. He came as the slave of M. Livius Salinator, who employed him as a tutor for his sons in Latin and Greek, and afterward set him free to follow the same profession independently. That he might have a Latin text from which to teach that language, he himself translated into the Roman tongue the _Odyssey_ of Homer and some plays of the Greek tragedians--the first professor of Latin on record! These same translations, strangely enough, remained school text-books in Rome for centuries. His first public work, to which we have referred above, was the production of a play; but whether tragedy or comedy we do not know. It was at any rate, without doubt, a translation into the crude, unpolished, and heavy Latin of his time, from some Greek original. His tragedies, of which only forty-one lines of fragments, representing nine plays, have come down to us, are all on Greek subjects, and are probably only translations or bald imitations of the Greek originals. The example set by Andronicus was followed by four Romans of marked ability, whose life and work form a continuous chain of literary activity from Nævius, who was but a little younger than Andronicus, and who brought out his first play in 235 B. C.; through Ennius, who first established tragedy upon a firm foundation in Rome; through Pacuvius, the nephew of Ennius and his worthy successor, to the death of Accius in (about) 94 B. C., who was the last and greatest of the old Roman tragedians. As to the themes of these early tragedies, a few of them were upon subjects taken from Roman history. Tragedies of this class were called _fabulæ prætextæ_, because the actors wore the native Roman dress. When we think of the great value which these plays would have to-day, not only from a literary but also from a historical point of view, we cannot but regret keenly their almost utter loss. In the vast majority of cases, however, the old Roman tragedy was upon subjects taken from the traditional Greek cycles of stories, and was closely modeled after the Greek tragedies themselves. Æschylus and Sophocles were imitated to some extent, but Euripides was the favorite.