The strongly felt desire to know something about Greek literature must have produced within a few years a pioneer bold enough to make the attempt, if the accident of a schoolmaster needing text-books in the vernacular for his scholars had not brought it about. The man who thus first clothed Greek poetry in a Latin dress, and who was always gratefully remembered by the Romans in spite of his sorry performance of the task, was LIVIUS ANDRONICUS (285-204? B.C.), a Greek from Tarentum, brought to Rome 275 B.C., and made the slave probably of M. Livius Salinator. Having received his freedom, he set up a school, and for the benefit of his pupils translated the Odyssey into Saturnian verse. A few fragments of this version survive, but they are of no merit either from a poetical or a scholastic point of view, being at once bald and incorrect. [2] Cicero [3] speaks slightingly of his poems, as also does Horace, [4] from boyish experience of their contents. It is curious that productions so immature should have kept their position as text-books for near two centuries; the fact shows how conservative the Romans were in such matters. Livius also translated tragedies from the Greek. We have the names of the _Achilles_, _Aegisthus_, _Ajax_, _Andromeda_, _Danae, _Equus Trojanus_, _Tereus_, _Hermione_. In this sphere also he seems to have written from a commendable motive, to supply the popular want of a legitimate drama. His first play was represented in 240 B.C. He himself followed the custom, universal in the early period, [5] of acting in his own dramas. In them he reproduced some of the simpler Greek metres, especially the trochaic; and Terentianus Maurus [6] gives from the _Ino_ specimens of a curious experiment in metre, viz. the substitution of an iambus for a spondee in the last foot of a hexameter. As memorials of the old language these fragments present some interest; words like _perbitere (= perire), anculabant ( =hauriebant), nefrendem (= infantem), dusmus (= dumosus)_, disappeared long before the classical period.