The two earliest authors who fill a period of forty years in the literary history of Rome, extending from the end of the First to the end of the Second Punic War, are Livius Andronicus and Cn. Naevius. Of the first very little is known. The fragments of his works are scanty and unimportant, and have been preserved by grammarians merely as illustrative of old forms of the language. The admirers of Naevius and Ennius, in ancient times, awarded only scanty honours to the older dramatist. Cicero, for instance, says of his plays 'that they are not worth reading a second time[31].' There is no ground for believing that Livius was a man of original genius. The importance which attaches to him consists in his being the accidental medium through which literary art was first introduced to the Romans. He was a Greek, and, as is generally supposed, a native of Tarentum. If he was among the captives taken after the fall of that city, he must have resided thirty years at Rome before he ventured to reproduce a Greek drama in the Latin language. He educated the sons of his master, M. Livius Salinator, from whom he afterwards received his freedom. The last thirty years of his life were devoted to literature, and chiefly to the reproduction of the Greek drama in a Latin dress. His tragedies appear all to have been founded on Greek subjects; most of them, probably, were translations. Among the titles, we hear of the _Aegisthus_, _Ajax_, _Equus Trojanus_, _Tereus_, _Hermione_, etc.--all of them subjects which continued to be popular with the later tragedians of Rome. No fragment is preserved sufficient to give any idea of his treatment of the subjects, or of his general mode of thought and feeling. Little can be gathered from the scanty remains of his works, except some idea of the harshness and inelegance of his diction. In addition to his dramas, he translated the Odyssey into Saturnian verse. This work long retained its place as a school-book, and is spoken of by Horace as forming part of his own early lessons under the rod of Orbilius[32]. One or two lines of the translation still remain, and exemplify its bald and prosaic diction, and the extreme irregularity of the Saturnian metre. The lines of the Odyssey[33], οὐ γὰρ ἔγωγέ τί φημι κακώτερον ἄλλο θαλάσσης ἄνδρα γε συγχεῦαι, εἰ καὶ μάλα καρτερὸς εἴη; are thus rendered:-- Namque nilum pejus Macerat hemonem, quamde mare saevom, viris quoi Sunt magnae, topper confringent importunae undae. He was appointed also, on one occasion, near the end of the Second Punic War, to compose a hymn to be sung by 'virgines ter novenae,' which is described by Livy, the historian, as rugged and unpolished[34].