Livius Andronicus

 

born c. 284 bc, Tarentum, Magna Graecia [now Taranto, Italy]
died c. 204 bc, Rome?

founder of Roman epic poetry and drama.

He was a Greek slave, freed by a member of the Livian family; he may have been captured as a boy when Tarentum surrendered to Rome in 272 bc. A freedman, he earned his living teaching Latin and Greek in Rome.

His main work, the Odyssia, a translation of Homer’s Odyssey, was possibly done for use as a schoolbook. Written in rude Italian Saturnian metre, it had little poetic merit, to judge from the less than 50 surviving lines and from the comments of Cicero (Brutus) and Horace (Epistles); according to Horace, 1st-century-bc schoolboys studied the work. It was, however, the first major poem in Latin, the first example of artistic translation, and the subject matter happily chosen for introducing Roman youth to the Greek world. Livius was the first literary figure to give Odysseus his Latin name, Ulysses (or Ulixes).

In 240, as part of the Ludi Romani (the annual games honouring Jupiter), Livius produced a translation of a Greek play, probably a tragedy, and perhaps also a comedy. After this, the first dramatic performance ever given in Rome, he continued to write, stage, and sometimes perform in both tragedies and comedies, after 235 in rivalry with Gnaeus Naevius. Only one fragment is known from each of his three remaining comedies; fewer than 40 lines of the 10 tragedies have survived. Their titles show that he translated mainly the three great tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

In 207, to ward off menacing omens, he was commissioned to compose an intercessory hymn to be sung, in procession, to Aventine Juno. As a reward for the success of this intervention, a guild of poets and actors, of which he became president, was granted permission to hold religious services in the temple of Minerva on the Aventine.