afterwards, was much more far-reaching in its consequences. This was a
translation of the _Odyssey_ into Saturnian verse by one Andronicus, a
Greek prisoner of war from Tarentum, who lived at Rome as a tutor to
children of the governing class during the first Punic War. At the
capture of his city, he had become the slave of one of the distinguished
family of the Livii, and after his manumission was known, according to
Roman custom, under the name of Lucius Livius Andronicus.

The few fragments of his _Odyssey_ which survive do not show any high
level of attainment; and it is interesting to note that this first
attempt to create a mould for Latin poetry went on wrong, or, perhaps it
would be truer to say, on premature lines. From this time henceforth the
whole serious production of Latin poetry for centuries was a continuous
effort to master and adapt Greek structure and versification; the
_Odyssey_ of Livius was the first and, with one notable exception, almost
the last sustained attempt to use the native forms of Italian rhythm
towards any large achievement; this current thereafter sets underground,
and only emerges again at the end of the classical period. It is a
curious and significant fact that the attempt such as it was, was made
not by a native, but by a naturalised foreigner.

The heroic hexameter was, of course, a metre much harder to reproduce in
Latin than the trochaic and iambic metres of the Greek drama, the former
of which especially accommodated itself without difficulty to Italian
speech. In his dramatic pieces, which included both tragedies and
comedies, Andronicus seems to have kept to the Greek measures, and in
this his example was followed by his successors. Throughout the next two
generations the production of dramatic literature was steady and
continuous. Gnaeus Naevius, the first native Latin poet of consequence,
beginning to produce plays a few years later than Andronicus, continued