prodigious literary fecundity and versatility, was born at a small town
of Calabria about thirty years later than Naevius, and, though he served
as a young man in the Roman army, did not obtain the full citizenship
till fifteen years after Naevius' death. For some years previously he had
lived at Rome, under the patronage of the great Scipio Africanus, busily
occupied in keeping up a supply of translations from the Greek for use on
the Roman stage. Up to his death, at the age of seventy, he continued to
write with undiminished fertility and unflagging care. He was the first
instance in the Western world of the pure man of letters. Alongside of
his strictly literary production, he occupied himself diligently with the
technique of composition--grammar, spelling, pronunciation, metre, even
an elementary system of shorthand. Four books of miscellaneous
translations from popular Greek authors familiarised the reading public
at Rome with several branches of general literature hitherto only known
to scholars. Following the demand of the market, he translated comedies,
seemingly with indifferent success. But his permanent fame rested on two
great bodies of work, tragic and epic, in both of which he far eclipsed
his predecessors.

We possess the names, and a considerable body of fragments, of upwards of
twenty of his tragedies; the greater number of the fragments being
preserved in the works of Cicero, who was never tired of reading and
quoting him. As is usual with such quotations, they throw light more on
his mastery of phrase and power of presenting detached thoughts, than on
his more strictly dramatic qualities. That mastery of phrase is
astonishing. From the silver beauty of the moonlit line from his
_Melanippe_--

_Lumine sic tremulo terra et cava caerula candent_,