Livius Andronicus

Livius Andronicus came up as a tutor in a Roman noble household around 284 BC, a Greek speaker producing Latin versions of Greek texts for his own school. His Odyssey translation was a teaching tool; the stage work came later. He wrote tragedies and comedies in Latin—characters in Greek cloaks, plots lifted from New Comedy—and the Romans called the form comoedia palliata, "cloaked comedy." Suetonius would tag him and Ennius "half-Greek" for the hybrid genre. Varro, Cicero, and Horace all pointed back to him as the one who got Latin literature moving. He died around 204 BC, the first Roman poet…