Lucius Livius Andronicus

Lucius Livius Andronicus (c. 280/260 BCE – c. 200 BCE), not to be confused with the later historian Livy, was a Greco-Roman dramatist and epic poet of the Old Latin period.

He begins as an educator in the service of a noble family at Rome by translating Greek works into Latin, including Homer’s Odyssey.

They are meant at first as educational devices in the school he founda.

When it comes to drama, he begins staging plays, both tragedies and comedies, which are the first Roman dramatic works.

The comedy, based on Greek New Comedy, comes to be called comoedia palliata, "the Greek comedy," by the Romans.

Suetonius later coins the term "half-Greek" of Livius and Ennius (referring to their genre, not their ethnic backgrounds).

The genre is imitated by the next dramatists to follow in Andronicus' footsteps and on that account he is regarded as the father of Roman drama and of Latin literature in general; that is, he was the first man of letters to write in Latin.

Varro, Cicero, and Horace, all men of letters during the subsequent Classical Latin period, considered Livius Andronicus to have been the originator of Latin literature.

He is the earliest Roman poet whose name is known.

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