ABSTRACT
In the beginning, teachers of Greek who were introduced into Roman families came from cities of Italy in which Greek was spoken, not yet from Greece itself. One of the earliest known tutors was Livius Andronicus, who, we are told, ‘was given his freedom, in recognition of his intellectual ability, by Livius Salinator, whose children he taught’. [1] There is some uncertainty as to which Livius Salinator this was, particularly as St Jerome, who gives this notice, puts the floruit of Andronicus as late as 187 B.C., following the dating of Accius. This dating, however, which creates many difficulties, is not generally accepted; and if the strongly attested opinion that Andronicus produced the first Latin play in 240 B.C. is true (and Atticus, Cicero and Varro all vouched for it), then his activity must have fallen in the third century rather than the second; one of the children whom he taught would most likely have been the Livius Salinator who was born c. 254 B.C., and was twice consul (in 219 and 207 B.C.). [2] At all events, Andronicus’ origin was connected with the Greek-speaking city of Tarentum, and Suetonius describes him as ‘half-Greek’. [3] But he taught in both Greek and Latin; in Greek, he was perhaps the first of a long line of tutors who read Homer with their pupils in Rome, and this teaching he supplemented with one of his own compositions in Latin, a translation of the Odyssey into Saturnian verse. The surviving fragments show that this was a pioneer work of little literary merit, [4] yet, remarkably, it remained a standard textbook in Roman schools right down to Horace's day, by which time it had a decidedly odd and archaic flavour. [5] In his own age, Andronicus won considerable public recognition. In 207 B.C. he was commissioned (probably not for the first time) to compose a State Hymn, and shortly afterwards the guild of writers and actors, with which he was intimately associated (for he acted in his own plays) was allowed in his honour to use as its official meeting-place the temple of Minerva on the Aventine. [6] Livius Andronicus, then, was not only a tutor but an original, if primitive, literary artist. But in 204 B.C., shortly before his death, there arrived in Rome another, far more gifted poet, who, like Andronicus, maintained himself by acting as a tutor to Roman families, but as a creative writer far outshone his predecessor, and won lasting fame as one of the great founders of Latin literature.
