_First Period: from 240 to about 80 B.C._
The historical event which brought about the greatest change in the intellectual condition of the Romans, and thereby exercised a decisive influence on the whole course of human culture, was the capture of Tarentum in 272. After the capture many Greek slaves were brought to Rome, and among them the young Livius Andronicus (c. 284-204), who was employed in teaching Greek in the family of his master, a member of the Livian gens. From that time to learn Greek became a regular part of the education of a Roman noble. The capture of Tarentum was followed by the complete Romanizing of all southern Italy. Soon after came the first Punic war, the principal scene of which was Sicily, where, from common hostility to the Carthaginian, Greek and Roman were brought into friendly relations, and the Roman armies must have become familiar with the spectacles and performances of the Greek theatre. In the year after the war (240), when the armies had returned and the people were at leisure to enjoy the fruits of victory, Livius Andronicus substituted at one of the public festivals a regular drama, translated or adapted from the Greek, for the musical medleys (_saturae_) hitherto in use. From this time dramatic performances became a regular accompaniment of the public games, and came more and more to encroach on the older kinds of amusement, such as the chariot races. The dramatic work of Livius was mainly of educative value. The same may be said of his translation of the _Odyssey_, which was still used as a school-book in the days of Horace, and the religious hymn which he was called upon to compose in 207 had no high literary pretensions. He was, however, the first to familiarize the Romans with the forms of the Greek drama and the Greek epic, and thus to determine the main lines which Latin literature followed for more than a century afterwards.
His immediate successor, Cn. Naevius (d. c. 200 B.C.), was not, like Livius, a Greek, but either a Roman citizen or, more probably, a Campanian who enjoyed the limited citizenship of a Latin and who had served in the Roman army in the first Punic war. His first appearance as a dramatic author was in 235. He adapted both tragedies and comedies from the Greek, but the bent of his genius, the tastes of his audience, and the condition of the language developed through the active intercourse and business of life, gave a greater impulse to comedy than to tragedy. Naevius tried to use the theatre, as it had been used by the writers of the Old Comedy of Athens, for the purposes of political warfare, and thus seems to have anticipated by a century the part played by Lucilius. But his attacks upon the Roman aristocracy, especially the Metelli, were resented by their objects; and Naevius, after being imprisoned, had to retire in his old age into banishment. He was not only the first in point of time, and according to ancient testimony one of the first in point of merit, among the comic poets of Rome, and in spirit, though not in form, the earliest of the line of Roman satirists, but he was also the oldest of the national poets. Besides celebrating the success of M. Claudius Marcellus in 222 over the Gauls in a play called _Clastidium_, he gave the first specimen of the _fabula praetexta_ in his _Alimonium Romuli et Remi_, based on the most national of all Roman traditions. Still more important service was rendered by him in his long Saturnian poem on the first Punic war, in which he not only told the story of contemporary events but gave shape to the legend of the settlement of Aeneas in Latium,--the theme ultimately adopted for the great national epic of Rome.