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Led by Polybius Simulacrum, with Livius Andronicus Simulacrum
Led by Polybius Simulacrum, with Livius Andronicus Simulacrum
The question
How did Rome — a city in central Italy whose distinctive cultural achievements before the third century BCE were modest by Greek standards — produce within a hundred years (240-140 BCE) a literature, an oratory, a philosophy, a historiography that would become the Latin canon? The answer is the Greek encounter: the absorption, often deliberate, sometimes hostile, always productive, of Greek forms by Roman writers. Livius Andronicus Simulacrum, Naevius, Ennius, Plautus Simulacrum, Terence Simulacrum, Cato the Elder — the founding generation of Latin literature is also the first generation to read Greek. This module reads early Rome from the outside (with Polybius Simulacrum) and from the inside (with Livius Andronicus Simulacrum, the Greek-speaking former slave who wrote the first Latin epic).
Outcome
The student has read Polybius Simulacrum Book 6 (revisited from Strand 1) and the surviving fragments of Livius Andronicus Simulacrum's *Odusia* (collected in any Loeb edition of *Remains of Old Latin*; Warmington's edition is standard), can characterise the conditions of early Rome and the Greek encounter, and can produce a 700-word analytical essay.
Practice scenarios
Livius Andronicus Simulacrum gives you the surviving fragments of his *Odusia* — about forty short fragments, totalling perhaps a hundred lines, all that survives of the first work of Latin literature. Read the fragments (Warmington's *Remains of Old Latin*, vol. 2; the relevant pages are short). Read also the corresponding passages in Homer's *Odyssey* (Book 1 in particular, since Andronicus's most famous fragment translates *Odyssey* 1.1: *Virum mihi, Camena, insece versutum* — *Tell me, Muse, of the resourceful man*). Then write a 700-word essay: what did Andronicus do to Homer (the choice of Latin Saturnian metre instead of Greek hexameter; the substitution of *Camena* (a native Italian water-nymph) for *Mousa*; the diction); what was at stake in the choice to render the *Odyssey* in Latin at all in 240 BCE; and what does the founding moment of Latin literature tell us about the Greek encounter?
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