[2] This was Livius Andronicus: he is supposed to have been a native of Tarentum, and he was made prisoner by the Romans, during their wars in Southern Italy; owing to which he became the slave of M. Livius Salinator. He wrote both comedies and tragedies, of which Cicero (Brutus 18) speaks very contemptuously, as “Livianæ fabulæ non satis dignæ quæ iterum legantur”—not worth reading a second time. He also wrote a Latin Odyssey, and some hymns, and died probably about 221 b.c.
[3] C. Fabius, surnamed Pictor, painted the temple of Salus, which the dictator C. Junius Brutus Bubulus dedicated 302 b.c. The temple was destroyed by fire in the reign of Claudius. The painting is highly praised by Dionysius, xvi. 6.
[4] For an account of the ancient Greek philosophers, see the sketch at the end of the Disputations.
[5] Isocrates was born at Athens 436 b.c. He was a pupil of Gorgias, Prodicus, and Socrates. He opened a school of rhetoric, at Athens, with great success. He died by his own hand at the age of ninety-eight.
[6] So Horace joins these two classes as inventors of all kinds of improbable fictions:
Pictoribus atque poetis
Quidlibet audendi semper fuit æqua potestas.—A. P. 9.
Which Roscommon translates:
Painters and poets have been still allow’d
Their pencil and their fancies unconfined.