The Literature of the Romans: In many respects, the writers of the Roman Republic and the Empire chose to imitate previous works of the great Greek authors. Virgil's Aeneid, for example, emulated Homer's Iliad; Plautus, a comic playwright, followed in the footsteps of Aristophanes; Tacitus' Annals and Germania follow essentially the same historical approaches that Thucydides devised; Ovid and his Metamorphoses explore the classic Greek myths in new ways. It has been argued that the Roman authors actually improved on the genres already established by their Greek predecessors. What is undeniable, however, is that the Romans innovated relatively few literary styles of their own. Satire is one of the few Roman additions to literature - Horace was the first to use satire extensively as a tool for argument, and Juvenal turned it into a weapon.