Under the influence of philhellenistic ideas, ancient scholars ascribed the beginning of Roman literature to a ‘Greek slave’, Livius Andronicus, and his alleged translation of a Greek drama in 240 BC. This paper aims to demonstrate that the Roman project of finding ‘Greek origins’ had an impact not only on our general understanding of Roman tragedy, but also on the theoretical framework, methods and techniques of editing and contextualizing its fragmentary remains, i.e. on philological approaches to working with its fragments.