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Three Millennia of Greek Literature
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Please note that Mommsen uses the AUC chronology (Ab Urbe Condita), i.e. from the founding of the City of Rome. You can use this reference table to have the B.C. dates

THE HISTORY OF OLD ROME

III. From the Union of Italy to the Subjugation of Carthage and the Greek States

From: The History of Rome, by Theodor Mommsen
Translated with the sanction of the author by William Purdie Dickson


The History of Old Rome

Chapter XIV - Literature and Art

ELPENOR EDITIONS IN PRINT

The Original Greek New Testament

» Contents of this Chapter

Page 112

If the Roman public of this period was in some degree familiar, as the comedies of Plautus show, with the Homeric poems and the legends of Herakles, and was acquainted with at least the more generally current of the other myths,(71) this knowledge must have found its way to the public primarily through the stage alongside of the school, and thus have formed at least a first step towards the understanding of the Greek poetry.

71. Even subordinate figures from the legends of Troy and of Herakles niake their appearance, e. g. Talthybius (Stich. 305), Autolycus (Bacch. 275), Parthaon (Men. 745). Moreover the most general outlines must have been known in the case of the Theban and the Argonautic legends, and of the stories of Bellerophon (Bacch. 810), Pentheus (Merc. 467), Procne and Philomela (Rud. 604). Sappho and Phaon (Mil. 1247).

But still deeper was the effect--on which the most ingenious literary critics of antiquity justly laid emphasis--produced by the naturalization of the Greek poetic language and the Greek metres in Latium. If "conquered Greece vanquished her rude conqueror by art," the victory was primarily accomplished by elaborating from the unpliant Latin idiom a cultivated and elevated poetical language, so that instead of the monotonous and hackneyed Saturnian the senarius flowed and the hexameter rushed, and the mighty tetrameters, the jubilant anapaests, and the artfully intermingled lyrical rhythms fell on the Latin ear in the mother-tongue.

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Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/rome/3-14-literature-art.asp?pg=112