 In many respects, the writers of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire chose to avoid innovation in favor of imitating the great Greek authors.Virgil's "Aeneid", in many ways, 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 (the Christian historian Eusebius does also, although far more influenced by his religion than either Tacitus or Thucydides had been by Greek and Roman polytheism); Ovid and his "Metamorphoses" explore the same Greek myths again in new ways.It can be argued, and has been, that the Roman authors, far from being mindless copycats, improved on the genres already established by their Greek predecessors.