Publilius Syrus

He became a member of the Publilia gens. Publilius' name, due to the palatalization of 'l' between two 'i's in the Early Middle Ages, is often presented by manuscripts (and some printed editions) in corrupt form as 'Publius', Publius being a very common Roman praenomen.

His mimes, in which he acted, had a great success in the provincial towns of Italy and at the games given by Julius Caesar in 46 BC. Publilius was perhaps even more famous as an improviser. He received from Julius Caesar the prize in a contest, in which Syrus vanquished all his competitors, including the celebrated Decimus Laberius. His performances acquired the praise of many, but he drew the ire of Cicero who could not sit through his plays. All that remains of his corpus is a collection of sententiae, a series of moral maxims in iambic and trochaic verse. This collection must have been made at a very early date because it was known to Aulus Gellius in the 2nd century AD. Each maxim consists of a single verse, and the verses are arranged in alphabetical order according to their initial letters. Over time, the collection was interpolated with sentences drawn from other writers, especially from apocryphal writings of Seneca the Younger. The number of genuine verses is about 700. They include many pithy sayings, such as the famous "iudex damnatur ubi nocens absolvitur" ("The judge is condemned when the guilty is acquitted"), which was adopted as its motto by the Edinburgh Review. Due to the fragmentary nature of the collections, many of the sayings are contradictory or do not make much sense. The original plays and characters they were written for are lost to time. Only two titles of his plays survive: Putatores (the Pruners) and a play amended to Murmidon.