PUBLILIUS (less correctly PUBLIUS) SYRUS  , a Latin writer of mimes, flourished in the 1st century B.C . He was a native of Syria and was brought as a slave to Italy, but by his wit andtalent he won the favour of his master, who freed and educated him . His mimes, in which he acted himself, had a great success in the provincial towns of Italy and at the games given by Caesar in 46 B.C . Publilius was perhaps even more famous as an improvisatore, and received from Caesar himself the prize in a contest in which he vanquished all his competitors, including the celebrated Decimus Laberius . All that remains of his works is a collection of Sentences (Sententiae), a series of moral maxims in iambic and trochaic verse . This collection must have been made at a very early date, since it was known to Aulus Gellius in the 2nd century A.D . Each maxim is comprised in a single verse, and the verses are arranged in alphabetical order according to their initial letters . In course of time the collection was interpolated with sentences drawn from other writers, especially from apocryphal writings of Seneca; the number of genuine verses is about 700 . They include many pithy sayings, such as the famous " judex damnatur ubi nocens absolvitur " (adopted as its motto by the Edinburgh Review) . The best texts of the Sentences are those of E . Wolfflin (1869) A . Spengel (1874) and W .

Meyer (188o), with complete critical apparatus and index verborum; recent editions with notes by O . Friedrich (188o), R . A . H . Bickford-Smith (1895), with full bibliography; see also W . Meyer, Die Sammlungen der Spruchverse des Publilius Syrus (1877), an important work .