Minor Latin poets; with introductions and English translations

TO PL'BLILIUSSYRUSputting some thoughts better than any dramatist,Greek or Roman ; Petronius gives a specimen of hisstyle in a passage sixteen lines long, and in thesecond century Gellius recognises the neatness andquotability of his moral maxims, of which he citesfourteen examples, all but one to be found in our extantcollections." Roman educators soon saw practicaladvantage in excerpting from his mimes, for use inschool, -wise saws and modern instances, the inheritedexperience of human conduct brought up to date inpithy Latin. Similar anthologies had already beenmade from Menander in Greek and very possiblyfrom Ennius in Latin. Such a text-book had been**'^available for generations before Jerome as a schoolboylearned the line " aegre reprendas quod sinasconsuescere." But if the earliest collection of themaxims in the first century a.d. was purely Publilian,it is now hard to decide how much proverbial philosophyhas been foisted into later collections by freeparaphrase of genuine verses and by insertion ofthoughts from Seneca (or Pseudo-Seneca) and others.It is equally hard to decide how much has beenspoiled or lost by such misreading and distortion ofgenuine verses (iambic senarii or trochaic septenarii)as led copyists to mistake them for prose. There is,however, good authority for the acceptance of over700 lines as genuine survivals of what was once aconsiderably larger selection.It will be appreciated thatPublilius' lines, originally• Sen. Control'. VII. 3. 8; Petron. Sat. 55; Gell. X.A.xvii. 14.* Phaedrus, III. Epil. 3.3-35.' Hieron. Epist. 107, 8 (I. 679, Vallarsi): cited again Epist.128, 4: see F. A. Wright, Select Letters of St. Jerome (LoebCI. Lib.), pp. 356, 478.5