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 , 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 "" ("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. ==Texts==