Decimus Laberius: The Fragments

"This is a newly revised, critical text of the fragments attributed to the Roman knight and mimographer Decimus Laberius, a witty and crudely satirical contemporary of Cicero and Caesar. Laberius is perhaps the most celebrated comic playwright of the late Republic, and the fragments of plays attributed to him comprise the overwhelming majority of the extant evidence for what we conventionally call 'the literary Roman mime'. The volume also includes a survey of the characteristics and development of the Roman mime, both as a literary genre and as a type of popular theatrical entertainment, as well as a re-evaluation of the place of Laberius' work within its historical and literary context. This is the first English translation of all the fragments, and the first detailed English commentary on them from a linguistic, metrical, and (wherever possible) theatrical perspective"--Provided by publisher.

"What survives from the scripts of the Roman literary mime today comprises some 55 titles of plays, a number of literary fragments (not all of them considered to be genuine extracts) which amount to about 200 lines, and a collection of over 730 sententiae, some of which are attributed to the mimographer Publilius. It is far from certain that all of these one-line apophthegms, which lack a theatrical context and were composed in iambic or trochaic metres, were written by him. The length of the remaining mime-fragments, composed usually in senarii or septenarii, varies from one word to 27 lines. The fragments are cited mainly by grammarians and lexicographers on account of their linguistic features and their literary value. The overwhelming majority of these mime-fragments, 44 titles and about 150 lines, is currently attributed to the Roman knight and mimographer Decimus Laberius, a contemporary of Cicero and Caesar, both of whom Laberius is reported to have confronted in public"--Provided by publisher.