Laberius
historical figure · 3 works · 3 mentions · 3 anchored passages
in the texts
On Anger
Roman writer of mimes whose theatrical line about mutual fear is recalled as an example of poetic truth striking a civil-war audience.
Let that line of Laberius come to your mind here, which, spoken in the theatre in the midst of the civil war, turned the whole people upon him no otherwise than if the voice of public feeling had been uttered:
Apologeticum
A philosopher (or mime-writer) invoked as arguing, after Pythagoras, that souls transmigrate between men and beasts.
Come now, if some philosopher affirm — as Laberius does, after the opinion of Pythagoras — that a man is made out of a mule, a snake out of a woman, and bend all the arguments of his eloquence to that opinion by the power of his rhetoric, will he not move assent and fix belief, so that men should abstain even from animals for that reason?
De Pallio
Author/mime-writer whose depiction of a ram is invoked and set aside.
For the ram too — not the one which Laberius makes with curving horn and woolly hide and dragging its testes, but the engine, a beam, which campaigns to break walls — though never yet had it been swung against anyone, that Carthage, fiercest in the pursuits of war, is said first of all to have armed, into the swinging of a pendent assault, having devised the force of the engine from the rage of a …