The same idea is thus expressed by La Bruyere: “La vie est courte pour ceux qui sont dans les joyes du monde: Elle ne paroit longue qu’a ceux qui languissent dans l’affliction. Job se plaint de vivre long temps, et Salomon craint de mourir trop jeune.” La Bruyere, indeed, has interspersed a vast number of the maxims of the Roman Mime in his writings,—expanding, modifying, or accommodating them to the manners of his age and country, as best suited his purpose. One of them only, he quotes to reprehend: “Ita amicum habeas, posse ut fieri inimicum putes.” This sentiment, which Publius had borrowed from the Greeks, and which is supposed to have been originally one of the sayings of Bias, has been censured by Cicero, in his beautiful treatise _De Amicitia_, as the bane of friendship. It would be endless to quote the lines of the different Latin poets, particularly Horace and Juvenal, which are nearly copied from the maxims of Publius Syrus. Seneca, too, has availed himself of many of his reflections, and, at the same time, does full justice to the author from whom he has borrowed. Publius, says he, is superior in genius both to tragic and comic writers: Whenever he gives up the follies of the Mimes, and that language which is directed to the crowd, he writes many things not only above that species of composition, but worthy of the tragic buskin(558). Cneius Matius, also a celebrated writer of Mimes, was contemporary with Laberius and Publius Syrus. Some writers have confounded him with Caius Matius, who was a correspondent of Cicero, and an intimate friend of Julius Cæsar. Ziegler, though he distinguishes him from Cicero’s correspondent, says, that he was the same person as the friend of Cæsar(559). Aulus Gellius calls Matius a very learned man, (_homo eruditus et impense doctus_,) and frequently quotes him for obsolete terms and forms of expression(560). Like other writers of Mimes, he indulged himself a good deal in this sort of phraseology, but his diction was considered as agreeable and highly poetical(561). The Mimes of Matius were called Mimiambi, because chiefly written in iambics; but not more than a dozen lines have descended to us. The following verses have been praised for elegance and a happy choice of expressions— “Quapropter edulcare convenit vitam, Curasque acerbas sensibus gubernare; Sinuque amicam recipere frigidam caldo Columbatimque labra conserens labris(562).”