The Rolling Stones owe their name, indirectly, to a freed Roman slave
A rolling stone gathers no moss is a Latin maxim from Publilius Syrus, a Syrian brought to Rome as a slave. Muddy Waters named a 1950 song after the saying, and a young British band then took its name from that song. Publilius himself had once out-improvised every rival before Julius Caesar.
Publilius came from Antioch and arrived in Italy aboard the same ship as the astronomer Manilius Antiochus and the grammarian Staberius Eros. His quick wit charmed his owner, who educated him and set him free, and he joined the Publilia family. Medieval copyists often garbled his name into the far more common Publius, a slip caused by how the letter l shifted in pronunciation between two i sounds.
On stage he was a star of the mime, a popular form of short comic drama, in which he both wrote and acted. His pieces drew crowds in provincial Italian towns and at Caesar's games in 46 BC, where he won a contest of improvisation, beating even the celebrated Decimus Laberius and taking the prize from Caesar's hands. Not everyone was a fan: Cicero found his plays unbearable. Only two titles survive, one of them The Pruners.
What lasted were his one-line moral maxims, written in verse and arranged alphabetically by first letter. The collection existed by the 2nd century AD, when Aulus Gellius knew it, but over time it swelled with lines borrowed from other authors, especially writings falsely credited to Seneca the Younger. Scholars think around 700 verses are genuine. Stripped of their original plays and speakers, some contradict each other or make little sense on their own. Others are sharp: the Edinburgh Review adopted as its motto his line that the judge stands condemned when the guilty go free.
Seneca the Younger admired him and spent his life trying to write in the same compact, sententious style, quoting him in two of his letters to Lucilius. A line in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing about hating deadly and loving dearly may come from him too, either directly or by way of John Lyly. An English translation by J. Wight Duff and Arnold M. Duff appeared in 1934.
Source: Publilius Syrus
