Never find your delight in another’s misfortune.

Publilius Syrus was a 1st‑century BCE writer of Latin mimes whose lines survived largely as standalone moral maxims (sententiae) excerpted and copied for rhetorical and ethical instruction. The saying “Never find your delight in another’s misfortune” fits this tradition: a compact admonition against schadenfreude, framed as practical wisdom for civic life. Because Syrus’s original plays are mostly lost, the line is typically encountered in later collections of his Sententiae used in Roman and, later, medieval classrooms, where such aphorisms served as memorably phrased guides to character and conduct.

The maxim warns that taking pleasure in someone else’s suffering is morally corrosive and socially dangerous. It implies that delight in another’s downfall deforms one’s character—training the mind toward cruelty, envy, and a false sense of superiority—while also inviting retaliation or reversal of fortune. In the Roman ethical register, it is less a sentimental appeal than a prudential one: a stable community depends on restraint, empathy, and recognition of shared vulnerability. The line also suggests that misfortune is a common human condition; to rejoice in it is to forget that one may soon need the same mercy one denies.