Mancia, Helvius
a Roman orator (about B. C. 90), who was remarkably ugly, and whose name is recorded chiefly in consequence of a laugh being raised against him on account of his deformity by C. Julius Caesar Strabo [CAESAR, No. 10], who was opposed to him on one occasion in some law-suit. (Cic. de Orat. 2.66; Quint. Inst. 6.3.38; Plin. Nat. 35.4: the last writer mentions the orator Crassus as the person who raised the laugh against Mancia.) Cicero further relates a smart saying of Mancia on another occasion (de Orat. 2.68).
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.