a Roman satirist who flourished under Arcadius and Honorius. Rutilius Numatianus in his Itinerary (1.599) addresses a certain Decius, a man of high station, whom he styles " Lucilli nobile pignus," and whose father he pronounces to be not inferior as a poet to Turnus and Juvenal. But this Decius, the son, is supposed to be the same person with the Decius, son of Albinus, introduced by Macrobius as conversing with Postumianus (Saturn. 1.2, init.), and Decius the father is identified with Caecina Albinus, represented in the same chapter of the Saturnalia as the friend and companion of Aurelius Symmachus. Moreover, it is maintained that the elder Decius, the satirist, is the individual to whom several of the epistles of Symmachus are addressed (Ep. 7.35-65, comp. 8.21), that he was praefectus urbi in A. D. 302 (Cod. Theod. 7. tit. 15. s. 13; Gruter, Corp. Inscr. p. cclxxxvii.), and that from the success with which he followed in the foot-steps of Aurunca's bard, he was known as the Lucilius of his day. Hence the expression " Lucilli (Lucili) nobile pignus" applied to his son, and hence the mistake of those historians of literature who have included a Lucillus or Lucullus (corrupt forms of Lucilius) among the satirical writers of the fifth century. Lastly, the persons who hold the above opinions believe that the epigrams in the Greek Anthology bearing the name of Lucillius, and assigned by Fabricius to a writer who lived at the end of the fourth century, are in reality the productions of the subject of this article. (Fabric. Bibl. Graec. vol. ii. p. 719.)
The web of conjecture by which all these facts are connected has been very ingeniously woven by Wernsdorff, but in many places the tissue is too frail to bear rough handling. (Wernsdorff, Poet. Latin. Min. vol. iii. p. xxii., vol. v. p. 182.)
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