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 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.)