LICINIUS MACER CALVUS, GAIUS (82-47 B.C.), Roman poet and orator, was
the son of the annalist Licinius Macer. As a poet he is associated with
his friend Catullus, whom he followed in style and choice of subjects.
As an orator he was the leader of the opponents of the florid Asiatic
school, who took the simplest Attic orators as their model and attacked
even Cicero as wordy and artificial. Calvus held a correspondence on
questions connected with rhetoric, perhaps (if the reading be correct)
the _commentarii_ alluded to by Tacitus (_Dialogus_, 23; compare also
Cicero, _Ad Fam._ xv. 21). Twenty-one speeches by him are mentioned,
amongst which the most famous were those delivered against Publius
Vatinius. Calvus was very short of stature, and is alluded to by
Catullus (Ode 53) as _Salaputium disertum_ (eloquent Lilliputian).
For Cicero's opinion see _Brutus_, 82; Quintilian x. I. 115; Tacitus,
_Dialogus_, 18. 21; the monograph by F. Plessis (Paris, 1896) contains
a collection of the fragments (verse and prose).
LICODIA EUBEA, a town of Sicily in the province of Catania, 4 m. W. of
Vizzini, which is 39 m. S.W. of Catania by rail. Pop. (1901) 7033. The
name Eubea was given to the place in 1872 owing to a false
identification with the Greek city of Euboea, a colony of Leontini,
founded probably early in the 6th century B.C. and taken by Gelon. The
town occupies the site of an unknown Sicel city, the cemeteries of which
have been explored. A few vases of the first period were found, but
practically all the tombs explored in 1898 belonged to the fourth period
(700-500 B.C.) and show the gradual process of Hellenization among the
Sicels.
See _Römische Mitteilungen_, 1898, 305 seq.; _Notizie degli scavi_,
1902, 219. (T. As.)
LICTORS (_lictores_), in Roman antiquities, a class of the attendants
(_apparitores_) upon certain Roman and provincial magistrates.[1] As an
institution (supposed by some to have been borrowed from Etruria) they
went back to the regal period and continued to exist till imperial
times. The majority of the city lictors were freedmen; they formed a
corporation divided into decuries, from which the lictors of the
magistrates in office were drawn; provincial officials had the
nomination of their own. In Rome they wore the toga, perhaps girded up;
on a campaign and at the celebration of a triumph, the red military
cloak (_sagulum_); at funerals, black. As representatives of magistrates
who possessed the _imperium_, they carried the fasces and axes in front
of them (see FASCES). They were exempt from military service; received a
fixed salary; theoretically they were nominated for a year, but really
for life. They were the constant attendants, both in and out of the
house, of the magistrate to whom they were attached. They walked before
him in Indian file, cleared a passage for him (_summovere_) through the
crowd, and saw that he was received with the marks of respect due to his
rank. They stood by him when he took his seat on the tribunal; mounted
guard before his house, against the wall of which they stood the fasces;
summoned offenders before him, seized, bound and scourged them, and (in
earlier times) carried out the death sentence. It should be noted that
directly a magistrate entered an allied, independent state, he was
obliged to dispense with his lictors. The king had twelve lictors; each
of the consuls (immediately after their institution) twelve,
subsequently limited to the monthly officiating consul, although Caesar
appears to have restored the original arrangement; the dictator, as
representing both consuls, twenty-four; the emperors twelve, until the
time of Domitian, who had twenty-four. The Flamen Dialis, each of the
Vestals, the _magister-vicorum_ (overseer of the sections into which the
city was divided) were also accompanied by lictors. These lictors were
probably supplied from the _lictores curiatii_, thirty in number, whose
functions were specially religious, one of them being in attendance on
the pontifex maximus. They originally summoned the comitia curiata, and
when its meetings became merely a formality, acted as the
representatives of that assembly. Lictors were also assigned to private
individuals at the celebration of funeral games, and to the aediles at
the games provided by them and the theatrical representations under
their supervision.
For the fullest account of the lictors, see Mommsen, _Römisches
Staatsrecht_, i. 355, 374 (3rd ed., 1887).