Bellienus

Bellienus or Billienus was a man of ancient Rome who lived in the 1st-century BCE. He was the son of a female slave and was himself originally a slave, born into the family and ownership of one "Demetrius".^[1] Virtually everything we know about Bellienus comes from an exchange of letters between the orators Cicero and Marcus Caelius Rufus.^[2]

In 49 BCE, he was stationed at Intemelium (modern Ventimiglia) with a garrison, where he was bribed by partisans of Pompey to put to death a locally respected nobleman named Domitius, a friend of Pompey's enemy Julius Caesar.^[1]

The enraged Intimilii took up arms in revolt, and Marcus Caelius Rufus had to march to the town with some cohorts, to put down the insurrection. ^[1][2]

Some scholars have raised doubts about this anecdote, or at least about the name "Bellienus". Nineteenth-century German philologist Karl Friedrich Hermann thought it unlikely that a freedman would have a name that was a well-attested cognomen of an unrelated Roman family, that of the minor but still noble Belliena gens.^[3] Later scholars, such as Robert Yelverton Tyrrell, Louis Claude Purser, Theodor Mommsen, and Johan Cornelis Gerard Boot [nl] demurred on the grounds that "many cognomina were used as nomina at the time".^[4] D. R. Shackleton Bailey proposes that Hermann was correct and that Demetrius himself, Bellienus's former owner, could himself have been a freedman, and to have inherited a family name of Bellienus.^[4]