LICINIUS CALVUS STOLO, GAIUS, Roman statesman, the chief representative of the plebeian Licinian gens, was tribune in 377 B.c., consul in 361. His name is associated with the Licinian or Licinio-Sextian laws (proposed 377, passed 367), which practically ended the struggle between patricians and plebeians. He was himself fined for possessing a larger share of the public land than his own law allowed.
See [Rome]: History, II. “The Republic.”
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.