Hostius

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Hostius, was a Roman epic poet, who probably flourished in the 2nd century BC.

He was the author of a Bellum Histricum in at least seven books, of which only a few fragments remain. The poem is probably intended to celebrate the victory gained in 129 by Gaius Sempronius Tuditanus (consul and himself an annalist) over the Illyrian Iapydes (Appian, Illyrica, 10; Livy, epit. 59). Hostius is supposed by some to be the doctus avus alluded to in Propertius (iv. 20. 8), the real name of Propertius's Cynthia, according to Apuleius (Apologia x.) and the scholiasi on Juvenal (vi. 7), being Hostia (perhaps Roscia).

Fragments in F Bührens, Fragmenta poetarum Romanorum (1884); A Weichert, Poetarum Latinorum reliquiae (1830).

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• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.