Bruttiani
Bruttiani slaves whose duty it was to wait on the Roman magistrates. They are said to have been originally taken from among the Bruttians, because this people continued from first to last faithful to Hannibal (P. Diac. s. v. Bruttiani; Gel. 10.3.19); and Strabo (v. extr.) says the same of the Lucanians and Picentes. But Niebuhr (Hist. of Rome, vol. iii. note 944) is disposed to think that these servants bore this name long before, since both Strabo (6.2.4) and Diodorus (16.15) state that this word signified revolted slaves
in the Lucanian language. (Mom. Röm. Staatsr. 1.260.)
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.