Decurio
Decurio the head or representative of a decuria.
1. The head of the decuriae into which the curiae and the senate were divided. [DECURIA 1, 2.]
2. The head or commander of the decuriae of the Equites. [DECURIA 3.] But decurio was in later times the name of an officer of a division of cavalry, though such division might contain any number of men (Veget. Mil. 2.14: cf. Tac. Ann. 13.40; Hist. 2.29).
3. The head or representative of a decuria in corporations. [DECURIA No. 5.] In like manner we find a decurio cubiculariorum (Suet. Dom. 17), a decurio palatii (Amm. Marc. 20.4.20; Cod. Just. 12.16), a decurio ostiariorum (Spon, Misc. Erud. Ant. vi. p. 214), a decurio Germanorum (Orelli, inscr. 2923), and there was even a decurio of slaves in the imperial household (Orelli, 2785).
4. But the most important decuriones were those in the municipal towns, who are the subject of the following article.
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.