Excubitores
Excubitores which properly means watchmen or sentinels of any kind (Caes. Bell. Gall. 7.69), was the name more particularly given to the soldiers of the cohort who guarded the palace of the Roman emperor (Suet. Nero 8, Oth. 6). Their commanding officer was called tribunus excubitor (Suet. Cl. 42; Ner. 9). When the emperor went to an entertainment at the house of another person, the excubitores appear to have accompanied him, and to have kept guard as in his own palace (Suet. Oth. 4).
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.