L. Cestius Pius
a native of Smyrna, taught rhetoric at Rome a few years before the commencement of the Christian era. He was chiefly celebrated on account of the declamations which he was wont to deliver in places of public resort in reply to the orations of Cicero; but neither Seneca nor Quintilian speaks of him with any respect. No fragment of his works has been preserved. (Hieronym. apud Chron. Euseb. ad Ol.cxci.; Senec. Controv. iii. praef., Suasor. vol. vii.; Quint. Inst. 10.5.20; Meyer, Orator. Roman. Fragm.)
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. 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.