CAECILIUS, of Calacte in Sicily, Greek rhetorician, flour ished at Rome during the reign of Augustus. Next to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, he was the most important critic and rhetorician of the Augustan age. Only fragments of his works are extant, among which may be mentioned : On the Style of the Ten Orators (including their lives and a critical examination of their works), the basis of the pseudo-Plutarchian treatise of the same name ; On the Sublime, attacked by Longinus ( ?) in his essay on the same subject (see L. Martens, De Libello IIepi. iitfiovs, 1877) ; History of the Servile Wars, or slave risings in Sicily ; On Rhetoric and Rhetorical Figures; an Alphabetical Selection of Phrases, an Attic lexicon, mentioned by Suidas as one of his authorities; Against the Phrygians, probably an attack on the florid style of the Asiatic school of rhetoric.
The fragments have been collected and edited by T. Burckhardt (1863), and E. Ofenloch (1907) ; some in C. W. Muller, Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, iii. C. Bursian's Jahresbericht . . . der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, xxiii. (1896), contains full notices of recent works on Caecilius, by C. Hammer. See also J. Brzoska in Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyklopadie (1897).