LICODIA EUBEA, a town of Sicily in the province of Catania, 4 m. W. of Vizzini, which is 39 m. S.W. of Catania by rail. Pop. (1901) 7033. The name Eubea was given to the place in 1872 owing to a false identification with the Greek city of Euboea, a colony of Leontini, founded probably early in the 6th century B.C. and taken by Gelon. The town occupies the site of an unknown Sicel city, the cemeteries of which have been explored. A few vases of the first period were found, but practically all the tombs explored in 1898 belonged to the fourth period (700–500 B.C.) and show the gradual process of Hellenization among the Sicels.
See Römische Mitteilungen, 1898, 305 seq.; Notizie degli scavi, 1902, 219. (T. As.)
LICTORS (lictores), in Roman antiquities, a class of the
attendants (apparitores) upon certain Roman and provincial
magistrates.[1] As an institution (supposed by some to have
been borrowed from Etruria) they went back to the regal period
and continued to exist till imperial times. The majority of the
city lictors were freedmen; they formed a corporation divided
into decuries, from which the lictors of the magistrates in office
were drawn; provincial officials had the nomination of their
own. In Rome they wore the toga, perhaps girded up; on a
campaign and at the celebration of a triumph, the red military
cloak (sagulum); at funerals, black. As representatives of magistrates
who possessed the imperium, they carried the fasces and
axes in front of them (see Fasces). They were exempt from
military service; received a fixed salary; theoretically they were
nominated for a year, but really for life. They were the constant
attendants, both in and out of the house, of the magistrate to
whom they were attached. They walked before him in Indian
file, cleared a passage for him (summovere) through the crowd,
and saw that he was received with the marks of respect due to
his rank. They stood by him when he took his seat on the
tribunal; mounted guard before his house, against the wall of
which they stood the fasces; summoned offenders before him,
seized, bound and scourged them, and (in earlier times) carried
out the death sentence. It should be noted that directly a
magistrate entered an allied, independent state, he was obliged
to dispense with his lictors. The king had twelve lictors; each
of the consuls (immediately after their institution) twelve,
subsequently limited to the monthly officiating consul, although
Caesar appears to have restored the original arrangement; the
dictator, as representing both consuls, twenty-four; the emperors
twelve, until the time of Domitian, who had twenty-four. The
Flamen Dialis, each of the Vestals, the magister-vicorum (overseer
of the sections into which the city was divided) were also
accompanied by lictors. These lictors were probably supplied
from the lictores curiatii, thirty in number, whose functions were
specially religious, one of them being in attendance on the
pontifex maximus. They originally summoned the comitia
curiata, and when its meetings became merely a formality, acted
as the representatives of that assembly. Lictors were also
assigned to private individuals at the celebration of funeral
games, and to the aediles at the games provided by them and
the theatrical representations under their supervision.
For the fullest account of the lictors, see Mommsen, Römisches Staatsrecht, i. 355, 374 (3rd ed., 1887).
LIDDELL, HENRY GEORGE (1811–1898), English scholar
and divine, eldest son of the Rev. Henry George Liddell, younger
brother of the first Baron Ravensworth, was born at Binchester,
near Bishop Auckland, on the 6th of February 1811. He was
educated at Charterhouse and Christ Church, Oxford. Gaining
a double first in 1833, Liddell became a college tutor, and was
ordained in 1838. In the same year Dean Gaisford appointed
him Greek reader in Christ Church, and in 1846 he was appointed
to the headmastership of Westminster School. Meanwhile his
life work, the great Lexicon (based on the German work of
F. Passow), which he and Robert Scott began as early as 1834,
had made good progress, and the first edition appeared in 1843.
It immediately became the standard Greek-English dictionary
and still maintains this rank, although, notwithstanding the
great additions made of late to our Greek vocabulary from
inscriptions, papyri and other sources, scarcely any enlargement
has been made since about 1880. The 8th edition was published
in 1897. As headmaster of Westminster Liddell enjoyed a
period of great success, followed by trouble due to the outbreak
of fever and cholera in the school. In 1855 he accepted the
deanery of Christ Church, then vacant by the death of Gaisford.
In the same year he brought out a History of Ancient Rome
(much used in an abridged form as the Student’s History of Rome)
and took a very active part in the first Oxford University Commission.
His tall figure, fine presence and aristocratic mien
were for many years associated with all that was characteristic
of Oxford life. Coming just at the transition period when the
“old Christ Church,” which Pusey strove so hard to preserve,
was inevitably becoming broader and more liberal, it was chiefly
due to Liddell that necessary changes were effected with the
minimum of friction. In 1859 Liddell welcomed the then prince
of Wales when he matriculated at Christ Church, being the first
holder of that title who had matriculated since Henry V. In
conjunction with Sir Henry Acland, Liddell did much to encourage
the study of art at Oxford, and his taste and judgment
gained him the admiration and friendship of Ruskin. In 1891,
owing to advancing years, he resigned the deanery. The last
years of his life were spent at Ascot, where he died on the
18th of January 1898. Dean Liddell married in July 1846 Miss
Lorina Reeve (d. 1910), by whom he had a numerous family.
See memoir by H. L. Thompson, Henry George Liddell (1899).
LIDDESDALE, the valley of Liddel Water, Roxburghshire,
Scotland, extending in a south-westerly direction from the
vicinity of Peel Fell to the Esk, a distance of 21 m. The Waverley
route of the North British railway runs down the dale, and the
Catrail, or Picts’ Dyke, crosses its head. At one period the points
of vantage on the river and its affluents were occupied with
freebooters’ peel-towers, but many of them have disappeared
and the remainder are in decay. Larriston Tower belonged
to the Elliots, Mangerton to the Armstrongs and Park to
“little Jock Elliot,” the outlaw who nearly killed Bothwell in
an encounter in 1566. The chief point of interest in the valley,
however, is Hermitage Castle, a vast, massive H-shaped fortress
of enormous strength, one of the oldest baronial buildings in
Scotland. It stands on a hill overlooking Hermitage Water,
a tributary of the Liddel. It was built in 1244 by Nicholas de
Soulis and was captured by the English in David II.’s reign.
It was retaken by Sir William Douglas, who received a grant
of it from the king. In 1492 Archibald Douglas, 5th earl of
Angus, exchanged it for Bothwell Castle on the Clyde with
Patrick Hepburn, 1st earl of Bothwell. It finally passed to the
duke of Buccleuch, under whose care further ruin has been
arrested. It was here that Sir Alexander Ramsay of Dalhousie
was starved to death by Sir William Douglas in 1342, and that
James Hepburn, 4th earl of Bothwell, was visited by Mary,
queen of Scots, after the assault referred to.
To the east of the castle is Ninestane Rig, a hill 943 ft. high, 4 m. long and 1 m. broad, where it is said that William de Soulis, hated for oppression and cruelty, was (in 1320) boiled by his own vassals in a copper cauldron, which was supported on two of the nine stones which composed the “Druidical” circle that gave the ridge its name. Only five of the stones remain. James Telfer (1802–1862), the writer of ballads, who was born in the parish of Southdean (pronounced Soudan), was for several years schoolmaster of Saughtree, near the head of the valley. The castle of the lairds of Liddesdale stood near the junction of Hermitage Water and the Liddel and around it grew up the village of Castleton.
LIDDON, HENRY PARRY (1829–1890), English divine, was the son of a naval captain and was born at North Stoneham, Hampshire, on the 20th of August 1829. He was educated at King’s College School, London, and at Christ Church, Oxford,
- ↑ The Greek equivalents of lictor are ῥαβδοῦχος, ῥαβδοφόρος, ῥαβδονόμος (rod-bearer); the Latin word is variously derived from: (a) ligare, to bind or arrest a criminal; (b) licere, to summon, as convoking assemblies or haling offenders before the magistrate; (c) licium, the girdle with which (according to some) their toga was held up; (d) Plutarch (Quaestiones Romanae, 67), assuming an older form λιτωρ, suggests an identification with λειτουργός, one who performs a public office.
