NAZARIUS (4th century A.D.), Latin rhetorician and panegyrist, was, according to Ausonius, a professor of rhetoric at Burdigala (Bordeaux). The extant speech of which he is undoubtedly the author (in E. Bährens, Panegyrici Latini, No. 10) was delivered in 321 to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the accession of Constantine the Great, and the fifth of his son Constantine’s admission to the rank of Caesar. The preceding speech (No. 9), celebrating the victory of Constantine over Maxentius, delivered in 313 at Augusta Trevirorum (Trier), has often been attributed to Nazarius, but the difference in style and vocabulary, and the more distinctly Christian colouring of Nazarius’s speech, are against this.
See M. Schanz, Geschichte der römischen Litteratur, iii. (1896); Teuffel-Schwabe, Hist. of Roman Literature (Eng. trans., 1900), 401. 6.