Lucius Fabius Justus

Lucius Fabius Justus was a Roman senator (active in the late 1st and early 2nd centuries AD) who occupied a number of offices in the imperial service. He also served as suffect consul in 102, replacing Lucius Licinius Sura as the colleague of the consul who opened the year, Lucius Julius Ursus Servianus; both Justus and Servianus closed their nundinium at the end of April.

Justus is known as a correspondent of Pliny the Younger, and is the addressee of Tacitus' Dialogus de oratoribus. Ronald Syme questioned in a 1957 essay the rationale behind Tacitus addressing his work to Justus instead of, for example, Pliny the Younger. Syme's answer was that Justus at the time of the dedication was a young adult who had become cynical of the craft of rhetoric. Syme further pictures Justus as a viri militares (unlike Pliny), and as "an enlighted and cultivated person [who] had deserted eloquence for the career of provinces and armies" despite the scant evidence for Justus' role in governing provinces or leading armies.^[1]