Who is Acilius?

I post at losthunderlads.wordpress.com. Some posts from that blog will be copied here from time to time.

Gaius Acilius was one of Rome's first historians. We have only a very few brief fragments of his works and an equally sparse set of comments from those who had read it, not enough to be sure of anything about him. Some scholars have seen in these scraps the founder of the tradition of sourly pessimistic Latin historians, the tradition that would give us Tacitus and Ammianus Marcellinus. Whatever the truth about Gaius Acilius, this idea of him intrigues me and has led me to use his name as an online pseudonym for some time now.