Celer, senator

A senator named Celer who appears as a recipient in the early sixth-century Latin correspondence of Ennodius of Pavia, Avitus of Vienne, and Pope Hormisdas, placing him in the senatorial and ecclesiastical milieu of post-Roman Italy and Gaul around 500-520 AD. The most prominent figure of this name in the period is Flavius Celer, magister officiorum and patrician under the emperor Anastasius I and consul in 508, who handled imperial diplomacy with the West during the Acacian schism that Hormisdas worked to resolve; it is plausible but not certain that this record refers to him. Note that the corpus also links this entry to the much earlier letters of Pliny the Younger (early second century), where a different man named Celer appears, so the record likely conflates more than one historical figure. Beyond his appearance as a correspondent, the senator Celer of the sixth-century letters is otherwise thinly attested, and specific details of his career should not be inferred from the letters alone.