Lucius Fabius Justus

Lucius Fabius Justus was a Roman senator of the 2nd century AD who occupied a number of offices in the imperial service, as well as serving as suffect consul in 102, replacing Lucius Licinius Sura. Justus is also known as a correspondent of Pliny the Younger, and the addressee of Tacitus' Dialogue.

From the correspondence Pliny published, he mentions Justus in one letter and writing two more to him. In a letter to Voconius Romanus, wherein Pliny gloats over the discomfort the delator or informer Marcus Aquillius Regulus felt following the death of Domitian in the year 96, Pliny mentions that Justus was one of the people Regulus approached to intervene on his behalf with Pliny, hoping to stave off Pliny's prosecution of the former informer.^[1] Of the two letters he wrote to Justus, the first was a light-hearted reproach for not writing him, while the second apparently was written after Justus responded to Pliny's first letter, accepting Justus' explanation that during the present summer he was too busy and looking forward to the winter months when Justus would have more time to write, while promising to send some of his own writings which the other had apparently asked for.^[2] Ronald Syme fails to detect in the two letters addressed to Justus "a common friendship" with Justus that Pliny had with Tacitus, another of his correspondents: "Justus. He stood closer to Tacitus than did the other consular orator. Pliny favoured Tacitus with a long epistle defending long orations (I. 20). Fabius has the dedication of the Dialogus which declared that eloquence is not needed any more."^[3]

Evidence for his career begins after Justus completed his nundinium as suffect consul. He held the governorship of Moesia Inferior from 105 to 108,^[4] then was governor of Syria from 108 to 112.^[5] Syme speculates he may have died in Syria, thus being robbed of a second consulship.^[3]