Bellienus Demetrius

Bellienus or Billienus was a man of ancient Rome who lived in the 1st-century BCE. He was the son of a female slave and was himself originally a slave, born into the family and ownership of one "Demetrius".

Some scholars have raised doubts about this anecdote, or at least about the name "Bellienus". Nineteenth-century German philologist Karl Friedrich Hermann thought it unlikely that a freedman would have a name that was a well-attested cognomen of an unrelated Roman family, that of the minor but still noble Belliena gens. Later scholars, such as Robert Yelverton Tyrrell, Louis Claude Purser, Theodor Mommsen, and demurred on the grounds that "many cognomina were used as nomina at the time". D. R. Shackleton Bailey proposes that Hermann was correct and that Demetrius himself, Bellienus's former owner, could himself have been a freedman, and to have inherited a family name of Bellienus.