Avitus Marinianus

Avitus was praetorian prefect[1] and consul in 423[2] He is mentioned in the Gesta de purgatione Xysti III episcopi' in a list of aristocrats involved in the investigations against Pope Sixtus III. Although the Gesta has been long recognized as a later forgery, B.L. Twyman argued in 1970 that the list of aristocrats was taken from a later papal investigation concerning the deposition of bishop Celidonius by archbishop Hilarius of Arles.[3] T.D. Barnes subsequently showed that the list was best explained as the product of "a writer of the sixth century [who] has deliberately mixed genuine and fictitious persons."[4]

He had a wife, Anastasia, and a son, Rufius Praetextatus Postumianus (consul in 448);[5] it is possible that Rufius Viventius Gallus was another son. Marinianus and his wife were Christians; at Pope Leo I's request, they restored the mosaic on the façade of the Old St. Peter's Basilica, as recorded by an inscription on the mosaic itself.[6]

• Jones, Arnold Hugh Martin, John Robert Martindale, John Morris, The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, Volume 2, Cambridge University Press, 1992, ISBN 0-521-07233-6, pp. 723–724.