Marcus Gavius Apicius

Marcus Gavius Apicius is believed to have been a Roman gourmet and lover of luxury, who lived sometime in the 1st century AD, during the reign of Tiberius.

He was the subject of On the Luxury of Apicius, a famous work, now lost, by the Greek grammarian Apion.

Evidence for the life of M. Gavius Apicius derives partly from contemporary or almost-contemporary sources but is partly filtered through the above-named work by Apion, whose purpose was presumably to explain the names and origins of luxury foods, especially those anecdotally linked to Apicius.

From these sources the following anecdotes about Apicius survive: to what extent they form a real biography is doubtful.

The first such reference may be that in the Scholia on Juvenal (4.22), which assert that Apicius wrote about how to arrange dinners, and about sauces.