CNEIUS, a famous poet of Campania, was bred a soldier; but quitted the profession of arms, in order to apply himself to poetry, which he professed with great diligence. He composed a history in verse, and a great number of comedies; but it is said, that his first performance of this last kind so displeased Metellus on account of the satirical strokes it contained, that he procured his being banished from the city: on which he retired to Utica in Africa, where he at length died, 202 B.C. We have only some fragments left of his works.

There was another NAEVUS, a famous augur in the reign of Tarquin, who, to convince the king and the Romans of his preternatural power, cut a flint with a razor, and turned the ridicule of the populace to admiration. Tarquin rewarded his merit by erecting him a statue in the comitium, which was still in being in the age of Augustus. The razor and flint were buried near it under an altar, and it was usual among the Romans to make sacrifices in civil causes swear near it. This miraculous event of cutting a flint with a razor, though believed by some writers, is treated as fabulous and improbable by Cicero, who himself had been augur.

a mole on the skin, generally called a mother's mark; also the tumour known by the name of a wen.

All preternatural tumours on the skin, in the form of a wart or tubercle, are called excrescences; by the Greeks they are called acrothymia; and when they are born with a person, they are called naevi materni, or marks from the mother. See TUMOURS, SURGERY Index.