Herodes Atticus

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Herodes Atticus (

Herodes' father, Tiberius Claudius Atticus Herodes entered the Roman Senate and became Roman consul, the first Athenian to do so.^[12] His mother was the wealthy heiress Vibullia Alcia Agrippina.^[7][13][14] He had a brother named Tiberius Claudius Atticus Herodianus and a sister named Claudia Tisamenis.^[7] His maternal grandparents were Claudia Alcia and Lucius Vibullius Rufus, while his paternal grandfather was Hipparchus.^[14]

His parents were related as uncle and niece.

Herodes Atticus was born in Marathon, Greece,^[18] and spent his childhood years between Greece and Italy. According to Juvenal^[19] he received an education in rhetoric and philosophy from many of the best teachers from both Greek and Roman culture.^[20] Throughout his life, however, Herodes Atticus remained entirely Greek in his cultural outlook.^[20]

He was a student of Favorinus and inherited Favorinus' library.^[21] Like Favorinus, he was a harsh critic of Stoicism.

these disciplines of the cult of the unemotional, who want to be considered calm, brave, and steadfast because they show neither desire nor grief, neither anger nor pleasure, cut out the more active emotions of the spirit and grow old in a torpor, a sluggish, enervated life.^[22]

In 125, Emperor Hadrian appointed him prefect of the free cities in the Roman province of Asia. He later returned to Athens, where he became famous as a teacher. In the year 140, Herodes Atticus was elected and served as an Archon of Athens. Later that same year, the Emperor Antoninus Pius invited him to Rome from Athens to educate his two adopted sons, the future Emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. Sometime after, he was betrothed to Appia Annia Regilla, a wealthy aristocrat, who was related to the wife of Antoninus Pius, Faustina the Elder. When Regilla and Herodes Atticus married, she was 14 years old and he was 40. As a mark of his friendship, Antoninus Pius appointed Herodes Atticus consul in 143.

Herodes Atticus and Regilla controlled a large tract around the third mile of the Appian Way outside Rome, which was known as the "Triopio" (from Triopas, King of Thessaly). For his remaining years he travelled between Greece and Italy.

Some time after his consulship, he returned to Greece permanently with his wife and their children.

In 160, the year that her brother was consul, Regilla, while eight months pregnant, was brutally kicked in the abdomen by a freedman of Herodes Atticus named Alcimedon. This caused her to go into premature labor, killing her. Consul Appius Annius Atilius Bradua brought charges against his brother-in-law in Rome, alleging that Herodes Atticus had ordered her beaten to death; the emperor Marcus Aurelius exonerated his old tutor of his wife's murder.^[23]

Herodes Atticus was the teacher of three notable students: Achilles, Memnon and Polydeuces (Polydeukes). "The aged Herodes Atticus in a public paroxysm of despair at the death of his perhaps eromenos Polydeukes, commissioned games, inscriptions and sculptures on a lavish scale and then died, inconsolable, shortly afterwards."^[24] He also taught many orators and philosophers such as Aristocles of Pergamon.

Herodes Atticus had a distinguished reputation for his literary work, most of which is now lost,^[20] and was a philanthropist and patron of public works. He funded more building projects in Roman Greece than anyone aside from the Roman emperors,^[25] including:

• The Panathenaic Stadium – Athens
• Odeon – Athens; built to honor the memory of his wife^[26]
• A theater at Corinth
• A stadium at Delphi
• The baths at Thermopylae
• Canusium in Italy
• An aqueduct at Alexandria Troas
• A nymphaeum (monumental fountain) with his wife at Olympia
• various benefactions to the peoples of
  Peloponnesus

He also contemplated cutting a canal through the Isthmus of Corinth, but was deterred from carrying out the plan because the same thing had been unsuccessfully attempted before by the emperor Nero.^[26]

Throughout his life, Herodes Atticus had a stormy relationship with the citizens of Athens, but before he died he was reconciled with them.^[20] When he died, the citizens of Athens gave him an honored burial, his funeral taking place in the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens, which he had commissioned.^[20]

Children

Regilla bore Herodes Atticus six children, of whom three survived to adulthood. They were:

• Son, Claudius – born and died in 141^[7]
• Daughter, Elpinice – born as Appia Annia Claudia Atilia Regilla Elpinice Agrippina Atria Polla, 142–165^[7]
• Daughter, Athenais (Marcia Annia Claudia Alcia Athenais Gavidia Latiaria), married Lucius Vibullius Rufus.^[7] They had a son, Lucius Vibullius Hipparchus, the only recorded grandchild of Herodes Atticus.^[27]
• Son, Atticus Bradua – born in 145 as Tiberius Claudius Marcus Appius Atilius Bradua Regillus Atticus^[7]
• Son, Regillus – born as Tiberius Claudius Herodes Lucius Vibullius Regillus, 150–155^[7]
• Unnamed child who died with Regilla or perhaps three months later in 160^[7]

After Regilla died in 160, Herodes Atticus never married again. Sometime after his wife's death, he adopted his cousin's first grandson Lucius Vibullius Claudius Herodes as his son.^[28] When Herodes Atticus died in 177, his son Atticus Bradua and his grandchild survived him.

Legacy

Herodes Atticus and his wife Regilla, from the 2nd century until the present, have been considered great benefactors in Greece, in particular in Athens. The couple are commemorated in Herodou Attikou Street and Rigillis Street and Square, in downtown Athens. In Rome, their names are also recorded on modern streets, in the Quarto Miglio suburb close to the area of the Triopio.

References

Sources

Primary sources

• Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights
• ISBN 978-3-86539-368-5
• Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists, 2.1 (paragraphs 545–566)

Secondary material

• Byrne, Sean G. (2003). Roman citizens of Athens. Leuven: Peeters.
  ISBN 9042913487
  .
• Day, J., An economic history of Athens under Roman domination, Ayers Company Publishers, 1973
• Geagan, Daniel J. (1997). Hoff, Michael C.; Rotroff, Susan I. (eds.). The Romanization of Athens : proceedings of an international conference held at Lincoln, Nebraska (April 1996). Oxford, England: Oxbow Books. pp. 19–32.
  ISBN 978-1-900188-51-7
  .
• Gibbon, E., The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
• Graindor, P., Un milliardaire antique, Ayers Company Publishers, 1979
• Kennell, Nigel M. "Herodes and the Rhetoric of Tyranny", Classical Philology, 4 (1997), pp. 316–362.
• Lambert, R., Beloved and God: The Story of Hadrian and Antinous, Viking, 1984.
• Papalas, A. J. (1981). "Herodes Atticus: An Essay on Education in the Antonine Age". History of Education Quarterly. 21 (2): 171–188.
  S2CID 147284273
  .
• Pomeroy, S. B. (2007). The murder of Regilla: a case of domestic violence in antiquity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Potter, David Stone, The Roman Empire at Bay, AD 18–395, Routledge, 2004.
  ISBN 978-0-415-10058-8
• Rutledge, Harry Carraci (1960). Herodes Atticus: World Citizen, A.D. 101-177 (PhD). Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms, Inc. Retrieved 16 September 2021.
• Schmalz, Geoffrey C. R. (2009). Augustan and Julio-Claudian Athens : a new epigraphy and prosopography. Leiden: Brill.
  ISBN 978-90-04-17009-4
  .
• Spawford, Anthony (2012). "Claudius, Atticus Herodes (1), Tiberius". In Hornblower, Simon; Spawford, Anthony (eds.). The Oxford Classical Dictionary (4th ed.). Oxford University Press. p. 325.
• Tobin, Jennifer, Herodes Attikos and the City of Athens: Patronage and Conflict Under the Antonines, J. C. Gieben, 1997.
• Wilson, N. G., Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece, Routledge 2006

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Herodes Atticus.

• Sleepinbuff.com
• Plancia Magna, Aurelia Paulina, and Regilla: Civic Donors

Political offices
Preceded by (Sulpicius?) Julianus, and Titus Julius Castus as suffect consuls	Roman consul 143 with Gaius Bellicius Flaccus Torquatus	Succeeded by Quintus Junius Calamus, and Marcus Valerius Junianus as suffect consuls