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Herodes Atticus was a Greek rhetorician and writer.
Background
Herodes Atticus was a Greek of Athenian descent. His ancestry could be traced to the Athenian noblewoman Elpinice, a half-sister of the statesman Cimon and daughter of politician Miltiades the Younger. He claimed lineage from the Athenian King Theseus, the Athenian Monarch Cecrops, King Aeacus and the God Zeus. He had an ancestor four generations removed from him called Polycharmus, who may have been the Archon of Athens of that name from 9/8 BC-22/23. His family bore the Roman family name Claudius. There is a possibility that a paternal ancestor of his received Roman citizenship from an unknown member of the Claudian gens.
Herodes Atticus was born to a distinguished and very rich family of consular rank. His parents were a Roman Senator, Tiberius Claudius Atticus Herodes and the wealthy heiress Vibullia Alcia Agrippina. He had a brother named Tiberius Claudius Atticus Herodianus and a cousin that he loved
His parents were related as uncle and niece. His maternal grandmother and his father were sister and brother. His maternal uncle Lucius Vibullius Hipparchus was an Archon of Athens in the years 99–100 and his maternal cousin, Publius Aelius Vibullius Rufus was an Archon of Athens between 143–144.
Herodes Atticus was born in 101 in Marathon , Greece and spent his childhood years between Greece and Italy.
Education
He received an education in rhetoric and philosophy from many of the best teachers from both Greek and Roman culture.
Career
His talents gained him the favourable notice of Hadrian, who appointed him praefect of the free towns in the province of Asia (125).
On his return to Athens, he attained great celebrity as an orator and teacher of rhetoric, and was elected to the office of archon.
In 140 he was summoned by Antoninus Pius to undertake the education of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, and received many marks of favour, amongst them the consulship (143). He is principally celebrated, however, for the vast sums he expended on public purposes.
He built at Athens a great race-course of Pentelic marble, and a splendid musical theatre, called the Odeum in memory of his wife Regilla, which still exists.
At Corinth he built a theatre, at Delphi a stadium, at Thermopylae hot baths, at Canusium in Italy an aqueduct.
He even contemplated cutting a canal through the Isthmus of Corinth, but was afraid to carry out his plan because the same thing had been unsuccessfully attempted before by the emperor Nero.
Many of the partially ruined cities of Greece were restored by Atticus, and numerous inscriptions testify their gratitude to their benefactor.
He enjoyed a very high reputation amongst his contemporaries, and wrote numerous works, of which the only one to come down to us is a rhetorical exercise On the Constitution (ed. Hass, 1880), advocating an alliance of the Thebans and Peloponnesians against Archelaus, king of Macedonia.
His latter years were embittered by family misfortune, and having incurred the enmity of the Athenians, he withdrew from Athens to his villa near Marathon, where he died in 177.
Achievements
Herodes Atticus was a distinguished and rich Greek aristocrat and sophist who served as a Roman senator. Appointed consul at Rome in 143, he was the first Greek to hold the rank of consul ordinarius, as opposed to consul suffectus.
He was the most celebrated of the orators and writers of the Second Sophistic, a movement that revitalized the teaching and practice of rhetoric in Greece in the 2nd century ad.
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. During his life, he built a theater called the Odeon of Herodes Atticus.
M. I. Finley described Herodes Atticus as "patron of the arts and letters (and himself a writer and scholar of importance), public benefactor on an imperial scale, not only in Athens but elsewhere in Greece and Asia Minor, holder of many important posts, friend and kinsman of emperors. "
Connections
After Herodes Atticus came to Rome from Athens he was betrothed to Aspasia Annia Regilla, a wealthy aristocrat, who was related to the wife of Antoninus Pius, Empress Faustina the Elder. When Regilla and Herodes Atticus married, she was 14 years old and he was 40.
Regilla bore Herodes Atticus six children, of whom three survived to adulthood.
After Regilla died in 160, Herodes Atticus never married again. When he died in 177, his son Atticus Bradua and his grandchildren survived him. Sometime after his wife’s death, he adopted his cousin’s first grandson Lucius Vibullius Claudius Herodes as his son.
Father:
Tiberius Claudius Atticus Herodes
(65 - before 160)
Mother:
Vibullia Alcia Agrippina
(early 80– by 170)
Spouse:
Aspasia Annia Regilla
(125-160)
Uncle:
Lucius Vibullius Hipparchus
He was a Greek aristocrat who lived in the second half of the 1st century AD and the first half of the 2nd century AD in the Roman Empire.
