Hadrian’s Arch

The final chapter completes the narrative with an examination of Hadrian’s dealings with Athens, thanks to whom the city was again made prominent in the Greek world. After discussing Hadrian’s economic and constitutional arrangements for Athens, the chapter turns to the religious and intellectual life in the city and how these appealed to a polymath like Hadrian. Most importantly there is a focus on Hadrian’s Panhellenion, a league of cities of the East created by the emperor that made Athens its center. As a result, Athens’ reputation and prestige skyrocketed once again, and it became in effect the second city of the Roman Empire after Rome. The Panhellenion also spawned a burst of building activity under Hadrian not seen since the days of Augustus. The completion of the monumental Temple to Olympian Zeus was meant to be the focal point of the Panhellenion. A section on Hadrian’s Arch is also discussed, as the monument was commissioned by the Athenians and shows the extent of Hadrian’s power over the city, Greece, and the east. As a postscript, there is a broad brushstroke description of Athens after Hadrian, including the activity of Herodes Atticus and up to the Herulian sack.

La stele dei Maratonomachi (o ‘stele di Loukou’)

The ‘stele of the Marathonomachoi’ was found in 1999 in Herodes Atticus’ villa at Eua-Loukou, in the eastern Peloponnese. Dated on palaeographical grounds to the time of the Persian wars and attributed to the tomb of the Marathonomachoi on the battlefield, it has been alternatively dated shortly after 490, or during the ’70s. Developing some arguments which I have already discussed in previous articles, I here explore the possibility that the stele was originally inscribed with the casualty list of the Erechtheid tribe, while the epigram was added some time after 480-479. The stele would therefore represent two different phases of the historical memory of the Marathon battle.

Fronto and His Circle

Fronto, the great orator of the second century and teacher of Latin rhetoric to the future emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, while not fitting Philostratus’s definition of a sophist, did practice some sophistic genres and shares with his Greek homologues an epideictic vision of rhetoric, a love for archaisms and an interest in similar themes. This chapter attempts to show the connections that Fronto maintains with the sophists whom he knows, as seen in the Correspondence (Herodes Atticus, Favorinus, Polemon), and those whom he encounters, as shown in Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights, and to illustrate the commonality of thought and literary style between the Roman orator and the Greek sophists. Attitudes to Greek and political power are analyzed to show the strategies adopted by Fronto to define his relations with the imperial family and to situate himself in the cultural geography of his time.

Favorinus and Herodes Atticus

Favorinus is chiefly known, besides the brief account in Philostratus and three speeches of his own composition, from his admirer Aulus Gellius and his enemy M. Antonius Polemon, who dilates on his lurid private life; this apparently made Hadrian, with whom he had a fraught relationship, banish him to Chios. His engagement with philosophy was sufficient to bring him into conflict with Galen. His close friend Herodes, a man of high birth and immense wealth, enjoyed a great reputation as an orator that did not secure the survival of any speeches barring one miserable effort almost certainly spurious. Despite his munificence, his overbearing power at Athens was much resented by its upper class; his lack of self-control, manifested in his excessive displays of mourning, brought him more than once into court, but he never lost the protection of his former pupil Marcus Aurelius.