While in Rome, Herodes married Appia Annia Regilla, often supposed on no evidence a kinswoman of Marcus’s biological father M. Annius Verus; her name points rather to Perusia (now Perugia), where the Appii Annii were a leading family (Torelli 1969, 301–302), but hardly grand enough for Herodes. In any case, such intercultural marriages were unusual; but Herodes was ready to assume either a Greek or a Roman identity at will (Gleason 2010). The date is uncertain, but in the summer of 142 a stillborn son caused Herodes to display the excess of grief for which he would become notorious. Once Herodes’s consulate ended (Febuary 28, 143; cf. Graindor 1930, 89), Regilla accompanied him on his return to Greece, where she too made benefactions (Pomeroy 2007, 85–111); at Olympia, his aqueduct fed into her nymphaeum and may even have been due to her service as priestess. However, after bearing him several children she was killed in the eighth month of another pregnancy by a kick in the stomach from Herodes’s freedman Alcimedon, allegedly on his orders; Herodes was prosecuted at Rome by her brother Bradua but acquitted for want of evidence, and because Bradua, a pompous ass, had made a hash of his case (Philostr. VS 2.1.8). Whatever the facts (one possibility is an attempt at inducing an abortion), Herodes mourned her with his usual extravagance of grief, which some saw as a mark of innocence; not even all those who thought it excessive deemed it insincere.
The same extravagance was also shown in the monuments erected to his three foster-sons, on whom he had lavished the love he withheld from his stupid playboy son, named Bradua after his uncle: Achilleus, Memnon (so called because he was black), and above all Polydeucion (“Little Pollux”), more formally L. Vibullius Polydeuces, whose portraits were modeled on those of Hadrian’s beloved Antinous (Meyer 1985 and 1989). It is usually thought to have been Polydeucion for whom his excessive grieving was censured by a Stoic as unmanly; to this he replied in a speech reported by Gellius (NA 19.12) upholding the Peripatetic doctrine of moderation against the Stoic ideal of no passion with the warning fable of the Thracian who, learning from his neighbor the virtues of pruning, cut his whole farm down to nothing.
This Latin paraphrase is as near as we come to the eloquence of a man regarded as the greatest of the sophists, worthy to be ranked amongst the classic Ten Orators of Athens (“Well, I am better than Andocides,” he modestly admitted); no Greek speech survives, only a miserable composition (Albini 1968) transmitted under his name, set in Thessaly during the late fifth century BCE and more plausibly attributed by Russell (1983, 111) to Hippodromus of Larisa, which not only contains Latinisms such as συντιθέασιν “they compare,” calqued on componunt, instead of παραβάλλουσιν, but exhibits toward the end an obtrusive replication of the Thucydidean ὀρρωδεῖν, “to fear,” evidently a good classical word that the author has just remembered or discovered. We are therefore unable to judge Herodes’s oratory against Philostratus’s description at VS 2.1.14, which, as often with the language of literary criticism, is not always easy to understand, let alone translate:
The structure of his discourse was well enough disciplined and its vehemence crept up on one rather than burst in; grandeur was united with simplicity, its sonority recalled Critias, there were conceits that no-one else would have thought of, his ready wit was not dragged in but arose from the subject-matter, and his style was pleasant, full of figures, elegant, with skillfull variation; his manner was not vehement but smooth and calm, and his style gave the overall impression of a gold-dust gleaming beneath the silver eddies of a river.
Such mastery was not achieved without hard work and much reading; on one occasion, so he told Galen, he fell short of his usual standard after being too busy in the previous three days to read or write anything (On Examinations 9.19, pp. 112.11–114.1 Iskandar 1988). Normally, however, he read even while drinking, and encouraged his best students to do the same; these were the members of his Waterclock Club (Philostr. VS 2.10.1), who met after his public lectures. Intellectual conversation over wine is also attested by Gellius, who was more than once his guest at Cephisia and Marathon (NA 1.2, 18.10) and who shows only his good side.
The reading that Herodes practiced was requisite, not merely for a stock of arguments and exempla, but for command of Attic Greek, which even in Athens was no longer the current mode of speech; but Herodes symbolized that command through his familiar, variously called Heracles and Agathion, a strapping up-country lad, allegedly eight feet tall, who spoke (in fluent and complex periods) the true Attic dialect uncorrupted by the koinê of the city—or so Herodes informed a correspondent. There is not a little of the folk-tale about this Heracles, who is also credited with such primitive traits as wrestling with wild beasts and such marks of purity as detecting that a bowl of milk had been polluted by a woman’s touch (Philostr. VS 2.1.7); but this much is clear, that in showing him favor Herodes was favoring himself, and demonstrating that he was Ἀττικός in more than name.
Herodes’s wealth naturally gave him a dominant position in Athenian politics that no less naturally was resented, doubtless even by those who had acquiesced in his changing the traditional black cloaks of the ephebes to white, or had voted to remove the day on which his daughter Athenais had died from the calendar. When in 171 the two Quintilius brothers were sent to Greece as correctores Achaiae, they were invited to a meeting of the Athenian assembly at which speakers complained of his tyrannical conduct and requested them to lay these grievances before the emperor. They lost no time in doing so, whereupon Herodes (in the best tradition of tyrants ancient and modern) accused them of plotting against him by stirring up the Athenians, and even tried to prosecute his enemies in the proconsul’s court for arousing the people against him; but they forestalled him by approaching Marcus directly.
The case was heard at Sirmium (now Sremska Mitrovica). After an outstanding speech by his enemy Demostratus (scholars debate whether he was Fronto’s client in the earlier case), Herodes, out of his mind with grief at the death by lightning of Alcimedon’s two daughters, who had served him since childhood, instead of defending himself threw a tantrum; Marcus, though clearly disturbed by the accusations, transferred the blame to Herodes’s freedmen. Freedmen, unlike slaves, were legally responsible for their actions; excessive sway over a former master had been illustrated for Marcus not only by Herodes’s account of his father’s will, but by the reign of his predecessor Claudius. Nevertheless, his primary motive was no doubt to protect Herodes; although for a time he displayed a certain coolness toward him not only by ceasing to write him letters but by appointing Theodotus, who had been in league with Demostratus’s party, to his new chair of rhetoric in Athens, when Theodotus died soon afterwards, Marcus nominated Herodes’s favourite pupil Hadrian of Tyre, and on his visit to Athens in 176, when he attempted to reconcile the citizenry with the great man, it was Herodes whom he appointed to nominate the first holders of his philosophical professorships. When, a year or so afterwards, Herodes died at the age of seventy-six, the Athenians put aside their resentments and gave him a magnificent civic funeral, overriding his wish to be buried at Marathon; Hadrian’s funeral oration moved his audience to tears.
FURTHER READING
For various opinions on Hadrian’s dealings with Favorinus, see Bowie 1997, Fein 1994, Holford-Strevens 2015, Swain 1989. The view of Favorinus’s philosophical writings expressed here were set out at greater length in Holford-Strevens 1997, 207–217; see too Bonazzi 2003, 158–163; Glucker 1978, 256–292; Ioppolo 1993; Opsomer 1997; 1998, 213–240.
For Herodes, see, besides Graindor 1930 and Ameling 1983: Bowersock 1969, Kennell 1997, and Tobin 1997. The education received and imparted by Herodes is considered by Papalas 1981. On his buildings see Galli 2002.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Albini, U. 1968. [Erode Attico]:Περὶ πολιτείας. Florence.
Amato, E. 2005. Favorinos d’Arles, Œuvres: Introduction générale, témoignages, Discours aux Corinthiens, Sur la Fortune. Paris.
Amato, E. 2010. Favorinos d’Arles, Œuvres III: Fragments
. Paris.
Ameling, W. 1983. Herodes Atticus. 2 vols. Hildesheim.
Barigazzi, A. 1991. Galeno: Sull’ottima maniera d’insegnare; Esortazione alla medicina. Berlin.
Bonazzi, M. 2003. Academici e Platonici: Il dibattito antico sullo scetticismo di Platone. Milan.
Bowersock, G. W. 1969. Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire. Oxford.
Bowie, E. L. 1997. “Hadrian, Favorinus, and Plutarch.” In Plutarch and His Intellectual World, edited by J. Mossman, 1–13. London.
Fein, S. 1994. Die Beziehungen der Kaiser Trajan und Hadrian zu den Litterati. Stuttgart and Leipzig.
Galli, M. 2002. Die Lebenswelt eines Sophisten: Untersuchungen zu den Bauten und Stiftungen des Herodes Atticus. Mainz.
Gleason, M. W. 1995. Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome. Princeton, NJ.
Gleason, M. W. 2010: “Making Space for Bicultural Identity: Herodes Atticus Commemorates Regilla.” In Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World, edited by T. Whitmarsh, 125–162. Cambridge.
Glucker, J. 1978. Antiochus and the Late Academy. Göttingen.
Graindor, P. 1930. Un milliardaire antique: Hérode Atticus et sa famille. Cairo.
Goggin, M. G. 1951. “Rhythm in the Prose of Favorinus.” YClS 12: 149–201.
Holford-Strevens, L. 1997. “Favorinus: The Man of Paradoxes.” In Philosophia Togata II: Plato and Aristotle at Rome, edited by J. Barnes and M. Griffin, 188–217. Oxford.
Holford-Strevens, L. 2003. Aulus Gellius: An Antonine Scholar and His Achievement. Rev. ed. Oxford.
Holford-Strevens, L. 2015. “L’exil de Favorinos eut-il réellement lieu?” In Le Traité “Sur l’exil” de Favorinos d’Arles: Papyrologie, philologie et littérature, edited by E. Amato and M.-H. Marganne, 123–132, Rennes.
Hout, M. P. J. van den. 1988. M. Cornelius Fronto: Epistulae. Leipzig.
Hout, M. P. J. van den. 1999. A Commentary on the Letters of M. Cornelius Fronto. Leiden.
Hoyland, R. 2007. “A New Edition and Translation of the Leiden Polemon.” In Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul: Polemon’s “Physiognomy” from Classical Antiquity, edited by S. Swain, 329–463. Oxford.
Ioppolo, A. M. 1993. “The Academic Position of Favorinus of Arelate.” Phronesis 38: 183–213.
Iskandar, A. Z., ed. 1988. Galen: On Examinations by which the Best Physicians Are Recognized. East Berlin.
Kennell, N. M. 1997. “Herodes Atticus and the Rhetoric of Tyranny.” CPhil. 92: 346–362.
Meyer, H. 1985: “Vibullius Polydeukion: ein archäologisch-epigraphischer Problemfall,” MDAI(A) 100: 393–404 and pls. 87–90.
Meyer, H. 1989: “Zu Polydeukion, dem Archon Dionysios und W. Ameling in Boreas 11, 1988, 62 ff.” Boreas 12: 119–122 and pls. 32, 23.
Morris, J. 1964, “Leges Annales under the Principate, I: Legal and Constitutional.” Listy filologické 87: 316–337.
Opsomer, H. J. 1997. “Favorinus versus Epictetus on the Philosophical Heritage of Plutarch: A Debate on Epistemology.” In Plutarch and His Intellectual World, edited by J. Mossman, 17–39. (London, 1997)
Opsomer, H. J. 1998. In Search of the Truth: Academic Tendencies in Middle Platonism. Brussels.
Papalas, A. J. 1981. “Herodes Atticus: An Essay on Education in the Antonine Age.” History of Education Quarterly 21: 171–188.
Pomeroy, S. B. 2007. The Murder of Regilla: A Case of Domestic Violence in Antiquity. Cambridge, MA.
Repath, I. 2007. “Anonymus Latin, Book of Physiognomy.” In In Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul: Polemon’s “Physiognomy” from Classical Antiquity, edited by S. Swain, 549–635. Oxford.
Russell, D. A. 1983. Greek Declamation. Cambridge.
Swain, S. 1989. “Favorinus and Hadrian.” ZPE 79: 150–158.
Swain, S, ed. 2007. Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul: Polemon’s “Physiognomy” from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam. Oxford.
Tobin, J. 1997. Herodes Attikos and the City of Athens: Patronage and Conflict under the Antonines. Amsterdam.
Torelli, M. 1969. “Senatori etruschi della tarda repubblica e dell’impero.” Dial. di Arch. 3: 285–363.
Whitmarsh, T. 2001. Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation. Oxford.
CHAPTER 16
FRONTO AND HIS CIRCLE
PASCALE FLEURY
RECENT studies on the Second Sophistic have shown that the characteristics of this movement and this period differ according to the observer’s point of view. If we look beyond the desire we have to find a steady definition for this cultural phenomenon, it becomes clear that the literature of this period, for Greek and Latin writers, shares some common traits and themes. Fronto, the great orator of the second century and teacher of Latin rhetoric to the future emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, cannot be included among the sophists, at least as defined by Philostratus, first because he is not Greek, an essential feature in Philostratus’s rather narrow definition, but also because he does not seem to have practiced declamation, nor did he possess the spectacular eloquence of his contemporaries. However, Fronto practiced some sophistic genres and shares with his Greek homologues an epideictic vision of rhetoric, a love for archaisms and an interest in similar themes.1 Therefore, this contribution will attempt, initially, to show the connections that Fronto maintains with the sophists that he encounters and, second, to illustrate the commonality of thought and literary style between the Roman orator and the Greek sophists.
16.1 FRONTO AND THE SOPHISTS: HERODES ATTICUS, FAVORINUS, POLEMON
Fronto’s letters include few judgments on the contemporary sophists as sophists. Thus, the interactions between the Latin orator and Herodes Atticus are essentially social. Indeed, in the preserved Correspondence, the Greek sophist is not judged on literary criteria nor on his sophistic actions, but on a moral basis.2 From a literary perspective, Fronto alludes probably to Favorinus in the third paragraph of the Laudes neglegentiae: “< . . . > de Fauorini nostri pigmentis fuci quisnam appingerems licet?”3Fronto seems to know the sophist’s adoxographies, but it is not likely that the reference to the red color (pigmentis fuci) recalls the color debate staged in the Attic Nights (2.26). Indeed, the makeup metaphor is not unusual in the theoretic expositions on style and in ancient literary criticism (Fleury 2006b: 236–252). This allusion to Favorinus, when reframed in the context of the Laudes neglegentiae, where Fronto demonstrates the superiority of natural beauty over artificial charms, seems to be a criticism of rhetorical ornamentation compared to the beauty of natural speech, a frequent theme in Fronto (Fleury 2002). The philological difficulties of the text prevent us from going further with this hypothesis.
Polemon the Sophist (Philostr. VS 1.25.530–544) receives a fuller treatment in the letters since Marcus Aurelius writes to his teacher of rhetoric (Ad Marcum 2.10) to report on a declamation that he has heard.4 Fronto answers this letter with a jest (Ad Marcum 2.2.5): “Pro Polemone rhetore, quem mihi tu in epistula tua proxime exhibuisti Tullianum, ego in oratione, quam in senatu recitaui, philosophum reddidi, nisi me opinio fallit, peratticum” (“Instead of Polemon the rhetorician, whom you lately presented to me in your letter as a Ciceronian, I have given back to you in my speech, which I delivered in the Senate, a philosopher, if I am not mistaken, of the most Attic type”; Haines 1919–1920, 1:123, slightly modified). Then, Fronto cites Horace (Sat. 2.3.254–257) to talk about the conversion of Polemon the Philosopher.5 It is clear that the basis of Marcus Aurelius’s criticism was stylistic in nature.6 However, for our purpose, it is more pertinent to point out the amalgam that Fronto seems to make between philosophy and sophistry. Philostratus does not report any philosophical pretentions when he writes Polemon’s biography and it is safe to think that Polemon had no more claims to philosophy than the other sophists (cf., inter alia, Anderson 1993, 133–143). Polemon’s portrayal as an Attic philosopher is paradoxical. The terms used by Fronto closely associate two notions that are somewhat contradictory: the search for reason, as Fronto himse
lf calls philosophy (Ad Marcum 4.12.2; cf. Fleury 2006b, 133–143) and style.7 Furthermore, the two stages of the assimilation are not wholly positive. For Fronto, a Ciceronian rhetor is probably more commendable than an Attic philosopher, but first, the word rhetor is sparsely used in the Correspondence,8 where orator is preferred, and second, Fronto’s opinion on Cicero, positive as it may be, is not devoid of criticism.9 Even if it is challenging to understand the issues clearly, Fronto’s observation seems to establish a sharp dichotomy between Latin rhetoric and Greek philosophy; Fronto positions Polemon the Sophist in a world opposite to his own. This division is similar to other devices used in the Correspondence (Fleury 2002 and 2007), where Fronto establishes through the use of speech clear distinctions and oppositions between the Greek world, associated with shameful philosophy and dialectic, and the Latin world, associated with respectable eloquence and lifestyle. Still, it is clear that these speeches are only words. Fronto’s circle, as we can see it in the Attic Nights and in the Correspondence, in his rhetorical display, in his use of Greek and in his idea of the world are, after all, more closely related to the Greek sophists than Fronto would admit.
16.2 FRONTO’S CIRCLE IN THE ATTIC NIGHTS
Fronto’s portrait as the center of an intellectual circle comes primarily from the writing of Aulus Gellius, who uses the Latin orator as the protagonist in five chapters.10 The anecdotes in the Attic Nights show Fronto in standard social situations. The orator is most of the time pictured in familiar settings, surrounded by friends and scholars, young and old, debating casually about the subtleties of the Latin language. The scene is usually staged in his villa on the Esquiline hill, but on one occasion it takes place in the hall of the Palatine palace. The members of Fronto’s circle, most of the time, are not really identified. To describe the attendees of the orator in his villa, Aulus Gellius uses periphrasis highlighting their number (“plerisque uiris doctis presentibus,” 2.26; “nobis ac plerisque aliis adsidentibus,” 13.29; “sedentibus multis doctrina aut genere aut fortuna nobilibus uiris,” 19.10; “cum quibusdam aliis,” 19.13) and the interlocutors are usually identified by a cultural function (a grammarian, a poet). The first and last chapters where Fronto is a character in the Attic Nights seem peculiar, at the same time, by their staging and by the results of the lexical investigation. In both cases, the interlocutors are named (Favorinus in 2.26; Postumius Festus and Sulpicius Apollinaris in 19.13) and in both cases, the discussions revolve around the relationship between Greek and Latin (the comparison of the number of words for colors in Greek and Latin in 2.26; the Latinity of the adjective nanos in 19.13). In the first chapter, Favorinus concedes victory to Fronto, while in the last chapter, Fronto asks the opinion of Apollinaris on the subject of the adjective nanos and Festus proceeds to ask an unnamed grammarian to give some Latin examples of the word. The example in question is then taken from an Augustan poet. This is a practice that is not characteristic of the depiction of Fronto in the other stories told in the Attic Nights.11
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