The King of Athens

Abstract

AbstractChapter 6 explores the contemporary and near-contemporary reception of Herodes Attikos in the literary record. In particular, it examines his most robust literary portrait in Philostratos’ Lives of the Sophists and its collision with both his material footprint and the portrayal of other authors, including Fronto, Aulus Gellius, Pausanias, and Lucian. It argues that Philostratos uses rhetorical stock characters (the tyrant, king, hero, and philosopher) to draw out the complexities and discordances in Herodes’ character and to create a remarkably ambivalent depiction of the role of the ‘Second Sophistic’ in the contemporary Roman empire. Herodes is in sharpest relief when he is juxtaposed to Roman emperors. In these circumstances he comes to resemble Athens’ legendary king, Theseus. The chapter shows that Philostratos creates two versions of both Athens and Herodes: the anachronistic and unreal sophistic city in which Herodes is the ‘king of words’ and rules with a generous democratic nature, and the Roman provincial city in which he is an ambiguous mix of hero and tyrant, who never fulfils his kingly potential. The two ultimately incompatible paradigms offer competing visions of a utopic fantasy and a difficult reality. Philostratos’ shaping of Herodes as a failed political force in the empire reveals that the commemorative anxieties identified in previous chapters as characteristic of imperial Greek cultural output were very real and valid concerns.