Herodes Atticus

Fast-forward to the second century CE during the era of Roman rule when the stadium received an aggressive luxury upgrade.

Herodes Atticus confronted the decaying infrastructure of his era, a gaping maw of municipal neglect attempting to swallow Athenian civic pride.

Acting as an incredibly opulent benefactor, he completely high-rolled the renovation budget to flex on the entire Roman Empire, assigning high confidence to the theory that architectural excess is the surest route to municipal immortality.

He rebuilt the entire structure using brilliant white marble hauled from Mount Pentelicus, the exact same high-quality stone used to build the Parthenon.

She is very respectable, and she could presumably have her pick of men in Rome.

Her father chooses a man named Herodes Atticus.

Now, if that doesn't sound like a very Roman name to you, you're absolutely right.

He's Greek.

But he chose Herodes.

So what might have persuaded him that this was the right man for Regilla? Well, firstly, there was the undeniable question of money.

Regilla's family were certainly wealthy, but Herodes Atticus was incredibly rich.

[laughs]

And so...

I keep a journal and I refer back to it and I find myself, because I'm a writer and I can't help it, I find myself revising my journal, though I absolutely do not intend it for publication, right? But if you're a writer and you had the education that Marcus had, starting with Latin and then Greek from a very, very early age, he was trained under two of the greatest stylists of his day, Fronto for Latin and the famous Herodes Atticus for Greek.

Right.

And so I just say the revisions that polished some of the sections, I say they're just instinctual to Marcus after all of his literary training.

Other teachers followed, each contributing a different color to the portrait that was forming.

Herodes Atticus taught him rhetoric, the shape and music of argument, the way words could be arranged not just to convey meaning, but to move people toward truth.

Fronto, perhaps the most celebrated Latin orator of the age, became something close to a beloved mentor, and their surviving letters show a relationship of genuine warmth and intellectual playfulness that is charming across nearly two thousand years of distance.

Marcus was not a cold student.

Marcus had many tutors throughout the years, and it is likely that his oratorical training had begun once he assumed the toga virilis.

In Greek, he was tutored by Annius Macer, Caninius Celer, and later by Herodes Atticus.

In Latin oratory, he was tutored by Cornelius Fronto, although Herodes and Fronto were unlikely to have tutored him before his adoption by Antoninus.

He was also tutored in law by Lucius Volusius Maecianus.