ARISTEIDES, AELIUS, surnamed Theodorus, Greek rhet orician and sophist (A.D. 117, or perhaps 129-189). After study ing at Pergamum and Athens, he lived at Smyrna. In 178, when it was destroyed by an earthquake, he wrote an account of the disaster to Aurelius, and induced him to rebuild the city. His extant works consist of two small rhetorical treatises on political and simple speech, with Demosthenes and Xenophon as models (Spengel, Rhetores Graeci) and 55 declamations, of which only the Panathenascus and the Encomium of Rome were actually delivered. Of the others, The Sacred Discourses deal with his illness and with miraculous cures, and the rest are panegyrics or treat subjects from Greek history. Though they lack living in terest, their style is correct, and they became school books and the subject of commentaries.