HERO'DES, TIBE'RlUS CLA'UDIUS ATTICUS, a native of Marathon, in Attica, end of an illustrious family, which numbered among its members several officers aud magistrates of the latter period of the Athenian commonwealth, was born under the reign of Trojan. He inherited from his father Atticus a very large property. Atticus, it is said, discovered one day in his grounds, in or near Athens, a vast treasure, probably hidden there during the preceding wars. He informed the then emperor Nerve of what he had found, and was told to do with it as he pleased. In consequence of this, Atticus left his son lierodes possessed of enormous wealth. Herodes was educated by the best teachers of his time : he studied under Favorinus and Polcmon, and he became an accomplished scholar, rhetorician, and philosopher. lie was made by Autooiuuis Pius prefect of the Greek towns of Asia. Having removed to Rome, his wealth, his counectious, and his extempore eloquence, which is spoken of as wonderful, gave him a considerable degree of importance, and he was made consul with C. Iiellicius Torquatus, A.D. 148. Ile was also one of the preceptors of the younger Verus, the adopted son of Antoninus. Ilcrodes married at Rome Aumda Regina, of au illustrious and wealthy family. She bore him four children, and died while pregnant of the fifth. His brother in-law suspected Hcrodes, who was of a violent and jealous temper, of foul treatment of his wife, and he brought him to trial ou the charge of murder; but lierodes was acquitted. lierodes displayed an excessive, and, as some believed, an assumed grief for the loss of his wife, and he dedicated her estate to Minerva and Nemesia. An inscription which he wrote, or caused to be written, in Greek hex,. meters, records the fact. There is another inscription, likewise in Greek verse, in which the poet invites the Roman women to honour the memory of Regilla, descauting upon her beauty, virtue, and high lineage : he speaks of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, whom he cow pares to Jupiter, for the consolation which he administered to the widower in his old age, left with two young surviving children, upon one of whom, named Atticus, the emperor bestowed the patrician and senatorial sandals, or shoes spangled with stars and ornamented with a crescent, which custom of the Roman patricians the poet derives from Mercury. lie then launches out into mythological allusions, and
?peaks of his own descent from the Athenian heroes and demigods. The whole composition, as well as the one previously mentioned, is curious as a memorial of the Greco-Roman style of poetry in the age of the Antonines. These two inscriptions, which are on two large slab. of Greek marble, and were discovered In the early part of the 17th century, under I'ope Paul V. (Iiorgheee), have given much employment to critics and philologists. (Visconti, ' Iscrizioui Tropes ore Borgheeiane; 4to, Rome, 1794.) Heresies, after the loss of his wife, returned to Greece, end died at Marathon, in the seventy-sixth year of his age, towards the end of the reign of Aurelius, or the ' beginning of that of Commodus. lie erected monuments', temples, baths, and aqueducts, in Italy, Greece, and Asia. Psusanias (vii. 20) mention. an Odeon, or Music Theatre, at Athens, as built by him, called tho Theatre of Regina, after his wife : he also embellished the Stadium, near the Ilissus, which was originally constructed by the orator Lycurgus, s.c. 350. Herodea was evidently a conspicuous personage in the age in which he lived, and is mentioned as such by Aulus Collins, Philostratus, Capl tolin us, Zonaras, Suidas, and a number of others. (Fiorillo, ' Herodis Attici clues supersunt; Svo, Leipzig, 1801.) Reredos is said by Philostratua to have written orations, epistles, and ephemerides; but none of these compositions have come down to us except a fragment of an address to the Thebaus, published by Reiske, Leipzig, 1773 ; but its genuineness is doubted by the critics. In the iuscriptiou above mentioned, in honour of his wife, he is styled " the living langnage of Athens," and "the king of oratory." Hie sots Atticus is said to have been a complete idiot all his life.