Favorinus and Herodes Atticus

Favorinus is chiefly known, besides the brief account in Philostratus and three speeches of his own composition, from his admirer Aulus Gellius and his enemy M. Antonius Polemon, who dilates on his lurid private life; this apparently made Hadrian, with whom he had a fraught relationship, banish him to Chios. His engagement with philosophy was sufficient to bring him into conflict with Galen. His close friend Herodes, a man of high birth and immense wealth, enjoyed a great reputation as an orator that did not secure the survival of any speeches barring one miserable effort almost certainly spurious. Despite his munificence, his overbearing power at Athens was much resented by its upper class; his lack of self-control, manifested in his excessive displays of mourning, brought him more than once into court, but he never lost the protection of his former pupil Marcus Aurelius.