The Nymphaeum Of Herodes Atticus At Olympia (reconstruction model). The immensely wealthy Athenian sophist (c. A.D. 101-77) was not only a much
admired literary stylist but also a Roman senator and consul, a friend and tutor of Emperors, and a liberal patron of the arts. Among the buildings which
he sponsored were concert halls in Athens and Corinth and fountain-buildings in Corinth and (here) Olympia.
(d) The second-century sceptical writer Lucian (above, pp. 670 ff.), makes it clear that there was a good deal of religiosity in evidence in these years, and
several of his essays are designed to poke fun at the various quacks and charlatans who thrived on some such atmosphere. Essay 42 deals with the false
prophet Alexander of Abonuteichus who played grossly on the credulity of the period, and no. 55, 'On the death of Peregrinus', is an amusing account of
a man who passed through Cynicism and Christianity to end up an Indian mystic. Lucian is hardly more merciful on grammatical pedants (Essay 41) or
on philosophers (Essay 70, 'Her-motimus', a sustained attack on all philosophical schools). It was an era in which there appears to have been an abnormal
flowering of many forms of occult piety, philosophical syncretism, and genuine religion. This sort of evidence has led E.R. Dodds to label it 'an age of
anxiety', and to suggest that what led men and women to seek peace and revelation in all manner of mysteries was a sense of misery, a Jin de siecle
feeling, which encouraged such strange and unwonted outbursts. It is an attractive hypothesis, though it is hard to see why the age of the Antonines (97-
180 A.D.) should be thought of as especially wretched. The historian Gibbon would hardly have subscribed to such a view. It is certainly true that many
of the writers of the period seem to be very self-obsessed; some of them indeed like Herodes Atticus seem to have been pathological cases. It is also true