Theagenes (patrician)

Theagenes (Greek: Θεαγένης, floruit 470s–480s) was an Athenian politician.

Biography

A native of Athens, Theagenes belonged to a wealthy and aristocratic family that claimed descent from Miltiades and Plato. He had a wife, Asclepideneia, who was the great-granddaughter of the Neoplatonic philosopher Plutarch of Athens.[1] He also had a son called Hegias.[2]

He was a Roman senator, a patricius and an archon.[3] He was a supporter of the Neoplatonic school of Proclus.[4] After Proclus' death however, Theagenes came into conflict with the school's headmasters, as he used its patronage to increase his own prestige. He was a supporter of Pamprepius when the poet went to Athens, but later they fell out (Theagenes styled himself a philosopher, while Pamprepius' ambition was to become the best philosopher) and Pamprepius was forced to leave the city.[5]

A panegyric dedicated to Theagenes, probably written by Pamprepius, exists.[6]

Notes
  1. Glen Warren Bowersock, Peter Robert Lamont Brown, Oleg Grabar, Late antiquity: a guide to the postclassical world, Harvard University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-674-51173-5, p. 321.
  2. Edward Watts, City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria, University of California Press, 2008, ISBN 0-520-25816-9, p. 116.
  3. Suda Θ 78.
  4. Watts, p. 110.
  5. Watts, pp. 119–120; Nagy, p. 30.
  6. Nagy, Gregory, Greek Literature, Routledge, 2001, ISBN 0-415-93770-1, p. 486.
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