Early Christian Terminology in the Death of Peregrinus

[Secret Alias]

Here is the dating:

Lucian relates in his Death of Peregrinus (19) that Herodes Atticus, the friend, and teacher of Marcus Aurelius, built an aqueduct to supply drinking water to Olympia;

The date of the exedra:

and the Exedra of Herodes Atticus (AD 157-160) gradually added to the complex

The dedication cannot, therefore, have been later than 160 or 161 A.D

The dating of the dedication is probably 160 CE https://books.google.com/books?id=x84_A ... en&f=false

[Secret Alias]

To this end we go back to Peregrinus:

Coming at last to Greece under these circum­stances, at one moment he abused the Eleans, at another he counselled the Greeks to take up arms against the Romans, and at another he libelled [Herodes Atticus] a man outstanding in literary attainments and position because he had been a benefactor to Greece in many ways, and particularly because he had brought water to Olympia and prevented the visitors to the festival from dying of thirst ... When they almost killed him with stones, mobbing him with one accord, he managed to escape death at the moment by fleeing to Zeus for sanctuary (stout fellow!), and afterwards, at the next Olympiad [four years later], he gave the Greeks a speech which he had composed during the four years that had intervened, praising the man who had brought in the water and defending himself for running away at that time ... after the last Olympic games [four years later] that he would burn himself up at the next festival.

If we imagine that the first complaint of Peregrinus came with the beginning of construction -it's 12 years later. So if the earliest date is 154 for the construction (which would make sense for the first complaint) then 12 years later was the death of Peregrinus.

[Joseph D. L.]

The book you linked to postulated two possible date ranges for the exedra: one between 147-151, and 154-157. The author even seems against the later dating.

But the exedra is a later addition to the aqueduct, which was itself probably completed in 144 ad to coincide with the Olympia the following year, and when Peregrinus made his infamous decleration against it--while drinking from it. Which places his announcment to cremate himself in 149 ad.

[Secret Alias]

There can't have been that large of a gap between the exedra and the aqueduct. Nikolaos Gialoures the most recent scholar to date the aqueduct dates it to the time of the exedra:

Finally, Herodes Atticus built his Aqueduct in A.D. 160. The waters of a copious spring, 4 kilometres east of Olympia, were channeled into the imposing Nymphaion, or Exedra. This was semicircular in shape and had two small circular temples in front of it, one on each side; the walls were made of baked brick and faced with coloured marble. Twenty statues stood in the niches on the face of the semicircular wall, stood20 statues, depicting Antoninus Pius and his family and the family of Herod Atticus, witha statue of Zeus prominentinthe central niche. Between the twosmall temples,therewere two cisterns on two different levels, one in front of the semicircular wall and one lower down. The water ran into the higher, semicircular cistern and from there into the lower, rectangular one, from where it was channeled to the whole of the sanctuary by a vast network of conduits.

Actually there is one more recent by Jayne Huntington Reinhard:

Pausanias seems to have visited Isthmia around the year 160 CE, and he reported seeing the statue donated by Herodes in the temple of Poseidon, which must date in the 150s. Around this time Herodes had worked on renovations in the Corinth Odeion and Olympia was benefiting from his new aqueduct and the nymphaeum constructed by Regilla by 153.

153 CE seems to be the date:

A generation later, Regilla, wife of Herodes Atticus, dedicated the monumental scaenae frons style nymphaeum in the Sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia (149–153 CE) (Regilla built the fountain, while Herodes supplied the aqueduct; Bol 1984, 22–31; Tobin 1997, 70, 81,314–323; Galli 2002, 223–227).

Here some of the logic behind 153 CE:

Philostratus (V S 2.551) credits Herodes Atticus with the construction of an aqueduct at Olympia in honor of Zeus. And yet this 1 km long aqueduct piped water to a fountain with a dedicatory inscription that clearly states that the aqueduct and fountain were dedicated by Appia Regilla, the Roman wife of the Athenian millionaire: 32 ῾Ρήγιλλα ἱέρεια Δήμητρος τὸ ὕδωρ καὶ τὰ περὶ τὸ ὕδωρ τῷ Διί. Regilla, priestess of Demeter, (dedicated) the water and everything connected with the water to Zeus. Regilla served as priestess of Demeter Chamyne in 149 or 153 C.E., and the dedicatory inscription suggests that she built or dedicated the fountain in return for the honor of being granted the esteemed priesthood by the citizens of Elis, the Greek polis in control of Olympia

[Secret Alias]

It's worth noting that 'Herod(es)' is the villain in the Martyrdom of Polycarp. Parvis brings up the parallel Parvis, 'Martyrdom', 137 n 32 and Foster https://books.google.com/books?id=V_sRB ... us&f=false. Baronius is more explicit; he says Polycarp's 'Herod' is Herodes Atticus. The overlap between Quadratus and Herodes as governors https://books.google.com/books?id=WqkWR ... us&f=false

Some argue that the exedra or nymphaion It was erected in 153 CE by Herodus Atticus to be the terminal of a newly constructed aqueduct.

Those who date Peregrinus to 165 CE (the date Eusebius gives for Polycarp's death) include Novak - "Peregrinus died by burning himself alive at the completion of the Olympic games in 165 C.E., after having advertised the coming suicide for several years in advance. " https://books.google.com/books?id=LuhZy ... gQ6AEIKTAA Hellerman In 165 C.e., A Cynic philosopher named Peregrinus committed suicide by throwing himself on the flames at the Olympic Games https://books.google.com/books?id=E91fG ... gQ6AEILzAB Kannaday At the Olympic games held in 165 C.E., Peregrinus after much fanfare leaped headlong into a bonfire, https://books.google.com/books?id=Zg_fG ... gQ6AEIMzAC Desmond https://books.google.com/books?id=_5z-z ... us&f=false Preus https://books.google.com/books?id=wjW_B ... gQ6AEIPzAE Burke https://books.google.com/books?id=vykqA ... gQ6AEIUDAH Clay https://books.google.com/books?id=VFloA ... us&f=false Planck https://books.google.com/books?id=8NkWA ... us&f=false Apparently the calculation of Peregrinus's death comes from a statement in Eusebius https://books.google.com/books?id=aZJAA ... us&f=false

The logic seems to be then that the aqueduct only functioned by the Olympiad of 157 (and thus was completed after 154 CE).

[Secret Alias]

The entry in Chronicon:

236th Olympiad - At Pisa, the philosopher Peregrinus, after a funeral pyre that he had built from timber had been lit, threw himself on it.
the next year - A persecution began in Asia and Polycarp and Pionius suffered martyrdom, of whom also there are written accounts of their martyrdom.

[Secret Alias]

Some people date the death of Regilla to 157 CE:

According to Spyropoulos 2006a, 170, the transformation of the temple into a family heröon took place sometime after the death of Regilla (157 CE) and before ...https://books.google.com/books?id=eAJiD ... wQ6AEIKTAA

[Secret Alias]

Here's what it looked like:

[Secret Alias]

Apparently there are four Olympiads in the Death of Peregrinus:

Thanks to Paul Graindor, the date of the Olympiads mentioned in connection with Peregrinus can now be determined. He has deduced from the apparent ages of the children represented in the exedra erected by Herodes on the completion of his aqueduct that this took place in A.D. 153 (Herode Atticus et Sa Famille, pp. 87-88). His deduction finds support in the text of Lucian as soon as we recognise that Lucian is talking about four different Olympiads, not three. The first is that on which Peregrinus criticised the aqueduct, which will be the year of its completion, A. D. 153. At the next, A.D. 157, he withdrew his criticism. The Olympiad just after which he announced his intention of cremating himself need not and cannot be identical with the one of A. D. 157 it is called by the speaker the last or previous, and the text clearly implies a lapse of time. It must therefore be the one of A. D. 161. Then comes the fourth, on which the cremation took place, dated by Eusebius in A. D. 165.

[Joseph D. L.]

It just shows how tenuous reaching an actual date is. Nikolaos Gialoures writes that the aqueduct was completed in 160, putting Peregrinus's death at 172 ad. Any further calculation is dependent upon the exedra, which was a later installment to the aqueduct, and so cannot possibly give us a straight answer. Yet Lucian himself is not at all clear with his own dates--given that he's not writing a biography of Peregrinus's life, but a satire, and takes liberties with the titular character--he does mention four Olympias, which I acknowledged in my last post:

*Herodes Atticus completes the aqueduct in 144 ad,

*The Olympia commences the following year, 145 ad, and Peregrinus criticizes Herodes and his aqueduct,

*During the following Olympia (149 ad) Peregrinus rescinds his criticism and announces his intention to kill himself at the next Olympia,

*The next Olympia arrives (153) but Peregrinus postpones his suicide to the following Olympia,

*The Olympia of 157 ad ends, and so does Peregrinus

It's the same issue with pinning Peregrinus's maneuvers after he left Parium. We simply don't know when he left his home, or how long he travelled before reaching Palestine. He joined a Jewish sectarian community, was imprisoned in Syria, and released by a governor who "was fond of philosophy". Hadrian alone matches this description, even if he is unnamed. And he was only the governor of Syria in 117 ad, right at the end of Kitos. That means that Peregrinus's career started long before the consensus' time, and lasted long enough for Peregrinus to become elevated to the status of teacher, Lawgiver, and God to the community.

What's more, the general date range for Agathobulus, Peregrinus's teacher in Cynicism, flourished early in Hadrian's reign. Nor did the bar Kochba revolt reach Syria, where Peregrinus was imprisoned. That means the most probable course of events are...

Peregrinus traveled to Egypt in the late twenties, early thirties,

and arrived at Rome in the early forties .

After that, Lucian seems rather uniform with his dates. And if Peregrinus was expelled from Rome in the early forties, that makes a mid-sixties date for his death unobtainable.

The general consensus places his death at 165 ad., but I don't.