ABSTRACT
In the 160s CE, an Ethiopian youth named Memnon walked the streets of Athens and hunted through its hinterland along with other adolescents in the school of Herodes Atticus. He caused a stir in his lifetime, and beyond that, his celebrity lived into the 230s and across the Aegean in Asia Minor at least, as we read of him in the pages of Philostratus. We know nothing of Memnon from his own voice, but his differences, both cultural and racial, made him a potent symbol of new possibilities – for the conception of ethnicity, for the exercise of imperial power – among the Hellenic elite of the Roman-controlled Mediterranean. This chapter is about how Herodes made use of Memnon, both as a student in his entourage and as a device in his self-fashioning, in his efforts to forge an imperial identity that transcended Athenian localism and, in this way mimicking the conduct of the imperial centre, to carve out a sphere of infl uence for himself within the larger empire.
