IN THE MIDDLE OF THE 170s, the emperor Marcus Aurelius sent a lengthy official communication from his field headquarters at Sirmium to the people of Athens. They subsequently erected an inscribed copy of the massive document that filled at least two plaques of Pentelic marble, each measuring a ponderous 2.3 m by 1.8 m. Published by James Oliver in 1970, the surviving portions, apart from some more or less disjointed fragments, preserve almost the entire text of the second, concluding plaque.' On it are recorded the emperor's judgments in a number of appeals on cases originating in various courts at Athens, as well as general rules he set forth regarding admission to the Areopagus, Boule, and Panhellenium. At several points during the course of the letter, and especially in the conclusion, a section whose importance for comprehending the document as a whole has hitherto been unrecognized, the name of that paragon of late rhetoric, Herodes Atticus, appears. Although Oliver acknowledged the connection between this document and the famous trial before Marcus Aurelius at Sirmium involving Herodes and an Athenian faction that Philostratus describes in the second book of his Lives of the Sophists, Oliver devoted most of his energy to elucidating the document's constitutional and social implications.2 In the quarter-century since then, other studies have improved on his text, notably those of C. P. Jones and S. Follet, whereas our understanding of the letter's historical context has failed to advance appreciably.3 In particular, there has been a lack of attention to the document as a unity, with scholars seeing it as an ancient equivalent of the omnibus bills so popular among lawmakers in the United States. This approach has meant that the document's potential for illuminating the so-called feud between Herodes and the Athenians remains underappreciated, as does its significance in imparting concrete reality to a phenomenon long thought to be merely the stuff of rhetoric in the Roman Empire-Greek tyranny.4