A Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology

Smith, William

A Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology. William Smith, LLD, ed. 1890

the name of several persons under the early Roman emperors. There is considerable discrepancy in the orthography of the name. Josephus writes it Numidius, which is the form that Glandorp (Onomast. p. 631) hats adopted; while in the different editions of Tacitus, Pliny, and the Scriptores Historiae Augustae, we find it written variously Numidius, Vinidius, and Ummidius. The latter, which occurs in some of the best manuscripts, is supported by the authority of inscriptions, and is evidently the correct form. In the passage of Horace (Sat. 1.1. 95) where the present reading is Ummidius, there is the same variation in the manuscripts, but Bentley has shown that the true reading is Ummidius.

1. UmmidiusQuadratus, was governor of Syria during the latter end of the reign of Claudius, and the commencement of the reign of Nero. He succeeded Cassius Longinus in the province

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about A. D. 51, and continued to govern it till his death in A. D. 60. Only three circumstances are mentioned in connection with his administration. In A. D. 52 he allowed Rhadamistus to dethrone and put to death Mithridates, the king of Armenia, whom Tiberius had placed upon the throne, and whom the Romans had hitherto supported. In the same year he marched into Judaea, and put down the disturbances which prevailed in that country. He is said to have condemned, or, according to other accounts, to have sent to the emperor Claudius for trial, Ventidius Cumanus, one of the procuratores, but to have protected Antonius Felix, the other procurator. [Comp. FELIX, p. 143a.] The other circumstance is his disagreement with Domitius Corbulo, who had been sent into the East to conduct the war against the Parthians. His name occurs on one of the coins of Antioch. (J. AJ 20.5.2, B. J. 2.12. §§ 5, 6 ; Tac. Ann. 12.45, &c., 54, 13.8, 9, 14.26; Eckhel, vol. iii. p. 280.) In the editions of Tacitus the praenomen of Quadratus is Titus, but it appears from an inscription that this is a mistake, and that his real praenomen was Caius. (Orelli, Inscr. 3665.) We learn from the same inscription that his full name was C. Ummidius Durmius Quadratus, and that he had been previously the legatus of Caligula in Lusitania. The Ummidia Quadratilla, whose death in the reign of Trajan is mentioned by Pliny [QUADRATILLA], was in all probability a sister of the above. She could hardly have been a daughter, as some modern writers have supposed, since she had a grandson of the age of twenty-four and upwards at the time of her death [see below, No. 2], and it is not probable that Ummidius, who died in A. D. 60, could have had a great-grandson of that age about A. D. 100.

2. UmmidiusQuadratus, a friend and admirer of the younger Pliny, whom he took as his model in oratory. Pliny speaks of him in the highest terms, and praises both his abilities and his excellent moral character. He was the grandson of the wealthy Ummidia Quadratilla, and inherited two-thirds of her property. [QUADRATILLA.] In the estate thus bequeathed to him was the house formerly inhabited by the celebrated jurist Cassius Longinus. He married at the age of twenty-four, in the life-time of his grandmother, but lost his wife soon after their marriage. (Plin. Ep. 6.11, 7.24.) Two of Pliny's letters are addressed to him (Ep. 6.29, 9.13), in the latter of which Pliny gives an account of the celebrated attack which he made upon Publicius Certus in the senate, in the reign of Nerva, A. D. 96.

3. UmmidiusQuadratus, is mentioned as one of the persons whom Hadrian persecuted. (Spartian. Hadr. 15.) He may have been a son of No. 2, who probably married again after the time that Pliny's letter was written. It seems to have been this Quadratus who married the sister of Antoninus Pius.

4. M.UmmidiusQuadratus, the son of No. 3, was the nephew of Antoninus Pius, being his sister's son. Antoninus Pius gave his maternal property to this Quadratus. (Capitol. M. Aurel. 7, where he is in some editions erroneously called Mummius Quadratus.) He was consul in A. D. 167, with M. Aurelius Verus.

5. UmmidiusQuadratus, the son of No. 4, was induced by Lucilla to enter into a conspiracy against her brother Commodus, by whom he was put to death, A. D. 183. (Herodian. 1.8; Lamprid. Commod. 4; D. C. 72.4.)