Plutarch's Gift

When Emperor Julian’s private secretary, the Greek sophist and rhetorician Himerius, was trying to get his son Rufinus admitted into the Areopagus in the fourth century AD, he pulled a nepo baby move that had nothing to do with the Roman emperor but everything to do with the Empire. Himerius name-dropped to the Athenians a particularly famous member of his son’s maternal ancestry—a certain Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, or Plutarch. “This is the descendant of Plutarch, through whom you [Athens] educate all men,” he proclaimed to the prestigious council. Himerius’s suit unsurprisingly succeeded.