Quadra'tus, Ummi'dius
1.
Ummidius Quadratus, 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 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. ยงยง 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.
