 According to the notoriously unreliable Historia Augusta, his mother was a Roman woman called Fabia Orestilla, born circa 165, who the Augustan History claims was a descendant of Emperors Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius through her father Fulvus Antoninus.Modern historians have dismissed this name and her information as false.There is some evidence to suggest that Gordian's mother might have been the granddaughter of the Greek Sophist, consul and tutor Herodes Atticus.