Second Sophistic
Second Sophisticis the term regularly applied in modern scholarship to the period c. AD 60–230 when declamation became the most prestigious literary activity in the Greek world. Philostratus of Athens (early 3rd cent.) coined the term in his Lives of the Sophists, claiming a link between the Classical sophists and the movement whose first member he identified as Nicetes of Smyrna in the reign of Nero (Lives 1. 19). The term sophist (sophistēs; verb sophisteuein) seems restricted to rhetors (public speakers, see rhetoric, Greek) who entered upon a career of public displays, though usage even in the Digest is erratic, and Philostratus' Dionysius of Miletus (Lives 1. 22) is simply rhētōr on his sarcophagus at Ephesus (Inschriften von Ephesos 426).
On the evidence of Philostratus, whose 40 lives of imperial sophists...
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