SOURCE: Wright, Wilmer Cave. “Introduction.” In The Lives of the Sophists, by Philostratus and Eunapius, translated by Wilmer Cave Wright, pp. ix-xli. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1921, Wright offers an overview of Philostratus's Lives of the Sophists, discussing the date of composition, its style and content, as well as including summaries on several sophists who were overlooked by Philostratus in his treatise.]

The island Lemnos was the ancestral home of the Philostrati, a family in which the profession of sophist was hereditary in the second and third Christian centuries. Of the works that make up the Philostratean corpus the greater part belong to the author of these Lives. But he almost certainly did not write the Nero, a dialogue attributed by Suidas the lexicographer to an earlier Philostratus; the first series of the Imagines and the Heroicus are generally assigned to a younger Philostratus whose premature death is implied by our author who survived him and was probably his father-in-law; and the second series of the Imagines was by a Philostratus who flourished in the third century, the last of this literary family.

There are extant, by our Philostratus, the Gymnasticus, the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, the Lives of the Sophists, the Erotic Epistles, and a brief discourse (διάλεξιs) On Nature and Law, a favourite commonplace of sophistic. In the Lives he quotes the Life of Apollonius as his own work, so that his authorship of the two most important works in the corpus is undisputed.

Flavius Philostratus was born about 170, perhaps in Lemnos, and studied at Athens with Proclus, Hippodromus, and Antipater, and at Ephesus with the aged Damianus from whom he learned much of the gossip that he retails about the second-century sophists. Philostratus wrote the Lives of his teachers. Some time after 202, perhaps through the influence of the Syrian sophist Antipater, who was a court favourite, he entered the circle of the philosophic Syrian Empress, Julia Domna. Julia spent much of her time in travelling about the Empire, and Philostratus may have gone with her and the Emperor Septimius Severus to Britain¹ in 208, and to Gaul in 212; and we may picture him at Pergamon, Nicomedia, and especially at Antioch,² where Julia preferred to reside. All three towns were centres of sophistic activity. The husband of Julia, the Emperor Septimius Severus, was himself a generous patron of letters, and, as Philostratus says, loved to gather about him the talented from all parts. But it was Julia who, first as his consort, and later as virtual regent in the reign of her son Caracalla, gave the court that intellectual or pseudo-intellectual tone which has reminded all the commentators of the princely Italian courts of the Renaissance. I say pseudo-intellectual, because, when Philostratus speaks of her circle of mathematicians and philosophers, it must be remembered that the former were certainly astrologers—the Syrian Empress was deeply dyed with Oriental superstition—and that the latter were nearly all sophists. However, to converse with sophists on equal terms, as Julia did, she must have been well read in the Greek classics, and so we find Philostratus, in his extant letter³ to her, reminding her of a discussion they had had on Aeschines, and defending Gorgias of Leontini from his detractors. We do not meet with such another court of literary men until, in the fourth century, the Emperor Julian hastily collected about him the sophists and philosophers who were so soon to be dispersed on his death. Cassius Dio⁴ tells us that Julia was driven by the brutality of her husband to seek the society of sophists. However that may be, it was during her son's reign that she showed especial favour to Philostratus. After her downfall and death he left Antioch and went to Tyre, where he published the work called generally the Life of Apollonius, though the more precise translation of its title would be In Honour of Apollonius. His wife, as we learn from an inscription⁵ from Erythrae, was named Aurelia Melitine. From the same source we may conclude that the family had senatorial rank, which was no doubt bestowed on Philostratus during his connexion with the court. We have no detailed knowledge of the latter part of his life, but he evidently settled at Athens, where he wrote the Lives of the Sophists. He survived as late as the reign of Philip the Arab.⁶ Like other Lemnians he had the privilege of Athenian citizenship, and he is variously called in antiquity “Tyrian,” from his stay in Tyre, “Lemnian,” and “Athenian.” That he himself preferred the last of these epithets may be gathered from the fact that he calls the younger Philostratus “the Lemnian,” evidently to avoid confusion with himself.

Philostratus dedicates the Lives to Gordian, and on this we depend for the approximate date of their composition. Gordian was consul for the second time in 229-230, and, since Philostratus suddenly changes his form of address, first calling him consul and then proconsul, he seems to have written the dedication when Gordian was proconsul of Africa, immediately after his consulship. Gordian at the age of eighty assumed the purple in 238, and shortly after committed suicide. The Lives were therefore ready to publish between the years 230 and 238, but there is no certain evidence for a more precise date.

Philostratus in writing the Lives evidently avoided the conventional style and alphabetical sequence used by grammarians for biographies; for he had no desire to be classed with grammarians. He wrote like a well-bred sophist who wished to preserve for all time a picture of the triumphs of his tribe, when sophists were at the height of their glory. His Lives, therefore, are not in the strict sense biographies. They are not continuous or orderly in any respect, but rather a collection of anecdotes and personal characteristics. He seldom gives a list of the works of a sophist, and when he does, it is incomplete, so far as we are able to check it, as we can for Dio or Aristeides. He was, like all his class, deeply interested in questions of style and the various types in vogue, but he must not be supposed to be writing a handbook, and hence his discussions of style are capricious and superficial. He had collected a mass of information as to the personal appearance, manners and dress, temperament and fortune of the more successful sophists, and the great occasions when they triumphantly met some public test, and he shows us only the splendeurs, not the misères of the profession. He has no pity for the failures, or for those who lost their power to hold an audience, like Hermogenes, who “moulted” too early, and from a youthful prodigy fell into such insignificance that his boyish successes were forgotten. But to those who attained a ripe old age and made great fortunes Philostratus applies every possible superlative. They are the darlings of the gods, they have the power of Orpheus to charm, they make the reputation of their native towns, or of those in which they condescend to dwell. In fact, he did not observe that he made out nearly every one of these gifted beings to be the greatest and most eloquent of them all. Polemo and Herodes are his favourites, and for them he gives most details, while for Favorinus he is unusually consecutive. But no two Lives show the same method of treatment, a variety that may have been designed. He succeeded in founding a type of sophistic biography, and in the fourth century, in Eunapius, we have a direct imitation of the exasperating manner and method of Philostratus. To pronounce a moral judgement was alien to this type of biography. Philostratus does so occasionally and notably in the Life of Critias, whom he weighs in the balance. This is, perhaps, because, as a tyrant, Critias was often the theme of historical declamations, and Philostratus takes the occasion to use some of the commonplaces of the accusation and defence.

After his hurried and perfunctory review of the philosophers who were so eloquent that they were entitled to a place among the sophists, of whom the most important are Dio Chrysostom and Favorinus, he treats of the genuine sophists; first, the older type from Gorgias to Isocrates; then, with Aeschines, he makes the transition to the New Sophistic. Next comes a gap of four centuries, and he dismisses this period with the bare mention of three insignificant names which have no interest for him or for us, and passes on to Nicetes of Smyrna in the first century A.D. This break in the continuity of the Lives is variously explained. Kayser thinks that there is a lacuna in the MSS., and that Philostratus could not have omitted all mention of Demetrius of Phaleron, Charisius, Hegesias, who is regarded as having founded Asianism, not long after the death of Alexander the Great; or of Fronto, the “archaist,” that is to say Atticist, the friend and correspondent of Herodes Atticus, not to speak of others. In ignoring the sophistic works of Lucian in the second century, Philostratus observes the sophistic convention of silence as to one who so excelled and satirized them all. He was a renegade not to be named. In accounting for the other omissions, a theory at least as likely as Kayser's is that there lay before Philostratus other biographies of these men, and that he had nothing picturesque to add to them. Hesychius evidently used some such source, and Philostratus seems to refer to it when he remarks with complete vagueness that on this or that question, usually the place of birth or the death of a sophist, “some say” this and “others” that. In the Life of Herodes he says that he has given some details that were unknown “to others”; these were probably other biographers. Thus he arrives at what is his real aim, to celebrate the apotheosis of the New Sophistic in the persons of such men as Polemo, Scopelian, and, above all, Herodes Atticus, with whom he begins his Second Book.

Without Philostratus we should have a very incomplete idea of the predominant influence of Sophistic in the educational, social, and political life of the Empire in the second and third Christian centuries. For the only time in history professors were generally acknowledged as social leaders, went on important embassies, made large fortunes, had their marriages arranged and their quarrels settled by Emperors, held Imperial Secretaryships, were Food Controllers,⁷ and high priests; and swayed the fate of whole cities by gaining for them immunities and grants of money and visits from the Emperor, by expending their own wealth in restoring Greek cities that were falling into decay, and not least by attracting thither crowds of students from the remotest parts of the Empire. No other type of intellectual could compete with them in popularity, no creative artists existed to challenge their prestige at the courts of phil-Hellenic Emperors, and though the sophists often show jealousy of the philosophers, philosophy without eloquence was nowhere. But besides all this, they kept alive an interest in the Greek classics, the ἀρχαι̑οι or standard authors; and a thorough knowledge of the Greek poets, orators, and historians such as we should hardly find equalled among professors of Greek to-day was taken for granted in Syrian, Egyptian, Arab, and Bithynian humanists, who must be able to illustrate their lectures with echoes of Homer, Plato, Thucydides, and Demosthenes. In their declamations historical allusions drawn from the classics played much the same part and were as essential as the heroic myths had been to the Odes of Pindar or Bacchylides. Not only were they well read, but their technical training in rhetoric was severe, and they would have thought any claim of ours to understand the art of rhetoric, or to teach it, superficial and amateurish. We do not even know the rules of the game. Moreover, they had audiences who did know those rules, and could appreciate every artistic device. But to be thus equipped was not enough. A successful sophist must have the nerve and equipment of a great actor, since he must act character parts, and the terminology of the actor's as well as the singer's art is frequently used for the sophistic profession; he must have unusual charm of appearance, manner, and voice, and a ready wit to retort on his rivals. All his training leads up to that highest achievement of the sophist, improvisation on some theme which was an echo of the past, stereotyped, but to be handled with some pretence to novelty. The theme was voted by the audience or propounded by some distinguished visitor, often because it was known to be in the declaimer's répertoire. He must have a good memory, since he must never repeat himself except by special request, and then he must do so with perfect accuracy, and, if called on, must reverse all his arguments and take the other side. These themes were often not only fictitiously but falsely conceived, as when Demosthenes is represented pleading for Aeschines in exile, a heart-breaking waste of ingenuity and learning; or paradoxical, such as an encomium on the house-fly. Lucian from his point of view ridiculed the sophists, as Plato had satirized their intellectual and moral weakness in his day, but the former could not undermine their popularity, and the latter might well have despaired if he could have foreseen the recurring triumphs of the most sensational and theatrical forms of rhetoric in the second, third, and fourth Christian centuries. For now not only the middle-class parent, like Strepsiades in the Clouds, encourages his son to enter the sophistic profession; noble families are proud to claim kinship with a celebrated sophist; sophists preside at the Games and religious festivals, and, when a brilliant sophist dies, cities compete for the honour of burying him in the finest of their temples.

The official salaries were a small part of their earnings. Vespasian founded a chair of rhetoric at Rome,⁸ and Hadrian and Antoninus endowed Regius Professorships of rhetoric and philosophy in several provincial cities. At Athens and, later, Constantinople, there were salaried imperial chairs for which the normal pay was equivalent to about £350, and professors enjoyed certain immunities and exemptions that were later to be reserved for the clergy. The profession was definitely organized by Marcus Aurelius, who assigned an official chair to rhetoric and another to political oratory, and as a rule himself made the appointment from a list of candidates. Many municipalities maintained salaried professors. But, once appointed, a professor must rely on his powers of attraction; there was complete liberty in education; anyone who wished could open a school of rhetoric; and sometimes a free lance would empty the lecture theatre of the Regius Professor, as Libanius did in the fourth century. Nor did the Christian Emperors before Julian interfere with the freedom of speech of famous sophists, though these were usually pagans without disguise who ignored Christianity. In order to reserve for pagan sophists the teaching of the classics Julian tampered with this freedom and, as is described in the Lives of Eunapius, extended the powers of the crown over such appointments.

Political oratory, which was a relatively severe type and must avoid emotional effects and poetical allusions, was reduced to school exercises and the arguing of historical or pseudo-historical themes, and was not so fashionable or so sought after by sophists as the chair of pure rhetoric. Though officially distinct in the second century, the “political” chair was gradually absorbed by its more brilliant rival, and in the third and fourth centuries no talented sophist would have been content to be merely a professor of political oratory, a πολιτικόs. The study of law and forensic oratory was on a still lower plane and is referred to with some contempt by Philostratus. The writing of history was an inferior branch of literature. In short every form of literary composition was subservient to rhetoric, and the sophists whom Plato perhaps hoped to discountenance with a definition were now the representatives of Hellenic culture. “Hellene” had become a technical term for a student of rhetoric in the schools.

Philostratus had no foreboding that this supremacy was doomed. For him, as for Herodes, Sophistic was a national movement. The sophist was to revive the antique purer form of religion and to encourage the cults of the heroes and Homeric gods. This was their theoretical aim, but in fact they followed after newer cults—Aristeides for instance is devoted to the cult of Asclepius whose priest he was, and there were probably few like Herodes Atticus, that ideal sophist, who was an apostle of a more genuinely Hellenic culture and religion. By the time of Eunapius the futility of Philostratus' dream of a revival of Greek religion and culture is apparent, Sophistic is giving way to the study of Roman law at such famous schools as that of Berytus, and the best a sophist can hope for is, like the sober Libanius, to make a living from his pupils and not to become obnoxious to the all-powerful prefects and proconsuls of the Christian Emperors who now bestow their favours on bishops.

There are two rival tendencies in the oratory of the second and third centuries, Asianism and Atticism. The Asianic style is flowery, bombastic, full of startling metaphors, too metrical, too dependent on the tricks of rhetoric, too emotional. In short, the Asianic declaimer aims at but never achieves the grand style. The Atticist usually imitates some classical author, aims at simplicity of style, and is a purist, carefully avoiding any allusion or word that does not occur in a writer of the classical period. In Aristeides, we have the works of an Atticist, and we know that he had not the knack of “improvisation” and was unpopular as a teacher. He was thought to be arid, that is, not enough of an Asianist to please an audience that was ready to go into ecstasies over a display of “bombast and importunate epigram.” Philostratus never uses the word Asianism, but he criticizes the “Ionian” and “Ephesian” type of rhetoric, and it was this type which then represented the “theatrical shamelessness” that in the first century Dionysius of Halicarnassus deplored.

Philostratus was one of those who desired to achieve simplicity of style, ἀϕέλεια, but when a sophist attempts this the result is always a spurious naïveté such as is seen at its worst in the Imagines, the work of his kinsman. Above all the classical writers he admires for his style Critias, who was the ideal of Herodes Atticus also, and the fluent eloquence of Aeschines. He was an Atticist, but not of the stricter type, for he held that it was tasteless and barbarous to overdo one's Atticism. He writes the reminiscence Greek of the cultured sophist, full of echoes of the poets, Herodotus, Plato, and Xenophon. His sentences are short and co-ordinated, his allusions are often so brief that he is obscure, and in general he displays the carelessness of the gentlemanly sophist, condescending to write narrative. If we may judge from his scornful dismissal of Varus as one who abused rhythmical effects in declamation, he himself avoided such excess in his sophistic exercises, μελέται, which are no longer extant. He was a devoted admirer of Gorgias, and in one passage⁹ at least he imitates the careful distinction of synonyms that was characteristic of Prodicus. In fact he regarded the Atticizing sophists of his day as the true descendants of the Platonic sophists, and scolds Plutarch¹⁰ for having attacked, in a work that has perished, the stylistic mannerisms of Gorgias. Like all his Greek contemporaries he lacked a sense of proportion, so that his literary criticisms are for the most part worthless, and the quotations that he asks us to admire are puerile. He longed for a revival of the glories of Hellenism, but it was to be a literary, not a political revival, and he shows no bitterness at the political insignificance of Greece. The Hellenes must impress their Roman masters with a sense of the inferiority of Roman culture and he will then have nothing to complain of. In the opinion of the public, improvisation was the highest achievement of Sophistic, and so thought Philostratus. He believed that the scorn of Aristeides for this fashionable form of display, ἐπίδειξιs, masked chagrin at his failure, and dismisses with contempt¹¹ the later career of Hermogenes the technical writer; whereas Norden¹² praises Hermogenes for giving up declamation and devoting himself to more sober and scientific studies. Philostratus has preserved the renown of a number of these improvisators who, but for him, would have perished as completely as have the actors and dancers of those centuries. More than half the sophists described by him are ignored even by Suidas. Yet they were names to conjure with in the schools of rhetoric all through the Roman world, until the Christian Fathers and the rhetoric of the pulpit took the place of the declaimers. Christianity was fatal to Sophistic, which seems to wither, like a Garden of Adonis, never deeply rooted in the lives of the common people. But sophists for centuries had educated Christians and pagans alike, and it was from their hands, unintelligent and sterile as they often were in their devotion to Hellenic culture, that the Church received, though without acknowledgement, the learning of which she boasted, and which she in her turn preserved for us.

The following notices of the sophists of whom we know more than is to be found in Philostratus are intended to supplement him with dates and facts that he ignored, or to correct his errors. They are in the order of the Lives.

Eudoxus of Cnidus (408-352 B.C.), famous for his researches in geometry, astronomy, and physics, was for a short time a pupil of Plato. He went to Magna Graecia to study with Archytas the Pythagorean, and to Egypt in the reign of Nectanebus. Strabo¹³ describes his observatories at Heliopolis and Cnidus. He opened a school at Cyzicus and made laws for Cnidus.¹⁴ Plutarch¹⁵ praises the elegance of his style.

Leon of Byzantium was a rhetorician and historian about whom we have confused and contradictory accounts in Suidas and Hesychius, especially as to the precise part that he played when Philip of Macedon tried to take Byzantium in 340 B.C. The story is partly told by Plutarch, Phocion 14, where Leon probably played the part there assigned to one Cleon.

Dias may be, as Natorp suggests, a mistake for Delios. Others read Bias. Delios of Ephesus is mentioned by Plutarch as a contemporary of Alexander the Great. In any case we know nothing more of this philosopher than is related here.

Carneades (213-129 B.C.) is reckoned as an Athenian, though he was born at Cyrene. He founded the New Academy at Athens, and in 155 was sent to Rome on an embassy for the Athenians. He is so celebrated as a philosopher that Philostratus, whose interest is in the genuine sophists, can dismiss him in a sentence, but no doubt Cato, who disapproved of his influence at Rome, would have called him a sophist.

Philostratus the Egyptian was not connected with the Lemnian family. But for the facts of his life something may be added to the scant notice by his biographer. In his Life of Antony 80 Plutarch relates that after the defeat of Antony by Octavian, the latter pardoned the members of Cleopatra's circle, among them Areius¹⁶ the Stoic, who was then in Alexandria. “Areius craved pardon for himself and many others, and especially for Philostratus the most eloquent man of all the sophists and of orators of his time for present and sudden speech; howbeit he falsely named himself an Academic philosopher. Therefore Caesar, who hated his nature and conditions, would not hear his suit. Thereupon Philostratus let his grey beard grow long, and followed Areius step by step in a long mourning gown, still buzzing in his ears this Greek verse:

A wise man if that he be wise indeed
May by a wise man have the better speed.

Caesar understanding this, not for the desire he had to deliver Philostratus of his fear, as to rid Areius of malice and envy that might have fallen out against him, pardoned him.” We have also an epigram by Crinagoras of Mytilene, a contemporary, a lament over the downfall of this favourite of princes:—“O Philostratus, unhappy for all thy wealth, where are those sceptres and constant intercourse with princes? … Foreigners have shared among them the fruit of thy toils, and thy corpse shall lie in sandy Ostrakine.”¹⁷

Dio Chrysostom, the “golden-mouthed,” was born in Bithynia about A.D. 40. Exiled for fourteen years by his fear of Domitian, he acquired the peculiar knowledge of the coast towns of the Black Sea and of the savage Getae that is shown in his writings. We have eighty of his speeches, or rather essays; they are partly moral lectures or sermons delivered both during and after his exile, which ended in 96 with the accession of his friend Nerva. He denounces the “god-forsaken” sophists, but for part at least of his life he was a professed sophist, and many of his essays are purely sophistic. Dio labelled himself a philosopher, and he was one of Plutarch's type, borrowing the best from all the schools. He wrote the “plain” style and Xenophon and Plato were his favourite models. Next to Lucian he is the most successful and the most agreeable to read of all the Atticizing writers with sophistic tendencies.

Favorinus (A.D. 80-150) was a Gaul who came to Rome to study Greek and Latin letters in the second Christian century; he spent much of his professional life in Asia Minor. He became the intimate friend of Plutarch, Fronto, and other distinguished men, and had a powerful patron in the Emperor Hadrian. He wrote Greek treatises on history, philosophy, and geography. A statue of him was set up in the public library of Corinth to encourage the youth of Corinth to imitate his eloquence. He was regarded as a sort of encyclopaedia, and his learning is praised by Cassius Dio, Galen, and Aulus Gellius. He belonged to the Academic school of philosophy, but composed numerous sophistic speeches including paradoxical panegyrics, e.g. an Encomium of Quartan Fever. Lucian¹⁸ speaks of him disparagingly as “a certain eunuch of the school of the Academy who came from Gaul and became famous in Greece a little before my time.” He was an Asianist in his use of broken and excessive rhythms. We can judge of his style from his Corinthian Oration, which survives among the Orations of Dio Chrysostom. It is the longest extant piece of Asianic prose of the early second century.¹⁹ The Universal History of Favorinus was probably the chief source used by Athenaeus for his Deipnosophists, and was freely borrowed from by Diogenes Laertius.

Gorgias of Leontini in Sicily came to Athens in 427 B.C., at the age of about fifty-five, on an embassy from Leontini, and that date marks a turning-point in the history of prose-writing. The love of parallelism and antithesis was innate in the Greeks, and the so-called “Gorgianic” figures, antithesis, similar endings (homoioteleuta), and symmetrical, carefully balanced clauses were in use long before the time of Gorgias. They are to be found in Heracleitus and Empedocles, and in the plays of Euripides that appeared before 427. But by his exaggerated use of these figures and his deliberate adoption for prose of effects that had been held to be the property of poetry, Gorgias set a fashion that was never quite discarded in Greek prose, though it was often condemned as frigid and precious. He is the founder of epideictic oratory, and his influence lasted to the end. But the surer taste of Athenian prose writers rejected the worst of his exaggerations, and later, when Aristotle or Cicero or Longinus points out the dangers of making one's prose “metrical” by abuse of rhythms, or condemns short and jerky clauses, minuta et versiculorum similia (Cicero, Orator 39), they cite the mannerisms of Gorgias. A fragment of his Funeral Oration survives, and, though scholars are not agreed as to the genuineness of the Helen and the Palamedes which have come down under his name, these are useful as showing the characteristic features of his style. We have the inscription that was composed for the statue of Gorgias dedicated at Olympia by his grand-nephew Eumolpus; in it he defends Gorgias from the charge of ostentation in having in his lifetime dedicated a gold statue of himself at Delphi.

Protagoras of Abdera in Thrace was born about 480 B.C. and came to Athens about 450. His agnostic utterances about the gods led to his prosecution for impiety by the Athenians who would not tolerate a professed sceptic. He may be called the founder of grammar, since he is said to have been the first to distinguish the three genders by name, and he divided the form of the verb into categories which were the foundation of our moods. In speech he was a purist. His philosophy was Heracleitean, and to him is ascribed the famous phrase “Man is the measure of all things.” His aim was to train statesmen in civic virtue, by which he meant an expert knowledge how to get the better of an opponent in any sort of debate. We have no writings that are certainly his, but can judge of his style by Plato's imitation in the Protagoras. A treatise on medicine called On the Art, which has come down to us among the works of Hippocrates, has been assigned by some to Protagoras. For his Life Philostratus used Diogenes Laertius.

Hippias of Elis was the most many-sided of the early sophists, the polymath or encyclopaedist. He professed to have made all that he wore, taught astronomy and geography, and was a politician rather than a professed teacher of rhetoric. In the two Platonic dialogues that bear his name he appears as a vain and theatrical improvisator. In the Protagoras his preference for teaching scientific subjects is ridiculed, in passing, by Protagoras. Philostratus derives his account of Hippias from Plato, Hippias Maior 282-286, where Socrates draws out Hippias and encourages him to boast of his versatility and success in making money.

Prodicus of Ceos was a slightly younger contemporary of Protagoras. He was famous for his study of synonyms and their precise use, and may be regarded as the father of the art of using the inevitable word, le mot juste. Plato speaks of him with a mixture of scorn and respect, but perhaps Prodicus showed him the way to his own nice distinction of terms. “Cleverer than Prodicus” became a proverbial phrase.

Polus of Sicily, “colt by name and colt by nature,” is the respondent to Socrates in the second part of Plato's Gorgias, and on that dialogue and the Phaedrus we rely mainly for our knowledge of this young and ardent disciple of Gorgias. He had composed an Art of Rhetoric which Socrates had just read, and he provokes Socrates to attack rhetoric as the counterfeit of an art, like cookery. In the Phaedrus 267 B, he is ridiculed as a Euphuist who had invented a number of technical rhetorical terms and cared chiefly for fine writing; but he is far inferior, we are told, to his teacher Gorgias, and exaggerates his faults.

Thrasymachus of Chalcedon is said to have been the first to develop periodic prose, and hence he may be said to have founded rhythmic prose. In the Phaedrus 267 C, D Plato parodies his excessive use of rhythm and poetical words. In the First Book of the Republic Plato makes him play the part of a violent and sophistic interlocutor whom Socrates easily disconcerts with his dialectic. He wrote handbooks of rhetoric, and according to the Phaedrus he was a master of the art of composing pathetic commonplaces (τάποι), miserationes, “piteous whinings,” as Plato calls them. Like Polus, his name, “hot-headed fighter,” indicates the temperament of the man.

Antiphon of the Attic deme Rhamnus was born soon after 480 B.C., and was a celebrated teacher of rhetoric at Athens. He was deeply influenced by Sicilian rhetoric. Thucydides says that no man of his time was superior to Antiphon in conceiving and expressing an argument and in training a man to speak in the courts or the assembly. He was an extreme oligarch, and was deeply implicated in the plot that placed the Four Hundred in power in 411. When they fell he was condemned to death and drank hemlock, his fortune was confiscated, and his house pulled down. We have his Tetralogies, fifteen speeches all dealing with murder cases; twelve of these are in groups of four, hence the name, and give two speeches each for the plaintiff and the defendant in fictitious cases. He uses the commonplaces of the sophists, but his style is severe and archaic. The only other authority for the generally discredited statement of Philostratus that he increased the Athenian navy is pseudo-Plutarch, Lives of the Ten Orators. Recently there have been found in Egypt four fragments of his Apology, that defence which Thucydides²⁰ called “the most beautiful apologetic discourse ever given.” Antiphon tries to prove that his motives in bringing the oligarchs into power were unselfish. He reminds the judges of his family, whom he did not want to abandon, and without whom he could easily have made his escape. I assume that Antiphon was both orator and sophist, though some maintain that throughout the Life Philostratus has confused two separate Antiphons.

Critias, “the handsome,” son of Callaeschrus, is remembered chiefly for his political career as a leader of the oligarchy, a pro-Spartan, and one of the Thirty Tyrants. He was exiled from Athens in 407 B.C., and returned in 405. It was Xenophon who said²¹ that he degenerated during his stay in Thessaly. He was killed fighting against Thrasybulus and the democrats a year later. Critias was a pupil of Socrates and also of the sophists. He wrote tragedies, elegies, and prose works, of which not enough has survived for any sure estimate to be made of his talent. He was greatly admired by the later sophists, especially by Herodes Atticus.

Isocrates (436-338) was trained by the sophists, by Prodicus certainly, and perhaps Protagoras, for a public career, but a weak voice and an incurable diffidence barred him from this, and after studying in Thessaly with Gorgias he became a professional rhetorician at Athens, where he opened his school about 393. In that school, which Cicero calls an “oratorical laboratory,” were trained the most distinguished men of the fourth century at Athens. It was his fixed idea that the Greeks must forget their quarrels and unite against Persia, and towards the end of his life he believed that Philip of Macedon might reconcile the Greek states and lead them to this great enterprise. The tradition that, when Philip triumphed over Greece at Chaeronea, Isocrates, disillusioned, refused to survive, has been made popular by Milton's sonnet, To the Lady Margaret Ley. Isocrates did in fact die in 338, but he was ninety-eight, and it is not certain that he would have despaired at the success of Philip. He was a master of epideictic prose, and brought the period to perfection in long and lucid sentences. Since Cicero's style is based on Isocrates, the latter may be said to have influenced, through Cicero, the prose of modern Europe.

Aeschines was born in 389 B.C. of an obscure family, and after being an actor and then a minor clerk, raised himself to the position of leading politician, ambassador, and rival of Demosthenes. He supported Philip of Macedon, and in 343 defended himself successfully in his speech On the False Embassy, from an attack by Demosthenes, whom he attacked in turn without success in the speech Against Ctesiphon in 330; to this Demosthenes retorted with his speech On the Crown. After this failure, Aeschines withdrew to Rhodes, where he spent the rest of his life in teaching, and it is because he taught rhetoric that Philostratus includes him here and calls him a sophist.

Nicetes flourished in the latter half of the first Christian century under the Emperors Vespasian, Domitian, and Nerva. After the Life of Aeschines Philostratus skips four centuries and passes to a very different type of orator. He is the first important representative of Asianic oratory in the Lives. Philostratus calls this the Ionian type, and it was especially associated with the coast towns of Asia Minor, and above all Smyrna and Ephesus. Nicetes is mentioned in passing by Tacitus,²² as having travelled far from the style of Aeschines and Demosthenes; Pliny the Younger says²³ that he heard him lecture. Nothing of his is extant. There was another sophist of the same name whom Seneca quotes, but he lived earlier and flourished under Tiberius.

Isaeus will always be remembered, but he does not owe his immortality to Philostratus, but rather to the fact that Pliny²⁴ praised his eloquence in a letter to Trajan, and Juvenal,²⁵ in his scathing description of the hungry Greekling at Rome, said that not even Isaeus could pour forth such a torrent of words. He came to Rome about A.D. 97 and made a great sensation there.

Scopelian of Clazomenae lived under Domitian, Nerva, and Trajan. His eloquence was of the Asianic type, as was natural in a pupil of Nicetes. In the letter addressed to him by Apollonius of Tyana,²⁶ Scopelian is apparently warned not to imitate even the best, but to develop a style of his own; this was shockingly heterodox advice. For Philostratus, his popularity with the crowd was the measure of his ability.

Dionysius of Miletus is mentioned in passing by Cassius Dio lxix. 789, who says that he offended the Emperor Hadrian. Nothing of his survives, for he almost certainly did not write the treatise On the Sublime which has been attributed to him, as to other writers of the same name, though on the very slightest grounds. He was inclined to Asianism, if we may trust the anecdote of his rebuke by Isaeus; see p. 513.

Lollianus of Ephesus, who lived under Hadrian and Antoninus, is ridiculed by Lucian, Epigram 26, for his volubility, and his diction is often criticized by Phrynichus. He wrote handbooks on rhetoric which have perished. From the quotations of Philostratus it is evident that he was an Asianist. He made the New Sophistic popular in Athens. He was curator annonae, an office which in Greek is represented by στρατοπεδάρχηs or στρατηγὸs ἐπὶ τω̑ν ὅπλων; the title had lost its military significance.²⁷ We have the inscription²⁸ composed for the statue of Lollianus in the agora at Athens; it celebrates his ability in the lawcourts and as a declaimer, but in a brief phrase, while the rest of the inscription aims at securing the immortal renown of the “well-born pupils” who dedicated the statue.

Polemo of Laodicea was born about A.D. 85 and lived under Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus. There have survived two of his declamations in which two fathers of Marathon heroes dispute the honour of pronouncing the funeral oration on those who fell at Marathon. We can judge from them of the Asianic manner of the time, with its exaggerated tropes, tasteless similes, short and antithetic clauses, and, in general, its obvious straining after effect and lack of coherent development of ideas. Polemo makes an attempt at Attic diction, but is full of solecisms and late constructions. These compositions seem to us to lack charm and force, but his improvisations may have been very different. Even as late as the fourth century he was admired and imitated, e.g. by Gregory Nazianzen.

Herodes Atticus, the most celebrated sophist of the second century, was born about A.D. 100 at Marathon, and died about 179; he was consul in 143. With him begins an important development of Sophistic, for he and his followers at least strove to be thorough Atticists and were diligent students of the writers of the classical period. They set up a standard of education that makes them respectable, and we may say of them, as of some of the sophists of the fourth Christian century, that never has there been shown a more ardent appreciation of the glorious past of Greece, never a more devoted study of the classical authors, to whatever sterile ends. But it is evident that Herodes, who threw all his great influence on the side of a less theatrical and more scholarly rhetoric than Scopelian's, failed to win any such popularity as his. For the main facts of his life we rely on Philostratus. Of all his many-sided literary activities only one declamation remains, in which a young Theban oligarch urges his fellow-citizens to make war on Archelaus of Macedonia. But its authenticity is disputed, and it shows us only one side of his rhetoric. Its rather frigid correctness is certainly not typical of the New Sophistic, nor has it the pathos for which he was famed. There are many admiring references to Herodes in Lucian, Aulus Gellius, and Plutarch. In the Lives that follow his it will be seen how deeply he influenced his numerous pupils, and, through them, the trend of the New Sophistic.²⁹ The notice of Herodes in Suidas is independent of Philostratus. If we accept the theory of Rudolph, Athenaeus in his Deipnosophists (Banquet of the Learned), has given us a characterization of Herodes as the host, disguised under the name Larensius.

There are extant two long Greek inscriptions³⁰ found at Rome, composed for Regilla, the wife of Herodes, one for her heroum or shrine on the Appian Way, the other for her statue in the temple of Minerva and Nemesis. Her brother Braduas was consul in 160. The inscription for the Appian Way must have been composed before 171, the date of the encounter at Sirmium of Herodes and Marcus Aurelius related by Philostratus, since in it Elpinice his daughter is named as still alive; it was partly grief for her death that made Herodes indifferent to his fate at Sirmium.

Aristocles, the pupil of Herodes, wrote philosophical treatises and rhetorical handbooks which have all perished. He was evidently a thorough Atticist. His conversion from philosophy to sophistic and his personal habits are described by Synesius, Dio 35 D. Synesius says that, whereas Dio was converted from sophistic to philosophy, Aristocles in his old age became a dissipated sophist and competed with his declamations in the theatres of Italy and Asia.

Alexander the Cilician probably derived his love of philosophy from his teacher Favorinus, but his nickname “Clay Plato” implies that his pretensions were not taken seriously. However sound may have been the studies of these more scholarly sophists of the type of Herodes, they evidently resorted to the trivial devices and excessive rhythms that the crowd had been taught by the Asianists to expect from a declaimer. If Alexander really declaimed more soberly than Scopelian, as Herodes said, the quotations from him in Philostratus do not show any real difference of style. Alexander was, however, something more than a mere expert in the etiquette of Sophistic.

Hermogenes of Tarsus is the most famous technical writer on rhetoric in the second century, though one would not infer this from Philostratus. His career as a declaimer was brief, but it is improbable that, as Suidas says, his mind became deranged at twenty-four. He was a youthful prodigy, a boy orator, who turned to the composition of treatises when his knack of declamation forsook him in early manhood. We have his Preparatory Exercises, Προγυμνάσματα, his treatise, On the Constitution of Cases, Περὶ τω̑ν στάσεων, On Invention, Περὶ εὐρέσεωs, and, best known of all, On the Types of Style, Περὶ ὶδεω̑ν. For him Demosthenes is the perfect orator who displays all the seventeen qualities of good oratory, such as clearness, beauty, the grand manner, and the rest. Hermogenes defines and classifies them, together with the formal elements of a speech. His categories are quoted by all the technical rhetoricians who succeed him. All his work was intended to lead to the scientific imitation of the classical writers, though he admired also a few later authors, especially the Atticist Aristeides, the strictest of the archaists. Philostratus, who can admire only the declaimer, says nothing of his success as a technical writer.

Aelius Aristeides, surnamed Theodorus, was born in Mysia, in 117. According to Suidas, he studied under Polemo, but no doubt he owed more to the teaching of Herodes. He is the chief representative of the religious and literary activity of the sophists and their revival of Atticism in the second century, and we must judge of that revival mainly from his works which are in great part extant. We have fifty-five Orations of various kinds, and two treatises on rhetoric in which he shows himself inferior in method and thoroughness to Hermogenes. He was proverbially unpopular as a teacher of rhetoric, and though the epigram on the seven pupils of Aristeides, four walls and three benches, which is quoted in the anonymous argument to his Panathenaic Oration, is there said to have been composed for a later rhetorician of the same name, it somehow clung to his memory, and a denial was felt to be necessary. His six Sacred Discourses, in which he discusses the treatment by Asclepius of a long illness of thirteen years with which he was afflicted, are one of the curiosities of literature. They mark the close association of Sophistic and religion in the second century, and it is to be observed that Polemo, Antiochus, and Hermocrates also frequented the temple of Asclepius. The sophists constantly opposed the irreligion of the contemporary philosophers, but it is hard to believe that an educated man of that time could seriously describe his interviews with Asclepius and the god's fulsome praises of his oratory. It is less surprising when Eunapius, in the fourth century, reports, apparently in good faith, the conversations of his contemporaries with Asclepius at Pergamon, for superstition, fanned by the theurgists, had by that time made great headway.

For the later sophists described by Eunapius, Aristeides ranks with Demosthenes as a model of Greek prose, and he was even more diligently read; it was the highest praise to say that one of them resembled “the divine Aristeides.” For them he was the ideal sophist, and he did indeed defend Sophistic with all his energy against the philosophers, whom he despised. He even carried on a polemic against Plato, and made a formal defence of Gorgias whom Plato had attacked in the Gorgias. In spite of his lack of success as a declaimer, he was an epideictic orator. He rebuked his fellow sophists for their theatrical methods, and his Oration Against the Dancing Sophists is the bitterest invective against Asianic emotional eloquence that we possess. But he was no less emotional than they, when there was a chance for pathos. When Smyrna was destroyed by an earthquake in 178 he wrote a Monody on Smyrna which has all the faults of Asianism. There is little real feeling in this speech over which Marcus Aurelius shed conventional tears. Yet he was in the main an Atticist, who dreamed of reproducing the many-sided eloquence of Demosthenes and pursued this ideal at the cost of popularity with the crowd. He had his reward in being for centuries rated higher than Demosthenes by the critics and writers on rhetoric. Libanius, in the fourth century, was his devout imitator, though he himself practised a more flexible style of oratory. Aristeides died in the reign of Commodus, about A.D. 187.

Adrian, the Phoenician pupil of Herodes, is hardly known except through Philostratus. He can scarcely have been as old as eighty when he died, for, as Commodus himself died in 190, that is the latest year in which he can have sent an appointment to the dying Adrian, as Philostratus relates. Now Herodes had died about 180 at the age of seventy, and Philostratus makes it clear that Adrian was a much younger man. This is of small importance in itself, but it illustrates the carelessness of Philostratus as a chronicler.

Julius Pollux of Naucratis came to Rome in the reign of Antoninus or Marcus Aurelius, and taught rhetoric to the young Commodus to whom he dedicated his Onomasticon. His speeches, which even Philostratus found it impossible to praise, are lost, but we have the Onomasticon, a valuable thesaurus of Greek words and synonyms, and especially of technical terms of rhetoric. It was designed as a guide to rhetoric for Commodus, but Pollux was to be more useful than he knew. He is bitterly satirized by Lucian in his Rhetorician's Guide, where he is made to describe with the most shameless effrontery the ease with which a declaimer may gull his audience and win a reputation. How far this satire was justified we cannot tell, but we may assume that Pollux had made pretensions to shine as a declaimer, and Lucian, always hostile to that type, chose to satirize one who illustrated the weaknesses rather than the brilliance of that profession. Nevertheless the passage quoted from a declamation of Pollux by Philostratus is not inferior to other such extracts in the Lives.

Pausanias the sophist is assumed by some scholars to be the famous archaeologist and traveller. But the latter was not a native of Lycia, and though he speaks of Herodes, he nowhere says that he had studied with him. Nor does Suidas in his list of the sophist's works mention the famous Description of Greece. The Pausanias of Philostratus is perhaps the author of the Attic Lexicon praised by Photius. We have some fragments of this work.

Antipater the Syrian was one of the teachers of Philostratus. At the court of Septimius Severus he had great influence, perhaps due in part to his Syrian birth, for the compatriots of the Empress Julia were under her special patronage. At Athens he had been the pupil of Adrian, Pollux, and a certain Zeno, a writer on rhetoric whom Philostratus does not include in the Lives. He educated the Emperor's sons, Caracalla and Geta, received the consulship, and was for a short time Governor of Bithynia. Galen, the court physician, praises Severus for the favour shown to Antipater. He starved himself to death after Caracalla's favour was withdrawn. This was about 212. We may therefore place his birth about 144. Philostratus studied with him before he became an official. Antipater's marriage with the plain daughter of Hermocrates took place when the court was in the East, but whether Philostratus in his account of this event means the first or the second Eastern expedition of Severus he does not say, so that we cannot precisely date Antipater's appointment as Imperial Secretary; it occurred about 194 or 197; Kayser prefers the later date. We learn from Suidas that Antipater was attacked by Philostratus the First in an essay, On the Name, or On the Noun. This statement is useful as fixing the date of the father of our Philostratus. The Antipater of the Lives must not be confused with an earlier sophist of the same name mentioned by Dio Chrysostom.

Claudius Aelian, the “honey-tongued,” as Suidas tells us he was called, is the most important of the learned sophists of the third century. He was born at Praeneste towards the close of the second century, and was a Hellenized Roman who, like Marcus Aurelius, preferred to write Greek. He was an industrious collector of curious facts and strange tales, but, in spite of the statement of Philostratus as to the purity of his dialect, he hardly deserves to rank as a writer of Greek prose. Though he claims to write for “educated ears,” his language is a strange mixture of Homeric, tragic, and Ionic Greek, with the “common” dialect as a basis. He is erudite in order to interest his readers and with no purpose of preserving a literary tradition; and in his extant works he observes none of the rules of rhetorical composition as they were handed down by the sophists. He aims at simplicity, ἀϕέλεια, but is intolerably artificial. We have his treatise in seventeen books, On Animals, a curious medley of facts and anecdotes designed to prove that animals display the virtues and vices of human beings; and the less well preserved Varied History, a collection of anecdotes about famous persons set down without any attempt at orderly sequence or connexion. Two religious treatises survive in fragments. In choosing to be a mere writer rather than an epideictic orator he really forfeited the high privilege of being called a sophist.

Notes

1. This is Münscher's conclusion from a remark in the Life of Apollonius v. 2, where Philostratus says that he has himself observed the ebb and flow of the Atlantic tides in “the country of the Celts.” But this may have been Gaul, not Britain.

2. In the dedication to Gordian Philostratus refers to their intercourse at Antioch.

3. Letter 63.

4. lxxv. 15.

5. Dittenberger, Sylloge i. 413.

6. A.D. 244-249; the Emperor Philip was elected by the army after the murder of Gordian III.

7. Lollianus in the second, and Prohaeresius in the fourth century, were appointed to the office of στρατοπεδάρχηs, for which Food Controller is the nearest equivalent.

8. A.D. 67-79.

9. Life of Adrian, p. 589, where he carefully distinguishes between δωρεαί and δω̑ρα.

10. Letter 63.

11. See p. 577 for Hermogenes.

12. Antike Kunst-Prosa i. 382.

13. xvii. 806.

14. Diogenes Laertius viii. 88.

15. Marcellus 4.

16. See Julian, The Caesars 326 B; Cassius Dio lvi. 43.

17. Palatine Anthology vii. 645. The “foreigners” are Romans, and Ostrakine is a desert village between Egypt and Palestine.

18. Eunuch 7; cf. Demonax 12.

19. Norden, Kunst-Prosa, p. 422.

20. viii. 68

21. Memorabilia i. 3. 24.

22. Dialogus 15.

23. Epistles vi. 6.

24. Epistles ii. 3.

25. Satire iii. 24.

26. Letter 19.

27. See for this office the Lives of Eunapius, especially the Life of Prohaeresius.

28. Kaibel, Epigrammata Graeca 877.

29. See Schmid, Atticismus 201.

30. Kaibel, Epigrammata Graeca 1046, gives a useful commentary on the dates in the life of Herodes.

Bibliography

Manuscripts.

There are a number of mss. of the Lives, of which the following are the most important: Vaticanus 99, eleventh century; Vaticanus 64, fourteenth century; Vaticanus 140, fifteenth or sixteenth century (contains also the Lives of Eunapius); Laurentianus 59, twelfth century; Marcianus, 391, fifteenth century. Cobet's emendations are in Mnemosyne, 1873, Jahn's notes and emendations in his Symbolae ad Philostrati librum de vitis sophistarum, Berne, 1837.

Editions.

Aldine, 1502. Juntine, 1517, 1535. Morell, 1608. Olearius, Leipzig, 1709. Westermann, Didot, Paris, 1822, reprinted 1849 and 1878 (with a Latin version, often incorrect). Heyne and Jacobs, 1797. Kayser, Heidelberg, 1838, with notes. Kayser, Zürich, 1842-1846, 1853. Kayser, Teubner, Leipzig, 1871. [The text of the present edition is that of Kayser, revised. The paging is that of Olearius.] Bendorf, Leipzig, 1893.

Polemo: Hinck, Leipzig, 1873. Herodes Atticus: In Oratores Attici, Paris, 1868. Hass, De H. A. oratione περὶ πολιτείαs, Kiel, 1880. Aristeides: Dindorf, Leipzig, 1829. Kiel, Berlin, 1897.

Literature.

Fertig, De Philostrati sophistis, Bamberg, 1894. Schmid, Atticismus, vol. iv. Stuttgart, 1896, on the style of Philostratus; vol. i. on the style of Aristeides, 1887. Baumgart, Aelius Aristeides, Leipzig, 1874. Jüttner, De Polemone, Breslau, 1898. Rohde, Der griechische Roman, Leipzig. 1876, 1900. Norden, Antike Kunst-Prosa, Leipzig, 1898. Leo, Griechisch-römische Biographie, Leipzig, 1901. Bruns, Die atticistischen Bestrebungen, Kiel, 1896. Volkmann, Die Rhetorik der Griechen und Römer, 2nd edition, Leipzig, 1885. Kohl, De scholasticarum declamationum argumentis ex historia petitis, Paderborn, 1915. Rohde in Rheinisches Museum, xli. Kaibel in Hermes, xx. Radermacher in Rheinisches Museum, lii., liv. (the last three articles are discussions of the historical development of the New Sophistic). Münscher, “Die Philostrate” in Philologus, Supplement 10, 1907 (this is the best discussion of the identity and the ascription of the works of the Philostrati), Wilamowitz in Hermes xxxv. (on Atticism and Asianism). Stock, De prolaliarum usu rhetorico, Königsberg, 1911. Burgess, Epideictic Literature, Chicago, 1902. Philologische Abhandlungen, Breslau, 1901, Quaestiones rhetoricae (articles on the lives and works or second and fourth century rhetoricians).