This study of Philostratus, first published in 1986, presents the Greek biographer's treatment of both sophists and holy men in the social and intellectual life of the early Roman Empire, which also displays his own distinctive literary personality as a superficial dilettante and an engrossing snob. Through him we gain a glimpse of the rhetorical schools and their rivalries, as well as a bizarre portrayal of the celebrated first-century holy man Apollonius of Tyana, long loathed by his later Christian press as a Pagan Christ.
Rarely does a biographer's reputation revolve round the charge that he forged his principal source. Graham Anderson's account produces new evidence which supports Philostratus' credibility, but it also extends the charges of ignorance and bias in his handling of fellow-sophists.
Philostratus is intended for any reader interested in the social, cultural and literary history of the Roman Empire as well as the professional classicist.
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Yes, you can access Philostratus (Routledge Revivals) by Graham Anderson in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Filología & Lenguas antiguas. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
A student on the high road of the history of the Early Roman Empire may not be detained for long over the following story:
(The Emperor Hadrian) used to hate those who attained preeminence in any particular field. And so he tried to destroy two sophists, Favorinus of Gaul and Dionysius of Miletus; his main ploy was to promote their rivals, who were worth very little or nothing. Dionysius is then said to have told Avidius Heliodorus, the Imperial secretary, ‘Caesar has the power to grant you money and honour, but not to make you an orator.’ And Favorinus, who was about to go to court before the emperor over the tax exemption he was claiming in Gaul, suspected that he would not only lose but be insulted as well. So he came into the court-room but said only this: ‘My teacher appeared to me last night in a dream and told me to serve my country; for I have a duty to the land of my birth as well as myself.’ (Cassius Dio LXIX.iii.3–6)
These two brief glimpses of what we might call court gossip in the second century AD might be ranked among the supreme non-events of the history of the Roman Empire, and their mention at all in a serious Greek historian might be seen as typical of his questionable preoccupations. But they are typical of facets of the cultural history of the Graeco-Roman world, and to put them into perspective we must leave the highroad of Dio’s History and take a very devious and less-travelled path through the work of Philostratus. The first anecdote is a case of academic one-upmanship, in which this relatively little-known figure is an acknowledged authority. The second reads like the kind of martyr-literature in which the holy man outmanoeuvres an emperor with a quick-witted answer; Philostratus has written the ultimate tour de force on the educated holy man. Neither of his interests, nor the exuberant way he handles them, is likely to be familiar to students of Roman history: no more is his overall perspective. But any serious understanding of how later Greek history and literature are related cannot ignore him, and demands an understanding of his cultural milieu.
Philostratus was a sophist who wrote the lives of other sophists. In this role he remains our most important historical witness for the phenomenon he himself calls the Second Sophistic.1 The biographer of sophists can perhaps best be seen as a connoisseur of professors: the writer has invested both himself and his peers with an aura of grandeur which sometimes illumines and often obscures his material. Connoisseurs do not always divulge their criteria; and sophists may not always turn from extempore speeches to biography for the true enlightenment of posterity: they may choose instead to extend their love of glory into a new field. By his very profession Philostratus is full of literary and historical preconceptions, and these are likely to take the reader unawares.
One single anecdote will alert us to his approach; it is already familiar as the opening scenario of Millar’s Emperor in the Roman World. An Athenian sophist and his political opponents travel to Sirmium to settle their differences in front of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. As soon as the contending parties arrive, things begin to happen: Demostratus and his party soften the emperor through his wife and young child, while things go badly for his rival, Philostratus’ favourite Herodes Atticus, two of whose adopted children are struck by lightning and killed just before he is due to put his case.2 All the melodrama of the declaimer’s world is here in real life, but how does Philostratus proceed?
Herodes was naturally out of his mind because of this misfortune, and he came into the emperor’s court with a frantic death-wish. For when he came forward he set about slandering the emperor, and did not even deploy elaborate circumlocution in his speech
; one would have thought that a man drilled in this style of speaking would have kept his temper under control. (Lives of the Sophists 560f)
The incident has been used as a paradigm of how emperors worked, and how important literary men could be: for Bowersock ‘There can be no undervaluing the fact that the Athenian disputes of Herodes were ultimately settled on the banks of the Danube by the Emperor Marcus.’ Indeed there cannot. But Philostratus’ view of the incident is also noteworthy. This was the day Herodes declined to use the proper rhetorical decoration! Here we have a revealing insight into what one sophist expects of another. It is taken for granted that he will not be overawed by emperors; that he must face charges of tyranny (so frequent in sophistic declamation); and that under stress he will still employ his rhetorical skills to the full.
That incident, recorded with much circumstantial detail by Philostratus, would have taken place in the early 170s, just outside or just within Philostratus’ own lifetime. We cannot postpone the pile of imprecisions any longer: which Philostratus was born somewhere around the 170s? We know at least that the same Philostratus wrote both the Life of Apollonius and the Lives of the Sophists; a cross-reference in the latter suggests that he completed them in that order.3 Beyond this point there has been plenty of confusion. The Byzantine Suda-Lexicon ranges him as the second of a series of three Philostrati from Lemnos;4 its indications are impossible to reconcile with the surviving works, and scholars have to be content to salvage a likely possibility: that our Philostratus was the second in a line of four (or first of three); that he wrote most of the surviving works; that he had a son-in-law-cum-great-nephew who was a sophist like himself; that one or other of these two wrote a series of Eikones, formal exercises in description; and that the author of these Eikones in turn had a grandson who imitated them.5 This outline would have been confusing enough in itself if it is the whole truth; it would easily have engendered confusion in the hands of careless compilers; and it is pure chance that it does not affect our knowledge of the two main works. It is convenient to label their author, and our subject, the Athenian Philostratus; he calls his younger relative the Lemnian, and an inscription from Olympia gives him the title
which so clearly reflects his own sympathies in the Lives.6
We have only the barest outlines of a biography. The Suda puts his floruit under Septimius Severus (193–211 AD), his death in the reign of Philip the Arab (244–9).7 Within that framework we can only attempt to fit the few isolated details that are accidentally available to us from the shortest asides in his work and a few isolated hints elsewhere. The ascription of the Lives of the Sophists gives the author’s name as Flavius Philostratus; epigraphic evidence enables us to add at least tentatively a praenomen Lu...
Table of contents
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Original Title Page
Original Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Dedication
Preface
Abbreviations
1 Sophist and Biographer
2 The Lives and their Subjects
3 Pedantry and Paideia: Some Typical Encounters
4 The Sophists: Gossip, Scandal, Diversion
5 The Sophist on Sophists: The Lives and their Outlook
6 Brief Lives: Some Philostratean Portraits
7 Apollonius of Tyana: A Holy Man in a Sophist’s World?
8 Apollonius: Philosopher and Miracle-monger
9 Damis: The Dubious Disciple Discovered?
10 Towards the Historical Apollonius?
11 Apollonius in Wonderland: Some Exotic Travels
12 ‘In Honour of Apollonius’: A Cyropaedia for a Superman?
13 Hero-Cults and Homer: The Heroicus
14 Pictures, Wrestling-Schools, Tyrants, Love-Letters: The Philostratean Opuscula
15 The Scope of a Sophist
Appendix 1 The Philostrati
Appendix 2 Herodes and Gordian
Appendix 3 Moeragenes
Appendix 4 The Pythagorean Doxai attributed to Apollonius
