Philostratus: Biography and Belles Lettres in the Third Century A.D 0709905750, 9780709905752

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Routledge Revivals

Philostratus

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.

Philostratus Biography and Belles Lettres in the Third Century A.D.

Graham Anderson

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

First published in 1986 by Croom Helm Ltd This edition first published in 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1986 Graham Anderson The right of Graham Anderson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact. A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 85028013

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-01327-8 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-1-315-79532-4 (ebk)

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~rnu[l((J~um~u[Jj~ BIOGRAPHY AND BELLES LETTRES IN THE THIRD CENTURY A.D. Graham Anderson

CROOM HELM London - Sydney - Dover, New Hampshire

© 1986 Graham Anderson

Croom Helm Ltd, Provident House, Burrell Row, Beckenham, Kent BR3 IAT Croom Helm Australia Pty Ltd, Suite 4, 6th Floor 64-76 Kippax Street, Surry Hills, NSW 2010, Australia British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Anderson, Graham Philostratus: biography and belles lettres in the second century A.D. I. Philostratus, Flavius I. Title 183'.1 B692.P5 ISBN 0-7099-0575-0

Croom Helm Ltd, Washington Street, Dover, New Hampshire 03820, USA Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Anderson, Graham. Philostratus, biography and belles lettres in the second century A.D. Bibliography: p. Includes indexes. 1. Philostratus, Flavius, ca. 170-ca. 245. 2. Biographers-Greece-Biography. 3. Sophists (Greek philosophy) 4. Biography (as a literary form) I. Title. PA4272.Z5A53 1985 183'.1 85-28013 ISBN 0-7099-0575-0

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Billing & Sons Limited, Worcester.

Contents

Preface Abbreviations I 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 II

12 13 14 15

Sophist and Biographer The Lives and their Subjects Pedantry and Paideia: Some Typical Encounters The Sophists: Gossip, Scandal, Diversion The Sophist on Sophists: The Lives and their Outlook Brief Lives: Some Philostratean Portraits Apollonius ofTyana: A Holy Man in a Sophist's World? Apollonius: Philosopher and Miracle-monger Damis: The Dubious Disciple Discovered? Towards the Historical Apollonius? Apollonius in Wonderland: Some Exotic Travels 'In Honour of Apollonius': A Cyropaedia for a Superman? Hero-Cults and Homer: The Heroicus Pictures, Wrestling-Schools, Tyrants, Love-Letters: The Philostratean Opuscula The Scope ofa Sophist

VB

Xl

I 23 43 57 77 97 121 135 155 175 199 227 241

259 283

Appendix I The Philostrati

291

Appendix 2 Herodes and Gordian

297

Appendix 3 Moeragenes

299

Appendix 4 The Pythagorean Doxai attributed to Apollonius

301

Select Bibliography

303

Index of Persons and Places

311

For

Donald Russell praeceptori patientissimo

Preface

'Not another book on Philostratus!' is a cry unknown in the history of classical scholarship. There is nothing that could be called a general study of this author of any length in any language, let alone an available one in English; and the deterrents against writing and reading about Philostratus at all are considerable. Of the two major German surveys, the more recent will soon be half a century old. And the need to 'first find one's Philostratus' is still only provisionally possible to fulfil: only a small proportion of the works assigned to a Philostratus can be surely credited to the biographer. If even Philostratus' identity is confusing, his work itself is confused: much effort has to be spent trying to separate innocent errors from calculated falsehood. And Philostratus' biographies deal with peculiar kinds of people: a suspiciously academic holy man and several dozen sophists. What he says about the latter in particular may make a good deal more sense to those practised in reading academic obituaries in The Times than to those who are not. Moreover the sheer scale of Philostratus' work is daunting. One of the major biographies is long and monolithic, the other long and fragmented. It is difficult to find the measure of both inside a reasonable compass. But the problems attached to Philostratus are outweighed by his attraction. For he supplies vital literary and social co-ordinates, so to speak, for the cultural life of the Roman Empire. The last two decades have seen monographs on Cassius Dio, Lucian, Arrian, Dio of Prusa, Plutarch and Fronto: an extended treatment of the writer who provides the major frame of reference for Imperial rhetoric in Greek is long overdue. But it is not Philostratus' range that is unique: it is his angle of vision. He is the arbiter of elegance for the high culture of the Greek-speaking world, a self-indulgent academic connoisseur. Often his value seems to reside in his demonstrable bias, in what we might call an anatomy of high imperial snobbery, and in the demonstration of how he adorns rather than presents the historical record. The Lives of the Sophists are often consulted for a consulship here or a bread-riot there: they are too slight and idiosyncratic to

viii

Preface

be taken seriously in the history of biography or as literature in their own right. Yet they deserve to be looked at as an end rather than a means. Their glorification of donnish trivia is a sharp reminder that the priorities of Tacitus or Marcus Aurelius were not shared by all who claimed to be intellectuals: Philostratus' selection and presentation is different, and no less essential to understanding the political and cultural double standards of the Hellenic Renaissance. On the other hand the so-called Life of Apollonius of Tyana, while assiduously studied, could always be dismissed in Lesky's phrase, 'monstrose aber interessante'. Yet once more it is as illuminating as a document of the activities of a serious holy man as it is of a sophist's technique of embellishment. But the traditional balance of views on this tantalising work is due to be questioned, all the more so now that its author can be virtually cleared of the charge of forging his chief source, the disciple Damis. In seeking to write a general book I have imposed a number of limitations. I have had to select and illustrate rather than exhaust material which includes over a hundred small units, once collections of letters and descriptions are taken into account. If I have concentrated on the major biographies at the expense of the opuscula, it is because the latter have received such adequate and detailed professional treatment from Mantero, Jiithner and the many who have slaved over more than a century to illuminate the Imagines. Many of my preoccupations in the cultural history of the Second Sophistic are expressed elsewhere, in a forthcoming contribution to the Aufstieg und Niedergang der romischen Welt; and a more general study of early Imperial holy men is in progress. Here I have tried to focus on the implications of a sophist's point of view, and ask how it influenced the variety of material that passed through his hands. I have tried to see Philostratus as a pepaideumenos at work and play, a late antique litterateur let loose on biography; I hope to show that what he brings to it is as fascinating as what he has left out. Early drafts of this book were read by Donald Russell, Hugh Lloyd-Jones and my late colleague at Kent, Guy Chilver. Ewen Bowie has been a constant encouragement to the development of views often divergent from his own; c.P. Jones, Robert Penella and Jan Kindstrand have generously supplied me with offprints; and my debt to the seminal work of G. W. Bowersock is as evident in my differences of perspective as in my broad agreement with his

Preface ix

evocation of Greek sophists. Eve Hurste once again proved equal to a typescript palimpsested with up to ten years of second thoughts. Richard Stoneman proved unexpectedly amenable to an unusual subject; so did my wife Margaret, who watched me extend my unhealthy taste for academic scandal back to antiquity. At this point I cannot resist a reminiscence doubly appropriate to a student of Philostratus, since it concerns a picture as well as a lecture-hall. Generations of students in the Humanity Classroom in the University of Glasgow used to look up at the resplendent portrait of a translator of Apollonius of Tyana. There he stood, scowling magnificently at the performance of his successor lecturing below, as the latter scowled no less magnificently at us. Anyone who remembers or can imagine the scene will recognise how well it recreates the ethos familiar to Philostratus: my fascination for sophists and holy men was formed then and there. This book is dedicated to Donald Russell: like the good guide to Sophistopolis, he showed me not only the entrances to that city but the exits as well. Graham Anderson Keynes College University of Kent at Canterbury

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Abbreviations

AJP American Journal of Philology ANRW Aufstieg und Niedergang der romischen Welt BCH Bulletin de Correspondence hellenique C & M Classica et Mediaevalia CP Classical Philology CQ Classical Quarterly CRAI Comptes rendus de l'Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres ERW F. Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World GRBS Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies HSCP Harvard Studies in Classical Philology IA Iranica Antiqua IG Inscriptiones Graecae IGR Inscriptiones Graecae ad res Romanas Pertinentes IGSK Inschriften griechischer Stiidte aus Kleinasien JAC Jahrbuch fur Antike und Christentum Journal of Hellenic Studies JHS JOeAI Jahreshefte des 6sterreichischen Archiiologischen Instituts Loeb Classical Library LCL OGIS Orientis Graeci Inscriptiones Selectae PBA Proceedings of the British Academy PCPS Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society PIR Prosopographia Imperii Romani RCCM Rivista di cultura classica e medioevale RE Realencyclopiidie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft REA Revue des Etudes Anciennes REG Revue des Etudes Grecques RFIC Rivista di Filologia e di Istruzione Classica RLM Rheinisches Museum fur Philologie Sacred Books of the East SBE

xii

Abbreviations

Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum TAPA Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association WS Wiener Studien yeS Yale Classical Studies ZDMG Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenliindischen Gesellschaft ZPE Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik SIG

1 Sophist and Biographer

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 A vidius 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.~) These two brief glimpses of what we might call court gossip in the second century AD might be ranked among the supreme nonevents 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 martyrliterature 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 1

2 Sophist and Biographer 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. I 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 (OUOE O"X:rltJ.cx'ttcrcxc; 't0'l 1.0,0'1); 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

Sophist and Biographer 3

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 Philo stratus 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-Iaw-cum-greatnephew 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 b 'A-Sl]'1l.1to~ 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 Lucius. 8 Philostratus had an association with the Athenian dependency of Lemnos in the northeast Aegean, and may have been brought up there. 9 As well as calling his younger relative the

4 Sophist and Biographer Lemnian, he comments in passing on two local curiosities of the island. lO He does not give us any specific information about the development of his own career; but he does include in the Lives brief portraits of at least three of his rhetorical teachers, Proclus of Naucratis, Antipater of Hierapolis an.d Damianus of Ephesus. 11 All had been pupils of Hadrian of Tyre, favourite pupils of the great Herodes Atticus round whom so much of the Lives revolves. Proclus certainly taught at Athens, and it is there that Philostratus most probably heard him. Among the information about him we are told some details of how he had organised his own rhetorical school: among them is the detail that boys and older students (7tctioe:c;, fJ-e:~pax~ct) actually attended the master together 12 - a warning against too rigid a distinction between ancient school and higher education, in Philostratus' case as in others. He also mentions a characteristic kind of contact with another sophist: he had attended a lecture by Hippodromus of Larissa in which the latter was expected to answer in kind an invective by Proclus, and the biographer was impressed by his courteous and unpolemical reply.13 He was already caught up at this stage in the fascinating rivalries between the stars of his profession. Also mentioned are three interviews (~uvouaict~) with Damianus of Ephesus, of whom he had also been a pupil: 14 advanced students frequently took the opportunity to travel to hear teachers from more than one centre. The Suda plausibly asserts that Philostratus practised as a sophist in Athens and subsequently in Rome. It is moreover a likely conjecture that he owed his introduction to the court of Septimius Severus' empress Julia Domna to her fellow-Syrian Antipater. 15 The biographer claims to have belonged to a circle of the empress, which also included his fellow sophist Philiscus. Julia's coterie has been romanticised and deflated in turn,16 but there is independent evidence of its existence in an explanation by Cassius Dio that Julia sought the companionship of philosophers and sophists to distract herself during the ominous rise of Septimius' praetorian prefect Plautianus; we still hear of it under Caracalla. 17 A letter of Philostratus, once wrongly discredited,18 gives some idea of the ethos of the relationship. The contents also offer a miniature manifesto of a sophist's ideals: Philostratus proves the respectability of his own profession by implicating the stylist Plato as well; the philosopher himself can use the style of Gorgias, as can every one else; only Plutarch remains adamant and Julia is to persuade him. By means of a celebrated conceit

Sophist and Biographer 5

from Plato's Phaedrus,19 Philostratus affects that Plutarch is still alive. There is also a cleverly contrived compliment to Julia, when she is compared to Aspasia, who persuaded Pericles to Gorgiise, and to her no less influential model Thargelia. 20 The letter gives the impression that Julia really was interested in stylistic questions, if only at the most decorative level: the initial issue had been a discussion on the style of Aeschines the Socratic, in which the empress had presumably called Plutarch to witness in favour of more restrained style for philosophic discourse. 21 It was Julia Domna who was responsible for entrusting Philostratus with the commission for a biography of the firstcentury holy man Apollonius of Tyana,22 which must therefore have been begun before her suicide in 217. Imperial interest in Apollonius may have gone back a long way: it was during the ascendancy of Plautianus that Septimius Severus had passed through Tyana, the sage's birthplace;23 the cult may have lasted through generations of the superstitious Severi. What the empress put into the biographer's hands has long been doubted;24 but the enterprise accords well with the cultural pretensions of the Letter. It has been claimed that for a sophist such activity was no more than second-rate time-serving; and that the great luminaries of the age had better things to do than pass the time of day with an inquisitive empress. 25 It is certainly true that this very statusconscious man does not figure among the known Imperial Secretaries (ab epistulis) or of the professors of rhetoric at Athens. But such promotion sometimes came late: Hadrian of Tyre received a secretaryship from Commodus only on his deathbed. 26 Philostratus cannot be considered manque simply because he claimed to belong to a royal circle. His satisfactions may have come, as we shall see, from skill, Hellenism and family wealth as much as from official honours; this product of three second-generation pupils of Herodes Atticus may reasonably have considered himself arrive as he was. Attendance on the Imperial Court entailed travel: Philostratus may have accompanied Severus . and his sons in the British campaign of AD 208: he claims to have watched the Western Ocean as an eye-witness, and indeed to have travelled most of the known world. 27 It used to be assumed that Philostratus' prolonged association with Athens itself belonged to a later period. 28 But an inscription names a Flavius Philostratus as hoplite general at some time during the reign of Septimius Severus himself. 29 This is very likely to have been the biographer, and

6 Sophist and Biographer tenure of this important administrative post need not have been inconsistent with close ties to the court. 30 The office of hoplite general itself is worth attention, since it well reflects the cultural microcosm in which an Athenian intellectual of the early empire might choose to move. Many of its functions are only tentatively attested, but all that we know of them accords well with the outlook and aspirations of our Philostratus. 31 It was at this time at least second in honour to the office of eponymous archon itself. 32 It called for wealth and outlay, because it entailed supervision of the grain supply, markets and shipping, among a number of civic and religious duties. 33 Philostratus, with his distinct interest in civic benefaction, his archaising outlook and his religious antiquarianism, would have been well suited to such a post, or even moulded by it. The post symbolised the continuity of ancient office. 34 Held by a member of Julia's circle, it may have given the emperor himself a trusted agent in Athens.35 On the other hand, times were becoming precarious: under Caracalla his teacher Antipater fell from grace,36 and this may have set back any further ambitions. Yet Philostratus seems to have stayed on the right side of the emperor. He puts in an aside from time to time about the role of courtiers: when Antipater sharply criticised Caracalla for the murder of his brother Geta in AD 212, Philostratus tactfully remarks that even a private citizen would have been angry after so outspoken an attack. 37 Yet Philostratus himself is the most likely writer of an epigrammatic letter to one Antoninus, most likely Caracalla, accusing him of living in a house he himself has sacked38 (by the assassination of Geta).39 Perhaps he knew better than to send it; or wrote it after Caracalla's death as an exercise. In either case it must be noted that he himself condemned the sophist Aelian for safely condemning a subsequent emperor after his death. Consistency is never a necessary quality in a sophist's behaviour. 40 From Philostratus we catch a glimpse of the Imperial entourage early in Caracalla's reign: he records an incident in the emperor's Gallic campaign, when a brash sophist making an appeal to the emperor turned it into a rhetorical display. 41 At some time during the same reign the Younger Philostratus was also following the sophist's profession: the biographer speaks with only thinly concealed pride and partisanship about his relative. The latter had an accommodating teacher in Hippodromus of Larissa, who refused to compete with his debut. 42 Philostratus records that he won an

Sophist and Biographer 7 exemption from Caracalla for a performance of a formal exercise (melete), while Philiscus, also in Julia's circle, lost his.43 It is at this point that either of these Philostrati is likely to have composed the extant Heroicus, which celebrates the cults of the heroes of the Trojan War on the sites of their former glories. 44 After the assassination of Caracalla and Julia's suicide in 217, the Severan dynasty never regained security and stability. We have no idea how Philostratus fared with the restored succession, though we might guess that he need not have been disadvantaged: Elagabalus was claimed as the illegitimate son of Caracalla, in whose entourage Philostratus himself had been;45 the biographer of Apollonius might have won favour with the superstitious young Syrian priest-king; and there is certainly a tradition that the latter's cousin and successor Severus Alexander had a cult-statue of Apollonius,46 on whom Philostratus could naturally claim to be an authority. We have possible evidence of a stay in Tyre,47 and a more positive indication of a teaching career in Athens, no doubt as a sophist: his name is linked as a teacher at Athens with that of the rhetorical theorist Apsines of Gadara 48 whom Philostratus himself mentions as a close friend at the end of the Lives, together with the Lemnian Philostratus and Nicagoras. 49 It would have been natural enough for Philostratus to practise paideia in his native habitat as well as the cultural capital of Hellenism, with the prestige of longstanding Imperial connections behind him. We know too that some time before the Imperial proclamations of 238 Philostratus also completed the Lives of the Sophists, dedicated to one of the Gordians elevated to the purple in that year. 50 The mise en scene of this work offers a significant glimpse into the milieu of the biographer: the Lives follow on a discussion with Gordian years before in the temple of Apollo at Antiochene Daphne. 51 The Proconsul Gordian's (literary?) forebear Herodes Atticus figures most prominently in the work, 52 and Philostratus himself had direct connections with three of the master's secondgeneration pupils. Whatever Philostratus' official recognition, he evidently moved with ease in consular circles: his Gordian was proclaimed emperor in due course. Had he survived and succeeded, the way would have been prepared for yet further Imperial favour. We find his own friend Nicagoras serving as an ambassador to Philip the Arab;53 according to the Suda, Philostratus did not survive the latter's reign.

8 Sophist and Biographer The sum of factual information on Philostratus remains frustratingly meagre. The chronological controls imposed by the lifespan of teachers, relatives, friends or patrons still do not yield a date of birth, let alone anything like a career for a man of letters whose literary activities could have spanned some six decades. But in Philostratus' case, like that of his sophists, it is the glimpses that count. They show us a literary figure educated in the Greek East towards the end of the second century, moving in Imperial circles in increasingly turbulent times. We can expect of him some picture of the literary milieu to which he belonged - and the broad framework of urban aristocracy in which it flourished; in the Life of Apollonius we can hope for at least a glimpse of its spiritual aspirations as well. And in both works we can expect some of the basic presuppositions of Philostratus himself. Philostratus calls his sophists the Second Sophistic. It is difficult to define precisely what he is claiming to chronicle: we seem to be dealing with an ethos or outlook rather than a movement, a selfconfident Hellenism which flourished within the Roman Empire on the secure economic foundations provided by the Pax Romana. 54 It embodied a cultural nationalism in an international milieu, while remaining loyal to the Roman Imperial system; and flourished in the conditions of limited self-government which the empire encouraged, particularly under Hadrian and the Antonines. 55 It was naturally backward-looking, 56 a fact which has brought persistent and sometimes unfair ridicule to almost all its output: for a second-century sophist, the golden age of Athens was stilI not entirely detached from the present. Modern scholarship has frequently demanded a definition of the term sophist itself. 57 We shall not get any satisfaction from Philostratus. It is characteristic of his habit of mind to quote any number of examples of who is a sophist or who is not, without actually stating his terms of reference, and the sophists' repertoire is likewise illustrated - very inadequately - by the most threadbare examples. We have to be content to suggest that none of the many proposed definitions need fit all his exhibits. 58 That is not to say that Philostratus would have objected very strongly to any of them, or indeed felt any particular need to reconcile them. It is worth bearing in mind the flexible uses of the words 'don', 'professor', 'lecturer', 'expert' and 'authority': all five overlap with the term in question. It offers the familiar problems of the fashionable and prestigious title which will become stretched from those

Sophist and Biographer 9

entitled to it to those who simply aspire. The layman will be free to apply or withhold it according to whim. 59 In spite of some inconsistency in his own use of the term, Philostratus' basic meaning is clear enough: the sophist emerges as the acknowledged expert, the arrive (not necessarily the professional, who may not be so). The term is used mainly in relation to public speakers, mainly in relation to their public extempore performances to pupils or the public. And that same public will bestow the term more readily on any particular person than his rivals and their pupils will approve. The title presupposes success and assures more. Philostratus' own list of original 'philosophic' sophists also offers us a commentary on the kind of criteria for which one can claim the title: ornate style, successful improvisation, versatility, good repartee, political aptitude, force and vigour in speaking, panegyric technique and skill in elaboration. 60 It is worth checking what has been said above against the usages in Lucian, a near-contemporary writer all the more interesting since his own claims to the title give rise to some argument. He can use the word to mean a specious confidence trickster - a legitimate sense dating from Plato's antipathy to the fifth-century sophists, as Philostratus himself has to acknowledge;6! but also to denote a lecturer with prestige, since Lucian is extremely angry about a rival who can lay claim to such a status in spite of his dubious background and talents. 62 He also uses it in comic phrases to refer to other 'professions': the philosopher Aristippus is caricatured as a sophistes hedupatheias ('professor of pleasure'). And Philostratus can use the term just as readily of an expert in myth. 63 It is better not to look for precise 'definitions' of philosopher, rhetor and sophist; we have rather to assess each in terms of two things: the range of nuances the words themselves could convey, and the viewpoint of the person applying them. 64 The more philosophical a writer's sympathies, the less likely he will be to use the term sophist in a complimentary manner. Many of Plato's subjects may have regarded it as principally a term of abuse, and would have classified themselves as philosophers or rhetors. 65 Aelius Aristides' use is interesting, and bears out the worth of the method suggested. 66 He himself probably preferred to be called a rhetor: this is consistent with Philostratus' concern for extempore speaking, which Aristides himself despised. From this point of view an extempore sophist would have been a charlatan; from a sophist's point of view he himself could have been regarded as a

10

Sophist and Biographer

mere rhetor. To the conservative underdog the sophist will always be the other man, the undeservedly successful, the idol of the fickle. In some ways we are forced to admit that Philostratus' illustration is better than almost any amount of scientific distinction: 7tpoot[J-ta yovv 7tOtEt'!at '!WV AOYWV '!O 'o[oa' xat '!o 'ytyvwcrxw' xat '7taAat OtecrxE[J-[J-at' xat '~e~atov av-Spwm9 ouoev', ('at any rate [the sophist] prefaces his

remarks with "I know" and "I am aware", and "I have long perceived" and "for man nothing is fixed,,,).67 That is a typically sophistic evasion of the question. But official inscriptions do not always help: the terms 'rhetor' and 'sophist' could be used together, perhaps not without an element of pleonastic pomposity. But academic titles are notoriously elusive and conservative, and anomalies easily multiply. One tendency however does seem clear in Philostratus' usage. Philosophers and rhetors are treated as conscientious and austere professionals, whereas the sophist has broken into the media; and he engenders the same divided reaction in relation to public and colleagues as the television don among fellow academics, or the 'journalist and broadcaster' among newspaper journalists. Each of these has the charisma or success which is emotive - either for or against themselves. It may be that Philostratus uses the three terms too rigidly;68 it is certainly noticeable that from his point of view philosophers and rhetors are somehow a little manqw?s. In the Lives of the Sophists Philostratus provides a brief survey of the sophists who flourished in the late fifth and early fourth centuries Be. In fact these men had some intellectual pretensions allied to their professional command of public speaking, and it is rather difficult to compare this very varied collection with the group of Imperial sophists Philostratus wishes to present in detail. But one thing is clear from the introductory sketch: these 'second' sophists are at least as indifferent to truth as their predecessors were held to be. It is largely a matter of style and outward appearances. Their intellectual effrontery can only be expressed from Philostratus' own mouth. For such a writer the merit of sophists, as we have already seen, consists in sprinkling their speeches with expressions of certainty which philosophers are honest enough to avoid: this is held to add to the impressiveness of the performance!69 Next a telling analogy: Philostratus compares the philosophic art to astrology, mere reliance on guesswork - while 'sophistic' is like prophecy, an authoritative statement by men divinely appointed by the gods! There could be no better illustration of how the sophist

Sophist and Biographer 11 saw himself, and on what slender grounds - the dependence on extempore powers of expression as a substitute for intellectual grasp. This dubious comparison is backed up with dubious history. Philostratus sets out to trace the descent of his 'second' sophists from Gorgias himself, with appalling results. The scheme is sadly out of joint: we are given eight philosophers with reputations as sophists, stretching over a period from the beginning of the Hellenistic age to the beginning of the Second Sophistic; 70 then ten sophists proper, from the previous epoch, from Gorgias himself down to Aeschines; 71 then the Second Sophistic itself from Nicetes onwards. 72 The scheme is absurd. We have been told, after all, that the original sophists treated philosophic themes themselves: nothing could have been more natural than for Philostratus to arrange the whole scheme along strict chronological linesGorgias and his age, then the eight 'sophistic' philosophers transposed en bloc, then Nicetes and his followers. There is one obvious objection: once Aeschines has 'founded' the Second Sophistic there must be no more philosophers; otherwise the continuity of the sophistic for nearly 400 years is in philosophic hands. It would also be unpalatable to have Dio and Favorinus, again described as philosophers, sharing the limelight with Nicetes and Isaeus - and to admit that long after Aeschines, philosophers were still holding their own against sophists at their own game. Philostratus' solution was simple: he relegated these embarrassing products to what amounts to a preliminary footnote. And even there they are distinctly ill-assorted. The biographer's catalogue runs lamentably short, with only six names before Dio of Prusa 73 , whose floruit was in the late first and early second centuries AD. One of these names is Carneades,74 of whom Philostratus could not but have heard; two others appear for little more reason than that they were able to face Philip of Macedon;7s the other three seem to have been included because they were the only names Philostratus could think of - and it is only too clear why he thought of them. One had the name Philostratus itself, and like the author had been the associate of a powerful empress;76 one was associated with the same exotic places as Apollonius of Tyana, on whom Philostratus had already written;77 and the third was evidently almost as unknown to Philostratus himself as he is to 78 Since he had however belonged to Naucratis, the home town US. of one of the biographer's own teachers, we have at least a reasonable chance of accounting for the name. But all these name-drops

12 Sophist and Biographer are a sham. There is as much on Dio of Prusa as there is on all six of them put together - this is the first name in the group that really mattered to the biographer. Philostratus is no better on the first batch of sophists proper, the original 'classical' group beginning with Gorgias. His task is to construct a 'succession' of sophists down to Aeschines, and here the difficulties become more acute. He has to gloss over the traditional charges against these original sophists, merely repeating that they argued with conviction rather than with the lack of it; and that the Athenians accused them of being morally unscrupulous (a charge he makes no effort to answer).79 He has also to include such unsavoury characters as Antiphon and Critias. 80 He might well have omitted them, as he omits so many others: but whatever his crimes, Critias was the literary model for Philostratus' idol Herodes Atticus. 81 The charges against him have therefore to be omitted, and the man himself casually exculpated. Why did Philostratus present Aeschines as the starting-point for the Second Sophistic,82 and not Isocrates83 or Demosthenes, both of whose careers seemed to Philostratus much more successful? Either may have been excluded on purely technical grounds: Isocrates did not practise pleading in public, while Demosthenes did not set himself up as an instructor of paying pupils; Aeschines began as the former and finished up as the latter. More important, for Philostratus Greek history ends with the death of Alexander: Aeschines was the last link with the free Athens of the golden age. The great gap of three-and-a-half centuries between Aeschines and the Second Sophistic has more than once been 'explained'. Philostratus offers only three names and no information to cover so long an interval: it has been argued that he must have been complementing existing biographers, or that his text contains a major lacuna. 84 But such speculations are unnecessary: his cursory treatment of the philosophic sophists already shows us the way Philostratus was prepared to deal with past history. He is simply concerned with today and yesterday, and in linking them directly with the distant past they idolised. Where he cannot establish continuity, he does not even bother to try. A good comparison has been drawn with Suetonius' De grammaticis et rhetoribus, where there is a similar jump from origins to examples. 85 As literary history, Philostratus' sketch belongs with Horace's ludicrous notions of the development of Greek drama. 86 Indeed Philostratus twice alludes to the very passage in Aristotle's Poetics which gave

Sophist and Biographer 13 the licence for all such attempts at literary history.87 Nor does he hesitate to force the development of the sophistic into the same pattern. 88 It is part of a sophist's job to conceal the gaps in his knowledge with a confident verbal flourish. And it is this gap which calls in question the credibility of Philostratus from the very outset. We shall not 'restore' his reputation by pointing to Imperial inscriptions containing the title sophistes. 89 The question is how second-century sophists differed in status and function from the rhetors of the early empire who appear, for example, in the elder Seneca; and whether a similar body of men existed at any time - or always - between Demetrius of Phalerum and Nicetes. We should be prepared to assume ex silentio that they did. The power of a public speaker is not to be connected exclusively with the revival of Asia Minor under the early empire; rather was it bound up with the prestige of literacy in a society where access to it was restricted. The only thing that is likely to have changed very much is the prestige and (mis-)application of the word sophistes itself; and the archaising outlook of Imperial literature was perfectly entitled to favour a term current in the fifth century Be. If the title was applied sparingly to figures before Nicetes, that is no proof that there were not 'virtuoso rhetors with a big public reputation' during that time. 90 The Second Sophistic is not a fiction; but it was the sort of grandiose affectation which may have given rise to misleading distinctions. The Philostratean Corpus as it has come down to us is a convenient illustration of the range of sophistic interests. As it happens no single surviving work is in the form of a melete, a formal rhetorical exercise, as SUCh. 91 Philostratus' own magnum opus is something of a surprise when we consider the somewhat 'academic' scope of the Lives of the Sophists. It is a hagiographical work - for want of a more precise description 92 - not about a sophist, but about a philosopher, as Philostratus claims Apollonius of Tyana to be. The Nero,93 by whichever Philo stratus it might be, is an historical or quasi-historical sketch set as a miniature dialogue rather than as a declamation; while the important and relatively neglected Heroicus is an ambitious literary diversion, a pious but elegant exchange sometimes almost verging on satiric dialogue. 94 The series of miniature descriptions in the Imagines and the potpourri of athletic information in the Gymnasticus give little hint of the professional highroad which Philostratus marks out in the Lives. But they point to the activities of the sophist in the salon rather than the theatre or the school. 95

14 Sophist and Biographer Philostratus' interest in sophists was largely concerned with style, and he himself has to be seen as a self-conscious stylist, broadly linked to the ideal of an Attic revival in early Imperial culture. 96 The production of biography was naturally suited to the practice of aphe/eia in Imperial prose: a relaxed, elegant but studiously casual manner which looks to such models as Xenophon, Herodotus and Plato,97 but does not aim at extremes of scholarly or antiquarian exactness. It is the literary idiom of the pepaideumenos who remains a dilettante and a gentleman. For long narrative such as the biography of Apollonius, or a succession of short ones like the Lives, it is a more practical medium than, for example, scholarly imitation of the orators. 98 Philostratus certainly admired Attic purity (though he might have been harder put to define it); he shares Herodes' admiration of the rustic Agathion, who has allegedly preserved the native purity of speech of the Greek mainland;99 or approves of Aelian, who has learnt his Greek exclusively in Italy outside a Hellenic environment;IOO nor does he fail to note that the lexicographer Pollux did not accord with the standards of Atticism such a role implied. 101 For his own part Philostratus allows hiatus, and succumbs to familiar deviations of morphology, verbal voice, mood and negation. 102 He can betray learned hypercorrection or pedantically conceived idiosyncrasy, 103 and is not uninfluenced by the Umgangsprach of his day: one notes that even the aforementioned Aelian can be purer in matters of vocabulary for example, precisely because he was not exposed to the inevitable changes even in academic language when preserved in a Greek environment. 104 Already ancient rhetorical technicians recognised Philostratus' characteristics: for Menander Rhetor he is a practitioner of a simple relaxed style (cbtAouO"'rEpa xal acpEAEO"'rEpa), not without the grace of calculated ornament (xaptC; a7to AE~EWC; Emn)OEu[J-EV'Y)C; xai XEXaAAW7tt0"[J-EV'Y)C;).105 We accordingly find him in the company of Plato, Xenophon, Dio of Prusa and his own friend Nicostratus. Philostratus' would-be rival Eunapius put the matter less charitably in the fourth century: to him the biographer 'spewed out the lives of the best sophists in his pleasantly superficial style' ('roue; 'rWV apiO"'rwv O"oCPtO"'rwv E~ E7ttOpO[J-lje; [J-E'r.x xapt'roe; 7tapE7t'ruO"E ~ioue;).l06 By contrast the Byzantine patriarch Photius offers the

most comprehensive and perceptive notice:

Sophist and Biographer

15

This Philostratus employs an attractive and extremely varied narrative diction; his expressions are dignified but his syntax is outlandish for a historian - for it seems more like 'asyntax' rather than anything to do with syntax. But we realise that this most learned of men did not arrive at this novel idiosyncrasy through incorrectness; but expressions perhaps rare in older writers he has employed to the full and made a bold display of them, not for no purpose but for their attractiveness. For such expressions are attractive and delightful. (Bibliotheca Codex 241) This is fair comment: Philostratus presents a lucid yet idiosyncratic performance. In the Lives in particular there is a noticeable preoccupation with variety in,the artistic impact of notices seldom of any length. Introductions are carefully varied: M'Yjos: ~Exouvoov 'wi ,A-/J'Yjvatov aiJ.v'YjiJ.OvWiJ.EV , . . IIEpt oS:' Hpwoov 't'OU ' AO'Yjvaiov 't'aoE 'X.P~ dOEvaL , .. 'E1tt 't'ov O"O~Lo"'t'~V 8EOOO't'OV xaAEL iJ.E 6 AOyO(, ... 'Let us not forget Secundus the Athenian ... '; 'The following should be known about Herodes the Athenian ... ' 'My narrative summons me to the sophist Theodotus .. .'107 But glib fluency easily extends to mannerism. Philo stratus will pursue variety by means of inversion or of studied asymmetry of construction: this is not the man to say 'Sousa, Bactra and India' when he can contrive 'Sousa, Bactra and the Indians beyond them' instead. 108 The persistent use of brachylogy, especially in the omission of principal verbs, justifies Photius' label 'aphoristic,;109 but the texture of any given notice can be further varied by the more or less random deployment of an elaborate metaphor or simile, or an occasional purple passage on envy, glory or the like: one need only look at the misguided attempt of Eunapius to ape such a texture to realise how well Philostratus can control his stylistic flosculi. It is time to look at a sample passage, on the last of Philostratus' sophists: ,A