Sometime around 230 CE, a Greek imperial prose writer named Philostratus addressed a two-book work to the future short-term Roman emperor Gordian I, in which he undertook to give an account of the lives of those eminent men who had been called “Sophists” since the beginning of the tradition in Classical Athens.Footnote ¹ “Sophist” was a title of respect in his own day, as we know from an assortment of contemporary inscriptions, especially from Asia Minor,Footnote ² and the profession was a topic of interest common to author and addressee. Philostratus was a Sophist himself, and Gordian was descended from one of the most famous of the latter-day Sophists, Herodes Atticus, whose life turns out to be the centerpiece of both Philostratus’ text and the educational network he portrays. The text received attention and response in its own time and has survived for us under the title Lives of the Sophists (abbreviated VS, from the Latin title, Vitae Sophistarum).Footnote ³ As far as we can tell, this is the first post-Classical text that looked back to a clearly defined and extensively described sophistic era, and in that respect its influence lasts into modern times.

Philostratus’ concern with the linear traditions of “sophistic” craft and practice is evident on all fronts, including his quasi-reification of what he calls the “ancient sophistic” and its sequel, the “Second Sophistic.” Insofar as Philostratus’ First Sophistic is the older phase of the sophistic practice of his own day, it differs from both modern conceptions of the sophistic movement and conceptions in the Classical period. It is foremost an oratorical tradition, albeit featuring oratory described as “philosophizing.” In his account of the First Sophistic, Philostratus privileges features of sophistic practice in his contemporary world, such as skills associated with extemporaneous speaking and functions of service to the state. He describes interactions and personal relationships among the early Sophists about which we hear nothing elsewhere. Yet most of the nine characters on Philostratus’ list of the first Sophists – Gorgias, Protagoras, Hippias, Prodicus, Polus, Thrasymachus, Antiphon, Critias, and Isocrates – are the figures who constitute the bulk of modern lists. (The exceptions are Polus and Isocrates.Footnote ⁴) They also coincide with many of the figures Plato and Xenophon portray in opposition to Socrates. The writings of Xenophon and Plato are indeed built into Philostratus’ project, despite the fundamental difference between the earlier authors’ negative conception of sophistry as sham philosophy and Philostratus’ celebration of the first Sophists as men who practiced “philosophizing oratory.”

Philostratus’ construction of the First Sophistic has been definitive since antiquity. Lives of the Sophists was being cited by title soon after its production, notably in the fourth-century Eunapius’ Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists (an extension of Philostratus’ project), and explicit references continued through the Byzantine period. Whereas Philostratus probably had predecessors in his effort to compose a list of the ancient Sophists, he is the earliest surviving author after Plato to have written at length about a “sophistic” movement or era – that is, a period of time characterized by definite boundaries, a common endeavor shared by identifiable individuals, and historical consequence. Elements of what might have been imagined as a “First Sophistic” period appear in works by some of Philostratus’ predecessors, as we shall see, but nothing like the strong conception of a movement and an age we find in the Lives of the Sophists.

In modern times, Philostratus’ list of Sophists and conception of a First Sophistic appears to have influenced Hermann Diels’s original collection of the “older Sophistic” (Ältere Sophistik) in an appendix in the first edition of the fragments of the Presocratics (1903), which has been fundamental for modern treatments of “the Sophists.” Diels’ first edition classified eight individuals as older Sophists: Protagoras, Xeniades, Gorgias, Prodicus, Thrasymachus, Hippias, Antiphon, and Critias (it also included two anonymous texts, the Dissoi Logoi and the so-called Anonymus Iamblichi). This twentieth-century set of named figures differs from Philostratus’ only by the omission of Polus and Isocrates and the inclusion of Xeniades.Footnote ⁵ (Lycophron, whose paradoxes are discussed by Aristotle, was added in the fifth edition of Diels and Kranz in 1934.) The Diels-Kranz list, in turn, is the foundation of the influential modern accounts of the individuals making up the group, such as “the men” described as players in the fifth-century enlightenment by W. K. C. Guthrie in 1969, “the individual sophists” profiled by G. B. Kerferd in 1981, and “the protagonists” surveyed as an appendix by M. Bonazzi in 2010.Footnote ⁶ A closer understanding of how Philostratus framed, populated, and characterized the First Sophistic and how his version builds on and exceeds other ancient conceptions of the phenomenon illuminates the formation of this tradition.

Here we begin by identifying elements of a “sophistic” in surviving works by those of Philostratus’ post-Hellenistic predecessors and contemporaries who most nearly approach such a concept. Next, we extract and examine the clearest characteristics of Philostratus’ First Sophistic, its boundaries, and its members, with attention to apparent assimilations of the First Sophistic to the Second. Finally, we assess Philostratus’ complicated relationship to Plato. The membership of the First Sophistic in Lives of the Sophists indicates that representation in the works of Plato and Xenophon was Philostratus’ basic criterion for inclusion. Philostratus also cites works by Plato and Xenophon as evidence for his own accounts of these Sophists. But nowhere does Philostratus describe a Sophist by reproducing any account from canonical Socratic literature. Rather, he expands Classical evidence for oratorical performances with extra narrative, while ignoring the negative views of the Sophists’ philosophical contributions. Philostratus’ Sophists are in fact praised for their knack for speaking without knowledge – a typical Platonic bugbear – and presented as successful in their endeavors to promote civic goals. Despite these fundamental differences in evaluation, Philostratus emphasizes the “philosophical” credentials of his own Sophists, drawing attention to his contestation of Plato’s image of the Sophist.Footnote ⁷

In Search of a First Sophistic before Philostratus

Some dialogues of Plato, and in particular his Protagoras, portray a community of competing intellectuals who perform for an audience and are called “Sophists.” The four who eventually became the most frequently cited Sophists – Gorgias, Protagoras, Prodicus, and Hippias – are listed together as international celebrities in Plato’s Hippias Major 282b1–d5. These are the four who come to mind as the “Sophists” some fourteen centuries later for a Byzantine commentator on Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations, representing a tradition presumably independent of Philostratus. When Aristotle states that “sophistic” is apparent wisdom and not really what it appears to be (Sophistical Refutations 165a19–22), the commentator, writing under the name of Alexander of Aphrodisias, and commonly identified as Michael of Ephesus, notes (with some unusual plurals): “This is clear from Hippiases and Protagorases and Gorgiases and Prodicuses: and anyone who wants to understand their ‘wisdom’ and the wealth they collected from it should read the dialogues of Plato named for them.”Footnote ⁸ Whereas uses of the word “Sophist” and lists of individuals who would become canonical Sophists are fairly common in the extant literature composed during the centuries separating Plato and Michael, groupings that imply intellectual unity or collective historical consequence are surprisingly infrequent.

Three of Philostratus’ near contemporaries of the early third century CE – Diogenes Laertius, author of the Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Athenaeus of Naucratis, author of the Dinner-Sophists (Deipnosophistai, sometimes translated Wise Men at Dinner), and Claudius Aelianus (Aelian), author of the Historical Miscellany – provide telling contrast to the project of Lives of the Sophists.Footnote ⁹ Like Philostratus, these writers were well read in certain traditions of Greek literature, and each pays special attention to the works of Plato. To some extent, their works are parallel efforts in a similar project, to collect outstanding products of classical Greek wisdom and integrate them into a single book for the benefit of the third-century reader. If there had been a concept of a First Sophistic circulating in a general intellectual and cultural discourse of the early third century CE, it is likely that at least one of these authors would have known it. Yet apart from Philostratus, they pay no special attention to the classical Sophists as a movement. For Diogenes Laertius, discussed further below, “Sophists” are excessively clever dialecticians or itinerant lecturers of respectable status, who lived in all generations from the Archaic period into Hellenistic times, the entirety of Greek experience covered in his book. Athenaeus, despite adopting the name “Sophist” in the title of his book, portrays his own characters using “Sophist” as a derogatory form of address when they interrupt each other, and several of his “Sophists” are experts merely in cuisine, a prominent topic of the learned conversation portrayed. When a speaker claims to list “the second seven wise men (σοφοί)” as successors to “those Sophists of old,” these turn out to be seven disciples of an eminent chef, a set of cooks who are modeled on the legendary Seven Sages, neither being a group with any correspondence to Plato’s Sophists.Footnote ¹⁰ Aelian in the Historical Miscellany refers more often, in more positive tones, to Indian “Sophists” allegedly encountered by Alexander the Great than to Greek Sophists of any age. All three of these contemporaries mention some of Plato’s ancient Sophists individually or in groups, but the canonical Sophists constitute only a few of the many experts in Greek wisdom discussed, and they have only a faint collective identity. We can conclude that the First Sophistic was not a generally recognized phenomenon in the broad Graeco-Roman intellectual world of the early third century CE.

To be sure, Philostratus’ project was anticipated – faintly, partially, and in contrasting parallel – by older authors in the rhetorical and philosophical traditions. His notion that the First Sophistic was a bounded period of time appears in several writers who practiced oratory themselves and explored antecedents to contemporary practice. Cicero integrates eight of those who would be Philostratus’ Sophists (all but Polus) into the histories of oratory embedded in his three chief works on the topic (Brutus, On the Orator, and Orator), mentioning most of them in clusters, but with special attention to Gorgias and (even more) Isocrates.Footnote ¹¹ Only in the latest of these works, Orator, does Cicero use the term “Sophists” to refer to such a group, which there consists of Gorgias, Thrasymachus, and Theodorus of Byzantium, all teachers of oratory according to Plato’s Phaedrus (but not all on Philostratus’ list).Footnote ¹² The dialogues Brutus and On the Orator contain narratives of the rise of Greek oratory, also informed by Plato, and these narratives contain some intimation of a “sophistic” era. Two factors that would color Philostratus’ image of the First Sophistic are also present: the use of oratory for statesmanship (such as Cicero practiced himself) is assumed throughout Cicero’s rhetorical texts and implicit in the history of Greek oratory sketched in Brutus; and skill in extemporaneous speaking is central to the discussions of Hippias and Gorgias in On the Orator.

In Brutus 27–38, a character named Cicero, an apparent surrogate for the author, presents a history of Greek oratory in four phases, of which the third phase could potentially be understood as the sophistic era. The first two phases extend from oratory’s beginnings in Homer through the period of Pericles, who transferred to his oratorical practice the skills in sharp thinking that he learned from the natural philosopher Anaxagoras.Footnote ¹³ It was during the second of these early phases that Critias flourished, together with Cleon, Alcibiades, and Theramenes, all fifth-century politicians with reputations for treachery. The third phase began with the rise of the earliest teachers of rhetoric (magistri dicendi), namely, Gorgias, Thrasymachus, Protagoras, Prodicus, and Hippias.Footnote ¹⁴ These “enjoyed great honor” (in honore magno fuit) and taught a single subject, “how the lesser cause could be made the better by speaking” (quem ad modum causa inferior … dicendo fieri superior posset) – evidently like the promise that drew pupils to Socrates’ school in Clouds and was also attributed to Protagoras in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. These are the core Sophists portrayed in argument with Socrates across Plato’s dialogues, and all are mentioned in Socrates’ discussion of contemporary oratory in the Phaedrus.Footnote ¹⁵ These first masters of rhetoric, according to Cicero, earned chastisement by Socrates, whose intervention opened the way to the fourth phase of oratory, the climactic period of the Attic orators, including Isocrates, Demosthenes, and Aeschines, the statesmen whose speeches are the most important models for Cicero.Footnote ¹⁶

A more positive evaluation of what would become the ancient sophistic appears in On the Orator 3.127–9, again without use of the word “sophist.” There a character named Catulus praises the thesis that universal knowledge is necessary for good oratory by pointing, as examples of this success, to Hippias, Prodicus, Thrasymachus, Protagoras, and Gorgias (the same five named in Brutus, in a different order). To make this point in favor of Plato’s “Sophists” but counter to Plato’s implied evaluation of them, Catulus poses a friendly interruption to Crassus, an orator serving as the dialogue’s main speaker and mouthpiece of its major messages. Catulus expands the praise of Hippias and Gorgias through embellished restatements of Plato’s Hippias Minor 363c7–364a9 and Gorgias 447c6–8, where the respective figures boast of their ability to speak extemporaneously on a range of topics, including those proposed by the audience. Catulus reverses the negative evaluation of these skills implied by Plato, just as Philostratus later will do. The anticipation of Philostratus’ association of extemporaneous speaking with knowledge is so close that there might be a real influence. Philostratus certainly knew Cicero, as he was alluded to in the Life of Apollonius of Tyana (7.11.1).

Dio of Prusa, one of five latter-day figures discussed in Lives of the Sophists whose texts survive for us, is the only one of those five whose writings present an image of a First Sophistic.Footnote ¹⁷ Unlike the image in Philostratus, Dio’s is delivered without narrative and with a negative evaluation that echoes Plato’s. In his short Oration 54, On Socrates (possibly intended as a kind of prologue to his longer orations), Dio lists Hippias, Prodicus, Polus, and Gorgias as four Sophists who collected money for their intellectual performances.Footnote ¹⁸ All are differentiated from Socrates on the basis of their holdings in money, a main point of the text. Furthermore, according to Dio, Socrates proved the enduring value of his words (λόγοι) by inspiring his followers to commemorate them. The Sophists, while popular for live audiences, inspired no such legacy, and their logoi have been lost. Dio uses the Sophists much as Plato did, as foils to extol Socrates. By attributing a common activity to all and opposing this to the profile of Socrates, Dio resembles Cicero as well. Whereas Cicero inscribes his sophistic age as a small piece in a larger story, Dio’s small narrative of comparison occupies his whole short oration, so making his sophistic age appear as a separate, coherent world.

More complicated suggestions of a sophistic age appear a generation after Dio, in some of Lucian’s humorous dialogues from the second century CE. Lucian was probably himself a public performer of speeches and thus, by Philostratus’ definition, a type of Sophist, although he is absent from Philostratus’ list.Footnote ¹⁹ One short text in Lucian’s corpus, Herodotus (probably a prologue text for a longer performance), lists Hippias, Prodicus of Ceos, Polus of Acragas, and one Anaximenes of ChiosFootnote ²⁰ as Sophists who, like Herodotus, found a “shortcut” to fame by performing recitations for large, trans-political gatherings, namely, at the Olympics, rather than by traveling from city to city. Not only does this list overlap with that in Philostratus, notably by its unusual inclusion of Polus, but, as in Philostratus, the setting is oratory at the Olympics. Lucian’s description of the mode of performance and clever shortcut of “those ancient Sophists”Footnote ²¹ becomes a precedent for his own mode of performance, and hence Lucian seems playfully to claim the title of Sophist for himself. The speaking persona is aligned not with the Sophists of the present day, however, but with the ancients, and this creation of an ancient sophistic allows him to escape the pejorative implications of the title “Sophist” that the word normally carries in his corpus.

Throughout his corpus, Lucian creates humor from the failure of modern philosophers to live up to their ancient precedents. The age of the ancient orators and Sophists is less clearly portrayed, but several texts – Teacher of Orators, Lexiphanês (“Word-Shiner”), and The Mistaken Critic – berate individual contemporaries or types through comparison to classical standards they fail to emulate. The sympathetic first-person accuser in The Mistaken Critic 5–9 claims to recite a prologue from a comedy by the late-classical Athenian poet Menander to make the point that orators pretend to deliver extemporaneous speeches that are actually prepared and staged carefully. The speaker is not named, except as a “Sophist claiming to be such,” but the scene is Olympia, and the topic of his speech is the ethnic identity of Pythagoras. Hence this Sophist appears to be modeled on a traveling classical Sophist, such as Hippias. Lucian’s ancient Sophist, in this case, is no better than the modern one (unless by an implication comprehensible only to Lucian’s contemporaries), but the Sophist’s wish to avoid the appearance of saying “stale things” by reading from a book rather than speaking extemporaneouslyFootnote ²² is a precedent for the image of the contemporary Sophist of the Roman Empire, as presented by both Lucian and Philostratus. This text anticipates Philostratus’ discussion of classical precedents for contemporary practice and uses similar vocabulary.

Alongside these partial antecedents of Philostratus’ First Sophistic as an age of orators, we can compare surviving texts that suggest a First Sophistic constituted on intellectual grounds. Most texts from the philosophical tradition seem to be remote from Philostratus’ concerns.Footnote ²³ Yet certain treatments of canonical Sophists as skeptics and dialecticians bear comparison to the way Philostratus portrays Sophists in general. Most relevant for present purposes are Sextus Empiricus’ Against the Professors, composed probably a generation before Philostratus’ work, and Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers, roughly contemporary with Philostratus’. Overall, the philosophical tradition is loyal to Aristotle’s concept of “sophistry” as deceptive speech involving logical fallacy, as developed by the Stoics. But the individual canonical Sophists are treated, at least by Sextus, without designation as “sophists.” In a section of Against the Dogmatists treating the criterion of truth, Sextus discusses Protagoras and Gorgias at length, in company with seven others ranging temporally from Xenophanes of Colophon of the sixth century BCE to Monimus the Cynic of the late fourth (and including the Xeniades of Corinth admitted to the canon of Sophists by Diels), for abolishing the criterion of truth. In another section, on atheism, Prodicus, Critias, and Protagoras are featured in shorter form among the six pre-Epicurean atheists.Footnote ²⁴ Protagoras is examined by Sextus in additional passages, for his claim that man is the measure of what is and that every presentation to the aesthetic senses is true.Footnote ²⁵ Isocrates is mentioned once, among a list of seven, for a definition of the end of rhetoric as the knowledge of persuasion. As we know from Isocrates himself, persuasion was his central science.Footnote ²⁶ The other Sophists found in Philostratus – Hippias, Polus, Thrasymachus, and Antiphon – make no appearance. Sextus recognizes no special period of time for the success of particular philosophical views, and hence he has no sophistic age literally speaking. His association of some Sophists with skepticism is, on the face of it, just the opposite of Philostratus’ claim, considered below, that the Sophists were outstanding for their confident knowledge.

Diogenes Laertius, writing a generation after Sextus, treats only Protagoras among the philosophers whose lives he discusses but makes broader use than Sextus of the term “sophist,” sometimes in a neutral, nonpejorative sense. The similarity of titles between Diogenes’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers and Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists is not matched by a similarity in the books; Diogenes includes more information, cites more sources, and engages in more technical topics than Philostratus. Diogenes places Protagoras in his ninth book, which includes the “scattered” or “isolated” Heraclitus and Xenophanes; the Eleatics Parmenides, Melissus, and Zeno; the Atomists Leucippus, Democritus, Protagoras, Diogenes of Apollonia, and Anaxarchus; and Pyrrho and the Pyrrhonians – many of these are claimed by Sextus to be skeptics.Footnote ²⁷ In this biography, Protagoras is explicitly said to “practice sophistry,” which refers to itinerant teaching for pay. Any assumption of direct opposition between Protagoras and Socrates, such as his role in Plato’s dialogues would imply, is disrupted by the observation that Protagoras was also an innovator in “the Socratic form of arguments.” Intellectual achievements are attributed to Protagoras largely in the realm of language, both in analysis and method and also in trickery and eristic competition, and the latter are called “sophistries.”

Throughout Diogenes’ work, the description “sophist” or the activity of “practicing sophistry” is attributed to about a dozen additional figures of various generations. These include fourth-century Socratic disciples (Aristippus and Euclides, but not Aeschines, of whom sophistry is explicitly denied), a Pythagorean (Eudoxus), the later eristic Stilpo, and the poet Timon, who celebrated the skeptic philosopher Pyrrho and satirized philosophers of earlier traditions. Polycrates, the pamphleteer who allegedly attacked Socrates, is called a “sophist,” as is the third-century eclectic Bion of Borysthenes. Diogenes, moreover, associates Prodicus with Protagoras through citation of Plato’s Protagoras, and in the biography of Plato he lists the figures who are presented as “being refuted concerning falsehood,” which includes “Thrasymachus, Callicles, Polus, Gorgias, Protagoras, Hippias, Euthydemus, and those similar.”Footnote ²⁸ But Diogenes Laertius does not call these figures “the Sophists.” Overall, Diogenes Laertius admits a neutral sense for “practicing sophistry,” a mode for making a living through itinerant teaching, but mostly uses “sophist” and “sophism” to designate deceptive verbal tricks in a realm that should be rigorous.Footnote ²⁹

In sum, we find various aspects of Philostratus’ First Sophistic anticipated in an array of earlier authors. The most immediate likely inspirations for his creation are lost to us; these would have included the ideas and teachings of Herodes Atticus and other players in the world of the Second Sophistic. Among surviving authors, Cicero comes closest to Philostratus in his listing of Sophists who made a definite contribution to the history of rhetoric, and his character Catulus’ admiration of the extemporaneous speaking of Gorgias and Hippias resembles the account Philostratus gives. Dio first presents an image of a sophistic period that fills a whole text, even though this text is short. Lucian presumes performance at the Olympics and extemporaneous speaking as key components of the sophist’s craft. Ties between Philostratus and the philosophical tradition are more obscure, but, as we see below, Philostratus did claim philosophy as part of his concept of sophistic. Both Sextus and Diogenes take a more philosophical approach in their presentation of ancient Sophists, in contrast to the more rhetorical and social conception of Philostratus, but their images of the Sophists are broadly consistent with Philostratus’ elevation of linguistic skill above philosophical knowledge.

Philostratus’ First Sophistic

Against this background, plausibly with inspiration from these ancestors, emerges Philostratus’ original account of the First Sophistic. Here we set out its literary presentation and the premises of its identity according to Philostratus, then look closely at features that mark it as a product of its time.

Philostratus’ account of the First Sophistic occupies about one-tenth of the Lives of the Sophists and consists of two parts. The first part is a narrative of the beginning and end of the period, each an episode of rivalry between two individuals: first, the canonical Sophists (and figures in Socratic dialogues) Gorgias of Leontini and Prodicus of Ceos; second, the Athenian orators Aeschines son of Atrometus and Demosthenes.Footnote ³⁰ The second part is a list, with anecdotal and biographical discussions, of nine prominent ancient Sophists: Gorgias, Protagoras, Hippias, Prodicus, Polus, Thrasymachus, Antiphon, Critias, and Isocrates.Footnote ³¹ This list continues seamlessly into the biographical discussions of forty-two members of the Second Sophistic that constitute the remaining 90 percent of the work, which ends with no concluding narrative or return to the opening frame.Footnote ³² As preamble to the lives of the Sophists proper, Philostratus lists eight additional men active after the time period of the First Sophistic, beginning with pupils of Plato, who were properly philosophers but “seemed to be Sophists” because they spoke with fluency.Footnote ³³ The final two of these, Dio of Prusa and Favorinus of Arles, are treated at length and reappear later in the text as teachers of the Sophists properly so called. This curious interlude, as will be discussed below, points to the power of the Platonic legacy, even in a project that largely seeks to rescue the Sophists from Plato’s opprobrium.

The “ancient sophistic” was Philostratus’ termFootnote ³⁴ for the first phase in the long tradition of the Sophists, extending from the career of Gorgias of Leontini to the career of Demosthenes (or at least his teacher Isocrates). In the course of this interconnected tradition, figures known to Philostratus from canonical texts allegedly interacted with one another in rivalry and mentorship, converging around a practice of public, extemporaneous speech about common topics. Appropriations from Thucydides, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Xenophon, Demosthenes, Aeschines, and others are recognizable in the nine biographies, and coincidences with the pseudo-Plutarchan Lives of the Attic Orators and Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers allow that Philostratus used now-lost Hellenistic sources.Footnote ³⁵ According to Philostratus, the “ancient sophistic” – technically an adjectival phrase that implies the noun technê, “craft,” as its complement – was a special kind of rhetoric, rhetoric that is “philosophizing” (ῥητορικὴ φιλοσοφoῦσα).Footnote ³⁶ From the perspective of his own time, “philosophizing” is an unexpected ingredient in Philostratus’ image of the First Sophistic. Aelius Aristides, one of the subjects of Philostratus’ later-period biographies, famously claimed the functions of eminent speaker, ambassador, and benefactor for the “Sophist” but denied them to the contemporary “philosopher.”Footnote ³⁷ Contemporary portraiture of the orator and the philosopher shows them as distinct types with distinct iconography.Footnote ³⁸ The surprising specification that the ancient sophistic craft was “philosophizing” is discussed further below.

Philostratus’ transmission of literary and scholarly knowledge from his own period is so robust that his text is uniquely informative for modern study of the Second Sophistic. He often cites texts composed and published by Sophists as source material, and even includes material from letters that must have been available in archives.Footnote ³⁹ His account of the First Sophistic, by contrast, is dominated by reports about activities and performances of the Sophists from classical authors, often cited by name, which seem to compensate for the unavailability, in general, of texts composed by the ancient Sophists themselves. Dio of Prusa, as we saw, noted that the words (λόγοι) of the Sophists had all perished. As it turns out, half of Philostratus’ biographies of the older Sophists are composed with no reference to any transmitted texts of their own or even the notion that they were writers. Prodicus’ speech the Choice of Heracles (as it is titled) is cited in what is explicitly called Xenophon’s imitation.Footnote ⁴⁰ Only for Gorgias, Hippias, and two of the last three Athenians on his list of the ancient Sophists – Antiphon and Isocrates – does Philostratus apply the method favored in his treatment of the Second Sophistic, citing verbal performances by title and sometimes summarizing their content (and for Hippias, Philostratus simply cribs the description of the Trojan Speech found in the Platonic Hippias Major). Only Isocrates is quoted, and all the titles mentioned seem to be orations.Footnote ⁴¹ In the absence of much textual evidence, Philostratus provides narratives of performances for most of his early Sophists, sometimes rewriting information provided by Plato, Xenophon, or Thucydides – in fact, the same passages Cicero seems to have used in Brutus – and sometimes, it seems, filling out the stories from his own imagination or lost sources from second-sophistic culture. Philostratus’ frequent references to his own opinion in his narratives of the First Sophistic are explicit indications that his interpretation exceeds what he found in his source material.Footnote ⁴²

Aside from the difference in source material, the Second Sophistic shapes Philostratus’ construction of the First Sophistic in several clear ways. First, the ancient founder of each phase in the sophistic tradition is characterized as a pioneer in extemporaneous speaking (αὐτοσχεδιάζειν), the most important skill for the contemporary Sophist according to Herodes Atticus. Second, the individual members of the First Sophistic are portrayed as linked by personal relationships, whether divisive quarrels or continuous mentorships, which also constitute the nexus of the Second Sophistic. Finally, the First Sophistic’s individual members are commemorated as much for their public achievements and benefactions as for intellectual expressions or contributions, which are in the field of rhetorical style. They were not statesmen in Cicero’s sense, but their political activities become unexpectedly important for Philostratus’ story.

Philostratus relates how extemporaneous speaking was invented almost by accident, as part of Gorgias’ quest to outdo Prodicus. We learn, in an anecdote unparalleled elsewhere, that Gorgias had heard Prodicus giving performances of his “Choice of Heracles,” a “not unpleasant text” composed in writing.Footnote ⁴³ Although Prodicus won fame and charmed his audiences, Gorgias judged his speeches to be “stale and commonplace,”Footnote ⁴⁴ and, whether in the spirit of reform or rivalry, turned to the contrary mode of extemporaneous speaking. The capacity to perform without preparation or reading gave the appearance of “knowing everything.”Footnote ⁴⁵ This demonstration of knowledge was superior to that of the philosophers. Whereas philosophers justified their claims to knowledge through careful method, the Sophists spoke clearly and confidently on their topics without concern for reasoning or method, like oracles.Footnote ⁴⁶ The Sophists’ clarity, according to Philostratus, is preferable to the minute precision of the philosophers, because the former demonstrated their “clear grasp of what is the case,” whereas the latter were like astronomers who “guessed at what is the case from parts of stars.”Footnote ⁴⁷

The Athenians prove to be the most demanding audience for extemporaneous speaking in both phases of the sophistic. Philostratus tells us that Gorgias “began” the First Sophistic in Thessaly (in accord with Plato Meno 70a), but his first narrated performance was, importantly, in Athens, when Gorgias appeared before the Athenians and challenged them to “propose a theme” on which he would speak without preparation or script but by “yielding to the moment.”Footnote ⁴⁸ During the Second Sophistic, extemporaneous speaking turns out to be a favorite skill of Herodes Atticus, who admired it from boyhood, taught it in his school in Rome, and expected it of students and guest performers at his famous school in Athens.Footnote ⁴⁹ Although Philostratus’ latter-day Sophists perform in cities across the Roman Empire, the community that most loves extemporaneous speaking in his own time is still the Athenians, who are the audience for the most detailed episodes of performance, for example, when the disciples of Herodes Atticus inspired a double performance from Alexander, a star of the Second Sophistic visiting Athens from Seleucia.Footnote ⁵⁰

Along with improvisation, the other major assimilation of Philostratus’ First Sophistic to the Second is in the centrality of personal relationships, both positive and negative, which constitute the periods’ unity and mark their boundaries. Whereas mentorships are more densely charted for the Second Sophistic, quarrels are definitive of the first. Both Gorgias and Prodicus survived their quarrel to become core members of the First Sophistic, but the quarrel that ended the era was more divisive. After Demosthenes defeated Aeschines in the dispute over honorable service to Athens during the Macedonian expansion – the topic of the surviving Demosthenic oration On the Crown and Aeschines’ Against Ctesiphon of 330 BCE, which was still replayed in extemporaneous performances of the Second SophisticFootnote ⁵¹ – Aeschines conceded his loss by departing from Athens and moving to Rhodes, where he founded the Second Sophistic. Aeschines made the whole city, as it appears from Philostratus’ articulation, into a “think tank for Sophists,”Footnote ⁵² an apparent imitation of the term (phrontistêrion) used in the Clouds for the school run by Socrates – but without the play’s sense of derision. Aeschines, apparently, soon had the acceptance of all the Rhodians, even though he was introducing Attic practices among Dorians. Beyond this geopolitical break and institutional turn, Aeschines’ sophistic craft differed from what preceded it in both subject matter and style. In subject matter, the Second Sophistic turned away from topics shared with philosophers, for example, ethics, myth, and cosmology, toward those drawn from historiography, specifically typologies of social groups: paupers and wealthy men, aristocrats and tyrants.Footnote ⁵³ In style, Aeschines was the first to speak as though “by a divine impulse” rather than “with outstanding wisdom” (the mode of Gorgias, founder of the ancient sophistic).Footnote ⁵⁴ Both changes diminish the connection to “philosophizing.”

The odd choice of Aeschines as founder of the Second Sophistic, which was really an Imperial-period tradition that began some five centuries after Aeschines’ lifetime, is underlined by a sort of apology from Philostratus. He cannot call his Second Sophistic the “new” sophistic in comparison to the “ancient sophistic” because both had ancient beginnings.Footnote ⁵⁵ Yet Aeschines’ founding role seems to follow from his successful new start after a divisive quarrel and the disruption entailed in his move to Rhodes, presumably the beginning of a diaspora that resulted in the location of sophistic schools in cities of Asia Minor, key sites in the Second Sophistic such as Miletus, Tyre, Pergamum, and especially Smyrna. Reenactments of ancient oratory during the Second Sophistic would have implied a continuity between ancient and modern eras, and implied the inclusion of figures like Aeschines and Demosthenes in Philostratus’ vision of the long sophistic tradition.Footnote ⁵⁶ Feuds and quarrels between rivals accounted for major developments of the Second Sophistic, especially the branching of institutional schools In the generation before Herodes, for example, a stylistic quarrel between Timocrates and Scopelian resulted in a division of their pupils.Footnote ⁵⁷ Hence it must have seemed plausible that the most famous feud of classical antiquity, in the view of Philostratus and his peers, was also the cause of an important break in tradition, the boundary between the First Sophistic and the Second. The implication that Demosthenes is a figure of the First Sophistic lurks within Philostratus’ account, and his literal exclusion from the list is most likely explained from a basic allegiance on the part of Philostratus or his sources to the principle that the first Sophists come from Socratic literature.

Whereas quarrels mark the boundaries of the First Sophistic, positive relationships such as those between teacher and pupil contribute to its inner constitution. One of these, Polus’ discipleship of Gorgias, is portrayed by Plato.Footnote ⁵⁸ But other reports of such pairs, namely, the assertion that Demosthenes emulated Isocrates and the highly surprising assertion that Aeschines was a pupil not only of Isocrates but of Plato as well,Footnote ⁵⁹ seem to have been contrived in order to create a coherent tradition of the First Sophistic, before the disruption that accompanies the start of the Second Sophistic. Traditions of teacher and disciple were standard long before Philostratus, as demonstrated by the Hellenistic “successions” literature cited by Diogenes Laertius and by the successions that Philostratus mentions but dismisses.Footnote ⁶⁰ Philostratus revises these stories to suit his purposes He devotes so much space within the biography of Isocrates to explaining the ways in which Demosthenes was more importantly a rivaling imitator (ζηλωτής) of Isocrates than a pupil (μαθητής) of Isaeus that he reinforces the continuity of the sophistic tradition down to Demosthenes’ quarrel with Aeschines.Footnote ⁶¹ That is, the last member of the First Sophistic, Isocrates, leaves an heir in the person of Demosthenes. Meanwhile, the founder of the Second Sophistic, Aeschines, while also heir to Isocrates, seems to descend from a new line, having been taught by Plato in addition to Isocrates. No other ancient source reports Plato as teacher of Aeschines the orator, and this original touch is one of at least three subtle indicators – together with the association of Aeschines’ Rhodian school and the phrontistêrion of Socrates as well as the Platonic heritage of the philosophers like Dio of Prusa – that Plato was a kind of ancestor to the Second Sophistic as well as an important contributor to the construction of the first.

A final striking way in which Philostratus’ First Sophistic mirrors the sophistic of his own time is the emphasis in the individual biographies on public affairs and benefactions to a unified Greece or to Athens, often through virtues of oratorical style. Philostatus relates such matters as if to fill the space left open by ignoring Plato’s intellectual objections to the Sophists. Philostratus’ references to Plato are multiple, but they never address Plato’s substantive disagreements with the sophists. Rather, in two of the four biographies where Plato is explicitly cited (Protagoras and Polus), the citations address style only.Footnote ⁶² In a third (Hippias), Plato is cited for implying that the Sicilians paid Hippias too much.Footnote ⁶³ The fourth case is Thrasymachus, and there a citation from Plato’s Republic is used to dismiss Thrasymachus from the list of the Sophists.Footnote ⁶⁴ The intellectual components of Plato’s portraits are replaced in Philostratus by statements about unifying activities among the Greeks and benefactions, or the contrary, to the Athenians. This replacement is especially evident in the biography of Gorgias, which contains no definite reference to Plato at all.

Gorgias’ Olympic orations urging Greek unity against the barbarians and his funeral oration in praise of fallen Athenians form the climax of Philostratus’ account. Gorgias also developed excellent oratorical style, taught important Athenian leaders, and led religious observances.Footnote ⁶⁵ Protagoras, for his part, implicitly failed as a benefactor on account of his impiety, which, as Philostratus opines, was developed under the influence of the Persians and inflicted on the unwitting Athenians. Hippias traveled throughout the Greek cities, becoming an honorary citizen of many (on unspecified evidence), and “used to charm” a unified Greece – also at Olympia – by his variegated and thoughtful speeches. Prodicus, too, was a traveling teacher, and his reputation as a speaker was so great, according to another anecdote that has no ancient parallel, that it inspired Xenophon to bail himself out from prison in order to hear the lectures.Footnote ⁶⁶

The most expansive discussions Philostratus offers for the earlier Sophists are devoted to the Athenians on his list, Antiphon, Critias, and Isocrates, none of whom is identified as a Sophist by Plato. These discussions devote considerable attention to each Sophist’s contribution to the political events of his day, especially events that preserved or threatened the survival of Athens. This emphasis on the integrity of Athens, and possibly even the inclusion of Athenians among the Sophists in departure from Plato, is likely related to these figures’ service as politicians. Herodes Atticus’ own performance as a Sophist coincided with and was possibly related to his many financial benefactions to his city. A similar coincidence of oratorical performance and civic benefaction characterizes the lives of several other members of Philostratus’ Second Sophistic.Footnote ⁶⁷

Despite acknowledgement of Antiphon’s role in the oligarchic revolution of 411, Philostratus seems intent overall on exonerating Antiphon from blame. Antiphon’s fame as an orator and rhetorical theorist are briefly discussed, but the criterion for Philostratus’ judgment “whether one should call him a good or bad man” is his service to Athens.Footnote ⁶⁸ Philostratus apologizes at length for Antiphon’s bad reputation among the comic poets, which he assigns to jealousy and mistrust of the rhetorical craft.Footnote ⁶⁹ Most surprisingly, he displaces Antiphon’s death by execution from Athens, at the hands of the Athenian people, to Syracuse, at the hands of the tyrant Dionysius, by conflating his fifth-century subject with a fourth-century tragic poet also named Antiphon.Footnote ⁷⁰ This conflation was already in the information about Antiphon that Philostratus would have inherited, for the biography of Antiphon included in the pseudo-Plutarchan Lives of the Attic Orators lists execution in Syracuse among three conflicting accounts for his death. But Philostratus’ story is embellished beyond that version. It explicitly contrasts Antiphon’s literary activity and politics in Syracuse, where he was trying to liberate the people from tyranny through his rhetoric, with his politics in Athens, where he enslaved the people. Hence the death of Antiphon in Syracuse is made to cap the story of his political activity in Athens and in a sense reverse Antiphon’s anti-democratic Athenian career.

In the case of Critias, Philostratus again confronts the difficulty in glorifying a violent enemy of the Athenian democracy for rhetorical excellence, but the outcome is much different. For Critias, Philostratus makes little effort to construct an apology, but instead entirely separates the political evaluation from the rhetorical. The longest section of the biography is a rant about Critias’ treachery toward Athens, favor for Sparta, and brutality. With little transition, Philostratus follows with an admiring description of Critias’ style, which is outstandingly “Attic” in its diction as well as terse.Footnote ⁷¹ What is given in the way of transition is puzzlement over the way Critias deployed his talents, not using them as Socrates would have, with wisdom and justice, but instead imbibing the arrogance of the Thessalians, among whom Critias could have surpassed even Gorgias in his rhetorical influence and reputation. As in the case of Protagoras, it appears that Critias’ worst offenses were due to foreign influence. Whatever the source of Critias’ corruption, however, rhetorical skill is not enough to qualify as a good man; one must unify talent with service to the community.Footnote ⁷² Critias fails entirely to meet this standard. But the political discussion in Critias’ biography, included despite its detraction from the praise of Critias, illuminates the importance of political benefaction in Philostratus’ conception of the First Sophistic. Critias is retained among the Sophists, it seems, because the rhetorical criterion is so well fulfilled; Philostratus acknowledges Critias early in the preface to Lives of the Sophists and reports in another passage that Herodes Atticus exalted Critias as a model of style.Footnote ⁷³ But failure to display civic values calls for lengthy concession and explanation, even as it does not disqualify an individual from Philostratus’ list of the Sophists.

Even Isocrates, the final subject of biography among Philostratus’ first Sophists, is assessed for his political service, despite his claim, cited by Philostratus, that he shunned politics due to a weak voice.Footnote ⁷⁴ According to Philostratus, his speeches constituted a kind of service. Hence in the biography of Isocrates, extended discussion of verbal style appears first, and the proof of his contributions to public affairs is drawn from these writings. The content of his letters to Philip, his writings on peace, and his Olympic oration the Panegyricus, among other texts, are said to demonstrate Isocrates’ interest in public affairs (τὰ κοινά). And Isocrates’ death following the battle of Chaeronea demonstrates his loyalty to Athens and symbolizes, in a sense, the Athenian quality of the First Sophistic.Footnote ⁷⁵

Philostratus’ historical position in the third century CE under the Severan dynasty, at great distance from classical Athens, leaves its stamp on his image of the First Sophistic in multiple ways. Philostratus elevates the importance of extemporaneous speaking, for which he apparently created new anecdotes. He invents a rivalry between Gorgias and Prodicus and exploits the famous quarrel of Demosthenes and Aeschines. He accentuates the political benefactions of Gorgias and Hippias while ignoring Plato’s intellectual criticisms, and he rewrites the story of Antiphon. But Philostratus was also a reader of classical literature, and his paradoxical loyalty to Plato in particular is evident in his frequent citations, his choice of characters to populate the First Sophistic, and probably in the very concept of his First Sophistic. We turn now to the ways Plato influenced Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists, despite his evident difference of opinion about the nature and value of the Sophist.

Philostratus and Plato

According to the last in a set of seventy-three letters attributed to Philostratus, addressed to Julia Domna, Plato was not hostile to the Sophists, as some believe, but competitive with them (φιλοτίμως πρὸς αὐτούς).Footnote ⁷⁶ He appropriated the stylistic techniques of Gorgias, Hippias, and Protagoras in order to persuade better than they did, and in like manner Xenophon emulated Prodicus’ Heracles text by rewriting it.Footnote ⁷⁷ The popular Gorgias inspired even the Socratic Aeschines of Sphettus to imitate him, together with many others such as Pericles, Thucydides, and Critias. Hence, Julia should persuade Plutarch, “boldest of the Hellenic race,” to cease casting aspersions on Gorgias.

The authenticity of this letter has been doubted on the basis of its anachronistic directive to Plutarch, but its resemblance to Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists is also clear.Footnote ⁷⁸ The letter presents a sort of apology for Plato’s apparent hostility to Gorgias, Hippias, and Protagoras. Nothing about the philosophical basis of Plato’s opposition is mooted, but features of his style – its “resonance” (ἠχώ) and, implicitly, features of “Gorgianizing” that are attributed to others, “grandeur” (τὸ μεγαλόγνωμον), “solemnity” (ἡ ὀφρύς), “emphatic breaks” (αἱ ἀποστάσεις), “sudden transitions” (αἱ προσβολαί) – are traced to rivalrous imitation of the Sophists.Footnote ⁷⁹ In Lives of the Sophists, too, Philostratus ignores Plato’s suggestions about the value and substance of Socrates’ conversations with Polus, Protagoras, Thrasymachus, and Hippias and considers Plato’s contributions on a purely stylistic level. This silence is surprising, given that Philostratus’ precise references to Plato show that he has read the dialogues. Various signals in Lives of the Sophists, as reinforced by the letter to Julia Domna, suggest that it is also intentional. In some sense, Philostratus sets out to defeat Plato by subordinating him to his own conception of the Sophist, thereby refuting Plato’s condemnations.

The fields of rhetoric and philosophy, cast into rivalry in the dialogues of Plato, competed for priority throughout the Hellenistic period, as Cicero comprehensively describes.Footnote ⁸⁰ Cicero claimed to reunite these fields for the Romans, and honorific inscriptions under the Empire beginning in the second century CE occasionally attributed both titles “philosopher” and “rhetor” to the same person.Footnote ⁸¹ Yet Philostratus takes his own approach to the relationship by requiring that the Sophist of the ancient period be not so much the best of orators – hence the exclusion of Demosthenes – but rather someone with a connection to philosophy under some description. The ancient sophistic, as Philostratus defines it, was “philosophizing rhetoric” (ῥητορικὴ φιλοσοφοῦσα). Although Philostratus’ notion of philosophy is never adequately explained in Lives of the Sophists, and philosophical interests are explicitly attributed only to Antiphon and Critias among the early Sophists, Philostratus’ emphasis on what he calls a philosophical ingredient in his definition of the First Sophistic shows an intent to define the concept of the Sophist differently than a contemporary would have. This difference seems to be reconciliation with Plato.

When Philostratus refers to “philosophizing,” as he does repeatedly through his introduction to Lives of the Sophists, he is referring not to the technical, differentiated philosophical schools of the Roman Empire, but a broad and deep-seated knowledge or wisdom, exemplified in one case by the rustic Celtic Agathion, who impressed Herodes Atticus as “one philosophizing.”Footnote ⁸² In this conception, Philostratus resembles some of the earliest users of the term “philosopher” (φιλόσοφος) in the pre-Platonic period, when the domain of “philosophy” was not clearly differentiated from “wisdom” (σοφία), and the term “wise man” (σοφός) had a field of reference overlapping with that of the “philosopher.”Footnote ⁸³ In Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana, his account of the activity of a philosopher from the previous century, the archaic model for Apollonius’ activity is Pythagoras, the same figure who is credited with first appropriating the name philosophos in differentiation from the sophos. Although Lives of the Sophists makes only light use of the simple terms sophia and sophos, by comparison with the Life of Apollonius, Philostratus’ frequent use of the substantive participle “one philosophizing” in place of the noun “philosopher” in Lives of the Sophists supports the probability that his concept of “philosophizing” was something more general and vague than the contemporary title “philosopher.”Footnote ⁸⁴ By contrast, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, and Diogenes Laertius, on average, use the verbal form “philosophize” once for every five uses of “philosopher.”

The omission of explicit reference to philosophical doctrines, methods, or other kinds of positions by Philostratus for most of his first Sophists might imply that mere appearance in Socratic dialogues provides the “philosophical” component that Philostratus is, in fact, merely assuming. The nine individuals Philostratus places in his First Sophistic are a blend between the list of experts in rhetorical craft described ironically in Plato’s Phaedrus 266b3–267d4 and those antagonists of Socrates who appear as speaking characters (and title characters) throughout Plato’s dialogues and in Xenophon’s Memorabilia. In Phaedrus 266b3–267d4, aspects of rhetorical craft are attributed to Gorgias, Prodicus, Hippias, Protagoras, Polus, and Thrasymachus, the first six members of Philostratus’ list, as well as three who do not appear on Philostratus’ list (Theodorus of Byzantium, Euenus, and Tisias).Footnote ⁸⁵ At the end of Phaedrus (278e8–10), Isocrates is ambiguously praised for his potential as a “philosopher.” Even the rhetorical craft of Pericles, the founder of the First Sophistic according to an alternative account Philostratus records but does not accept,Footnote ⁸⁶ is touted – ironically – as a founder of rhetoric in Phaedrus (269e1). If Phaedrus is the basis for Philostratus’ list, only Antiphon and Critias are added to this set by Philostratus or his source. A basis in Phaedrus would also explain the omission of several other rhetorically inclined antagonists of Socrates in Plato’s dialogues who might have been included by Philostratus but were not: Callicles, Euthydemus, and Dionysodorus. The importance of Phaedrus as background for Cicero’s rhetorical works, and generally in Imperial literature, makes it plausible that this was the key text for the whole discourse about philosophizing rhetoric.Footnote ⁸⁷ The discussion of oratory in Phaedrus would have offered a clear connection to practices in the Second Sophistic. The end of Phaedrus outlines a concept of philosophical rhetoric, although no such phrase is articulated, and Plato’s point is quite different from that of Philostratus, in that Plato aims to differentiate his rhetoric from the practice of any of the named experts (with the possible exception of Isocrates).Footnote ⁸⁸

A far more subtle contribution by Plato to Philostratus’ “philosophizing” ingredient in proper sophistic is implied in the passage that divides the preface of Lives of the Sophists from its list of the Sophists proper.Footnote ⁸⁹ This list of the eight men who, by Philostratus’ description, were philosophers who “seemed to be Sophists” is populated entirely by Academics who form a tradition (albeit without direct continuity) from Plato to the immediate ancestors of Philostratus’ own world. The first three are figures from the fourth century BCE who studied either with Plato or his Academy (Eudoxus of Cnidus, Leon of Byzantium, and Dias of Ephesus).Footnote ⁹⁰ Next follows the second-century-BCE founder of the New Academy, Carneades,Footnote ⁹¹ then figures from Cleopatra’s Alexandria of the first century BCE and Plutarch’s Athens of the first century CE (Philostratus the Egyptian and Theomnestus of Naucratis),Footnote ⁹² and finally, at disproportionate length, two figures who are attached securely to Philostratus’ network of the Second Sophistic through multiple teacher-to-pupil relationships, Dio of Prusa and Favorinus of Arles.Footnote ⁹³ Although Philostratus does not characterize Favorinus as an Academic, as he is known in other sources,Footnote ⁹⁴ his Platonic sympathies seem to appear in the nickname of his most fully portrayed pupil, Alexander the “Clay Plato” of Seleucia, who is said to have gained “the form of his speech” from Favorinus.Footnote ⁹⁵ As for Dio, his own outstanding style was inspired by the Phaedo of Plato and On the False Embassy of Demosthenes, the texts that he took with him into exile.Footnote ⁹⁶

Chronologically speaking, this succession of eight Academic philosophers occupies a span of four centuries that is all but elided in Philostratus’ narrative of the sophistic art proper. Between the Rhodian career of Aeschines in the late fourth century BCE and the rule of Nero in the first century CE, Philostratus only mentions the names of three figures who received but did not deserve the title of “Sophist.”Footnote ⁹⁷ But in the succession of “philosophers who seemed to be Sophists,” the same temporal span is more densely filled. This list, and especially its culmination in Dio and Favorinus, implies that Philostratus considered the Academic tradition to be a positive contribution to his own Second Sophistic.Footnote ⁹⁸ Herodes Atticus was educated in the dialogues of Plato by his teacher Tarsus and likely included them in this own curriculum.Footnote ⁹⁹ The fact that skeptics as famous as Carneades and Favorinus are on the list of Sophists is consistent with Philostratus’ underlying principle that Sophists differ from philosophers by virtue of not accounting rigorously for their knowledge.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Presumably, the fine speaking of both Carneades and Favorinus was delivered with conviction and received with appreciation despite the failure of either to establish firm knowledge about their topics. In this sense, philosophical skepticism might come to the same thing as the confident and arbitrary “knowledge” Philostratus admired in his early Sophists. Needless to say, the Academic tradition departs in significant ways from Plato, but the literary approach to Plato taken in the second century CE is consistent with an inclination to ignore his doctrines and message about the rigorous pursuit of knowledge.

Hence Plato is shown to have inspired the Second Sophistic in three ways: by teaching Aeschines; by offering a literary model to Dio; and by spawning the sequence of philosophers called Sophists who span the temporal gap of the Hellenistic period and connect the two treatments of the First Sophistic in Philostratus’ text. If some of the information Philostratus transmits is traditional or even historically correct, the textual digression about the Academics suggests how creatively Philostratus may have reconciled an allegiance to Plato with a celebration of his reconceived sophistry. Not only was Plato made like a Sophist, in the ways described most directly in the letter to Julia Domna, but the later Sophists who lived long after the writing career of Plato became heirs to Plato in an oblique way. Perhaps Philostratus not only defeated and subordinated Plato, but in so doing also paid him homage. Even the reversal of Plato’s ideas depends on Plato.

Conclusions

The image of the First Sophistic presented in Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists is a unique survival amid our extant record of ancient thinking about rhetoric, philosophy, and the overlaps between these. We have no other record of a consolidated classical era or tradition of “philosophizing rhetoric” such as Philostratus described. Some of its characteristics, to be sure, were suggested by Philostratus’ predecessors, notably Cicero and Lucian, but on a smaller scale. Philostratus’ conception of sophistic eras was highly influential. Lives of the Sophists was cited by title in almost every century from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries CE. These citations include Eunapius’ Lives of the Philosophers, which sets itself as its sequel; three entries in the Suda, where it is cited as a source for entries on the later sophists; a comment in the Byzantine Tzetzes’ Prologue to Exegesis of the Iliad, where a statement by Critias in salute to Homer is quoted from Philostratus’ prologue; a lexical work by the fourteenth-century monk Thomas Magister; and the fifteenth-century collector of proverbs Michael Apostolius.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In most cases, the references are merely decorative but show that the book was read and the title was recognized. In others, Philostratus’ book seems to have been the best source available for its information.

Philostratus constructed his concept of the Sophist from the practices of his own day, a period when oratory was a dazzling performance of skill and knowledge, not a mode of teaching or even persuasion about substantive points. His image of the First Sophistic must be understood as a creative construction, for the most part. A close reading of Lives of the Sophists reveals how central Plato is to the very concept of a First Sophistic, even though the particulars of Philostratus’ conception defy Plato and it is a substantially original one.