what is Philostratus?

1 ANSWERS

1. Amit bang
   

   Philostratus, the name borne by four writers, members of a family belonging, according to Suidas, to Lemnos, who lived in the second and third centuries AD. The most important works (in Greek) which have come down under this name are:  (i) (by Flavius Philostratus) Lives of the Sophists, that is, of the sophists and rhetoricians from Protagoras (in the fifth century BC) to the author's own times; (ii) (written for Julia Domna) a life of Apollonius of Tyana, the wandering Pythagorean mystic and miracle worker of the first century AD (which furnished material for anti-Christians who wanted a pagan narrative to set against the Gospel life of Jesus); (iii) Eikones (‘images’), two sets of descriptions in prose of pictures which the author purports to have seen (the first set far superior to the second); (iv) Heroicus, a dialogue in which the ghosts of heroes of the Trojan War appear; and (v) a collection of Letters (sophistical exercises for the most part), chiefly noteworthy as containing in Epistle 33 the source of Ben Jonson's ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes’.

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