A full account of this work, which has principally rendered Philostratus distinguished, is given under APOLLONIUS. [Vol. I. p. 242, &c.] It is divided into eight books, and bears the title In composing it, he seems at first to have followed Herodotus as his model, whom however he forsakes as he gets into those parts where he finds an opportunity to be more rhetorical, as in the appearance of Philostratus before Domitian (8.7). Kayser (ibid. p. viii.) thinks that in the latter part he had Thucydides in his eye, but Xenophon seems rather to have been his model.

It would be endless to enumerate all the works that have been written in whole or in part regarding this life of Apollonius. An examination or notice of them will be found in the prefaces of Olearius and of Kayser.

This work bears the following title in its dedication in the best MSS. :-- τῷ λαμπροτάτῳ ὑπάτᾳ Ἀντωνίῳ Γορδιανῷ Φλάυϊος Φιλόστρατος. Of Antonius Gordianus mention has been already made. The author states the object of his hook to be twofold--to write the history of philosophers who had the character of being sophists, and of those who were par ercellence (κυρίως) sophists. This distinction, which is well marked by Synesius (in Vita Dionis), was first pointed out in more recent times by the acute Perizonius (in his preface to Aelian, V. H. ed. Gronov. 1731, p. 48, &c.), and is essential to elucidate the chronology of the Lives. In his Philostratus makes an instructive distinction between the philosophers and the sophists. Philosophy doubts and investigates. The sophist's art takes its grounds for granted, and embellishes without investigation. The former he compares to the knowledge of futurity, carefully formed front the observation of the stars, the latter to the divine afflatus of the oracular tripos. Again, in the history of this art, he has two periods, characterized by their subjects. The sophists of the first period discussed such subjects as courage, justice, divine and human, and cosmogony; the second presented lively representations of the rich and the poor, and in general individualized more the subjects presented by history. In this respect the sophists seem to have borne to philosophers much the same relation that, in modern times, historical fiction does to history. He also states that the main distinction of a sophist was the power which he had over language, and discusses, in connection with this, the introduction of extemporaneous eloquence. Suidas states that this work is composed of four books, but this must be a mistake, as we have only two. Nor have two books been lost, for not only does Philostratus bring down the history to his own times, but in the dedication he expressly mentions two books, as comprising the whole work. Of course, we have not, in a biography expressly authentic, the embellishments which we find in the life of Apollonius. The best description that can be given of them is that of Eunapius (Vit. Soph. p. 5), that Philostratus has written the lives of the most distinguished sophists, without minuteness and gracefully (ἐξ ἐπιδρομῆς μετὰ χάριτος). Olearius, following the suggestion of Perizonius, and attending to the distinction made by Philostratus between the oldest and the more recent schools of rhetoric, with great propriety divides the Lives into three parts, of which the first is the shortest, and contains mere notices, in most cases, of the sophistic philosophers, beginning with Eudoxus of Cnidus, B. C. 366, and ending with Dion Chrysostom and Favorinus, a contemporary of Herodes Atticus, on whom he dwells a little more fully--eight lives in all. He then begins with the sophists proper of the old school, commencing with Gorgias (born about B. C. 480), and ending with Isocrates (born B. C. 438), who (eight in all) may be said to belong to the school of Gorgias. He begins the newer school of sophists with Aeschines (who was born B. C. 389), which seems mainly introductory, and to prove his position that the modern school was not entirely new, but had its origin so far back as the time of Aeschines. He passes immediately thereafter to the time of Nicetas, about A. D. 97, and the first book ends with Secundus, who was one of the instructors of Herodes Atticus, bringing the sophists in ten lives down to the same period as the sophistic philosophers. The second book begins with Herodes Atticus, about A. D. 143, and continues with the lives of his contemporaries and of their disciples, till the reign of Philip, about A. D. 247, as has been already stated. It consists of thirty-three lives, and ends with Aspasius. The principal value of this work is the opinion which it enables us to form of the merits of the parties treated of, as the taste of Philostratus, making allowance for his prepossessions as a rhetorician, is pure, and is confirmed by the remains we have of some of the productions to which he refers, as in the case of Aeschines. The work is tinctured with rhetorical amplification, from which, probably, he could not wholly free his style. His opportunities of knowledge regarding the personages of his second book, stamp it strongly with genuineness. Beginning with Herodes Atticus, he had conversed with parties that knew him (2.1.5), and so of Aristocles (2.3), Philager (2.8.2), and Adrianus (2.23.2). He was personally acquainted with Damianus (2.9.3), and had received instruction from, or was intimate with Proclus (2.21.1 ) and Antipater (2.24.2); he had heard Hippodromus (2.27.3) and Heliodorus (2.32), and, in all probability, Aspasius. Hence, another valuable characteristic of these Lives is the incidental glimpses they give us of the mode of training rhetoricians ; and of this Kayser has made a judicious use in his preface to the works of Philostratus.

or (Ἡρωικὰ, Olear.; Ἡρωικὸς, Kayser). The plan which Philostratus has followed in this work is to introduce a Phoenician merchant conversing with a Thracian vintager, near the town of Eleus (Prooem. iii.). The latter invites the merchant to his vineyard, and when seated, they discourse concerning the heroes engaged in the Trojan war. The vintager is under the especial patronage of the hero Protesilaus, with whom he is intimately acquainted, and who spends his time partly with him (Eleus was sacred to Protesilaus), and partly with the shades below, or at Phthia, or at the Troad. He then proceeds to discuss many points connected with the Trojan war, on the authority of Protesilaus, to the great astonishment and delight of his guest, dwelling longest on the great merits of Palamedes, and the wrong done to him by Homer, in concealing his fame and exalting that of his enemy Ulysses. He introduces numerous incidents from the cyclic poets, from the tragedians, and of his own invention. It is on the whole not a pleasing work; and the source of the unpleasant feeling is rightly traced by Göthe as quoted by Kayser (p. iv. of the Prooemium to the Ἡρωικὸς in his edition of the whole works of Philostratus). Various conjectures have been formed as to the object which Philostratus had in view in writing this treatise. Olearius thinks that his object was to expose the faults of Homer. Kayser thinks it was written partly to please Caracalla, who deemed himself another Achilles,--and hence he conjectures that it was composed between A. D. 211-217,--and partly to furnish an antidote against the false morality of Homer. In the last notion he may be correct enough; but there is nothing to support the first, as there is not a sentence that can be strained to have any allusion to Caracalla, and Palamedes is the great object of the vintager's laudations. If one might hazard a conjecture as to the main object that Philostratus had in view, if he actually intended anything more than a mere rhetorical description of mythological incidents, collected from various sources, it is that he wrote this work to illustrate a collection of pictures having mythological subjects,--perhaps in the palace of Julia Domna. It is certain that a great part of it is written much as the letterpress description of engravings is often composed in our own day. The vineyard in the introduction might be suggested by a landscape. Then, throughout he dwells on the personal appearance of the heroes. Hence Grote (History of Greece, vol. i. p. 611) draws the inference that the real presence of the hero was identified with his statue. The truth seems to be that the statue or picture furnished the portrait of the hero. Every page of the Heroica furnishes instances of this : one will suffice. In the fifth year of the war Antilochus requests Achilles to intercede for him with Nestor, that he may he allowed to take a share in the enterprize. Achilles obtains permission for him, and Nestor, proud of his son, introduces him to Agamemnon. Then occurs the following picture :--"Antilochus stood close beside and lower than his father (ὑπὸ τῷ πατρὶ), blushing and looking down on the ground, and gazed on by the Greeks, with no less admiration than that which Achilles himself inspired. The godlike appearance of the overawed, that of the other was pleasing and gentle" (3.2).

This is certainly the author's most pleasing work, exhibiting great richness of fancy, power and variety of description, and a rich exuberance of style. The subject was suited to him, and he to the subject. He has escaped from the trammels of an artificial criticism by which he is fettered in the Alike in grouping and in depicting single objects, he manifests a complete mastery of what a picture ought to be. The frame-work of the dissertation, which consists of two books (Suidas erroneously says four), is briefly as follows. After an introduction in which he compares poetry to painting and statnary, he represents himself as having gone to Naples, with no intention of practising his art as a rhetorician. He lived in a villa out of the city, where there was an excellent collection of paintings. His host had a son who used to watch him while examining the pictures. At once to gratify him, and to free himself from the importunities of some youths that had besought him to exercise his art, he employed himself in explaining the subjects of the paintings; and this explanation forms the work. The paintings present various subjects in which he can display his acquaintance both with poets and historians,--they are mythological, historical, biographical, landscapes with figures, and allegorical. They consist of thirty-one in the first, and thirty-three in the second book. Though Sillig (s. v. Euphranor I.) gives an unfavourable view of Philostratus as a judge of paintings, the opinion of critics seems to be all but unanimous in his favour. He is fond of referring to works of art, and his writings abound with proofs that he had studied the subject carefully. It is less certain whether his description refers to an actual collection, or whether he had not invented the subjects. The question is a difficult one to decide. On the one hand is the great distinctness and vividness of the details; on the other he mentions no artist's name--he alludes to no picture which is certainly known or described by any other, and in his description of Pantheia (2.9) he shows how any man may follow out the mere statement of an historical fact (in this case made by Xenophon), so as to draw a picture of each incident. We may therefore expect that his object was to rival the painter's art by the rhetorician's, as he rivals the poet's by the painter's. On the other hand, it has been properly remarked by Kayser that no objection to the reality of the pictures can be drawn from the fact that a few of the descriptions contain two or more sinmltaneous actious, for that was not unknown to the ancient artists. (Praefat. p. iv.)

These were probably composed before he settled in Rome, as the best MSS. bear the title They are seventy-three in number, and are chiefly specimens of amatory letters; hence Suidas calls them ἐρωτικάς ; or perhaps he had not the fall collection. Kayser thinks that he published in his life-time two editions, the one in his youth, of which the letters are full of fire, and the other more contemplative, and issued in his old age. The cast of them, however, seems to be no otherwise varied than to suit his aim of showing the versatilityof his powers. They present, in general, the same subjects, and are treated in the same ways as amatory epigrams, with a few that are satirical, and one to Julia Domna in defence of the sophists. To these is added a letter on letterwriting, which Olearius attributes to Philostratus Lemnius, and Kayser to our Philostratus, with a fragment on the union of Nature and Art, which is probably a portion of a rhetorical exercise.

This account is palpably inconsistent with itself, as it makes a man who lived in the time of Nero, A. D. 54-168, the father of another who was alive under Philip, A. D. 244-249. Besides, the connection between the second and the third Philostratus is unintelligible, and, if we are to take every thing as it stands, is contradicted by a passage in the Εἰκόνες of the author last-mentioned, where he speaks of the second as Μητροπάτωρ, which Fabricius, following an alteration of Meursius on the text of Suidas, translates avunculus. Those difficulties are rendered insuperable by the fact that the second Philostratus, in his Lives of the Sophists though he speaks of an Egyptian and a Lemnian Philostratus, does not give the remotest hint that his father had ever practised his own art. He was sufficiently impressed with the honour of the profession, which he often magnifies; and he shows his sense of this in his dedication of the Lives of the Sophists, in his allusion to the descent of Antoniiis Gordianus the consul from Herodes Atticus, whom he there expressly names "the sophist." It is inconceivable, then, that he should never have alluded to the distinctions gained, and the works written by his own father. With regard to the third Philostratus, he repeatedly names a Lemnian of that name, whose intimate friend he was. But he classes him along with other intimate friends, of whom, at the close of the work, he declines to say anything, on the ground of that very intimacy, -- but not a word of relationship. No shifting of the names, such as that adopted by Meursius, and followed by Vossius and others, of referring the lives of the sophists to the third and not the second Philostratus, removes these difficulties, which are increased by the singular coincidence of three generations born in Lemnos, teaching in Athens, then in Rome, then returning to Lemnos, to perpetuate Lemnian sophists. If the Εἰκόνες attributed to the third Philostratus be actually his, then μητροπάτωρ stares us in the face, and, to make the tale intelligible, we must alter the text of Suidas as Meursius does, and understand the word in an unusual sense, or disbelieve Suidas in an important portion of his evidence, as is done by Kayser. But the truth seems to be that the mention of two other Philostrati, in the Lives of the Sophists, and the very probable occurrence of imitations of the writings of the biographer, whose works, from the unbroken chain of quotations in succeeding authors, we know to have been exceedingly popular, led Suidas into an error which has been the source of so much perplexity. We can easily believe that, finding many works ascribed to men of that name, with fictitious genealogies, purposely contrived, he carelessly assumed the truth of the title, and inserted the name in his list without inquiry.

Confining ourselves to the evidence of the biographer, we find another distinguished sophist of his time, who was his intimate friend, and may have been a relation, though he takes no notice of it. He uniformly calls him the Lemnian. The first notice that we have of him is that when twenty-two years old he received instructions at the Olympic games, held A. D. 213 (see Clinton, Fasti Rom. p. 225), from the aged and magnanimous Hippodromus (V. S. 2.27.3). He received exemption from public duties at the hands of Caracalla, whom Philostratus calls Antoninus, the son of Julia, τῆς φιλοσόφου,--an exemption generally attached to the rhetorical chair of Athens, but, on this occasion, withheld from Philiscus, the professor, and bestowed on Philostratus. The Lenmian was then twenty-four years old, A. D. 215 (2.30). He once found Aelian reading with great vehemence a declamation against an unmanly emperor (Γύννικος), recently deceased. Philostratus rebuked him, saying, "I could have, admired you if you had attacked him in his lifetime; for only a man can assail a living tyrant, any one can when dead" (2.32.2). Vossius and others had fallen into the error of supposing that this tyrant was Domitian, but Perizonius pointed out the impossibility of a man who was twenty-four years old in the reign of Caracalla, being placed near the time of an emperor dead upwards of 110 years before. He conjectures (and his idea has since then been universally acquiesced in) that it was Elagabalus, slain A. D. 22, whom Aelian had attacked (V. H. praefat. p. 50). At the close of his work, Philostratus the biographer praises his powers in forensic, popular, and extemporaneous eloquence, in rhetorical exercises, and for his writings, and naming him with Nicagoras and Apsines, he says, οὐκ ἐμὲ δεῖ γράφειν, καὶ γὰρ ἂν καὶ ἀπιστηθείην ὡς χαρισάμενος, ἐπειδὴ φιλία μοι πρὸς αὐτοὺς ἦν. It has been held that this last cause infers the death of the Lemnian, previously to the finishing of these memoirs. (Fabric. Bibl. Graec. vol. v. p. 555.) But this by no means follows. Among the parties mentioned is Nicagoras, of whom he expressly says, that he is (ἐστί) herald in the Eleusinian rites (Kayser has ἐστέφθη, not on the best authority). Then χαρισάαενος, in its plain meaning, would lead us to suppose that Philostratus was afraid of appearing to flatter, not the dead, but the living. And as to ἦν, that is accounted for by the indirect narration, and as preceded by ἂν ἀπιστηθείην. From this then we can infer noting as to the time of his death. But Suidas says he died and was buried in Lemnos.

It is hardly possible that he can have been a grandson of the biographer, as Kayser in his preface supposes, as the latter was writing vigorously in th>e reign of Philip (A. D. 244-249), when, according to the computation already given, the Lemnian, born in 191, would have been between 53 and 58 years old. We have already seen that the biographer notices no relationship. Hence the Prooemium to the Εἰκόνες, printed along with the Εἰκόνες of the elder writer, is highly suspicious. He mentions that the work of the same nature, written bv his namesake and grandfather τοὐμῷ ὁμωνύμῳ καὶ μητροπάτορι, led him to undertake his. If so we must add another to the Philostrati, and suppose that the Lemnian married the biographer's daughter, and that this writer was the issue of the marriage. But the truth is, that although this work is not destitute of merit, it has very much the appearance of a clever imitation by a later sophist, who found Philostratus a convenient name. This is confirmed by the fact, that while the Εἰκόνες of the elder writer furnish favourable materials for imitation, quotation, and reference to subsequent poets, collectors, grammarians, and critics, not a single quotation from this by any subsequent writer can be traced, and only three MSS. have yet been discovered.

The writer, whoever he was, after rather a clumsy Prooemium, discusses seventeen pictures, which are almost all mythological, and in describing them he appeals to the poets more than his predecessor does.