Sophists

This chapter examines two collective biographies of Imperial sophists: Philostratus’ Lives of Sophists (VS) and Eunapius’ Lives of Philosophers and Sophists (VPS). The VS records the careers of ten classical and forty-one Imperial figures ‘properly called sophists’, along with eight ‘philosophers with a reputation as sophists’. Eunapius improves on Philostratus, as he sees it, by combining Neoplatonist philosophers, sophists, and rhetorically skilled physicians in a single work. As these summaries suggest, sophists made an awkward subject for collective biography. The term is notoriously protean, and the proper relationship of sophistic to other forms of paideia was hotly disputed; disagreement between Philostratus and Eunapius surfaces already in their titles. Unlike rhetoric and philosophy, sophistic had never had a discrete history, and it is unlikely that Philostratus’ subjects thought they belonged to a coherent ‘Second Sophistic’ movement. For both authors, writing biographies of sophists is a charged intervention in the cultural politics of their day. The chapter considers how the cultural histories of sophistic—and, by implication, sophists—produced by each collection work to position sophistic within and against the political history of the Roman Empire; map its outer limits, especially vis-à-vis philosophy; and authorize the author himself.