Philostratus (review)

J. Elsner sounds two key notes in the opening chapter of this collection of articles on Philostratus. First, Philostratus should be approached holistically—as indeed any writer taken seriously should be. Elsner and his coeditor E. Bowie encourage this approach by assembling essays on Dialexis II, the Heroicus, the Gymnasticus, the Letters, and the first set of Philostratean Imagines, as well as on Lives of the Sophists and the Life of Apollonius —all ascribed to the same Philostratus here. There is also a final essay, by S. Bain, on the influence of Philostratus' Imagines on Caravaggio's Narcissus. The second note sounded by Elsner, and explicitly or implicitly sounded again in other contributions, is the literary importance, sophistication, and even "brilliance" (15, cf. 205-206) of Philostratus, especially in his range, mix, and innovation in the use of various genres. This judgment is in line with the steady climb in value of Philostratean stock over the last forty years, as Philostratus has evolved from biographer of imperial sophists and inventor of the Second Sophistic to writer in his own right.

There are three contributions each for the major works, Lives of the Sophists and the Apollonius. T. Schmitz shows how Philostratus bolsters his authority and credibility in Lives by speaking as an insider; for his insider status one should also now see K. Eshleman, CP 103 (2008) 395-413, an important piece that appeared too late for Schmitz to know. H. Sidebottom and J. L. Rife use Lives along with other textual and material evidence to examine how sophists self-presented, respectively, in life and in death—in life, in contrast to philosophers, in death, through burial practices (especially the locations of their tombs). As for the Apollonius, J.-J. Flinterman examines the Philostratean holy man as a latter-day Pythagoras, including in his chapter extended criticism of the views of D. S. du Toit on Apollonius' foreknowledge and ontological status; and G.-J. van Dijk examines Apollonius (and the Apollonius) as a latter-day Odysseus (and Odyssey), perhaps occasionally overplaying the intertextual links. V. Piatt offers a very different kind of study: she highlights Philostratus' emphasis on the visual—specifically images of the gods—in the course of Apollonius' travels. Viewing, it emerges, is connected with the acquisition of knowledge, but not without the aid of the textual, intellectual, and philosophical.

The two major works, though, do not crowd out the rest of the corpus. The Heroicus, a text that has made a remarkable debut in scholarship in the last fifteen years, is the subject of contributions by T. Whitmarsh and I. Rutherford. J. König maintains that the Gymnasticus represents gymnastics as a prestigious intellectual discipline; part of the Greek past, it must be transformed and recreated in the Second Sophistic just like any other serious inheritance from the past. It is good to have S. Goldhill's essay on the love letters, "the least well known" of Philostratus' works (287): he notes the oddness (for letters) of their lyric tone and of their largely solipsistic expression of personal feelings. An essay on the Imagines by S. Dubel observes that Philostratus emphasizes color over line or drawing. Another by Z. Newby notes the tension in that work between visual absorption by an image and verbal/textual understanding of it (cf. Platt's contribution). And if S. Swain correctly argues that the short Dialexis II is a prolalia on a theme (Nature) that is significant in the corpus, then one may once again warn against too quickly dismissing prolaliai as "inconsequential trifles" (R. Bracht Branham, TAPA 115 [1985] 243).

Philostratus, writes Whitmarsh, "is in danger of becoming fashionable" (205). Only time will tell whether the claims being made for his belletristic importance are going to hold. The publisher's assertion that he is "the most scintillating writer of Greek prose in the third century AD" does not really say much, given what survives of third-century Greek prose. (And if he...