FILOSTRATO (Φιλάσταστος). — Name of four sophists of the imperial age, natives of Lemnos.
I. Son of Verus, F. of LEMNOS is said by the Suda to have taught rhetoric (mid-2nd century A.D.) at Athens, under the Flavians. The brief dialogue Nero (Νέρων), included among the writings of Lucian, is attributed to him; it speaks of Nero’s extravagances and cruelties.
II. FLAVIUS F., called the ATHENIAN, born at Lemnos ca. 170, died under Philip the Arab (A.D. 244–49). A professor in Athens, he then came to Rome under the reign of Septimius Severus (before 211) and, at the advice of Julius Lomma, wrote the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, in which the figure of Apollonius, enveloped in Neo-Pythagorean mysticism, was taken up by Hierode of the 3rd century as a counterpart to Jesus. F. is also the author of the Lives of the Sophists (Βίω σοριστῶν), a collection of biographies, lacking in profound insight, of the principal sophists, such as Eudosius of Cnidus, Leo of Biannius, Gorgias, Isocrates, Aspasius, etc. The treatise On Gymnastics (Περὶ γυμναστικῆς), written around 219, is also attributed to him, though with some uncertainty; it sought to revive ancient athletics.
III. F. of LEMNOS, son of Nervianus, born ca. 191. He taught in Athens and is thought to have been the author of two works preferentially attributed to him rather than to F. the Athenian: the Heroicus (Ἡμαχάς), or Dialogue on the Heroes, an evocation of a supernatural world set within a rural framework (a vine-grower, not far from the tomb of Protesilaus, recounts to a Phoenician merchant the revelations that Protesilaus makes to him concerning the heroes of Troy); and the Imagines (Βίχανος), a collection in two books containing sixty-four descriptions of paintings, predominantly mythological in subject, executed with considerable stylistic skill.
IV. F., nephew of the preceding, lived in the second half of the 3rd century and was the author of a second series of Imagines (seventeen paintings in the manuscripts), in which artifice prevails over naturalness and stylistic ease.