SOURCE: Wright, Wilmer Cave. “Introduction.” In The Lives of the Sophists, by Philostratus and Eunapius, translated by Wilmer Cave Wright, pp. ix-xli. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952.

In the following essay, originally published in 1921, Wright offers an overview of Philostratus's Lives of the Sophists, discussing the date of composition, its style and content, as well as including summaries on several sophists who were overlooked by Philostratus in his treatise.

The island Lemnos was the ancestral home of the Philostrati, a family in which the profession of sophist was hereditary in the second and third Christian centuries. Of the works that make up the Philostratean corpus the greater part belong to the author of these Lives. But he almost certainly did not write the Nero, a dialogue attributed by Suidas the lexicographer to an earlier Philostratus; the first series of the Imagines and the Heroicus are generally assigned to...