Philostratus

by Edited by Ewen Bowie , JaÅ› Elsner

• ISBN13: 9780521827201
• ISBN10: 0521827205
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-04-27
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This is the first volume of collected papers to be devoted to the work of Philostratus, the great essayist, biographer and historian of Greek culture in the Roman world, and the most scintillating writer of Greek prose in the third century AD. The papers cover his remarkable range, from hagiographic fiction to historical dialogue, from pictorial description to love letters, and from prescriptions for gymnastics to the lives of the Sophists. The quality of his writing and the concerns within his purview - religion, aesthetics, athletics and education - make Philostratus's writings among the most important documents for understanding Greek culture in the Roman world, and guide us in exploring the maturity of Hellenic cultural identity in the context of the rise of Christianity. Few studies have been devoted to this neglected figure, and this collection will therefore be of great value to scholars and students of imperial Greek literature and art.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. vii
Notes on the contributors	p. ix
Preface	p. xii
Introductory
A Protean corpus	p. 3
Philostratus: the life of a sophist	p. 19
Culture and nature in Philostratus	p. 33
Lives of the Sophists
Narrator and audience in Philostratus' Lives of the sophists	p. 49
Philostratus and the symbolic roles of the sophist and philosopher	p. 69
The deaths of the sophists: Philostratean biography and elite funerary practices	p. 100
On Apollonius
Virtual visions: Phantasia and the perception of the divine in The Life of Apollonius of Tyana	p. 131
'The ancestor of my wisdom': Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism in Life of Apollonius	p. 155
The Odyssey of Apollonius: an intertextual paradigm	p. 176
Heroicus
Performing heroics: language, landscape and identity in Philostratus' Heroicus	p. 205
Black sails to Achilles: the Thessalian pilgrimage in Philostratus' Heroicus	p. 230
Gymnasticus
Training athletes and interpreting the past in Philostratus' Gymnasticus	p. 251
Letters
Constructing identity in Philostratus' Love Letters	p. 287
Imagines
Colour in Philostratus' Imagines	p. 309
Absorption and erudition in Philostratus' Imagines	p. 322
Philostratus and the Narcissus of Caravaggio	p. 343
Appendix: Dialexis 2	p. 356
Bibliography	p. 358
Index	p. 389
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