In Lives of the Sophists Philostratus depicts the widespread influence of Sophistic in the second and third centuries CE. Lives of Philosophers and Sophists by Eunapius is our only source concerning Neo-Platonism in the latter part of the fourth century CE. Of the distinguished Lemnian family of Philostrati, Flavius Philostratus "the Athenian, " ca. 170-205 CE, was a Greek sophist who studied at Athens and later lived in Rome. He was author of the admirable Life of Apollonius of Tyana (...) and of Lives of the Sophists, a treasury of information about notable sophists. Philostratus's sketches of sophists in action yield a fascinating picture of the predominant influence of Sophistic in the educational, social, and political life of the Empire in the second and third centuries. The Greek sophist and historian Eunapius was born at Sardis in 347 CE, but went to Athens to study and lived much of his life there teaching rhetoric and possibly medicine. He was initiated into the mysteries and was hostile to Christians. His Lives of Philosophers and Sophists is our only source for knowledge of Neo-Platonism in the latter part of the fourth century. (shrink)

Our more distinct knowledge of the career of Eunapius of Sardis is confined to its first stage, when he resided in Athens and studied under Proaeresius, the Christian from Armenia. Common agreement holds that Eunapius reached Athens c. 362, when he was sixteen, and that he remained there for five years, returning to Lydia c. 367 when he was twenty. These conclusions derive from two passages in the V. Soph. in which Eunapius first described the unusual circumstances (...) attendant on his arrival in Athens and then alluded to his departure therefrom . But though the first passage is unproblematical enough, the second is less so; as will appear, the very context which includes within it the datum of the five-year-long residence in Athens carries implications which are inimical to it. Reexamination, therefore, may be profitable. (shrink)

Our more distinct knowledge of the career of Eunapius of Sardis is confined to its first stage, when he resided in Athens and studied under Proaeresius, the Christian from Armenia. Common agreement holds that Eunapius reached Athens c. 362, when he was sixteen, and that he remained there for five years, returning to Lydia c. 367 when he was twenty. These conclusions derive from two passages in the V. Soph. in which Eunapius first described the unusual circumstances (...) attendant on his arrival in Athens and then alluded to his departure therefrom. But though the first passage is unproblematical enough, the second is less so; as will appear, the very context which includes within it the datum of the five-year-long residence in Athens carries implications which are inimical to it. Reexamination, therefore, may be profitable. (shrink)

Eunapius, pagan historian of the fourth century, wrote a history of the contemporary Roman Empire. Scholars have understood Eunapius'animosity toward Christianity as coloring his judgment and supplying him with a purpose for writing. Though his history did reflect contemporary religious tension, it is primarily shaped by traditional approaches to historiography. Eunapius attempts to analogize and explain human behavior in terms of the natural laws which pervade the history. His message is founded on classical values independent of current (...) concerns; Eunapius inculpates an apparently innocent pagan to prove one point. He was not only participant in the sectarian struggle which divided the Empire; he was also part of a thousand-year-old culture that served to unify it. (shrink)

In a recent article, Dr. A. F. Norman has attributed to Eunapius the authorship of a fragment in Suidas , which clearly relates to the siege of Maiozamalcha. His arguments are cogent and must, I think, be accepted. Some slight additional support for the attribution is provided by the fact that it contains the adverb of which, as Vollebregt pointed out, Eunapius was particularly fond. Norman compares this fragment with the relevant passages in Ammianus Marcellinus and Zosimus and (...) points out that if the attribution is correct, ‘now, and for the first time, we have a reference to the same incident of this campaign from the narratives of Ammianus, Eunapius, and Zosimus’. (shrink)

Eunapius makes it clear in his Lives of the Philosophers, published some time after A.D. 396, that he had already published the major part of his historical work, and that he was contemplating extending its scope. He refers to the Gothic invasion of Greece in 395, and states that he has already recorded some of the disasters which befell about that time, and that he hopes to relate others.

This passage seems to have escaped identification so far. This is somewhat surprising, since it clearly refers to an incident at the sack of Maiozamalcha during Julian's Persian campaign which has been much discussed by editors ind critics of Ammianus and Zosimus. The reason may well be that in some ilder editions of Suidas the name appears as.

A. F. Norman has recently suggested that a hitherto overlooked passage in Suidas is a fragment from the history of Eunapius of Sardis. He is clearly correct in referring the passage to an incident at the siege of Maiozamalcha during the Persian campaign of the emperor Julian, but I am not so sure that he is right in ascribing it to Eunapius, or in the conclusions he draws from this ascription. I give in parallel columns the accounts of (...) Ammianus Marcellinus, Zosimus, and the passage from Suidas, together with a further version of the incident, unfortunately without names, from the pen of Libanius. (shrink)

A. F. Norman has recently suggested that a hitherto overlooked passage in Suidas is a fragment from the history of Eunapius of Sardis. He is clearly correct in referring the passage to an incident at the siege of Maiozamalcha during the Persian campaign of the emperor Julian, but I am not so sure that he is right in ascribing it to Eunapius, or in the conclusions he draws from this ascription. I give in parallel columns the accounts of (...) Ammianus Marcellinus, Zosimus, and the passage from Suidas, together with a further version of the incident, unfortunately without names, from the pen of Libanius. (shrink)

On the basis of evidence obtained by unravelling enigmas in Philostratus and Eunapius’ Lives of the Sophists and lifting the veil of mystery surrounding some of the crucial, sophistic-related passages from Isocrates and Dio Chrysostom’s writings, we were able to arrive to a conclusion that, contrary to all expectations, the Second Sophistic is closely connected not so much with rhetoric as with philosophy itself, no matter what the so-called sophists say of the phenomenon in their attempts to disguise the (...) essence of things. Paradoxically enough, it turned out that the enigma in Eunapius and, above all, Philostratus’ work played almost the same role as did myth in Herodotus’ historical work in so far as only the skillful use of the mentioned stylistic device might confer an aura of magic to the scarce material being at the disposal of the authors. Keywords: Second Sophistic, Philostratus, Eunapius, legend of Socrates, Xenophon’s Memorabilia, Isocrates, Platonism, enigma, symbolism. (shrink)

L'A. étudie le récit d'Eunapius concernant le règne d'Arcadius à partir de la mort de Théodose en 395 jusqu'en 404. Eunapius de Sarde est un sophiste, un philosophe et un historien grec païen qui a vécu de 347 à environ 414 ; il est un exemple de la rédaction helléniste et son travail peut être classé dans la fiction historique. Il s'oppose aux changements politiques, sociaux, économiques et religieux du 4e siècle ainsi qu'aux régimes de Constantin et Théodose. (...) Son héros est Julien l'Apostat. (shrink)

In the 4th century B.C., philosophers began to write not only philosophical texts, but also biographical ones. As biographers, they often presented members of their own schools as the epitome of their ideals, or tried to prove that the followers of others lived in ways inconsistent with their own doctrines, which the writers thereby hoped to show were ultimately unrealizable. Other biographies contained chapters engaging in doxographical or more properly philosophical discussions. Even when the philosopher-biographers' attention turned to the lives (...) of politicians and poets, they would find occasions to introduce their philosophical concerns. This whole genre of Greek biography, then, is an rich source of commentary on the philosophical doctrines current in Antiquity. The papers collected in this volume explore the many ways in which philosophy was incorporated into such texts, as well as how the genre was used as a means of philosophical instruction, discussion and polemics. They analyze texts from the 4th century B.C. to the 6th century A.D., some belonging to the best-known examples of the genre, and others being virtually unknown to most students of Antiquity. The volume contains studies of, among others, Dicaearchus, Timaeus, Philodemus, Plutarch, Lucian, Iamblichus, Philostratus, Eunapius and the anonymous Prolegomena to Plato's Philosophy. (shrink)

The story of Sosipatra of Pergamon (4th century C.E.) as told by her biographer, Eunapius of Sardis in his Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists, is a remarkable tale. It is the story of an elite young girl from the area of Ephesus, who was educated by traveling spirits (daemons), and who grew up to lead her own philosophy school on the west coast of ancient Asia Minor. She was also a prophet of sorts, channeling divine messages to her (...) students, family, and friends, capable of mentally viewing events that were happening in other locations, and foretelling the future. This volume is the first sustained, book length, attempt to tell the story of this mysterious woman. It presents a rich contextualization of the brief, sketchy, and highly fictionalized portrait provided by Eunapius. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The English Polydaedali:How Gabriel Harvey Read Late Tudor LondonNicholas PopperHarvey and GauricoIn 1590 Gabriel Harvey read his copy of Luca Gaurico's 1552 Tractatus Astrologicus, a collection of genitures and commentaries for cities and individuals.1 Harvey had spent the previous twenty-five years at Oxford and Cambridge, mastering Greek and Latin, earning renown as a rhetorician, and promoting English letters. He was a well-known partisan of the French Calvinist Peter Ramus, (...) whose works on curriculum reform had sparked vicious [End Page 351] controversies in the English universities. But Harvey read Gaurico far removed from the schools where he had acquired fame and notoriety as an orator and poet. He had recently relocated to London, where he daily faced a dense, active city unlike his native Saffron Walden and the university towns. Nevertheless he read as he always had, carefully recording his reactions in the margins of the printed text, filling blank spaces with his own commentaries on the subjects presented by Gaurico. The notes disclose an experience of reading that intervened in contemporary debates regarding technology, astrology and utility.2 They also place Harvey among a group of scholars in London in the 1590s, such as Francis Bacon and Hugh Plat, who were examining the benefits local artisans might offer the commonwealth and reconsidering the intellectual status of craft knowledge.Harvey read and annotated Gaurico on several occasions, but the particular strain of notes that I will follow, united by a common ink and hand, engages the learning and erudition of Gaurico's subjects.3 Concentrated almost [End Page 352] exclusively in Book Four, which discussed learned men, these annotations evaluate the poets, philosophers, philologists, and others whom Gaurico had canonized as especially learned.There are only spare annotations prior to Book Four. On the title page of Book Two, devoted to churchmen, Harvey observes the quality of the individuals Gaurico presented and details his own method of evaluation:The most excellent Exemplars of this century [are] in Gaurico, and Cardano: Giovio, and Guiccardini. There are as many of the wisest men as of the greatest actors. Still others live, whether inferior, equal, or superior. And it is of interest to every skillful artificer, to know those most outstanding in their class, and the most celebrated professors of all. Certainly it is very profitable to observe exquisitely the most perfect artificers either of the world or of neighboring nations, or at least of your own people, and to consider with most cunning reason what it is, where it comes from, and what is most excellent. But seriously, and solidly, and always to the point, seeing that singular things are efficacious and are useful to polytechnoscopy. It is judicious to avoid all trivial detail, and to consider only the most pregnant theorists and practitioners of operating.4The notion of a sophisticated form of active knowledge labeled "polytechnoscopy" is the most striking element of this passage. This term seems to have been Harvey's own invention, with no direct precedents; nor was it adopted or used by others after him.Harvey repeatedly referred to polytechnoscopy in his notes. A carefully designed triptych annotation on the title page of Book Four clarifies it as a category uniting practice and knowledge. To the left Harvey wrote, "it is my task to observe the most excellent examples of this age which are useful for polytechnoscopy." On the right, "a polytechnic, polymechanic, polydaedalic, and almost panepistemic book; and likewise sufficiently polychristian. For philologists should be skimmed through; while polytechnics should be examined closely; as I did not only in the Lives of Giovio, but also in those of [End Page 353] Laertius, Eunapius, Philostratus, and others."5 The related Greek descriptors "polymechanic" and "polydaedalic" shed further light on polytechnoscopy. This constellation of terms refers to a method of garnering information by deploying technical knowledge. While not a systematic discipline, its practices—active applicability, craft expertise, observation of experience—constitute a significant realm of learning.In the central panel of the triptych, Harvey notes:[I] compared [this] to Giovio's Elegies of Learned Men. Give me the best man outdoors, and his image at home. For even true life is... (shrink)

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the works in which Ausonius of Bordeaux and Libanius of Antioch, writing within a few years of each other, recall their long and varied careers is that there is so little resemblance between them; the impressions given by these experienced and successful teachers could hardly be more disparate. The reader of Ausonius finds in his Protrepticus a familiar enough picture of the terrors of the schoolroom; his Professores offer at first sight a series of (...) bland commemorations apparently deficient in the interesting information which might be expected from such an archive. Libanius' many volumes, on the other hand, compared where appropriate with the Vitae Sophistarum of Eunapius, present a situation which is well summarised by the following sentences from Walden's work The Universities of Ancient Greece : ‘There was, among the sophists of the fourth century…little, if any, of that spirit of brotherhood… that usually exists in a community of scholars at the present day. Instead there were jealousy, spite and often unrelenting hatred’. This striking divergence between Ausonius and his Eastern counterparts is unlikely to reflect a basic difference between East and West, or between Latin- and Greek-speaking milieux; the complaints of Augustine about his problems in Africa and Rome warn against such a simple answer. When one adds the evidence provided seven centuries later by the Frenchman Peter Abelard, whose plaintive Historia Calamitatum — an account of the disasters he suffered, not those which he caused — is remarkably similar to the prickly self-justification of Libanius in its account of bitter scheming and almost military manoeuvres in the educational world, one is forced to consider whether the evidence of Ausonius is not a serious anomaly, and to seek an explanation. (shrink)

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the works in which Ausonius of Bordeaux and Libanius of Antioch, writing within a few years of each other, recall their long and varied careers is that there is so little resemblance between them; the impressions given by these experienced and successful teachers could hardly be more disparate. The reader of Ausonius finds in his Protrepticus a familiar enough picture of the terrors of the schoolroom; his Professores offer at first sight a series of (...) bland commemorations apparently deficient in the interesting information which might be expected from such an archive. Libanius' many volumes, on the other hand, compared where appropriate with the Vitae Sophistarum of Eunapius, present a situation which is well summarised by the following sentences from Walden's work The Universities of Ancient Greece : ‘There was, among the sophists of the fourth century…little, if any, of that spirit of brotherhood… that usually exists in a community of scholars at the present day. Instead there were jealousy, spite and often unrelenting hatred’. This striking divergence between Ausonius and his Eastern counterparts is unlikely to reflect a basic difference between East and West, or between Latin- and Greek-speaking milieux; the complaints of Augustine about his problems in Africa and Rome warn against such a simple answer. When one adds the evidence provided seven centuries later by the Frenchman Peter Abelard, whose plaintive Historia Calamitatum — an account of the disasters he suffered, not those which he caused — is remarkably similar to the prickly self-justification of Libanius in its account of bitter scheming and almost military manoeuvres in the educational world, one is forced to consider whether the evidence of Ausonius is not a serious anomaly, and to seek an explanation. (shrink)

Theurgy, the religious magic practised by the later Neoplatonists, has been commonly regarded as the point at which Neoplatonism degenerates into magic, superstition and irrationalism.1 A superficial glance at the ancient lives of the Neoplatonists, and in particular at Eunapius’ Lives of the Sophists, reveals a group of people interested in animating statues, favoured with visions of gods and demons, and skilled in rain-making. But when we look more closely at the works of the Neoplatonists themselves, rather than the (...) stories biographers tell about them, we find a considerable diversity of attitudes towards theurgy and a number of attempts to fit theurgy into their philosophical system. (shrink)

It is well known that the emperor Julian plays a central role in the life and writings of the Antiochene sophist Libanius. As a commentator on the life and reign of the emperor Constantine, he is seldom taken into account, and if he is, he usually gets short shrift as being verbose and unreliable. This neglect is, I believe, hardly justified. Even if it were true that Libanius could not teach us anything about the historical Constantine, his testimony still deserves (...) attention as an example of the attitude of eastern pagans to Constantine. Moreover, although much of what Libanius has to say about Constantine was written down half a century after the events, Libanius himself, born in 314, was a contemporary of the latter part of Constantine's reign. Unlike Julian, born in 331/2,2 and Eunapius, born in 347/8,3 he was able to form a judgement on Constantine based on first-hand knowledge. (shrink)

It is well known that the emperor Julian plays a central role in the life and writings of the Antiochene sophist Libanius. As a commentator on the life and reign of the emperor Constantine, he is seldom taken into account, and if he is, he usually gets short shrift as being verbose and unreliable. This neglect is, I believe, hardly justified. Even if it were true that Libanius could not teach us anything about the historical Constantine, his testimony still deserves (...) attention as an example of the attitude of eastern pagans to Constantine. Moreover, although much of what Libanius has to say about Constantine was written down half a century after the events, Libanius himself, born in 314, was a contemporary of the latter part of Constantine's reign. Unlike Julian, born in 331/2,2and Eunapius, born in 347/8,3he was able to form a judgement on Constantine based on first-hand knowledge. (shrink)

Theurgy, the religious magic practised by the later Neoplatonists, has been commonly regarded as the point at which Neoplatonism degenerates into magic, superstition and irrationalism.1 A superficial glance at the ancient lives of the Neoplatonists, and in particular at Eunapius’ Lives of the Sophists, reveals a group of people interested in animating statues, favoured with visions of gods and demons, and skilled in rain-making. But when we look more closely at the works of the Neoplatonists themselves, rather than the (...) stories biographers tell about them, we find a considerable diversity of attitudes towards theurgy and a number of attempts to fit theurgy into their philosophical system. (shrink)

The retired Byzantine bureaucrat, Zosimus, wrote his New History in the early sixth century. This work is not only one of the primary sources for the history of the Later Roman Empire in the fourth and early fifth centuries a.d., but it is also the primary witness to the now fragmentary Histories of Eunapius of Sardis which it faithfully epitomizes. In the last part of the New History which depends upon Eunapius, two lacunae have been detected which are (...) of interest with respect to the original texts of both authors. (shrink)