Sophistic Epideixis and Its Forms in “Lives of the Sophists” of Flavius Philostratus

About the author:

Svetlana I. Mezheritskaya, PhD in Philology, Associate Professor of the Smolny College, Saint Petersburg State University, Universitetskaya naberezhnaya, 7-9, 199034 St. Petersburg, Russia.

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ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0511-312X

Abstract:

One of the most important stages in the history of the development of ancient Greekoratory is the era of the so-called Second Sophistic (late 1^st – early 3^rd centuries A.D.), from that almost nothing has survived, except for some fragments of works and scattered speeches of several orators. Therefore, of great importance for the study of the literature of the Second Sophistic are, on the one hand, the rhetorical treatises that have come down to our time, relating both to the era of the Second Sophistic, and to a later time, and on the other hand, the well-known historical and literary work of Flavius Philostratus (II A.D.) “The lives of the sophists”. In addition to all sorts of historical anecdotes, facts about the lives of the sophists, the titles of the works written by them and a brief assessment of their language and style, Philostratus left us truly unique testimonies of what was the rhetorical performance in antiquity and how the forms of sophistic epideixis (μελέτη and διάλεξις) were correlated with the subject of speeches, their genre structure and other elements of oratory.