Philo'stratus or Philostratus the Aegyptian
4. The AEGYPTIAN, was in Africa with Juba when Cato and Scipio took the command against Julius Caesar, B. C. 47, on which occasion a rebuke given to Juba for the honours paid to Philostratus, led to the reconciliation of the two noble Romans, who had previously been at variance. (
Plut. Cat. Mi. 57.)
He afterwards attached himself to the party of Antony and Cleopatra, and his morals were not improved by the connection. (Epigram. apud Philostrat.
V. S. 1.5.) Hence the indignation of Augustus, when he entered Alexandria B. C. 30, at finding a professed follower of the Academic school so degraded.
He granted him his life, however, that no odium might attach to the philosopher Areius, whom Philostratus, with long white beard and funereal garb, followed, importuning for mercy. (
Plut. Ant. 80.) His familiarity with princes, and his wealth, the result of a life of labour, are contrasted with the condition to which, alive and dead, he was subjected by the Roman soldiers, in an epigram of Crinagoras. (
Anthol. Graec. ed. Jacobs, vol. ii. p. 139, vol. viii. p. 415.) Philostratus ranks him among the sophistical philosophers, and speaks of him as devoting himself to the panegyrical and varied styles of rhetoric. (Phil.
V. S. l.c.) Vossius, who has read the lives of the Philostrati very carelessly, places this contemporary of Augustus as contemporary with Philostratus the Lemnian, misled by the word
οἶδα, which he translates
vidi, instead of
novi. Vidi is the translation of Morellius.
This strange error has escaped the notice of Westermann. (
De Hist. Graec. p. 280.)
