Letters, Lectures by Philostratus the Athenian

Letters, Lectures brings together two works in Attic Greek by Philostratus the Athenian, a sophist of the early third century CE.

The Letters are short literary letters, most of them love letters to a boy or a woman. They play on a few set motifs, roses sent as gifts and roses as the only armour of the beautiful, and on myth, as when a woman is asked to pledge the writer with her eyes alone, as Zeus did with his cupbearer. The last is addressed to the empress Julia Domna: it defends Gorgias and the sophists, cites Aeschines the Socratic on Thargelia, and asks her to persuade Plutarch not to resent them.

The Lectures are two short pieces. The first is on the style proper to a letter: it names as models Apollonius of Tyana and Dio among philosophers, Brutus among generals and the emperor Marcus among rulers, faults Herodes of Athens for over-Atticising, and asks for language more Attic than everyday speech and plainer than Atticism. The second argues that nomos and physis are kin: physis shapes rocks and clouds into figures, while nomos gives gold its value and educates, arms and clothes human beings. Both works survive in medieval manuscripts.