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 PHILOSTRATUS, the name of several, three (or four), Greek sophists of the Roman imperial period—(1) Philostratus "the Athenian" (c. 170–245), (2) his nephew (?) Philostratus "of Lemnos" (born c. 190); (3) a grandson (?) of (2). Of these the most famous is Philostratus "the Athenian," author of the Life of Apollonius Tyana, which he dedicated to Julia Domna, wife of Alexander Severus and mother of Caracalla (see ). He wrote also (Lives of the Sophists), Gymnasticus and Epistolae (mainly of an erotic character). Very little is known of his career. Even his name is doubtful. The Lives of the Sophists gives the praenomen Flavius, which, however, is found elsewhere only in Tzetzes. Eunapius and Synesius call him a Lemnian; Photius a Tyrian; his letters refer to him as an Athenian. It is probable that he was born in Lemnos, studied and taught at Athens, and then settled in Rome (where he would naturally be called atheniensis) as a member of the learned circle with which Julia Domna surrounded herself. He was born probably in 172, and is said by Suïdas to have been living in the reign of Philip (244–249). The fact that the author of Apollonius is also the author of the Lives of the Sophists is confirmed by internal evidence. The latter is dedicated to a consul Antonius Gordianus, perhaps one of the two Gordians who were killed in 238. The work is divided into two parts: the first dealing with the ancient Sophists, e.g. Gorgias, the second with the later school, e.g. Herodes Atticus.

 PHILOXENUS, of Cythera (435–380 ), Greek dithyrambic poet. On the conquest of the island by the Athenians he was taken as a prisoner of war to Athens, where he came into the possession of the dithyrambic poet Melanippides, who educated him and set him free. Philoxenus afterwards resided in Sicily, at the court of Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, whose bad verses he declined to praise, and was in consequence sent to work in the quarries. After leaving Sicily he travelled in Greece, Italy and Asia, reciting his poems, and died at Ephesus. According to Suïdas, Philoxenus composed twenty-four dithyrambs and a lyric poem on the genealogy of the Aeacidae. In his hands the dithyramb seems to have been a sort of comic opera, and the music, composed by himself, of a debased character. His masterpiece was the Cyclops, a pastoral burlesque on the love of the Cyclops for the fair Galatea, written to avenge himself upon Dionysius, who was wholly or partially blind of one eye. It was parodied by Aristophanes in the Plutus (290). Another work of Philoxenus (sometimes attributed to Philoxenus of Leucas, a notorious parasite and glutton) is the Δεῖπνον (Dinner), of which considerable fragments have been preserved by Athenaeus. This is an elaborate bill of fare in verse, probably intended as a satire on the luxury of the Sicilian court. The great popularity of Philoxenus is attested by a complimentary resolution passed by the Athenian senate in 393. The comic poet Antiphanes spoke of him as a god among men; Alexander the Great had his poems sent to him in Asia; the Alexandrian grammarians received him into the canon; and down to the time of Polybius his works were regularly learned and annually acted by the Arcadian youth.

 PHILOXENUS (Syriac, Aksēnāyā), of Mabbōg, one of the best of Syriac prose writers, and a vehement champion of Monophysite doctrine in the end of the 5th and beginning of the 6th centuries. He was born, probably in the third quarter of the 5th century, at Tahal, a village in the district of Béth Garmai east of the Tigris. He was thus by birth a subject of Persia, but all his active life of which we have any record was passed in the territory of the Greek Empire. The statements that he had been a slave and was never baptized appear to be malicious inventions of his theological opponents. He was educated at Edessa, perhaps in the famous "school of the Persians," which was afterwards (in 489) expelled from Edessa on account of its connexion with the Nestorian heresy. The years which followed the Council of Chalcedon (451) were a stormy period in the Syrian Church. Philoxenus soon attracted notice by his strenuous advocacy of Monophysite doctrine, and on the expulsion of Calandio (the orthodox patriarch of Antioch) in 485 was ordained bishop of Mabbōg by his Monophysite successor Peter the Fuller (Barhebraeus, Chron. eccl. i. 183). It was probably during the earlier years of his episcopate that Philoxenus composed his thirteen homilies on the Christian life. Later he devoted himself to the revision of the Syriac version of the Bible, and with the help of his chorepiscopus Polycarp produced in 508 the so-called Philoxenian version, which was in some sense the received Bible of the Monophysites during the 6th century. Meantime he continued his ecclesiastical activity, working as a bitter opponent of