Philostratus
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Philostratus or Lucius Flavius Philostratus, called "the Athenian", was a Greek sophist of the Roman imperial period. His father was a minor sophist of the same name. He flourished during the reign of Septimius Severus (193–211) and died during that of Philip the Arab (244–249), probably in Tyre.
Bust of Julia Domna, Philostratus' patron in the early third century AD.
Sophist
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A sophist was a teacher in ancient Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Sophists specialized in one or more subject areas, such as philosophy, rhetoric, music, athletics and mathematics. They taught arete, "virtue" or "excellence", predominantly to young statesmen and nobility.
Socrates was lampooned by Aristophanes in The Clouds as a pedantic wordsmith who lived in a basket. Later philosophers such as Plato and Xenophon sought to distinguish Socrates' ethical teachings from this comic portrayal of a sophist.
Isocrates, one of the later sophists, was critical of the education practices of his predecessors