ABSTRACT
So far we have looked at the sort of situations Philostratus found memorable in the course of a sophist’s professional career. But other kinds of material engage the biographer’s attention just as readily. Little less than half his notice on Isaeus is taken up with the following details:
Isaeus, the Assyrian sophist, had devoted his time as a young man to pleasures, for he was addicted to gluttony and drunkenness, wore fine clothes, had a string of love-affairs, and indulged in his drinking-bouts without any inhibition. But when he reached adult life he changed so completely that people thought he was a different person, for he banished his seemingly effervescent frivolity from outward expression and mental attitude alike. He no longer came in contact with the beat of the lyre or flute even on the stage, and he discarded his see-through gear and psychedelic outfit; he purged his dinner-table of luxuries, and gave up sexual indulgence as if he had lost his previous eye for it. At any rate when the rhetor Ardys asked him whether he fancied a particular female, Isaeus gave him a very puritanical answer: ‘I no longer have trouble with my eyes’; and when someone else asked him the best fowl or fish for the menu his answer was ‘I am no longer concerned with such matters, for I have realised that I was dining on the Gardens of Tantalus’; he meant, I take it, that all pleasures are insubstantial dreams. (Lives of the Sophists 513).
