Philostratus Minor

Philostratus the Younger (sometimes called Philostratus III) was a member of the distinguished family of sophists and writers who shared the name Philostratus in the second and third centuries AD. He was probably the grandson of Flavius Philostratus the Athenian and active in the mid-to-late third century.

His surviving work, the Imagines (Eikones), is a collection of descriptions of paintings, continuing the tradition established by his grandfather's work of the same name. The seventeen ekphrases describe mythological scenes with the rhetorical vividness expected of the genre. Whether the paintings were real or imaginary is debatable.

The work is slight but represents the continuation of an important literary tradition linking art and rhetoric in the world of the Second Sophistic.