FAVORINUS, Φaβωpiνο<s, a celebrated sophist, flourished during the reign of Hadrian. A Gaul by birth, he was a native of Arles, but at an early age began his life-long travels through Greece, Italy, and the East. He may have acquired some knowledge of Latin and Greek even before he left Gaul, for Arles was within a short distance of the Phocian colony of Marseilles—that “Athens of the West" which Varro calls “trilinguis,” and which, according to Strabo, had taught the Gauls to become Philhellenes. His extensive knowledge, combined with great oratorical powers, raised him to eminence both in Athens and Rome. With Plutarch, who dedicated to him his treatise 7r∈pι του ιrporτοv ψvχpοv, with Herodes Atticus, to whom he bequeathed his library at Rome, with Demetrius of Alexandria, Cornelius Fronto, and Aulus Gellius, with Hadrian himself, he lived on intimate terms. His good humour appears to have been as inexhaustible as his wit, though in his later year3 he condescended to violent abuse of his rival Polemon, who divided with him the suffrages of Asia, the Smyrniote faction i pronouncing Polemon to be the greater rhetorician of the two, while that of Ephesus declared for Favorinus. It was Favorinus who, on being silenced by Hadrian in an argument in which the sophist might easily have refuted his adversary, made the subsequent explanation to his friend that it was foolish to criticize the logic of the master of thirty legions. It was one of his sarcastic boasts that though he had offended Hadrian he still continued to live. When the servile Athenians, feigning to share the emperor’s displeasure with the sophist, pulled down a statue which they had erected to the latter, Favorinus remarked that if Socrates also had only had a statue at Athens, he ...