Thanks so much for all this extra information, which I certainly could not have found myself, being no classicist. The ambiguities in the vocabulary are fascinating. From what you say, I'm sure you're right that there is no confusion on Philostratus's part.
Of course, this shunts the puzzle forward some 1,700 years. At first I thought - well, Loeb is an American series, and an American of that date is more likely to have seen African Americans than Indians, so may have defaulted to that physical type; but I see that the translator of this particular edition was in fact a British orientalist, Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare. The British in 1912 were if anything an even less stay-at-home people than the Greeks, and certainly knew the difference between inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Why he made up his mind that the passage was describing a black African when the text plainly tells him otherwise is still rather mysterious!
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Date: 2014-12-18 07:33 am (UTC)Of course, this shunts the puzzle forward some 1,700 years. At first I thought - well, Loeb is an American series, and an American of that date is more likely to have seen African Americans than Indians, so may have defaulted to that physical type; but I see that the translator of this particular edition was in fact a British orientalist, Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare. The British in 1912 were if anything an even less stay-at-home people than the Greeks, and certainly knew the difference between inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Why he made up his mind that the passage was describing a black African when the text plainly tells him otherwise is still rather mysterious!