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These testimonia gather what ancient sources report about Callinicus of Petra, a Greek sophist of the third century AD who taught rhetoric at Athens. The Suda lists his works, including an address to the emperor Gallienus, a history of Alexandria in ten books dedicated to a "Cleopatra", and writings on rhetorical style and against the philosophical schools. Libanius recalls his fame and says he was killed near the Euphrates.
The passages give a glimpse of the rivalries of the Athenian schools of rhetoric in the third century, when Callinicus competed with the sophist Genethlius. Jerome's notice that Porphyry used his history links a little-known sophist to wider debates of late antiquity.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: FGrHist 281 T 1–4). Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ).