Short answers, pulled from the story.
Scholars place the flourishing period of Callistratus during the 3rd century CE or possibly the 4th century CE. No birth date exists for him, and no death record survives to mark the end of his life.
The core of Callistratus's surviving legacy consists of fourteen descriptions of artworks crafted from stone or brass by distinguished artists of antiquity. Each description functions as a rhetorical exercise designed to evoke visual imagery through words.
Callistratus deliberately imitated the literary form established by Philostratus in his Eikones. Modern editors often publish their works together due to this structural similarity and shared tradition of ekphrasis within Greek sophistry.
F. Jacobs published critical notes on his statues in 1797 while C. Schenkl and E. Reisch produced a definitive Teubner edition in 1902. A. Fairbanks released an English translation with Philostratus for the Loeb Classical Library in 1931 and Balbina Bäbler and Heinz-Günther Nesselrath issued a German edition with archaeological commentary in 2006.
Contemporary academic research examines both the rhetorical and archaeological value of Callistratus's descriptions to reconstruct images that no longer exist physically. Scholars use his words as evidence for lost artworks and to gain rare glimpses into ancient artistic techniques and materials.