Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Second Sophistic refers to a specific group of Greek writers who flourished from the reign of Nero until approximately 230 AD. This literary-historical term describes a period when oratorical elements dealing with the first sophists of Greece were reintroduced to the Roman Empire.
Philostratus catalogued and celebrated these figures in his work titled Lives of the Sophists. While Philostratus traces the beginnings of the movement back to the orator Aeschines in the 4th century BC, modern scholarship points to Nicetes for actual historical origins.
The province of Asia embraced the Second Sophistic more than any other region during this time. The three main centers of sophism were Ephesus, Smyrna and Athens where writers taught and performed.
Owing largely to the influence of Plato and Aristotle, philosophy came to be regarded as distinct from sophistry by the time of the Roman Empire. The latter was viewed as specious and rhetorical, serving as a practical discipline rather than abstract thought.
Philostratus describes Asianism as a form that aims at but never achieves the grand style in speech delivery with flowery and bombastic language. In contrast, Atticism is explained by Philostratus as a technique exemplified by the sophist Aelius Aristides who aims at simplicity of style while carefully avoiding any allusion or word that does not occur in a writer of the classical period.