He received a refined education, first in Gallia Narbonensis and then in Rome, and at an early age began his lifelong travels through Greece, Italy and the East.
He lived on close terms with Plutarch, with Herodes Atticus, to whom he bequeathed his library in Rome, with Demetrius the Cynic, Cornelius Fronto, Aulus Gellius, and with the emperor Hadrian.
[2] After being silenced by Hadrian in an argument in which the sophist might easily have refuted his adversary, Favorinus subsequently explained that it was foolish to criticize the logic of the master of thirty legions.
Rehabilitated at the ascension of Antoninus Pius in 138, Favorinus returned to Rome, where he resumed his activities as an author and teacher of upper-class pupils.
[9] Of the very numerous other works of Favorinus, we possess only a few fragments, preserved by Aulus Gellius, Diogenes Laërtius, Philostratus, Galen, and in the Suda, Pantodape Historia (miscellaneous history) and Apomnemoneumata (memoirs, things remembered).
[11] One of the speeches of Favorinus contains the oldest example of psychomachia, suggesting that he may have invented the allegorical technique, which the Latin poet Prudentius later applied with so much success to the Christian soul resisting various kinds of temptation.