Apollonius of Tyana

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Apollonius of Tyana was a wandering teacher of the first century, born around the year 15 in the Cappadocian town that gives him his name and remembered as a Pythagorean holy man — an ascetic, a reformer of cult and sacrifice, and, in the stories told of him, a worker of cures and wonders. He died near the end of the century, an old man, his end as uncertain as the rest. Almost everything that can be said about him with any confidence comes from a single late source, and the gap between the man and the figure is the first thing any account of him has to admit. The town survives, the reputation survives, and between them lies a biography that no one can fully trust and no one can do without.

The source problem

The source is the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, eight books written in the early third century by the Greek sophist Flavius Philostratus at the request of the empress Julia Domna, wife of Septimius Severus and mother of Caracalla. The book was composed roughly a hundred and twenty years after Apollonius is supposed to have died — and probably some years after Julia Domna’s own death in 217, so that the commission outlived its patron. Philostratus claims to draw on the memoirs of a companion named Damis, a man of Nineveh who is said to have walked beside the sage for decades and set down what he saw on tablets that descended, by a convenient chain of custody, to the empress and so to her chosen author.

Damis is the hinge of the whole problem. If his notebooks were real, the Life rests on eyewitness testimony; if they were invented, the most circumstantial parts of the book are fiction dressed as report. The weight of modern scholarship treats Damis as a literary device — the naive Boswell whose wide-eyed wonder lets Philostratus narrate marvels at one remove and disclaim responsibility for them. The portrait is too neat, the travels too patterned, the companion too useful. A minority has always resisted this verdict; the early translator F. C. Conybeare thought the skepticism overdone, and others have argued that a genuine book, forged by some earlier hand, may have reached Philostratus and been used in good faith. The dispute is not settled by any external witness, because there is almost none: independent testimony to Apollonius before Philostratus is thin, and much of what comes after is already under Philostratus’s shadow. What survives outside him — scattered notices, a clutch of letters of doubtful authenticity, a lost biography or two named but not preserved — cannot anchor the figure on its own.

Much of the book reads as a deliberate literary composition, a travelogue carrying its hero from the Mediterranean to India and back, staged for an age that prized sophistic display. That a Pythagorean teacher named Apollonius existed, taught a disciplined vegetarian asceticism, and acquired a reputation for holiness is generally accepted. The biography’s miracles, its debates with kings, its Indian sages on their hill of wisdom — these are another matter, and historians read them as the work of a writer shaping a type, the divine man or theios anēr, rather than recording events. The honest reconstruction proceeds by subtraction, peeling the marvels from a core that grows quieter and smaller as it grows more credible.

The Pythagorean frame

That core is the steady part of the portrait, and it belongs squarely to Neopythagoreanism, the revival that had been recovering the teaching of Pythagoras and fusing it with Platonic metaphysics since the first century before the common era. Apollonius is shown as the type’s living emblem: keeping silence for five years as a discipline of the tongue and the will, refusing animal sacrifice and the shedding of blood, eating no flesh, wearing linen rather than wool because wool came from a living creature, going barefoot, letting his hair grow. He honors the divine not by slaughter at the altar but by purity of mind — the position the text presents as his own reform of inherited religion, a cleansing of the cults rather than their rejection.

This is the asceticism of a school, not of a hermit. Apollonius does not flee the temples; he walks into them to correct them, advising priests on rite and offering, pressing everywhere the conviction that the gods want the soul clean rather than the altar wet. The doctrine behind the discipline is recognizably Pythagorean: the soul is immortal and bound to the body’s appetites, transmigration links all ensouled life so that the eating of flesh is a kind of violence against kin, and the mind is trained upward through restraint as much as through study. Set beside the Meditations of his near-contemporary Marcus Aurelius, the resemblance and the distance both register: both are philosophy taken as a way of living rather than a body of argument, but where the emperor turns his discipline inward and tells no marvels, the sage of Tyana is surrounded by them. Around the Pythagorean core, in the Life, the wonders gather thickly.

The wonders

Philostratus’s Apollonius foreknows the future, reads minds, understands the speech of birds. He breaks a plague at Ephesus by directing the crowd against a beggar who is in truth a daimōn; he exposes an empousa, a shape-shifting bride, at a wedding; in Rome he halts a funeral and restores a dead girl to her family — though even Philostratus hedges, allowing that a spark of life might have lingered unseen. He predicts the murder of Domitian and announces it, by clairvoyant vision, to a crowd at Ephesus in the very hour it happens hundreds of miles away. The book’s climax is his trial before that emperor: hauled to Rome as a subversive and a sorcerer, accused of conspiracy and of human sacrifice, he defies the court, defends himself, and then — at the moment of acquittal or before it — simply vanishes from the room, reappearing the same day to his friends far off. At the end of his life he does not so much die as withdraw, taken up, the manner of his passing left deliberately open so that no tomb could be shown.

These are the episodes that made him famous and made him a problem. They place him in the company of the magus and the worker of the miracle — and Philostratus knows it, which is why he labors throughout to insist that his hero is a philosopher and a friend of the gods, never a sorcerer, the wonders flowing from wisdom and purity rather than from spells and compulsion. The defense is itself a clue to the climate: in an age when the line between the holy and the magical was fiercely policed, to call a man a magus was to accuse him, and to call him a sage was to acquit him of the same acts. The same deeds could be read either way depending on who was reading.

The afterlife: a counter-figure

His afterlife outran his life. The Emperor Caracalla raised a shrine to him; Alexander Severus is reported to have kept his image in the household chapel beside those of Orpheus, Abraham, and Christ; Aurelian, the story went, spared the city of Tyana after seeing Apollonius in a vision. Then, near the year 303, in the heat of the last great persecution under Diocletian, the Roman governor Sossianus Hierocles turned the figure into a weapon. In a pamphlet now lost — known by its title as a Lover of Truth — Hierocles set Apollonius against Jesus: here too was a teacher who healed and foreknew and worked wonders, and the pagans, he argued, had honored their wonder-worker soberly as a man dear to the gods, where the Christians had made theirs into God. The point was sharp precisely because the two stories rhymed.

The reply came from Eusebius of Caesarea, the church historian, in a treatise Against Hierocles that still survives. Eusebius granted that Apollonius was wise and virtuous, but denied that the marvels could be shown to have happened — and held that if they did, they were the work of daemons rather than of God. The comparison he tried to dissolve has shadowed Apollonius ever since; the church would not claim him, and so he became permanently available to those who wanted a holy wonder-worker the church had not claimed. He had been there to be picked up. When Aldus Manutius printed the first edition of Philostratus in 1501, he bound Eusebius’s refutation at the back as the antidote to the poison — and the binding tells the whole reception in one gesture: the Life could not circulate without its rebuttal riding alongside.

Later readers returned to him for the same reason. Renaissance scholars set him in the lineage of ancient sages that fed the Hermetic revival and the larger reawakening of pagan wisdom; the English Deist Charles Blount, in the 1680s, issued a partial translation freighted with notes that turned the wonders against revealed religion, and the book was suppressed for it. Voltaire spoke of Apollonius with admiration; the eighteenth century’s freethinkers found in him the natural sage whose powers, real or not, needed no church to license them. In 1901 the Theosophical writer G. R. S. Mead gave him a full and sympathetic study, reading him as a reformer and an initiate rather than a charlatan, and modern esoteric currents have kept him in view as a parallel holy man, an adept of the perennial wisdom. He stands beside the other contested wonder-workers of the period without merging into them: Simon Magus, the Samaritan whom Christian tradition cast as the arch-sorcerer, is the dark twin of the type, condemned where Apollonius is praised, and the contrast maps the same border from the other side. What draws readers has always been less what Apollonius taught than what his story could be made to mean. Every age that needed a pagan counter-Christ, or a natural saint, or an Eastern-traveled adept, found the materials ready in Philostratus and rearranged them to suit.

The texts and the scholarship

The whole reception hangs on a single transmitted work and its companions, so the critical apparatus matters more here than for most ancient figures. The first modern English rendering of consequence is F. C. Conybeare’s bilingual edition for the Loeb Classical Library (1912), which prints the Life in two volumes with the surviving letters of Apollonius and Eusebius’s treatise Against Hierocles — the last hosted in translation, with Conybeare’s introduction, at tertullian.org. Conybeare’s text has been superseded by Christopher P. Jones’s three-volume Loeb (Harvard University Press, 2005–2006), which offers a freshly edited Greek text, a more accurate translation, and a third volume gathering the letters, the testimonia, and Eusebius’s Reply to Hierocles — the fullest scholarly assembly of the dossier now in print. Jones also disentangled one of the book’s geographies in a study of the Indian journey, arguing in “Apollonius of Tyana’s Passage to India” (Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 42, 2001) that the route, unlike much of the Life, is built on real geographical knowledge.

The modern critical reconstruction of the man begins with Eduard Meyer’s study of 1917 and is carried furthest by two works. Maria Dzielska’s Apollonius of Tyana in Legend and History (Rome, 1986) is the standard biography that separates the historical Neopythagorean from the accreted legend and devotes a sustained chapter to demolishing the memoirs of Damis as a chronicler’s forgery. Ewen Bowie’s long essay Apollonius of Tyana: Tradition and Reality (in Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II.16.2, Berlin, 1978) revises Meyer and lays out, item by item, how Philostratus altered and amplified his subject, with the warning that everything in the Life must be weighed before it is used. Graham Anderson’s Philostratus (1986) reads the work from the side of its author, as a monument of third-century sophistic literature rather than a biography. The whole earlier debate is surveyed, from a frankly partisan vantage, in Mead’s Apollonius of Tyana of 1901, which remains valuable for its catalog of the ancient testimonia even where its conclusions belong to its theosophical moment. Mead measured the figure plainly against his only rival: with the exception of the Christ, he wrote, no more interesting personage appears upon the stage of Western history in these early years.

The Pythagorean lineage that Apollonius embodied flowed on past him into the Neoplatonism of late antiquity, and the later Platonists kept his memory. Iamblichus, the great fourth-century systematizer of theurgy, drew on a Life of Pythagoras attributed to Apollonius for the opening of his own biography of the master, so that the Tyanean’s reading of Pythagoras shaped the Neoplatonic image of the founder. In the same centuries Apollonius was named among the great initiates of the mystery traditions and the masters of prophecy, set in a line with Pythagoras and the sages of the East. He is not to be confused with Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish contemporary whose contemplative communities Mead and others invoked to sketch the religious world Apollonius moved through; the two never met in the record, and the link is one of milieu, not of contact.

What remains, after the subtraction, is a thin but real figure: a teacher of Pythagorean discipline who fasted from flesh, dressed in linen, kept silence, and told the priests that the gods are served by a clean mind. Everything bright and strange around that figure was added by others, and the additions are now the more famous part. The man asked the temples to offer less. Posterity could not stop offering him more.

→ In the library: Mead — Apollonius of Tyana (1901)

→ Related: Neopythagoreanism · Pythagoras · Neoplatonism · Philo Of Alexandria · Jesus Christ · Hermes Trismegistus · Iamblichus · Theurgy · Mystery Religions · Prophecy · Asceticism · Simon Magus · Marcus Aurelius