Apollonius of Tyana

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Apollonius of Tyana was a wandering teacher of the first century CE, born 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. 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 source is the Life of Apollonius, written in the early third century by the Greek author Philostratus at the request of the empress Julia Domna — roughly a hundred and twenty years after Apollonius is supposed to have died. Philostratus claims to draw on the memoirs of a companion named Damis, whose very existence scholarship has long doubted; much of the book reads as a deliberate literary composition, a travelogue carrying its hero from the Mediterranean to India and back. What lies beneath it is hard to recover. 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, debates with kings, and Indian sages are another matter, and historians treat them as the work of a writer shaping a type rather than a record of events.

The Pythagorean frame is the steady part of the portrait. Apollonius is shown keeping silence for years, refusing animal sacrifice and bloodshed, dressing plainly, and teaching that the divine is honored by purity of mind rather than by offerings — a position the text presents as his own reform of inherited religion. Around this core gathered the wonders: foreknowledge, healings, the raising of a dead girl, a vanishing from his trial before the emperor Domitian.

His afterlife outran his life. In the early fourth century the official Hierocles set Apollonius against Jesus, arguing that the pagan sage had done as much and was honored more soberly; the Christian Eusebius answered him at length, and the comparison has shadowed Apollonius ever since. Later readers — Renaissance occultists, eighteenth-century freethinkers, and modern esoteric writers among them — returned to him for the same reason, as a counter-figure or a parallel, the holy wonder-worker the church had not claimed. The fascination has always been less with what Apollonius taught than with what his story was made to mean. He survives mostly as a portrait, and the portrait keeps being repainted.

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

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Philo Of Alexandria · Jesus Christ · Hermes Trismegistus