Quick Answer
A Roman empress commissioned this book, a disciple's notebook that probably never existed supplied its material, and eighty years later a persecuting governor used it as a weapon against the Gospels. It is a superb ancient adventure story about a real Pythagorean ascetic, and it is not a biography in any sense a historian would accept.
Key Takeaways
- Written around 130 years after its subject died, at the request of Julia Domna, in the literary style of the Second Sophistic.
- Damis is almost certainly invented. The device lets Philostratus present fiction as eyewitness testimony.
- Philostratus hedges his own miracle stories, most notably the raising of the girl in Rome, which is more interesting than the miracle.
- The rivalry with Jesus was invented in 303 by Hierocles, not by Philostratus, and Eusebius's reply is why the book survived.
- The real Apollonius was smaller and more interesting than the legend, and Dzielska's study is where to find him.
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What This Book Is
Flavius Philostratus was a Greek sophist and man of letters who lived roughly from 170 to 245 AD and moved in the circle around the Severan imperial family. Somewhere in the 220s or 230s he produced an eight-book account of the life of Apollonius of Tyana, a Pythagorean holy man of the previous century.
The result is one of the strangest surviving works of antiquity. It is part philosophical biography, part travel romance, part collection of wonder stories, part defence of a reputation, and it is written in the deliberately ornate Greek of the Second Sophistic, the literary movement Philostratus himself named and chronicled.
Read it as ancient literature and it is tremendously entertaining. Read it as evidence about a first-century man and almost every sentence needs a caution attached. This review tries to do both.
On the distance involved: Apollonius seems to have died around the end of the first century. Philostratus wrote in the third. The gap is comparable to a biographer today writing about someone from the 1890s using material of unverifiable origin, at the request of a head of state, in a highly stylised literary register. That framing should sit behind everything in the book.
The Empress Who Ordered It
Julia Domna was the Syrian wife of the emperor Septimius Severus and the mother of Caracalla, and she was a serious patron of philosophy and letters. Philostratus says she gave him the source material and asked him to write the book.
Since she died in 217 and the finished work postdates her death, the commission and the completion are separated by at least several years. That gap has consequences. Philostratus was writing for a patron who could no longer supervise, about a figure the Severan house had reason to promote, in a period when the dynasty was interested in eastern religion and in holy men from the Greek-speaking provinces.
Caracalla is reported to have built a shrine to Apollonius. Whether that is cause or effect of the book's production is unclear, and the two facts belong together: this is court literature, produced inside a political programme, about a figure the court found useful.
None of that makes it worthless. It does mean the book has interests, and the reader should keep them in view.
The Notebook That Never Existed
Philostratus tells us his principal source was a set of memoirs kept by Damis of Nineveh, a disciple who joined Apollonius early and accompanied him for decades, recording what he saw. A relative of Damis, he says, brought these notebooks to Julia Domna.
Scholars have doubted Damis since the nineteenth century and the doubt has hardened. The reasons are cumulative. Damis appears nowhere else in ancient literature. His notebook is described as recording exactly the kind of material a biographer would need and nothing inconvenient. The narrative voice attributed to him is not distinguishable from Philostratus's own. And the device solves precisely the problem an author writing about a distant figure would have, which is the absence of eyewitnesses.
Philostratus also mentions other sources, including a work by Moeragenes, which he dismisses as ill-informed. That dismissal is itself telling. Moeragenes apparently treated Apollonius as a magician, which is the charge Philostratus spends eight books answering.
The Damis problem is not a small footnote. Remove Damis and you remove the entire evidential claim of the book. What remains is a third-century author's construction of a first-century figure, using a fictional witness to license invented episodes. It is a good construction and it may preserve genuine traditions. It is not testimony.
What Apollonius Actually Practised
The ascetic programme described is consistent, coherent, and matches what is known of Neopythagorean practice from other sources, which is one of the reasons the book retains value.
He keeps five years of complete silence, the traditional Pythagorean novitiate, and Philostratus gives a vivid scene of him intervening in a riot without speaking, using only gesture and presence. He refuses meat on the grounds that it clouds the mind and involves killing. He drinks no wine, calling it a disturbance of the clear liquid in the soul. He wears linen rather than wool or leather, since both come from animals. He does not marry. He goes barefoot and does not cut his hair.
Most consequentially, he refuses to sacrifice living animals and argues publicly that the gods do not want them. In the Roman world this is not a dietary preference. Blood sacrifice was the central act of civic religion, and a man who tells temples they are doing it wrong is making a political statement. Philostratus has him offer incense, prayer and an image made of frankincense instead.
This part of the book is worth taking seriously as a portrait of a real tradition. The Pythagorean discipline was a genuine and demanding way of life with a continuous history, and Apollonius belongs inside it rather than in the general category of ancient wonder-worker.
The Journey to the Brahmans
Books two and three take Apollonius east, through Babylon and over the Caucasus into India, to a community of sages living on a hill under a leader named Iarchas.
The sages levitate a couple of feet above the ground, control the weather, know everything about Apollonius before he arrives, and deliver teachings on the soul, on the elements, and on the transmigration through which Apollonius learns he was once a ship's pilot. The hill has automated tripods that serve the meal, borrowed from Homer's description of the workshop of Hephaestus.
Later he goes to Egypt and up the Nile toward Ethiopia to visit the naked philosophers there, and the comparison is unflattering to them. The Egyptians, Philostratus makes clear, are a degraded branch of the Indian wisdom.
The geography is not real. The peoples are not real. What the sequence does is establish a genealogy, in which the deepest wisdom is Indian, the Egyptian tradition derives from it, and Apollonius has been to the source and can therefore judge. It is a claim about authority in the form of a travel narrative, and versions of the same claim run through Greek writing about the East for eight centuries.
The Wonders, and How He Hedges Them
The miracle stories are what the book is remembered for and they are better written than their summaries suggest.
At Ephesus, during a plague, he identifies an old beggar as the cause, has the crowd stone him, and the corpse is revealed as a demon. At Corinth, he attends the wedding of a young man named Menippus and exposes the bride as an empusa, a creature that fattens young men before devouring them. That story reached John Keats and became the poem Lamia.
And in Rome he meets the funeral procession of a girl of marriageable age, touches her, says something inaudible, and she wakes and speaks.
Then Philostratus does something remarkable. He states that he cannot say whether Apollonius found a spark of life in her that the mourners had missed, since it was raining and steam was seen rising from her face, or whether he genuinely restored a life that had gone out. He leaves it open.
That single passage tells you a great deal about the book. Philostratus is not a credulous compiler. He is a sophisticated writer who knows the difference between what he is reporting and what he is prepared to assert, and he inserts the naturalistic alternative himself, in the middle of his most spectacular scene. Any account of this text as a pagan gospel has to explain why its author declined the miracle when it was handed to him.
The Trial and the Vanishing
The confrontation with Domitian occupies books seven and eight and is the emotional centre of the work.
Apollonius is arrested on charges bundling conspiracy, impiety and sorcery. He has his hair cut and his beard shaved in prison. He is offered escape and refuses it, choosing to answer the charge in person, and Philostratus gives him a long formal defence speech which is very clearly a rhetorical set piece of the third century rather than a first-century transcript.
Then, having answered, he vanishes from the courtroom in front of the emperor, and appears the same day at Puteoli, where his companions are waiting. Later, in Ephesus, in the middle of a public lecture, he breaks off and describes the assassination of Domitian as it is happening in Rome.
The end is handled with deliberate vagueness. Philostratus reports several accounts of how Apollonius died, or did not, including one in which he walks into a temple of Dictynna in Crete at night, the doors open for him, singing is heard, and the doors close. He notes that no tomb is shown anywhere. He also reports a later appearance to a young man who doubted the immortality of the soul.
Notice the structure of the ending: Philostratus gives several incompatible versions and declines to choose, exactly as he declined to choose about the girl in Rome. This is a recognised technique of ancient biography and it is also a signal. The author is telling you which parts of his book are load-bearing and which are traditions he is passing on. Very few readers, ancient or modern, have taken the hint.
Apollonius Against Christ
The book's most consequential afterlife began roughly eighty years after it was written and had nothing to do with its author's intentions.
Around 303, during the persecution launched under Diocletian, a Roman governor named Sossianus Hierocles wrote a treatise called Philalethes, the Lover of Truth, addressed to Christians. His argument, as far as it can be reconstructed, was that Apollonius performed wonders at least equal to those attributed to Jesus, that pagans nonetheless regarded him as a wise man rather than a god, and that Christians were therefore drawing an unreasonable conclusion from comparable evidence.
Eusebius of Caesarea, later the historian of the church, wrote a reply. Against Hierocles attacks Philostratus's reliability, points to the implausibilities in the narrative, questions Damis, and argues that the comparison fails on the evidence before it fails on theology.
Two things follow. The first is that the framing of Apollonius as an anti-Christ figure is a fourth-century polemical invention and should not be projected back onto Philostratus, who shows no awareness of Christianity at all. The second is that the controversy is why we still have the book. Eusebius's reply kept it in view, and Philostratus's text travelled through the Middle Ages partly as the thing a church father had bothered to refute.
The Long Afterlife
Later Roman evidence for the cult is thin and needs handling with care. The Historia Augusta reports that the emperor Alexander Severus kept images of Apollonius, Abraham, Orpheus and Christ together in his private shrine. It is a wonderful detail and the Historia Augusta is one of the least reliable texts to survive from antiquity, so the story should be quoted with the source named and the doubt attached.
The book resurfaced properly in early modern Europe. In 1680 the English deist Charles Blount published a translation of the first two books with notes that used Apollonius exactly as Hierocles had, and the volume was suppressed. Voltaire and the eighteenth-century freethinkers took up the comparison from there. For roughly a century, Apollonius functioned in European letters as the standard example of a pagan holy man whose reported wonders embarrassed Christian apologetics.
The Occult Revival Claims Him
The nineteenth century took him somewhere else again. Eliphas Levi, the French magician whose Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie did more than any other book to shape modern ceremonial magic, described performing an evocation in London in 1854 in which he attempted to call up the spirit of Apollonius. His account of the result is famously ambiguous and he draws no triumphant conclusion from it.
Levi also circulated a text called the Nuctemeron under Apollonius's name. It is not by Apollonius, and readers encountering it in occult anthologies should know that.
Theosophy absorbed him next. Blavatsky treated him as an adept, and G. R. S. Mead, her former private secretary, published a study of him in 1901 that is still readable and is more careful than most of its neighbours. Mead is the same figure who commissioned Ezra Pound's first essay on the troubadours, which is a fair illustration of how tightly connected the early modernist and occult circles in London were.
Be careful with modern retellings. A large secondary literature presents Apollonius as an initiate of ancient mystery schools, a master of a hidden brotherhood, or the actual source of the Gospels. None of this rests on evidence. The historical material is thin, Philostratus is a romance, and the claims made about Apollonius in occult writing generally originate in the nineteenth century rather than in antiquity.
What Can Actually Be Known
Maria Dzielska's Apollonius of Tyana in Legend and History, published in Rome in 1986, is the standard critical reconstruction and its picture is much smaller than the legend.
On her account there was a real Pythagorean teacher from Tyana, active in Asia Minor in the first century, who kept the ascetic discipline, taught, advised cities, and was remembered locally. His fame in his own lifetime was regional. The reputation grew after his death, took on wonder stories in the ordinary way that holy men's reputations do, gathered a body of letters of uncertain authenticity, and was then vastly enlarged by Philostratus for a court audience with its own reasons for wanting an eastern sage of imperial stature.
There is some independent evidence: inscriptions, a shrine tradition at Tyana, references in later authors. It supports a real and locally significant figure. It does not support the traveller to India, the courtroom vanishing, or the raising of the dead.
This smaller Apollonius is the more interesting one. A man who lived for decades on a discipline that hard, who refused to sacrifice animals in a world built on animal sacrifice, and who spoke to power without flattering it, is worth knowing about without any of the wonders.
Which Edition to Read
Christopher P. Jones produced a three-volume Loeb Classical Library edition, the first two volumes in 2005 and the third in 2006, replacing F. C. Conybeare's century-old version. It gives Greek and English on facing pages with a much improved text and full notes, and it is the edition to use.
The third volume is the one people overlook and it is arguably the most useful. It collects the letters attributed to Apollonius, the ancient testimonia about him from other authors, and Eusebius's Reply to Hierocles, so that the whole controversy sits in one place alongside the primary text.
Conybeare's 1912 translation is out of copyright and appears in many inexpensive reprints, including the one linked below. It is serviceable and the notes are dated. If you are reading for pleasure it will do; if you are working, use Jones.
For context, read Dzielska for the history and Graham Anderson or Jaap-Jan Flinterman for Philostratus as an author. Mead's 1901 study is worth having as a specimen of the occult revival's version.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you are interested in what a holy man looked like in the Roman East, because the book is a rich picture of that role even where it is fiction: the cities, the temples, the relationship between a sage and a governor, the constant question of whether a wonder-worker is pious or criminal.
Read it if you work with the Pythagorean tradition or the fragments attributed to Pythagoras, since this is the fullest surviving portrait of the discipline in practice, however romanced.
Read it if you are tracing the ancestry of Western esoteric literature. Apollonius is one of the names that recur, from Hierocles through Blount through Levi through Theosophy, and knowing what the source text actually says is a useful corrective at every stage.
Do not read it as history. Do not read it looking for a suppressed alternative to the Gospels, because the parallel was manufactured in the fourth century by someone with an interest. And do not read the abridged occult retellings, which reliably keep the wonders and drop the passages where Philostratus himself declines to vouch for them.
The most durable thing in the book is not a miracle. It is the five years of silence. A man decides that he will not speak for half a decade, and Philostratus shows him keeping it through a famine riot in which he stops a crowd from killing a governor using nothing but his hands and his face. Whatever else in this book is invented, that discipline was real and it was practised, and it points at something the modern world has almost no vocabulary for: that authority can come from restraint, and that a person who has given up the ordinary right to reply acquires a different kind of standing entirely.
An empress, a fictional witness, and a sage who vanished from an emperor's courtroom.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. We recommend books we have read and think are worth your time, and we say plainly when we think parts of them are weak. The linked edition is an inexpensive reprint of the older public domain translation; the Jones Loeb is the one to buy for serious study.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Apollonius of Tyana?
A Pythagorean philosopher and holy man from Tyana in Cappadocia who lived through most of the first century AD. He kept a strict ascetic discipline, travelled widely, advised cities and rulers, and acquired a reputation as a wonder-worker. Very little about him can be established independently of the biography written more than a century after his death.
Who wrote The Life of Apollonius and when?
Flavius Philostratus, a Greek sophist attached to the court of the Severan emperors, wrote it in eight books. He says the empress Julia Domna commissioned it. Since she died in 217 and the work postdates her death, it was probably completed in the 220s or 230s, roughly a hundred and thirty years after Apollonius died.
Was Damis a real person?
Probably not. Philostratus claims his main source was a notebook kept by a disciple named Damis, which came into Julia Domna's hands. Scholars have doubted Damis since the nineteenth century, and the prevailing view is that he is a literary device allowing Philostratus to present invented material as eyewitness testimony.
What was Apollonius's practice?
Pythagorean discipline as it was understood in the first century. Five years of complete silence, no meat, no wine, linen clothing rather than wool or leather, no animal sacrifice, no marriage, uncut hair, and bare feet. The refusal of blood sacrifice was the most publicly conspicuous part, since it set him against the ordinary practice of every temple.
Did he really travel to India?
Philostratus devotes several books to a journey through Persia to the Brahman sages of a hill in India, and later to the naked philosophers of Egypt and Ethiopia. The geography is largely fantastical and the episode reads as a set piece about the sources of wisdom rather than as a travel record. Whether the historical Apollonius went east at all is unknown.
What are the famous miracle stories?
He drives off a plague demon at Ephesus, exposes a shape-shifting creature about to marry a young man named Menippus, and apparently restores a dead girl to life in Rome. Philostratus hedges the last one himself, saying she may have retained a spark of life that the mourners missed, which is a notable piece of authorial caution.
What happened at his trial?
He was brought before the emperor Domitian on charges connected to conspiracy and sorcery. Philostratus has him answer the charge and then vanish from the courtroom, reappearing the same day at Puteoli, hundreds of miles away. He also describes Apollonius announcing Domitian's assassination in Ephesus at the moment it occurred in Rome.
Was the book written to rival the Gospels?
Almost certainly not. Philostratus shows no sign of engaging with Christianity, which was a small movement of little interest to the Severan court. The rivalry began around 303, when the governor Sossianus Hierocles used the book to argue that Apollonius outdid Jesus, and Eusebius of Caesarea wrote a reply.
What was the Hierocles controversy?
During the Diocletianic persecution, Hierocles wrote a work called Philalethes, the Lover of Truth, arguing that Apollonius performed comparable wonders and that Christians were inconsistent in their claims about Jesus. Eusebius answered with Against Hierocles, attacking Philostratus's reliability. That exchange is why the book survived and why it kept its reputation.
How did occultists come to claim him?
The Enlightenment deists revived him as a pagan counterweight to Christianity, and the nineteenth-century occult revival took him up from there. Eliphas Levi described attempting to evoke his spirit in London in 1854, and G. R. S. Mead published a study of him in 1901. Texts attributed to Apollonius in that literature are not his.
What can historians actually establish?
Maria Dzielska's 1986 study is the standard reconstruction. It argues for a real Pythagorean teacher of local rather than imperial fame, active in Asia Minor, remembered in his own region, whose reputation grew steadily after his death and was transformed by Philostratus into something far larger.
Which edition should I read?
Christopher Jones's three-volume Loeb edition from 2005 and 2006 is the standard, with Greek and English facing and full notes. The third volume is particularly useful because it collects the letters, the ancient testimonia and Eusebius's reply in one place. Conybeare's older Loeb translation is out of copyright and circulates in cheap reprints.
Watch the author hedge
Read this book once for the story and once for the seams. Every time Philostratus says he cannot be sure, gives two versions, or supplies a natural explanation next to a supernatural one, mark it. You will find these moments clustered around exactly the episodes that later writers built on hardest. The habit transfers. Any source, ancient or current, that never hedges is telling you less than one that does, and the places where an author declines to vouch for their own best material are usually the most honest sentences in the book.
Sources & References
- Philostratus. Apollonius of Tyana, ed. and trans. Christopher P. Jones, Loeb Classical Library, 3 vols., 2005 and 2006.
- Conybeare, F. C., trans. (1912). The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Loeb Classical Library, the older translation behind most public domain reprints.
- Eusebius of Caesarea. Against Hierocles, collected in Loeb volume III.
- Dzielska, M. (1986). Apollonius of Tyana in Legend and History. L'Erma di Bretschneider, Rome.
- Anderson, G. (1986). Philostratus: Biography and Belles Lettres in the Third Century AD.
- Mead, G. R. S. (1901). Apollonius of Tyana: The Philosopher-Reformer of the First Century AD.
- Blount, C. (1680). The Two First Books of Philostratus, the suppressed deist translation.
- Levi, E. Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, for the account of the 1854 evocation in London.