Life of Apollonius of Tyana is a book written in Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...

 by Philostratus

Philostratus

Philostratus or Lucius Flavius Philostratus , , called "the Athenian", was a Greek sophist of the Roman imperial period. His father was a minor sophist of the same name. He was born probably around 172, and is said by the Suda to have been living in the reign of emperor Philip the Arab . His death...

 (c. 170–c. 245 AD). It tells the story of Apollonius of Tyana

Apollonius of Tyana

Apollonius of Tyana was a Greek Neopythagorean philosopher from the town of Tyana in the Roman province of Cappadocia in Asia Minor. Little is certainly known about him...

 (ca. 40

40

Year 40 was a leap year starting on Friday of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Augustus without colleague...

—ca. 120

120

Year 120 was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Severus and Fulvus...

 AD), a Pythagorean

Pythagoreanism

Pythagoreanism was the system of esoteric and metaphysical beliefs held by Pythagoras and his followers, the Pythagoreans, who were considerably influenced by mathematics. Pythagoreanism originated in the 5th century BCE and greatly influenced Platonism...

 philosopher and teacher.

Contents

The book extensively describes the alleged travels of Apollonius to Italy, Hispania

Hispania

Another theory holds that the name derives from Ezpanna, the Basque word for "border" or "edge", thus meaning the farthest area or place. Isidore of Sevilla considered Hispania derived from Hispalis....

, Nubia

Nubia

Nubia is a region along the Nile river, which is located in northern Sudan and southern Egypt.There were a number of small Nubian kingdoms throughout the Middle Ages, the last of which collapsed in 1504, when Nubia became divided between Egypt and the Sennar sultanate resulting in the Arabization...

, Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia is a toponym for the area of the Tigris–Euphrates river system, largely corresponding to modern-day Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran.Widely considered to be the cradle of civilization, Bronze Age Mesopotamia included Sumer and the...

 and India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

. Some scholars view it as fiction, and contend that Apollonius probably never reached any of these countries, but spent his entire life in the East of the Roman Empire.

According to Philostratus, his book relies on a multiplicity of sources:

• A book on the youth of Apollonius, written by Maximus of Aegae
• Memoirs written by a disciple of Apollonius, Damis
  Damis
  Damis was a student and lifelong companion of Apollonius of Tyana, the famous Neopythagorean philosopher and teacher who lived in the early 1st up to the early 2nd century CE....
  
  .
• The "Memorabilia of Apollonius of Tyana, magician and philosopher", written by a Moeragenes, although Philostratus considers that account rather unreliable.
• Local knowledge from towns like Ephesus
  Ephesus
  Ephesus was an ancient Greek city, and later a major Roman city, on the west coast of Asia Minor, near present-day Selçuk, Izmir Province, Turkey. It was one of the twelve cities of the Ionian League during the Classical Greek era...
  
  , Tyana
  Tyana
  Tyana or Tyanna was an ancient city in the Anatolian region of Cappadocia, in modern south-central Turkey. It was the capital of a Luwian-speaking Neo-Hittite kingdom in the 1st millennium BC.-History:...
  
  , Aegae, and Antioch
  Antioch
  Antioch on the Orontes was an ancient city on the eastern side of the Orontes River. It is near the modern city of Antakya, Turkey.Founded near the end of the 4th century BC by Seleucus I Nicator, one of Alexander the Great's generals, Antioch eventually rivaled Alexandria as the chief city of the...
  
  .

The eastward travel of Apollonius is described in Book I. Apollonius receives from the Parthian king Vardanes

Vardanes I of Parthia

Vardanes I of Parthia ruled the Parthian Empire from about 40–45. He succeeded his father Artabanus II, but had to continually fight against Gotarzes II, a rival claimant to the throne....

 (40–47) a safe-conduct to the Parthian ruler Phraotes

Phraotes

Phraotes was an Indo-Parthian king of the city of Taxila in northern India, met by the Greek philosopher Apollonius of Tyana around 46 CE according to the Life of Apollonius Tyana written by Philostratus....

 in India:

And with that, he showed them a letter, written to that effect, and this gave them occasion to marvel afresh at the humanity and foresight of Vardanes. For he had addressed the letter in question to the satrap

Satrap

Satrap was the name given to the governors of the provinces of the ancient Median and Achaemenid Empires and in several of their successors, such as the Sassanid Empire and the Hellenistic empires....

 of the Indus, although he was not subject to his dominion; and in it he reminded him of the good service he had done him, but declared that he would not ask any recompense for the same, "for", he said, "it is not my habit to ask for a return of favors." But he said he would be very grateful, if he could give a welcome to Apollonius and send him on wherever he wished to go. And he had given gold to the guide, so that in case he found Apollonius in want thereof, he might give it him and save him from looking to the generosity of anyone else. – Book II:17

The description of Apollonius's visit to India is made in Book II, and particularly the visit to the city of Taxila

Taxila

Taxila is a Tehsil in the Rawalpindi District of Punjab province of Pakistan. It is an important archaeological site.Taxila is situated about northwest of Islamabad Capital Territory and Rawalpindi in Panjab; just off the Grand Trunk Road...

, described in chapters 20 to 24. He describes constructions of the Greek type in Taxila, probably referring to Sirkap

Sirkap

Sirkap is the name of an archaeological site on the bank opposite to the city of Taxila, Punjab, Pakistan.The city of Sirkap was built by the Greco-Bactrian king Demetrius after he invaded ancient India around 180 BC. Demetrius founded in the northern and northwestern Indian subcontinent an...

:

Taxila, they tell us, is about as big as Nineveh, and was fortified fairly well after the manner of Greek cities
I have already described the way in which the city is walled, but they say that it was divided up into narrow streets in the same irregular manner as in Athens, and that the houses were built in such a way that if you look at them from outside they had only one story, while if you went into one of them, you at once found subterranean chambers extending as far below the level of the earth as did the chambers above. – Book II:23

He also explains that the Indo-Parthian king of Taxila, named Phraotes, speaks Greek

Koine Greek

Koine Greek is the universal dialect of the Greek language spoken throughout post-Classical antiquity , developing from the Attic dialect, with admixture of elements especially from Ionic....

 fluently, a language in which he had been educated while in exile to the east, beyond the river Hyphasis:

Tell me, O King, how you acquired such a command of the Greek tongue, and whence you derived all your philosophical attainments in this place? – Book II:29

My father, after a Greek education, brought me to the sages at an age somewhat too early perhaps, for I was only twelve at the time, but they brought me up like their own son; for any that they admit knowing the Greek tongue they are especially fond of, because they consider that in virtue of the similarity of his disposition he already belongs to themselves. – Book II:31

Edition

• Philostratus: The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, ed. Christopher P. Jones, vol. 1 (Books I-IV) and 2 (Books V-VIII), Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 2005 (Loeb Classical Library no. 16 and no. 17), ISBN 0-674-99613-5 and ISBN 0-674-99614-3 (Greek text and English translation)

Further reading

• Jaap-Jan Flinterman: Power, Paideia and Pythagoreanism, Amsterdam 1995, ISBN 90-5063-236-X
• Maria Dzielska: Apollonius of Tyana in Legend and History, Rome 1986, ISBN 88-7062-599-0
• Graham Anderson: Philostratus. Biography and Belles Lettres in the Third Century A.D., London 1986, ISBN 0-7099-0575-0
• Theios Sophistès. Essays on Flavius Philostratus' Vita Apollonii. Edited by Kristoffel Demoen and Danny Praet. Leiden, Brill, 2008 (Mnemosyne, Supplements, 305), xvi, 405 pp.
• Dall'Asta, Matthias. Philosoph, Magier, Scharlatan und Antichrist: zur Rezeption von Philostrats Vita Apollonii in der Renaissance. (Kalliope - Studien zur griechischen und lateinischen Poesie, 8). Heidelberg, Winter, 2008. xii, 403 S.
• Flinterman, J.-J. "“The Ancestor of My Wisdom”: Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism in Life of Apollonius," in Philostratus. Ed. by E. Bowie and J. Elsner. Cambridge, 2009, 155–175.

External links

• The Life of Apollonius, translated by F. C. Conybeare, 1912, Loeb Classical Library
• fresh translations by Mahlon H. Smith of passages related to spirit possession & exorcism
• Study Guide translated by F. C. Conybeare, with 56,000 words of notes & coordinates to many sites within the text.