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APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
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APOLLONIUS OF 
 
 TYANA 
 
 A STUDY OF HIS LIFE AND TIMES 
 
 BY 
 
 F. W. GROVES CAMPBELL, LL.D. (Duel.) 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 
 
 ERNEST OLDMEADOW 
 
 LONDON 
 
 GRANT RICHARDS 
 
 1908 
 

 ^mfiAL 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface . ... 7 
 
 I. Apollonius of Tyana . . 26 
 II. The Birth and Youth of 
 
 Apollonius . . -31 
 
 III. The Contemplative Life . . 41 
 
 IV. The Active Life . . . 62 
 V. Apollonius Travels to India . 71 
 
 VI. He Visits Asia Minor and Greece 82 
 
 VII. He Visits Rome and Egypt . 93 
 
 VIII. His Further Travels and Return 
 
 to Rome for Trial . .107 
 
 IX. Conclusion. . . -113 
 
 206752 
 
CFTHu 
 
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 <.\ or 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 "^TINE and ninety years have passed since 
 Edward Berwick, vicar of Leixlip in 
 County Kildare, published the first and only 
 complete English version of the Life of 
 ^pollonius of Tyana by Flavius Philostratus, 
 the rhetorician and sophist of Lemnos. 
 Berwick's volume has become so rare that, 
 last autumn, two London book-dealers of 
 world-wide reputation searched and adver- 
 tised for a copy in vain. Yet the nineteenth 
 century produced a plentiful crop of essays 
 and commentaries on the gospel of Apol- 
 lonius according to Philostratus. Baur, 
 Zeller, Cardinal Newman, J. A. Froude, 
 Chassang — these are well-known names, but 
 they do not exhaust the list of scholars 
 and critics who, since Berwick's days, 
 have responded to the allurements of 
 7 
 
8 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 Tyana's saint and sage. Nor has the 
 spell fallen upon scholars and critics 
 alone. Thousands of readers of Keats* 
 Lamia have lingered curiously over the 
 foot-note, drawn from The Anatomy of Melan- 
 choly^ in which Burton quotes Philostratus* 
 account of the young philosopher whom 
 Apollonius miraculously delivered from a 
 lamia, or serpent, in the guise of a beautiful 
 young gentlewoman. There are others who 
 profess to breathe again the atmosphere of 
 the ^sculapian College at iEgae in Pater's 
 Marius the Epicurean, Swedenborgians have 
 found in Apollonius a Swedenborg born out 
 of due time : and some so-called Theoso- 
 phistSjOn the strength of the sage's pilgrimage 
 to the wise men of India, have claimed him 
 for their very own. Yet his full legend in 
 English is no longer to be bought for money. 
 There was, however, a day when the 
 names of Philostratus and of Apollonius of 
 Tyana were on every lettered Briton's 
 tongue. Towards the end of the seven- 
 teenth century there appeared in London a 
 
PREFACE 9 
 
 translation, by Charles Blount, of the first 
 two books of Philostratus* Life. Blount's 
 notes (which, according to some, he bor- 
 rowed from a more eminent scholar) poured 
 oil upon the already fierce fires of the 
 Deistical controversy. Bossuet had de- 
 scribed Apollonius as a magician in league 
 with the devil ; but the effect of Blount's 
 artfully annotated pages was to pit Tyana's 
 glory against Nazareth's. Great was the 
 consternation of the orthodox at the news 
 that thankful Tyana, like ungrateful Naza- 
 reth, had nursed a prophet of blameless life, 
 of miraculous power, of superabundant lov- 
 ing-kindness, and of heroic virtue. Both 
 Apollonius of Tyana and Jesus of Nazareth 
 were born in the same lustrum, if not in the 
 same year ;^ both Tyana's babe and Bethle- 
 
 1 The birth of Apollonius is assigned to the year b.c. 
 4. But, as everybody knows, the current computation of 
 the beginning of the Christian era is incorrect, and the 
 first year of our Lord ought to be dated four or five years 
 earlier. If the Apollonian and Christian nativities both 
 belong to the same year the coincidence is entitled to more 
 attention than it has received. 
 
lo APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 hem's were said to have sprung from a 
 divine Father and a human mother ; and 
 both these holy ones drew their first breaths 
 amid gracious portents and supernatural 
 singings. Nor were these the only paral- 
 lels in the memoirs of the Tyanean and the 
 Nazarene. Blount's publication was there- 
 fore received with horror as an attempt to 
 displace the religion of the Incarnation. In 
 answer to the question, " Is this He that 
 should come, or look we for another .'' " 
 orthodox Christians had been accustomed 
 to affirm boldly the uniqueness, sufficiency, 
 and finality of Mary's Son : but, like a bolt 
 from the blue, here was Philostratus oppos- 
 ing himself to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and 
 John and offering an alternative Messiah. 
 Matthew Arnold was anticipated ; and the 
 Greek ideal was pitted against the Hebrew. 
 Fierce passions were let loose. Sermons, 
 pamphlets, and volumes descended upon the 
 presumptuous Blount like fireballs and hail- 
 stones ; and his adversaries did not rest 
 until the authorities had forbidden him to 
 
PREFACE II 
 
 print the remaining six books of his transla- 
 tion.^ 
 
 That Philostratus composed his Life of 
 Apollonius of Tyana as a pagan counterblast 
 to the Christian Gospels is an opinion 
 which has been held by reputable scholars 
 both before and after Blount's day. Philo- 
 stratus wrote the Life about a.d. 216 ; and, 
 in 305, Hierocles, who had been pro- 
 consul of Palmyra, of Bithynia, and finally 
 of Alexandria, published a critical examina- 
 tion of Christianity in which he opposed 
 the Apollonian to the Christian miracles. 
 This work of Hierocles is lost, and we 
 know it mainly from the able rejoinder 
 of Eusebius.^ Hierocles was further 
 
 1 Blount repays the student more as a human being than 
 as a scholar. His tomes are the graves of lost causes. 
 He gave deep offence in arguing that King William held 
 the throne by right of conquest — an argument according 
 to which any stronger invader would have had the right to 
 turn King William out. In 1698 he committed suicide 
 because he could not marry his deceased wife's sister, 
 with whom he had fallen violently in love. 
 
 2 The reply of Eusebius to Hierocles was printed 
 as an appendix to the text of Philostratus' Life, which 
 
12 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 answered by Lactantius ; and it soon be- 
 came as necessary for every Catholic saint 
 or doctor of the fourth and fifth centuries 
 to have an opinion about Apollonius of 
 Tyana as it was for the French bishops 
 of fifty years ago to have an opinion about 
 Our Lady of La Salette. Eusebius hand- 
 somely recognised Apollonius as the first of 
 philosophers. Lactantius and Arnobius 
 did not deny his miracles, but referred 
 them to magic.^ St. Jerome also regarded 
 
 Aldus, with some trepidation, published in 1 5 o i . Aldus ex- 
 plained that he was giving " the antidote with the poison." 
 1 The miracles of Apollonius are further ascribed to 
 magic in the twenty-fourth of the Quaes tiones et Respon- 
 siones ad Orthodoxos^ a work formerly attributed to Justin 
 Martyr. As the passage appears to have been written by 
 an unknown author after the death of Philostratus, it is 
 hardly worth reproducing here : but, lest any reader 
 should be puzzled at hearing that Christian fathers 
 admitted any non-Christian miracles as historical, it may 
 be well to explain that many early Christians did not 
 look upon the gods and goddesses of paganism as mere 
 fictions. They vaguely imagined Jupiter and Juno and 
 the rest as supernal personages who, having been dethroned 
 and enfeebled by the Blessed Trinity, went on living 
 stealthily like kings and queens in exile. Wagner's Tann- 
 hauser, with the pious Minnesingers on the top of the hill 
 and Venus in her grotto below, illustrates this state of mind. 
 
PREFACE 13 
 
 him as a magician ; but he found things in 
 his life to praise. St. Augustine, in arguing 
 with the heathen, paid Apollonius a rather 
 mild compliment by allowing that he was 
 purer than Jove. The learned Bishop 
 Sidonius Apollinaris praised the Tyanean 
 and translated his Life into Latin. On the 
 other hand, St. John Chrysostom branded 
 the Life as false and Apollonius as a de- 
 ceiver ; and St. John Chrysostom's gradually 
 became the common view. In the ninth 
 century Photius of Constantinople roundly 
 denounced Philostratus' eight books as a 
 tissue of lies. Nevertheless the cult of 
 Apollonius lingered on almost to the end of 
 the Middle Ages, as appears from the state- 
 ment of Nicetas concerning the melting- 
 down of certain bronze doors at Byzantium. 
 These inestimable doors are said to have 
 been inscribed with extracts from the Book 
 of Rites, a lost work of Apollonius ; and 
 they were destroyed so as to put an end to 
 non-Christian beliefs and usages which had 
 gathered round them. Of the Renaissance 
 
14 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 writers who paid attention to Apollonius, 
 the most remarkable was naturally the 
 magic-loving and inquisitive Pico della 
 Mirandola who, like Baronius, opined that 
 the wonder-worker had made a pact with 
 Satan. Meric Casaubon, in his relation of 
 John Dee*s dealings with spirits, asserted 
 that the spirits with whom he had com- 
 merce, not Satan, gave Apollonius his 
 power : but this has not settled the matter. 
 Passing over Blount, with his friends and 
 foes, both English and French, and coming to 
 modern times, we find some writers following 
 Voltaire, and placing the miracles of both 
 Apollonius and Jesus in the same category, 
 while others went on maintaining that in so 
 far as Apollonius was not a myth he was 
 an impostor. Broadly speaking, the par- 
 tisans on both sides were equally uncritical, 
 and they simply allowed their prepossessions 
 for or against Christianity to determine their 
 attitude to Christianity's supposed rival. 
 
 In the middle of the nineteenth century 
 the most prevalent theory concerning the 
 
PREFACE 15 
 
 work of Philostratus was Baur*s. Baur, 
 followed by Zeller, held that the Life was 
 a "tendency-writing." The old opinion 
 that Philostratus had deliberately sought to 
 rival the Christian Gospels was adopted 
 by Cardinal Newman in one of the least 
 satisfactory of his writings ; and it was 
 much more fully set forth by T. W. 
 Allies in his Foundations of Christendom, 
 Later on, poor Apollonius fell among the 
 essayists and was adjudged a blackguard 
 and an impostor by J. A. Froude. At the 
 present day, the casual student is confronted 
 by a rich embarrassment of hypotheses. He 
 may believe, with Dr. Campbell, that Philo- 
 stratus has merely embellished and amplified 
 a partially truthful tradition ; or, with 
 Chassang,^ that the Life is a romanesque in 
 which, behind all the fond inventions, there 
 wanders the solid reality of a most original 
 peripatetic philosopher — un Dion Chrysostome 
 
 ^ A. Chassang, Apollonius de Tyane, sa Vie^ ses Voy- 
 ages, ses Prodigesy par Plnlostrate, etc. Paris, 1862. This 
 is one of the most notable works on the subject. 
 
i6 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 double de Plotin ou de Porphyre ; or, with 
 
 Professor MahafFy, who dissents from Baur 
 
 and Zeller, that we have to do with a mere 
 
 fairy tale, composed for the purpose of 
 
 painting an ideal sage, or a religious 
 
 counterpart to the fabulous history of 
 
 Alexander the Great ; or, with Eunape, 
 
 that Apollonius was something midway 
 
 between the gods and men ; or, with 
 
 Ammianus Marcellinus,that, like Pythagoras 
 
 and Socrates, he was a privileged mortal who 
 
 lived assisted by a familiar genius ; or, with 
 
 the abbe Freppel, that he was "a Don 
 
 Quixote of philosophy," Damis being his 
 
 Sancho Panza. 
 
 Meanwhile good progress has been made 
 
 in the dispassionate criticism, on modern 
 
 principles, of the text and its sources. The 
 
 text of Kayser (who, by the way, regards 
 
 the contents of the Life as fabulous) is the 
 
 best/ As for the sources, the most indus- 
 
 ^ Third Edition. Leipzig, 1870. This third edition 
 embodies the improvements of Westermann and of the 
 ItaHan brothers Piccolo. Kayser's Preface describes the 
 extant MSS. 
 
PREFACE 17 
 
 trious and sharp-eyed sifting of them so far 
 has been done by Jessen ;^ but there is room 
 for an industrious philologist with enough 
 sense of style to enable him to discrimi- 
 nate between Philostratus' own diction 
 and any older memorabilia of Apollonius 
 which may be preserved verbatim in the 
 Life. 
 
 From what has been said, it will be 
 apparent that the question of Apollonius is 
 almost wholly bound up with the question 
 of Philostratus. Outside the writings of 
 Philostratus, and the works to which they 
 have given rise, very few allusions to Apol- 
 lonius are to be found. It is true that 
 Appuleius spoke of him with respect, and 
 that Lucian, also writing in the second 
 century, spurned him as an impostor ; and 
 we have the assurance of Lampridius that the 
 
 1 J. Jessen, Apollonius von Tyana und sein Biograph 
 Philostratus. Hamburg, 1885. The British Museum 
 hbrarians have bound up the national copy of this work 
 along with a penny dreadful entitled The Life of Dick 
 Turpin^ Prince of Highwaymen, 
 
 B 
 
1 8 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 Emperor Alexander Severus placed in his 
 private chapel a statue of Apollonius along 
 with statues of Christ, Abraham, and 
 Orpheus. It seems also true that Marcus 
 Aurelius vowed a temple in his honour, 
 and that Hadrian, with reverent pomp, 
 deposited his writings in the splendid 
 palace at Antium, whither pilgrims flocked 
 daily in crowds to see them. But one 
 may fairly say that, without Philostratus, 
 Apollonius had survived merely as a shadow 
 of a shade. The credibility of Philo- 
 stratus is, therefore, a prime considera- 
 tion.^ 
 
 It was the Empress Domna Julia who set 
 Philostratus to work. This remarkable 
 woman, who deserves fuller recognition, 
 
 ^ Vopiscus, whose literary activity was seventy years 
 later than that of Philostratus, intended to write a life of 
 Apollonius (whom he regarded as more than a man), but 
 did not persevere. Tascius Victorianus, Nichomachus, 
 and the Egyptian epic-poet Soterichus are said to have 
 composed lives of the Tyanean ; but no traces of these 
 works remain. A reference in Dion Crassus is con- 
 temporary with Philostratus. 
 
PREFACE 19 
 
 was the daughter of Bassianus, priest of 
 the Sun at Emesa in Syria, Surrounded by 
 artists and men of letters, she dispensed 
 enlightened patronage to thought and learn- 
 ing.^ Paganism was making its last rally 
 against the new religion to which Constan- 
 tine, only ten years later, was destined to 
 surrender. Gibbon does not admit that the 
 Life of Apollonius of Tyana was intended as a 
 pagan stroke of offensive-defence, and those 
 who agree with him are entitled to their 
 opinion : but it is hard to believe that 
 Philostratus began his task without any 
 recollection of the Christian evangels. He 
 confesses that he had " embellished " the 
 materials out of which he pretended to have 
 built his work. These materials (excluding 
 four books on Apollonius by Maeraganes,^ 
 which Philostratus describes as untrust- 
 worthy) are said to have been the book of 
 
 ^ Like Blount, another sponsor of Apollonius, Domna 
 Julia committed suicide. 
 
 - There is a passing mention of Maeraganes' books 
 in Origen, Contra Celsum. 
 
20 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 Maximus of -/^gae/ where Apollonius spent 
 his early manhood, at the College of -^scu- 
 lapius, and a much more important account 
 of Apollonius' travels from the pen of his 
 disciple Damis. 
 
 If it be granted for the moment that 
 Damis and Maximus truly lived and 
 breathed, and that their manuscripts lay at 
 the elbow of Philostratus as he wrote, it 
 will still be evident that those who would 
 set up an historical Apollonius against the 
 historical Jesus are at a disadvantage. 
 Whatever may be believed as to a sup- 
 posed primitive Christian gospel, no open- 
 minded scholar can deny that the writings 
 ascribed to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, in 
 much the same form as we know them to- 
 day, were extant in the first century of the 
 Christian era : but, in the case of Apol- 
 
 1 Those who do not prefer to regard Apollonius of 
 .Tyana as a rival to Jesus of Nazareth will be glad to 
 learn that the college at JEg^e eventually became 
 Christian, and that the poor-sick were treated there 
 without money and without price. 
 
PREFACE 21 
 
 lonius, we have, at the best, an avowedly 
 embellished third-century redaction of con- 
 temporary records which have perished. It 
 is exactly as though our earliest Life of Jesus 
 of Nazareth should have been composed in 
 the same year as the Nicene Creed. Worse 
 still, there is no external evidence of the 
 existence of Damis and Maximus and their 
 writings ; and the internal evidence, if any, 
 stands suspect for the curious reason about 
 to be given. 
 
 One of the few extant works of Philo- 
 stratus is his Imagines^ which claims to be a 
 sort of catalogue raisonne to four and sixty 
 pictures in a villa at Naples.^ The book is 
 highly interesting as the earliest continuous 
 effort in art-criticism which has come down 
 to us : but, on grounds which cannot be 
 stated here, many students of Philostratus 
 have concluded that there was no such villa 
 and no such gallery of pictures. If this 
 conclusion be sound Philostratus was not 
 only the first art-critic, but also the first of 
 ^ There are French translations of the Ima^nes. 
 
22 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 those demure men of letters whose delight 
 is to play solemn hoaxes in which a list of 
 sham sources and authorities ushers in a 
 show of mock erudition and a pretence of 
 critical processes. In other words, if there 
 were no pictures at Naples there may have 
 been no Damis taking notes in the wake of 
 the shadowy Apollonius, and no Maximus 
 ransacking his memory in the College of 
 -^sculapius ; in which case the Apollonius 
 of Philostratus becomes an ingenious ex- 
 ample of literary confectionery, something 
 like the ox of barley and honey, sacrificed 
 by the Pythagorean Empedocles of Agri- 
 gentum, which Philostratus mentions in 
 the first chapter of the Life} It is fair to 
 add that the Imagines might never have 
 been impugned if a belief in the fabulous 
 character of the Life had not first established 
 
 1 The Life is one of the 269 books reviewed by 
 Photius of Constantinople in his precious Bibliotheca, 
 While denouncing the matter of the work as unedifying 
 fiction, Photius handsomely acknowledges its literary 
 charm. 
 
PREFACE 23 
 
 itself in its readers' heads : but the doubt 
 exists, with its proper arguments, and goes 
 to complicate one of the most alluring of 
 literary puzzles. That Philostratus was a 
 fanciful writer, hungry for the marvellous 
 and prone to fine writing, further appears 
 from his Eroica. Indeed, Chassang calls 
 the Eroica the key to the problem. 
 
 So much by way of introduction to the 
 case of Apollonius in general. And now 
 the reader will perhaps bear with a justifi- 
 cation of this little book in particular. As 
 Blount's translation is only an obsolete frag- 
 ment, and as Berwick's almost inaccessible 
 version contains a superabundance of mis- 
 renderings and lacks all the flavour of the 
 original. Dr. Campbell and I are wishful, either 
 by our own efforts or by stirring up some- 
 body better fitted for the task, to fill a gap 
 in English libraries with a more satisfactory 
 translation. Further, as the one problem 
 involves the other, we have in mind a trans- 
 lation of the Imagines (a book which has 
 
24 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 never been turned into English), accom- 
 panied by reproductions of such Pompeian 
 and other wall-paintings as may throw light 
 upon the text. But life is short ; and, as 
 every one knows who has made the experi- 
 ment, Philostratus is a troublesome author 
 to translate. We are, therefore, sending up 
 a ballon d^essai in the form of the present 
 volume, which is addressed to general 
 readers rather than to scholars who can 
 peruse Philostratus in his own Greek. 
 Should we find a sufficiently large public 
 interested in Apollonius and his biographer 
 we shall be encouraged to carry out our 
 plan. 
 
 In the following pages Dr. Campbell has 
 sought to recover Apollonius of Tyana from 
 the dust of controversy and to picture him 
 as he existed in the minds of his more rev- 
 erent and spiritually minded believers. 
 How far such an Apollonius is identical 
 with the mage who was certainly born in 
 Tyana, or how far he is a literary fiction, or 
 how far he is an ideal saint sublimated from 
 
PREFACE 25 
 
 the rarest aspirations of the finer spirits 
 in that pagan society which Christianity 
 had begun to leaven — these are polemics 
 from which Dr. Campbell has purposely 
 abstained. He has, however, rounded off 
 his short study by contrasting some of the 
 practices and doctrines of this Cappadocian, 
 who is well-nigh forgotten, with some words 
 and works of that Galilean who has con- 
 quered the world. 
 
 Ernest Oldmeadow. 
 
 Ju/y, 1908. 
 
APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 A STRANGE distinctive figure, clad in 
 white linen and not in garments wrought 
 of skins ; with feet unsandalled and with locks 
 unshorn ; austere, reserved, and of meagre 
 mien ; with eyes cast upon the ground as 
 was his manner, Apollonius of Tyana drew 
 to him, with something of a saint's attrac- 
 tion, all simple folk, and yet won as inti- 
 mates Emperors of Rome. 
 
 Through his love for all life and his swift 
 appreciation of the beauty of the human 
 form, he early drew nigh to the sufferings 
 of the body and became acquainted with the 
 sufferings of the soul. He sought to heal, 
 or at least to soothe, some of the distresses, 
 physical and spiritual, of poor humanity ; 
 and to such a singular degree of skilfulness 
 26 
 
APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 27 
 
 did he attain in the healing arts of his day 
 that even the sacred oracles of JEgx and of 
 Delphi, pronouncing him more than mortal, 
 referred the distempered body and the 
 smitten soul to him for relief, knowing 
 that from his very presence proceeded a 
 peculiar virtue, a benign influence, an 
 almost theurgic power. 
 
 By reason also of his devotion to a lofty 
 philosophy, he, at an unusually early age, 
 elected to be poor when the world laboured 
 to be rich ; and he learned to esteem 
 temperance when men would consider 
 luxury alone. As a youth, he broke away 
 from the status of family and city when 
 society was tribal and communal, preferring 
 — at critical and even at ordinary periods — 
 to live alone and to think alone and ulti- 
 mately, as it happened, to die alone. 
 
 By years of silence and contemplation, by 
 extensive travel, and by a continuous spirit- 
 ual and worldly experience he deepened and 
 developed, in no minute measure, an origi- 
 nally powerful and intense personality ; and 
 
28 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 so it was that at length he became the 
 admiration not only of all countries through 
 which he passed, but of the whole wide 
 Roman and Hellenic world. Cities sent 
 envoys and embassages to him decreeing 
 him public favours ; monarchs bestowed 
 special dignities upon him, counting him 
 worthy to be their counsellor ; incense was 
 burnt before his altars ; and after his death 
 divine honours were paid to his images, which 
 had been erected, with great enthusiasm, in 
 all the temples of the gods. Nor did his 
 fame evanesce. All down the ages his name 
 has carried in it something of a hurricane ; 
 for speculative critics of both early and latter 
 days have thought to find in the life of this 
 exceptional character a parallel to the life of 
 Christ, and to ground an argument thereon 
 against the supernatural claims of the Son of 
 Mary. Hence for centuries even the name 
 of Apollonius was odious to Christians, for 
 it seemed the very Gospel of the Son of 
 God was at stake ; and Christian apologists, 
 on their part, in self-defence (such is human 
 
APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 29 
 
 nature) were not lacking to attack fiercely 
 their adversaries' champion and to denounce 
 him as little better than an impostor, a 
 sorcerer, and a magician. On this account 
 they have generally failed to understand the 
 man. They have lacked, at least in their 
 combative approach to him, that sweet affec- 
 tion for signal worth, that gracious patience 
 and generous sympathy for nobleness which 
 is absolutely necessary to comprehend a new 
 or startling character or mode of life. 
 
 Moreover, they have entirely overlooked 
 the society and culture from which the man 
 took his origin and of which he was a 
 product — that mellowing and, even then, 
 ancient Greek culture, decadent, no doubt, 
 yet still influential, of which at its more 
 perfect epoch we in our age can catch but 
 some partial ideas from the marvellous 
 designs stamped on a Macedon coin, the 
 elegant shape of some beautiful Phocian 
 brazier or Attic tripod, from the satisfying 
 and grand grace-of-line still existing in 
 some old Athenian temple, or in passionate 
 
30 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 drama and profound philosophy — that cult- 
 ure, in a word, which has shaped and 
 informed the whole world's art. 
 
 So the dust of centuries of controversy- 
 has obscured this wonderful personality. A 
 name which once illuminated with a singular 
 splendour the mighty Roman Empire has 
 been transmitted to us dimmed, if not alto- 
 gether obscured, by uncouth hands ; and 
 there comes to us with an increasingly 
 regretful surprise the knowledge that we 
 can never now quite appraise to its correct 
 value the beauty and spirituality of the life 
 of one whose heart was with the hearts of 
 men and whose mind moved among celestial 
 things ; whose native city was accounted, 
 for his sake, a sacred city, a city of refuge, a 
 privileged city, one that enjoyed the peculiar 
 right of electing its own magistrates and 
 enacting its own decrees, and whose coins 
 were struck, in consequence of her son's 
 greatness, with the proud inscription : Tvava 
 lepa, aarvXo?, avrovojuLog. 
 
II 
 
 THE BIRTH AND YOUTH OF 
 APOLLONIUS 
 
 TN the dawn of one of those consummate 
 summer days which pass so calmly and 
 serenely by in Hellenic lands that even a 
 rustic Cappadocian might well conceive 
 them to be the immense slow-moving 
 thoughts of Zeus, Apollonius first breathed 
 this old world's air in the same year (accord- 
 ing to the latest computations) as the Babe 
 of Bethlehem. A wondrous child surely — 
 born at early morn, just at the time when, 
 doubtless, the finely fashioned feet of the 
 Sun -God fevered the mountain tops and 
 his purple mantle trailed gloriously through 
 the dark vales. For in the imaginative 
 appreciation of a later day (the only 
 31 
 
32 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 original appreciation,^ based on fragmentary 
 facts and floating fancies, which has come 
 down the centuries to us) it is recorded 
 that Apollo was his reputed father and 
 that birth was given to him in the flowering 
 fields around Tyana. Thither his mother, 
 attended by her maidens, had gone forth to 
 gather the gentle buds still sealed with dew, 
 plucking, so to say, the sweet blossom of 
 maternity to the joyous chants of swans, 
 sacred birds consecrated to the God of Light, 
 which with glad rush of wing and vent of 
 voice circled the mead wherein she lay, pre- 
 saging, as it would seem, in some sort, the 
 perfect purity of the man that was to be. 
 
 The child, of flower-like form and grace, 
 seemed as he grew to be endowed with such 
 singular bodily health and bright bloom of 
 countenance that the hearts of mothers of 
 other children, less favoured than he, would 
 be ever touched with an envious wistfulness ; 
 for there was about him such a pure and 
 delightful beauty as, in their eyes, could 
 1 Philostratus' Life of Apolknius, written about 216 a.d. 
 
THE BIRTH OF APOLLONIUS 33 
 
 only have been given him by a signal favour 
 of the Gods. 
 
 To the natural delight of the growing 
 lad in things comely and cheerful about him, 
 and to his peculiar esteem for all that was 
 externally bright and affluent in nature or 
 man, there was allied, at least during his 
 formative years, a profound disquiet, an 
 almost visible distress, a kind of revulsion 
 from excessive sympathy, as indeed it was, 
 at faces or forms tinted with the wan hues 
 of pain or decay, as at something lacking in 
 the fulness of life or the perfection of form 
 or natural grace. Meshed in a strangely 
 intimate way with his capacity for enjoy- 
 ment was a certain faculty for fear or grief. 
 The keen joy, for example, which he evinced 
 in the fresh vitality of spring or in the full 
 strength of summer would be ever chas- 
 tened with the anticipation of inevitable 
 change, of sunless hours and of darkness. 
 The fading of a flower or the inconsolable 
 crying of a little child would be, to his boyish 
 mind, the shadow, faint perhaps, yet certain, 
 c 
 
34 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 of the deeper and more enduring darkness 
 which is Death. 
 
 He had not, of course, as yet attained 
 to the estimation of the grandeur and dis- 
 tinction of Death, its unique and supreme 
 beauty, its natural loveliness when considered 
 as part of the economy of Life. But as he 
 grew in years it was given him to catch 
 something of its sweetness as of the perfume 
 of some hidden flower. 
 
 One may perhaps venture to indicate 
 certain influences which tended to develop 
 in Apollonius, as he advanced into manhood, 
 that lofty reverence in which he held all life, 
 and deepened, as a consequence, his dislike to 
 all that apparently degraded or impaired it ; 
 certain sources, as they undoubtedly were, 
 from which he drew the inspiration and the 
 enthusiasm of his life, which enabled him to 
 catch the vision of a deathless destiny and, 
 even, at length (Oh happy man !) to make 
 his life conformable to his dream. 
 
 First in fundamental importance of these 
 three persuasions was that blithe spirit of 
 
THE BIRTH OF APOLLONIUS 35 
 
 swift and joyful elevation, yet of swift and 
 delicate melancholy, which was essentially 
 Greek, and which pervaded Greece and the 
 Grecian world : not, of course, that supreme 
 Hellenism which for a short season, some 
 centuries previous, had soared serene and 
 grand beyond the range of all vain question- 
 ings and unrest, beyond all that would in 
 any way limit or diffuse consummate con- 
 ception or execution ; but that later spirit of 
 aftermost efflorescence or extreme maturity — 
 that decadence^ as we would call it — still 
 bright and glorious, but suggestive of 
 oblique suns in the August month, when 
 the inevitable fatigue of the year's glory is 
 already in the air, and when the shadow of 
 shortening days already steals, like a grief, 
 into the face of heaven. Native and not 
 alien to this blithe and buoyant spirit and to 
 this soft and tender melancholy was the 
 genius of Apollonius. For the Greeks were 
 really at heart a wistful people, shy in very 
 deed of the sorrows of life and timid of the 
 terrors of death. They turned ever in- 
 
36 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 stinctively to the light ; loving the glad 
 sunshine and the gleaming smile — for shadow 
 and tears had no inherent loveliness that 
 they should desire them. Thus they would 
 incline from all that would sadden or depress. 
 They saw the sombre side of things, but 
 they would ever avert their gaze. They 
 would be at pains, even, to change a sad tale 
 into a sweet myth : a murdered youth they 
 would translate into a bright star or a 
 beautiful flower ; and the very Erynnides or 
 Furies they softened into the Eumenides or 
 Merciful Ones. 
 
 But this fundamental and emotional trait 
 in the young man's character was powerfully 
 acted upon by that new influence which was 
 invading the whole Hellenist world, and 
 which was displacing, or at least transform- 
 ing, the ancient faiths which were exclu- 
 sively local, tribal, or civic. The old academic 
 systems of Zeno and Epicurus had ceased 
 to touch the heart, and the older rational 
 systems of Aristotle and Plato were comfort- 
 less and cold. Scepticism had clamoured 
 
THE BIRTH OF APOLLONIUS 37 
 
 awhile for support, but the souls of men 
 had shrunk from it. And now from the 
 shining East new worships and new faiths 
 came streaming in with a sense of sacred, 
 almost sacramental, mystery and inspiration :^ 
 worships which, beneath all multiplicity, 
 made for unity, and which, beneath all 
 variety, yearned for God ; attractive wor- 
 ships, with rites more magnificent and orgies 
 more august than any previously known 
 or than that offered by the simple service 
 or by the quiet prayer presented to Here 
 or Athene ; worships vivified with en- 
 thusiasm and inspired with poetry, and 
 which, notwithstanding at times gaudy and 
 meretricious shows, wild and uncontrolled 
 revivals, and mysteries mingled with debas- 
 ing extravagances, yet contained the eternal 
 truths of vital religion wherein was liberty 
 for the soul and a new way for the spirit, 
 where the hithertofore prisoned and pur- 
 blind being could soar into a loftier and a 
 
 ^ Cf. Professor MahafFy's Greek World under Roman 
 Sway (Macmillan), pp. 181-266, to which I am indebted. 
 
38 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 rarer air, and thence, in ascension, could 
 descry afar off the marvellous vision of an 
 endless life beyond this earthly day. And 
 further, in these new faiths, appeal was made 
 not to the confined or local, civil or tribal 
 cults — cults that were purely individualist 
 and only sundered man from man — but 
 to society at large, to all humanity, to 
 the whole world, and indicated the unity 
 and brotherhood of man and the unity and 
 fatherhood of God. Hence when the dulcet 
 sound of the sweet clanging cymbals and 
 of the soft reeds of the Phrygian Cybele 
 warmed the air, or the matinal chant ot 
 Mithra and the nocturnal note of Serapis 
 stirred it strangely, the flexible and acutely 
 syncretic mind of the Greek comprehended 
 the new voice and received the new hope ; 
 and Apollonius, feeling his spiritual thirst 
 assuaged and his yearning stanched, though 
 preserving the older aristocratic forms and 
 institutions and conservative beliefs, opened 
 his heart to what was best in the new faiths 
 and accepted them, not merely for the poetical 
 
THE BIRTH OF APOLLONIUS 39 
 
 and enthusiastic elements which predomin- 
 ated, but for the active virtues, the practical 
 conduct, which took form in a unitive life, 
 at once common, corporate, and continuous. 
 Lastly, came an actual experience which 
 consolidated and fused the otherwise un- 
 fixed and nebulous thoughts of the sensi- 
 tive youth : a delightful visit of four years* 
 duration to the cool groves and silent 
 temple of ^Esculapius at JEgx. Hither 
 he had come in the hope of wooing or 
 winning some of the reluctant and elusive 
 secrets of Nature or the God, by means of 
 which he would thenceforth be enabled to 
 approach with a sympathy that would 
 soothe and heal the ageless misery of man 
 or uphold for a time his agony that endures. 
 Here in this solemn temple, reared in all 
 the austere magnificence of Greek concep- 
 tion great with Greek restraint, he became 
 so devoted to the Master and so earnest in 
 his service that it was said the God, in his 
 clemency, found peculiar pleasure in per- 
 forming many and strange cures in the 
 
40 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 presence of so faithful a witness as his 
 servitor ; and here as one of a great com- 
 munity of devout men, bound together by 
 a moral discipline, possessing a common 
 rule, and, as it might appear to him, enjoy- 
 ing a privileged relationship with the God 
 that medicined the bodies and souls of sick 
 and sorrowful men, he saw and learned in 
 actual practice the ordered^ as well as the 
 corporate, life. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE 
 
 TN his daily occupation of restoring the 
 disordered body and the disarrayed mind, 
 and in his continual contact with the great 
 healing phenomena of Nature, problems 
 and profound questions, which had in earlier 
 years presented themselves incidentally to 
 the mind of the young disciple, now gradu- 
 ally became more recurrent and insistent. 
 But an event which about this time took 
 place suddenly fanned these smouldering 
 speculations into full flame. 
 
 One placid evening, while the memory of 
 the day's splendid rule still lived in the 
 cool and silent air, a messenger, compassed 
 with all the customary signs of grief, was 
 seen slowly wending his way up the long 
 avenue of cypresses which led to the great 
 41 
 
42 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 court of the sacred college. A certain faint 
 odour of sweet incense in the air and an 
 occasional splash of some gentle fountain 
 spoke, no doubt, to him of devotion and 
 purity, and of that higher and mysterious 
 Power who here deigned to heal all the 
 maladies of the soul and body. He asked 
 for one Apollonius of Tyana, and having 
 been conducted into one of the ante- 
 chambers, the walls of which were coloured 
 and carved with the history of the Son of 
 Apollo, he presented to the youthful 
 student, who had silently entered, a letter 
 with the sad intelligence that his father had 
 suddenly died. The painful news so shook 
 his being that it was some time before he 
 could control his emotion ; and even for 
 many days thereafter, neither the effluence 
 of his priestly ministrations nor the absolv- 
 ing calm of the sacred precincts could still 
 his mind. The thought of the old home 
 with all its sweet associations and his child- 
 hood came to him weighted with a sorrow 
 and a regret which he could scarcely bear. 
 
THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE 43 
 
 But above all broke out before his mental 
 vision the great question of Life and Death. 
 Before it was to him but a purely philo- 
 sophic or academic question. Now it be- 
 came one of supreme and intensely personal 
 and practical importance. It rose and de- 
 manded answer, at once immediate, clear 
 and decisive. 
 
 In common with all Hellenist culture 
 Apollonius had esteemed the more beauti- 
 ful and joyous aspects of life — delicate 
 shapes and lovely forms, lines that would 
 almost seem to be lyrical, and colours that 
 would almost seem to sing. But as he 
 looked on all things he saw that nothing 
 remained. Nothing lived. Udvra pel OvSh 
 fxevei. Everywhere there was disintegration 
 and decay ; and that not always of a benign 
 and gentle, but often of a violent and even 
 cruel, character. Something, sooner or later, 
 would cut athwart the sweet skein of exist- 
 ing things. The flower that had but blown 
 yesterday, and which would have glowed 
 to-day with a surpassing beauty, was last 
 
44 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 night shattered by heavy rain. That little 
 head of golden curls, which last week was 
 a glory to behold, was now but a painful 
 memory in a mother's broken heart. That 
 lovely city by the sea, that city of song and 
 laughter, of precious stones and fine linen, 
 of rich colour and incense, in one hour, had 
 come to nought, and was desolate and full 
 of grief. Nothing was sure. To-morrow 
 always lay behind the door of Death. But 
 whether the Difficult Day came by degrees 
 or of a sudden, in silence or in sound, the 
 Horror inevitably fell ; until it seemed that 
 behind all Life, whether in the shadow of 
 night or in the blaze of midday sun, there 
 ever followed " Murder with his silent 
 bloody feet." He himself had been struck 
 with it even as a lad. He could no doubt 
 recall many a Spring when the Breath of 
 Life itself appeared to inspire the whole 
 Earth, just at the time when troops of 
 Cappadocian youths would assemble to pay 
 their customary honours to Demeter. At- 
 tracted first by the sound of their simple 
 
THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE 45 
 
 hymn, which was chanted alternately by the 
 rustic companies, as they moved forward in 
 measured and rhythmic steps of stately pro- 
 cession or solemn dance, he would draw 
 near to look with a sort of natural curiosity. 
 But he would grow strangely troubled as 
 suddenly, in a lull between the antiphonal 
 refrain, he would hear the piteous bleating 
 of a little lamb, and anon he would see it, 
 a victim dedicated to the Goddess, led thrice 
 around the tender crops, clad in rich vest- 
 ments and garlanded with flowers ; and his 
 soul would shudder at the sight, and the 
 pools of pity in his heart would tremble as 
 he saw that the life which he loved was 
 about to be quenched. 
 
 And now at a later age, when his sensi- 
 tive intellect had received an acute emotion 
 and sudden stimulus in the great bereave- 
 ment he had suffered, the old problem of 
 Light and Darkness, of Flux and Repose, 
 of the launching Lightning Flash and the 
 Voice that roars after it in the Dark, pre- 
 sented itself to him with inevitable urgency. 
 
46 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 Brooding over the many speculative 
 systems of philosophical culture, he felt, to a 
 disturbing degree, the unsatisfying spirit of 
 their results. 
 
 Beneath the countless combinations under 
 which Life was manifest ; beneath the per- 
 petual cycle of Birth, Growth, Death, and 
 Dissolution ; beneath the chastening separa- 
 tive elements of time and place, the gulf 
 betwixt soul and soul, the infinite distance 
 between God and Man — was there co-ordi- 
 nation or unity ? Was there a golden 
 thread to be found to lead him out of this 
 vast and intricate Daedalism, this agony 
 that was ageless, this misery that endured ? 
 For long days and through weary nights he 
 sought, in severe intellectual contemplation, 
 some answer to his questionings ; and partly 
 through that idealism which was ever an 
 element in his character and partly through 
 that activity which was purely physical and 
 which his physical powers demanded, his 
 thoughts went back to the old, dim, theo- 
 logical and supra-sensible doctrines of Py tha- 
 
THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE 47 
 
 goras — vague, of course, and very far-off, 
 yet containing within themselves principles 
 suggestive of harmony and unity ;^ and in 
 the life of the Sage himself there was the 
 example of actual and real behaviour in 
 every-day life. 
 
 But meantime the affairs of his family 
 required his presence in his native city ; and 
 so, after some days of silent meditation, 
 and pondering still, with an entirely quick- 
 ened interest, all the sayings of the great 
 sages on the strange and baffling Mystery 
 of Death, he set out for his own country ; 
 bidding farewell for a while to the peaceful 
 College and carrying with him the regrets 
 and sympathies of the whole ^sculapian 
 brotherhood. 
 
 On reaching Tyana he found that his 
 property (for he was not yet of age) had 
 been seized by his elder brother, who, with 
 no eye of love, beheld him, as coming to 
 demand and claim his own. But Apollonius, 
 feeling it to be his vocation to renew the 
 
 ^ VUe MahafFy's Greek Worlds etc., already cited. 
 
48 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 sacrifice of his affections and to dedicate 
 himself afresh to sacred Philosophy, with 
 sweet words and kind looks, bestowed half 
 of his inheritance on his brother, and by 
 this act reclaimed him from an evil life : for 
 in very sooth the good man loves most 
 and suffers most and most forgives. 
 
 Having thus for a time freed himself 
 from worldly cares, he answered with ex- 
 ceeding joy the call of his heart ; and with- 
 drawing to the solitudes of Cappadocia and 
 Cilicia he sought to honour the Silent Muse 
 and by an actual example to place life above 
 philosophy or reasoning — in a word to put 
 his philosophical theories into real practice. 
 Here for five years he preserved unbroken 
 silence, contemplating divine things, until it 
 almost seemed that his life had become one 
 long colloquy with God. And here, in the 
 deep shadows of the Taurus range or in the 
 dark pass of Pylae, by the bleak and lonely 
 Euxine Sea or by the sinuous bendings of 
 the Halys River, he found the immense 
 Peace of Nature and took it into the sane- 
 
THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE 49 
 
 tuary of his being. Welcoming it there, pre- 
 serving it there, almost worshipping it there 
 as the presence of a God in the shrine of his 
 soul, he learnt so to identify himself with 
 that Spirit, not in a momentary participation 
 or fitful approach, but in the continuous 
 communion which was his life, that it never 
 thereafter ceased to sanctify and control his 
 whole existence, passing out into all his days 
 to come and projecting itself into every 
 future thought and act, however trivial, 
 absorbing and informing each with a des- 
 tinative calm. In following this mode of 
 life Apollonius was not altogether alone. 
 He was merely adopting for his own re- 
 quirements what had already become a fairly 
 common custom throughout Greece. City 
 life, in that old land of liberty, had grown so 
 exacting and so full of stress that a great 
 re-action had set in for a return to Nature — 
 to the simple life. It was then something 
 as it is to-day in England, where all the 
 activities of life have centred into huge and 
 hustling cities, in which the struggle to live 
 
so APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 is becoming fiercer every day, and the 
 piteous cry of the weaker ones already fills 
 the air : " Back to the land. Back to 
 Nature. Back to the simple life." In the 
 days of Apollonius, then, we find persons 
 casting off the bonds of urban life and seek- 
 ing, instead, the freedom and the calm of 
 fields and forests ; and there are many 
 instances of the extremes to which this life 
 was carried by those whose one desire was 
 to escape the weary world. 
 
 The fame of so earnest a Solitary passed 
 soon through Cappadocia, Cilicia and Pam- 
 phylia ; and those who were weary with the 
 weight of life, and those who were sad with 
 Faith's perplexities, came, like pilgrims, to 
 the haunts of the Tyanean. " Wouldest 
 thou but talk with Apollonius, thy relief is 
 sure" So spake the sacred Oracle of MgXy 
 and relying upon words spoken from the 
 very tripod of the God, multitudes came to 
 him for comfort and for help — for the days 
 of a good man are swift — some to copy the 
 manner of his life, taking some of his 
 
THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE 51 
 
 heavenly acts or virtues to polish them, so 
 to say, in their own persons ; others, again, 
 more pious, believing in his thaumaturgic 
 powers, would come that he might pray over 
 them, at least silently. As it is with us 
 to-day, so it was with them then, it is only 
 he who doubts miracle must cease to pray, 
 for when one prays one asks a miracle : but 
 all, even the most wretched, wished to see 
 him and, if possible, to converse with him, 
 but at all events to be near him, for they 
 instinctively felt, as we do in our time also, 
 that in the presence of what is great and 
 good there goes out a hidden virtue for the 
 weak. 
 
 So numerous and so intent did earnest 
 seekers become, that a proverb swiftly ran 
 amongst the inhabitants of those places, as 
 they beheld the ceaseless streams of votaries 
 hastening hither and thither through the 
 land that they might be entered in his 
 discipleship : " Whither run ye," it went ; 
 " whither run ye so swift ? Is it to see the 
 young man ? " And the young man, 
 
52 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 possessing this singular quality of attraction, 
 was so touched with inexpressible com- 
 passion for the countless souls, burdened 
 with spiritual distress or bodily infirmity, 
 that, though in no ways breaking through 
 his self-ordained restrictions, he would 
 often silently enfold in his thin palms the 
 pained hand of another until, through the 
 very sympathy of contact and tenderness of 
 touch, it would appear that the burden of 
 sorrow had passed away and the physical 
 suffering had ceased to be ; or again, upon 
 some other occasion, stretching forth his 
 white hands over some afflicted face, he 
 would say nothing, but with eyes com- 
 passionate and dim would speak with tears, 
 " showing kind thoughts in symbol." 
 
 Something so full of grace and sweet, we 
 are told, was in his manner of expressing 
 his thoughts that his very eyes and his 
 hands and the motions of his head would 
 make significant answer to whatever was 
 said by those who sought his counsel or his 
 help. 
 
THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE 53 
 
 During the earlier part of this great 
 period of silent reflection, when Loneliness 
 and Silence first made for him unbroken 
 paths to God, the mind of Apollonius must 
 have dwelt long on the various harmonies 
 of Day and Night, the moving rhythms of 
 Summer and Winter, and all the recurrent 
 motifs in Life and Death, which made the 
 whole Universe seem Music — religious 
 music with an austere and deep reserve. 
 
 It is, of course, quite impossible for us 
 now, after two thousand years, to know, not 
 to say, to precise, all the various searchings 
 of the mind of this son of Pythagoras 
 during these years of secret communing. 
 Like the "pious poet," in Tristesse de la 
 Lune^ into the hollow of whose hand the 
 moon had dropped a pale tear, irised like a 
 piece of opal with her own reflections, he 
 has hidden the lovely pearl-like secret in 
 his heart far from the eyes of our day ; but 
 at least we may conjecture the movements 
 
 1 One of Charles Baudelaire's poems in Les Fleurs du 
 Mai (Calmann-Levy. Paris). 
 
54 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 of his mind, as following the mystic 
 measures and inward music of his great 
 master, and studying, in his own vital ex- 
 periences, his exquisite science of Harmony 
 and Law, Proportion and Number, he 
 arrived gradually at the conception of the 
 abstract Unity of God. Ideas which had 
 formerly met and long struggled within his 
 soul, and problems in Life and Philosophy 
 which long had seemed irreconcilable, now 
 appeared to harmonise and resolve in the 
 new Synthesis ; for he saw — indistinctly at 
 first, but nevertheless with an increasing 
 clearness — beneath the multiplicity of gods, 
 beneath all gods, but one God, and in all 
 their various rites and worships but the 
 Protean shapes of one Divinity ; and also 
 beneath the multiplicity of life, beneath all 
 life, but one Life — Life deathless and strong 
 — the Life the Gods or rather the God en- 
 joyed in full, the Life Man partook of in 
 part. He felt that under the superficial 
 aspect of all life ; beneath its fleeting forms 
 and changing colours, melodies, and per- 
 
THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE $5 
 
 fumes ; beneath the various and ever fugi- 
 tive phases or states which mortals name 
 Birth, Growth, Decay, Death, and the like, 
 was the basal Life-stream, the eternal Life- 
 force in ceaseless energy, on the surface of 
 which he himself existed for a moment, 
 participating for that moment, in some 
 measure, in its vitality. So beneath all life 
 there was one Life. Though men died, yet 
 there lived the mighty dead, inasmuch as 
 Life and Death grew out of the one Stem. 
 There was Life deeper, more intimate than 
 that whereof men knew — a Life which 
 bound in one the living and the dead ; a 
 Life which was the Life of the Eternal God. 
 And since all life was one, the human soul 
 was linked to the Divine by identity of 
 Substance, the Ethereal Light Substance, 
 which Apollonius conceived to be the 
 Essence of the Deity, and which he believed 
 was shared, in a lesser or greater degree, 
 by the soul that is good. So he, devoted 
 to the service of the divine, believed that 
 he himself was in a sense divine, and in a 
 
56 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 sense God. The lesser or greater degree 
 of deification depended entirely upon him- 
 self, who could annihilate it by an evil life 
 or could develop it by a pure and excellent 
 one. Exceptional holiness would produce 
 exceptional wisdom ; and exceptional wisdom 
 would produce exceptional fulness of Life. 
 Hence, he appraised the necessity for the 
 uplifted life, the life free from all excess or 
 intemperance, the ascetic life, keeping the 
 custody of the senses, guarding the gravity 
 of the outer man, presenting sweetness of 
 manner to all and severity towards himself, 
 refraining from destroying any life what- 
 ever, on account of its inestimable value, 
 and even refusing to eat flesh or to drink 
 wine lest such an act would profane, though 
 but in a minor degree, what was after all to 
 him the only true temple in all the world — 
 the temple of the human body. Thus the 
 new Life — a nuova vita — opened out before 
 him, broadening ever more and more and 
 demanding in the devious byways, no 
 less than in the main avenue, of his life 
 
THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE 57 
 
 a care and attention which he had thereto- 
 fore not even suspected. O fair white 
 Hands, how can you now touch feet that 
 are foul ? O gentle Eyes, bright with the 
 burning breath of an unimaginable beauty, 
 how can you bear to gaze on souls that are 
 deformed ? Why do you now seek for 
 faces that are tinted with the wan hues of 
 pain or decay as at something lacking in 
 the fulness of life or the perfection of 
 form ? 
 
 In every dead rose there is the remem- 
 brance of the colour of the Dawn. In 
 every death-bell the memorare of the Angelus ; 
 and in the mystery of Death is wrapped 
 the mystery of immortal Love. And so 
 it was that by the method of Pythagoras, 
 of him who had attuned the ears of 
 men to measured movement and ordered 
 melody, the formerly insoluble mystery of 
 sorrow and suffering seemed to clear, and 
 the early difficulty of decay and death to 
 melt away. These, heretofore, seemed out 
 of place in the economy of life. Now 
 
58 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 they had their rightful setting there. There 
 was the divine necessity of death. There 
 was also the divine necessity of suffering. 
 Aei iraOelv. Aei airapprjcraarOai kavrov. He 
 must renounce this fugitive phase that men 
 name life in order to gain the fulness of 
 the endless and fundamental Life. And in 
 this renunciation he would find increase of 
 virtue. Virtus vulnere virescit. 
 
 In his younger days he had instinctively 
 sought Good. When, at times, he joined 
 in the solemn Olaa-oL and sacred opyewveg 
 how many a secret joy had he not experi- 
 enced, as in some marvellously rich moments 
 of supreme adoration he had felt himself, 
 as it would seem to him, seized and flooded 
 with an inexpressible measure of the Divine 
 Light-Substance, with a sense of a Presence 
 that could only be of God ! But now 
 there must be also the more strenuous 
 hours, the days that would be difficult, the 
 years that would be dark. Strenuous, 
 difficult, and dark they might be, but in the 
 arid wastes he at least would now see 
 
THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE 59 
 
 streams of waters bursting forth, and where 
 desert places were, there would be pools 
 moving with the music of tall reeds and 
 green grass. A highway would be there 
 and a way. A way called the way of holi- 
 ness, where the unclean in heart and lips 
 could not pass, but where the pure in heart, 
 though simple, could not lose his way or 
 err. 
 
 There is a picture in the Louvre which, 
 though unfinished, is so graciously and so 
 subtly conceived that some have, not in- 
 judiciously, ascribed it to Leonardo da 
 Vinci, that master of complex meanings and 
 strangely implicated thoughts in line and 
 colour. It is entitled A Bacchus, Far 
 away, through a liquid splendour of midday 
 heat and mist, peers a low but massive 
 mountain. Midway in heaven's high blue 
 a slender birch hangs out its delicacies of 
 silvery foliage, floating all tremulous and 
 pale. On a nearer, though still distant, 
 slope, a dappled deer with lifted antlers 
 scents the air ; and the green sward close 
 
6o APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 by is bright with flowers. But in the cool 
 shade of a rich brown bank is seated one — 
 prominent and grand — whose splendid and 
 naked loveliness is a delight to see. His 
 eyes, deep, dark and purple-warm, are those 
 of a god. A god's, too, his brow, decked 
 with the vine-leaf. The Bacchic thyrsus lies 
 along his curved arm. His countenance is 
 earnest. His gaze intense. He wins your 
 attention — but only to divert it. With long 
 and fascinating forefinger he points invit- 
 ingly from the sunlit champaign to some- 
 thing dark, far-off and unknown. Then 
 in some unimaginable way the loin-cloth 
 of leopard's fur becomes a girdle of 
 camel's hair ; the slanting thyrsus a desert 
 staff; and the form of earnest entreaty 
 a prophet. Surely it is the Baptist who, 
 turning his back upon the sunlit world, 
 would have you know that more enduring 
 joys lie beyond that impenetrable darkness 
 towards which he points. And well might 
 this canvas depict Apollonius of Tyana 
 during the period of his reclusion in the fairer 
 
THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE 61 
 
 fields of silent Cappadocia, directing, so to 
 say, the passer-by or devoted inquirer away 
 from the wearying brightness and passing 
 pleasures of his ephemeral day to the mystery 
 of a peace far off and unknown, and only to 
 be attained by passing through the shadows 
 and severities of life. 
 
IV 
 
 THE ACTIVE LIFE 
 
 1I>UT now for him the contemplative life 
 had ceased. The active was to begin. 
 The long period of extreme mental tension 
 had ended. A fresh mode of life was to 
 be undertaken. 
 
 Some say that those long years of severe 
 self-restraint formed the appointed initiation 
 into the Pythagorean brotherhood. We can 
 find no organised Pythagorean society, no 
 actual brotherhood, into which at the time 
 Apollonius was received. On the contrary, 
 we find him then Master : a follower indeed 
 of Pythagoras, but yet a Master. He 
 calls disciples : they follow. He commands : 
 they obey. 
 
 He was already famous. Renowned for 
 his skill in the intricate laws of ritual and 
 62 
 
THE ACTIVE LIFE 63 
 
 the hieratic mysteries, he was yet more 
 celebrated for the spiritual heights and lofty 
 mental planes to which he had attained. 
 His speech too had in it a kind of celestial 
 eloquence, so excellent indeed and so 
 weighted with rich thought that, it is said, 
 his very words were collected as in chalices 
 out of which all who would quenched their 
 thirst ; and the graces of his person were so 
 attractive that they were even remarkable in 
 a land where beauty of form or address was 
 the common property of the race. 
 
 Yet there were deeper excellences to be 
 acquired, wider aims to be achieved, higher 
 powers to be attained. Whither then would 
 he go ? To Greece, the home of all culture, 
 the hearth whereon the fire of faith and 
 science had been kindled and had flamed ? 
 No, not now. Some centuries ago, if he 
 had then lived, he might have looked to 
 Athens or to Corinth. But not now. For 
 with the Roman conquest of Greece, Mace- 
 donia and Asia Minor, the fairer religions 
 of Greece had become degraded to a con- 
 
64 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 siderable extent by the materialistic Latin 
 thought. Even then, in Apollonius*s time, 
 Hellenic religion was vastly higher than 
 Roman. It always was. The Romans never 
 possessed a true religious sense. A hard 
 and narrow ceremonialism satisfied them. 
 They produced no legends. They evolved 
 no myths. They never even conceived of 
 Gods. They made no representations of 
 them. They worshipped they knew not 
 what. Such they were in earlier times. 
 Such they were really still. The Greeks, on 
 the other hand, were by nature devout and 
 imaginative. Their religions were expansive, 
 flexible, adaptable. They marked the spi- 
 ritual forces behind the natural phenomena. 
 They conceived of these forces as deities ; 
 and they gave them form in metal and stone 
 and clay. The Greek artist pursued these 
 conceptions ; and his sculptured or molten 
 figures were no mere idols, but the repre- 
 sentations of the mysterious Powers behind 
 the natural objects of sense. Stand to-day 
 before a marble statue of some noble Posei- 
 
THE ACTIVE LIFE 65 
 
 don or Glaucus, and you too will seem to 
 hear the surging of the great waters in those 
 ears, and you too will see all the ocean 
 floating in those eyes. The Greeks believed 
 in these forces. The Romans did not. The 
 Greek approached them with head uncovered. 
 The Roman refused to bare his head. The 
 sons of Italy, if they prayed at all, prayed 
 for such solid blessings as food and land and 
 money. The sons of Greece sought for 
 moral force and spiritual excellence ; for the 
 Eastern counted on a future existence, the 
 Western only on the present. 
 
 Hence one of the results of the Roman 
 conquest and her sway was to lower and 
 materialise Greek spiritual thought. 
 
 It may be well to qualify here the word 
 " religion " as used in regard to the old 
 Hellenic world. Religion, as we know it — 
 the worship of a Supreme Being, ineffable, in- 
 visible, incomprehensible and eternal — was 
 then non-existent. Even in the period of the 
 highest culture it did not exist. Nay, it was 
 actually avoided ; and one might almost say 
 
66 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 that because it was avoided that lofty 
 culture was reached. For the excellences of 
 all Greek Art were achieved through the 
 frank recognition of the limited scope of 
 human powers. Within the definite bounds 
 of the human mind, which they had explored 
 and charted as we chart the seas, perfection 
 was sought and attained. Outside that they 
 refused to go. They never soared after the 
 infinite God. He was out of sight, out of 
 range, unknowable. Their very philosophies 
 turned deliberately away from Him. Religion 
 as the Greeks knew it for some centuries 
 before the Christian era was the personifica- 
 tion and cultus, always local and particular, 
 of the vast and minor forces, full of mystery 
 to their minds, of Wind and Sea and Forest 
 and Mountain, and the Power behind all 
 objects of sense and motion and thought. 
 In course of time wider conceptions and 
 deeper beliefs came in from Egypt through 
 Crete and from the Far East countries. 
 Amongst these newer faiths and rites were 
 the Mysteries, but they were separate from, 
 
THE ACTIVE LIFE 67 
 
 and indeed antagonistic to, the true Hellenic 
 culture. Time was to bring its revenge, 
 and the years, ay the centuries, were to come 
 when Greek minds would be all aflame with 
 desire to sound the fathomless Thought of 
 God, and when they would scale heights in 
 the Nature and Essence of the Divine Being 
 such as were never scaled before or since. 
 But the time had not yet come. It was but 
 the earliest moments of the Dawn. And 
 here in the faintly tracked ways of early 
 spiritual adventure we can trace the first 
 sure desires for the Day, the first gropings 
 towards the distant Light. And in the poor 
 magician and dreamer, Apollonius of Tyana, 
 we can see one who, looking up to heaven, 
 essayed to ascend thither and to soar out of 
 the narrow bounds and definite limits of 
 human experience. 
 
 Another result of Roman rule was its 
 withering effect upon the material and social 
 life of the Greek-speaking peoples. We 
 have noted how the religion of Rome was 
 inferior to that of Greece. She was also 
 
68 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 lower in the scale of civilisation. With her 
 practical common sense she had recognised 
 this ; and had left most of the great Greek 
 social institutions intact to the conquered 
 provinces. But otherwise her sway was 
 blighting. Her financial administration was 
 unjust and immoral. It depopulated and 
 impoverished the whole Empire ; and it 
 ruined the general material prosperity and 
 the moral constitution of Hellenic cities 
 and lands. Rome drained the wealth of all 
 her conquered provinces, and the vast 
 Empire was plundered for the support of the 
 Imperial City. The accumulated treasures 
 of centuries were shamefully dispersed in 
 maintaining immense armies and in supply- 
 ing grain gratuitously to feed hundreds of 
 thousands of her idle citizens. As a con- 
 sequence social and moral energy had de- 
 clined. Honest labour was despised and 
 considered a degradation. Corruption was 
 rampant and religion was decadent. Count- 
 less numbers of Greeks were compelled to 
 sell themselves as slaves because they could 
 
THE ACTIVE LIFE 69 
 
 not pay the extortionate and cruel im- 
 positions. The slave market was the only 
 prosperous one. 
 
 Even many years after, when Apollonius 
 was in the old land of liberty, endeavouring 
 to reform her religion and rekindle her 
 faith, he felt compelled to write to the 
 Museum at Alexandria, then the great centre 
 of learning and culture of the civilised 
 world, in such words as these : e^ap^apwOrjv 
 ov xpovLO^ (lov CKJy 'EXXa^o? aWa ^ovio^ (ov ev 
 *EXXa<5t. " I have become barbarised, not by 
 staying away from Greece, but by staying in 
 Greece." 
 
 How could he then turn Westward and 
 look there for hope of better things .? How 
 could he draw inspiration from the mate- 
 rialistic Roman ? The love of his country 
 was in his heart. He longed to see her 
 restored and reformed morally and spirit- 
 ually : and his one clear and definite aim 
 now was to fit himself for the great work — 
 the work of his life — the restoration and 
 revival of true religion, as he knew it, not 
 
70 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 only in his own Hellenic land, but through- 
 out the Roman Empire. A vast under- 
 taking, a tremendous task ! And where 
 could he fit himself properly and adequately 
 for it ? Where, but in the East, whence 
 had always come the higher faiths and hopes, 
 the devotions and enthusiasms, without 
 which religion is vain ? Did not the Samian 
 Sage himself seek, centuries previous, the 
 lands beneath the rising sun and hold con- 
 verse there with people pre-eminent in 
 virtue and spiritual adventure ? And Apol- 
 lonius felt that he too must follow that 
 great example if he were to succeed in the 
 vast undertaking proposed to himself — the 
 spiritual regeneration of life in the whole 
 Roman and Hellenic world. 
 
APOLLONIUS TRAVELS TO INDIA 
 
 'TpHE call of many countries was in his 
 ears. Where the voice of Wisdom 
 called, there he would go — be it to the land 
 of the Arabian famous for his perfumes, 
 or to Egypt the country whence all the 
 Gods, save Poseidon and Here, had come, 
 or to the land upon the extreme verge 
 of the world, beyond the confines of the 
 flowing-robed Arsacidae, beneath the earliest 
 beams of the rising stars, where the keen 
 crescent first cuts the blue. Yes ! There 
 from that far-off land of India the call was 
 clearest. And there first he went. 
 
 Fastidious, not only in his person, but in 
 his speech, he attached, prior to his de- 
 parture, two domestics as secretaries, one 
 eminent for the despatch with which he 
 71 
 
72 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 wrote and the other for the remarkable 
 beauty and the artistic form of his lettering. 
 
 On entering Mesopotamia, the Custom- 
 house officer approached the travellers with 
 his toll-book and requested the Sage to 
 declare, for excisable purposes, what com- 
 modities he was bringing into the country. 
 " Patience, Temperance, Justice, and Forti- 
 tude," replied Apollonius, naming these and 
 other virtues by feminine names. The tax 
 collector wrote each down carefully in his 
 book and then inquired if they were his 
 maids. " No," answered the philosopher, 
 " they are my Mistresses." 
 
 After spending some time at Nineveh, 
 where Damis, his disciple and jidus Achates^ 
 attached himself to his person, and having 
 visited the great King of Babylon, he set 
 out, with his followers, for India, mounted 
 upon the royal camels and preceded by one 
 bearing an ornament of gold upon its 
 forehead, signifying thereby that one of the 
 King's friends was on the road. 
 
 Each day the desire of the spiritual East 
 
APOLLONIUS TRAVELS TO INDIA 73 
 
 grew more and more on him ; and each day 
 above the mighty Himalaya with their 
 immense and silver screen of fretted pallid 
 peaks, he saw, flashing more and more 
 resplendent (for it was approaching summer) 
 the glorious solar diadem of the Deity. 
 Day by day he journeyed on 
 
 O'er the aerial mountains which pour down 
 Indus and Oxus from their icy caves, 
 
 wending his way through maze of mist and 
 mountain, where no tree or flower could 
 live, and snatching some little repose at 
 times beneath the immense white Moon, 
 the great Jewel of Asia, the Virginal Queen 
 of Heaven, until at length he came to places 
 clothed with aromatic plants, and saw the 
 warm cinnamon growing on the high hills 
 and the incense-bearing trees flowering in 
 the valleys. 
 
 By many strange waters and sacred rivers 
 he passed, and anon with joy beheld dark 
 pilgrims, with eyes devout and mournful, 
 pacing in prayer by their banks, calling the 
 
74 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 streams by their names, and casting sweet- 
 smelling flowers and fragrant spices into 
 their softly murmuring waves. 
 
 In fine, after many months, the little 
 party reached the sacred goal of their pil- 
 grimage, the mystic Monsalvat, the Holy 
 Hill inhabited by the Wise Men of the 
 East. High up the mountain stood, like 
 the Acropolis of Athens, defended on all 
 sides by immense piles of rocks. A great 
 mist crowned the summit, which seemed to 
 raise itself aloft beyond the clouds into the 
 very intimate music of the spheres. 
 
 Here now, at last, was the veritable Gar- 
 den of the Gods, the paradise of solitary 
 souls, where minds, alert and attentive, 
 might enter and breathe a rarer and diviner 
 air, and where, in its immense peace, the 
 repose and sweet savour of contemplation, 
 so ardently desired, could at length be fully 
 attained. 
 
 With a graciousness refined to a perfect 
 degree, the whole fraternity — both aged 
 professors and young students — of the ^/ooi'- 
 
APOLLONIUS TRAVELS TO INDIA 75 
 
 Tia-Tvpiov received the Alastor-like guest; for 
 he seemed to them like "a poet who had 
 wandered all his life long through the world, 
 seeking with a heart on fire for the flower- 
 like face he could never find " : and, on his 
 part, he found in the brethren men who 
 cared not for the propagation of the vine or 
 the tilling of the ground, but who cultivated 
 instead a knowledge and wisdom higher and 
 more celestial than that known in Greece 
 — men whose very language was a sort of 
 shrine and whose souls seemed to be deep 
 reservoirs of divine resignation. He could 
 not contemplate their faces but he saw in 
 them as it were something of the solemn 
 light of temples ; and the still atmosphere, 
 of which they almost seemed a part, appeared 
 to possess in itself the gentle melancholy of 
 a faint breeze which bears the soft tolling of 
 a far-off passing-bell. 
 
 Ascetics such as these which greeted 
 ApoUonius are not unknown to-day even 
 outside of Buddhist lands ; for in our own 
 Europe one may see something of the same 
 
76 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 peculiar temper in Sclavonic recluses. In 
 that land of immensity, of loneliness and 
 silence, where nothing is relative and every- 
 thing is absolute, there live, dispersed 
 through dim forest and barren steppe, by 
 the great Volga or in the Ural range, men 
 who, like Saint Sergius, have fled the world, 
 who touch no flesh, but exist only on herbs, 
 roots, and nuts, and who live alone, pursu- 
 ing and penetrating ideas and ever saturating 
 their souls with the immense Thought of 
 God.^ Or, again, in the Dominion of Canada 
 there are Christian communities so strange 
 that with them to eat meat is a brigandage, 
 to drink milk a theft. A little calf they 
 compare to a little child. " What would 
 you say," they ask naively, " if some one 
 took away your infant's milk ? " And in 
 such words as these they pray at seedtime : 
 " O Lord, cause the seed to grow for all 
 creatures ; for animal and bird ; for the 
 beggar, for he can ask for it ; for the robber 
 
 ^ Cf. Vavenir de VEglise Russe^ by Joseph Wilbois 
 (Bloud. Paris, 1907), pp. 157, 207, and 259. 
 
APOLLONIUS TRAVELS TO INDIA 77 
 
 if he wishes to steal ; give to him also his 
 portion." 
 
 A like curious delicacy of feeling is seen 
 in the manner in which even the rudest 
 Russian peasant regards ordinary bread, for 
 he would never throw it to his dogs for 
 food, in that he holds all bread to be sancti- 
 fied, in some sense, from the time the Master 
 took a loaf into His holy hands and 
 blessed it, saying, "This is My body."^ 
 
 And if in this twentieth century we find 
 among many peoples a sort of exquisite 
 refinement in the choice of physical susten- 
 ance, lest that subtle associate of the body, 
 the soul, be hampered, even in a minor 
 degree, through the appetites, in its spiritual 
 ascensions, we in England, who understand 
 so well the pains of the flesh and so little 
 the pangs of the spirit, may at least cease to 
 be astonished at these little austerities exer- 
 cised by races more psychic and more ideal 
 than our own. 
 
 We, with our strong practical nature, too 
 ^ Vide Vavenir de VEglise Russe^ cited above. 
 
78 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 often profess a profound pity, a pity beyond 
 words, for the soul that is lacerated with 
 the sense of the Ideal. Ideals, we seem to 
 believe, are the Tragedies of Man. And the 
 man whose life contains great Ideals is the 
 man whose life contains great Tragedies. 
 
 For four months Apollonius remained 
 the guest of these gentle Indian ascetics — 
 these little brothers of St. Francis, if we 
 might so call them. 
 
 They initiated him early into the very 
 arcana of their mysteries ; and we may take 
 the passage, in which Philostratus records 
 the rite, as a figurative, if not as a true 
 description of part of that sacred ceremony. 
 We find there delineated the solemn anoint- 
 ing of his person with fragrant chrism, the 
 Fire of Pardon ; the ritual ablution of his 
 members with lustral waters, the Well of 
 Discovery ; the crowning of his head with 
 incense-bearing blossoms ; and the final pro- 
 cession to the illuminated chapel with the 
 whole fraternity singing hymns with all due 
 reverence, and forming within its sacred pre- 
 
APOLLONIUS TRAVELS TO INDIA 79 
 
 cincts the figure of the ancient Greek chorus, 
 with the Superior as coryphaeus, the paeans 
 sounding not unlike those stately strophes of 
 Sophocles which were sung at Athens in 
 honour of -^sculapius. During the period 
 of his residence with the monks Apollonius 
 occupied himself with learning all they taught 
 him of their hidden wisdom, testing their 
 philosophical conclusions, and exercising 
 himself daily in their contemplative devo- 
 tions ; and to such a singular degree was he 
 impressed by the extraordinary height of 
 ecstatic contemplation to which many of 
 them attained that he was compelled to 
 exclaim, " 1 have seen, I have seen the 
 Brahmins of India dwelling on the earth 
 and yet not on the earth, possessing nothing 
 and yet having all things." 
 
 In their spiritual experiences he found 
 the confirmation of his own, and learnt 
 that at least with them " death was thought 
 to be no evil, but only inevitable change ;^ 
 
 ^ Cf. In the Great God^s Hairy translated from the Hindu 
 by F. W. Bain (Parker, 1904), pp. 44-47 and 89. 
 
8o APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 that no one is ever really born or ever 
 really dies, for that life is simply a state 
 of being visible and then being invisible ; 
 and that " true life consists in ceasing to 
 have any affection even for life itself (as his 
 famous countryman St. Basil the Great 
 enunciated some centuries later), and in 
 bearing the judgment of death in oneself 
 so that one might not trust in oneself." 
 
 Among the many subjects discussed with 
 the sages, Apollonius took especial delight 
 in their views of the nature of the soul, 
 Foreknowledge (Ilyooyj/cotrf?), and Self-know- 
 ledge (the TvcoOi areavTov) ; and he learnt 
 more fully from their discourses what 
 were the rules and principles of the 
 understanding, what the functions of the 
 body, how many the faculties of the 
 soul, and how many the mutations which 
 devolve hereafter upon the souls of the 
 departed according to their deserts. On 
 leaving, with deep regret, this home of 
 wisdom, the seers provided him with a 
 guide and camels for his journey, while some 
 
APOLLONIUS TRAVELS TO INDIA 8i 
 
 of the more intimate of the brethren court- 
 eously accompanied him on part of his way, 
 and only quitted him after many farewells, 
 assuring him that he would be considered as 
 a god not only after his death, but in his 
 lifetime, and expressing much sorrow at his 
 departure, and only returning to their 
 monastery after casting many looks behind. 
 
 or THE V\ 
 
VI 
 
 HE VISITS ASIA MINOR AND GREECE 
 
 /^N his return to Asia Minor he began at 
 once to reform and edify the various 
 religious confraternities and social guilds, 
 visiting temples and oracles and discoursing 
 with the priests on sacrifices and oblations, 
 their proper matter and the hours of 
 libations ; for holding in inestimable regard 
 Life in all its multiple manifestations, he 
 would abolish all animal sacrifice, as some- 
 thing abhorrent to the great Demiourgos, of 
 whom all things have genesis^ and would 
 substitute therefor an offering without 
 blood. 
 
 Chief among the great cities and centres 
 
 of worship which he visited now was 
 
 Ephesus. There the proud goddess Diana 
 
 displayed her wealth and magnificence in 
 
 82 
 
HE VISITS ASIA MINOR AND GREECE 83 
 
 flowering groves and parks and in mighty 
 mansions and splendid workshops. Busy- 
 streets resounded everywhere with the silver 
 sound of little hammers or with the deeper 
 vibrations of smitten bronze. But all these 
 marks of her patronage she crowned with 
 her immense temple, whose glorious pillars 
 of marble, mellowed by age and atmosphere, 
 gleamed like gold, and whose interior, 
 glistening with superb reliefs of polished 
 silver, shone emblematical of her voluptuous 
 virginity. Here on the arrival of Apollonius 
 the craftsmen held high festival and left 
 their silver metal-work, the commerce of 
 their day, to follow the Teacher, some 
 admiring him for the beauty of his form 
 and the singularly artistic folds of his robes, 
 others for his wisdom and holiness : all for 
 some reason or other. 
 
 As his eyes looked upon that fair city 
 — that city which St. Paul had probably just 
 visited — dwelling amid its choice trees and 
 stately monuments, one of those strange 
 moods of prophetic inspiration with which 
 
84 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 at times he was moved fell upon him, and 
 he spoke of the near advent of that great 
 human scourge, the plague, which shortly 
 afterwards came upon that splendid city, 
 and left it stricken and desolate, with streets 
 deserted, and villas ruined, and with no 
 lamps burning before its shrines. 
 
 Jealous of her sister city, Smyrna sent a 
 special embassage to the sacred man, without 
 giving any reason for the mission (according 
 to his devoted biographer Philostratus), but 
 merely urging his coming. When the Sage 
 inquired of the ambassadors for what pur- 
 pose they had come to him, they replied, 
 " To see you, O Apollonius, and to be seen 
 by you." No doubt the real reason of 
 the invitation was to attend the great 
 Panionian assembly which at this time was 
 about to meet in honour of Poseidon ; and 
 here we may catch something of the virility 
 and morality of the man, for he openly 
 rebuked the assembled councillors for their 
 barbarism in signing their decrees in Roman, 
 instead of in their own Greek, names, thus 
 
HE VISITS ASIA MINOR AND GREECE 85 
 
 forgetting the patriotism which was due to 
 their own country, and also (and surely this 
 was the real reason) forgetting their duty to 
 it ; for those who would avoid paying the 
 heavy taxes, and who would grind the faces 
 of their poor fellow-countrymen without let 
 or hindrance, became in many instances 
 Roman citizens to this end alone, and thus 
 contributed to the further demoralisation of 
 the land. 
 
 A similar courage was displayed by him 
 when later he received the embassage of the 
 chiefs of Olympia, who approached him with 
 their homage. In gentle but firm words he 
 chid them on their lack of manly bearing: 
 for he saw nothing of old Sparta in their 
 appearance. Odours steeped their hair, 
 and their faces were beardless and white ; 
 their garments were soft and effeminate, 
 and all their limbs were smooth and 
 glistening. They looked as if they had 
 breathed the air of Sybaris all their lives. 
 His words had the happy effect of reviving 
 their ancient spirit, that of the old Palaestra, 
 
86 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 and not long afterwards they announced to 
 him the reformation of their mode of life. 
 
 But the festival of the great and tre- 
 mendous mysteries, the Eleusinian Mys- 
 teries, was approaching ; and the desire of 
 Apollonius went forth to that devotional 
 rite. Making his way to Athens, he sought 
 initiation into these the most glorious and 
 spiritual of ancient Greek ceremonies. In 
 many places throughout Greece the Eleusinia 
 were celebrated, but only at Eleusis did they 
 possess a supreme significance, a profound 
 mystical instinct, a spiritual anticipation of 
 a future and eternal life. 
 
 For nine days he made the appointed 
 ways and all the sacred " stations " of the 
 via dolorosa from Athens to Eleusis, visiting 
 the Great Sea, joining in the torch-bearing 
 processions, making pilgrimages to the Holy 
 Well, the Threshing-floor, and the Stone 
 of Sorrow, whereon Demeter, the mother of 
 divine sorrow, sat weeping for our poor 
 humanity and mystically yearning to bestow 
 immortality upon our frail mortality. 
 
 iri 
 
HE VISITS ASIA MINOR AND GREECE 87 
 
 He was much disturbed in spirit at the 
 manner in which he saw the Athenians 
 celebrating certain introductory parts of this 
 august rite ; for on entering the theatre 
 to hear " the monodies and the melodies 
 and the songs of the chorus and the notes 
 which they sing in both tragedy and 
 comedy," he found to his disappointment 
 that the performance was mostly composed 
 of " dancing, and of dancing to the effemi- 
 nate flute." The stately lyre, used in the 
 festivals of the Gods, was absent ; and the 
 divine epics of Orpheus were debased by 
 voluptuous and shameful representations. 
 No doubt the performance was provided for 
 "the people," but the good man could not 
 refrain himself from rebuking the whole 
 gathering openly. Whether it was due to 
 his forcibly expressed censure or not, it is 
 hard to say, but the hierophant of the Mys- 
 teries now refused him initiation. Never- 
 theless on the tenth morning, when, as the 
 myth goes, Hecate meets Demeter bearing 
 a light in her hands looking for her child 
 
88 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 and uttering wild cries to Zeus for its return, 
 all the devout, and we may assume Apol- 
 lonius to have been of their number, entered 
 the splendid temple of Demeter, traversing its 
 immense white marble pavement and passing 
 through its great propylaea and corridors, un- 
 til they stood within the sacred shrine itself. 
 Let us picture the scene, for it is a 
 wonderful and uplifting sight. In the outer 
 precincts stands the great expectant crowd, 
 both Mystae or purified ones and Epoptae 
 or initiated. The Night has come. In the 
 glimmer of torch and ceremonial lights, made 
 dimmer by the all-pervading incense-smoke, 
 the faces that are worn with prayer and fast- 
 ing take to themselves something of strange 
 and unearthly beauty. It is dark and it is 
 silent. For Darkness shuts out the world 
 and Silence shuts in the soul ; and in the Dark- 
 ness is the Light of Heaven and in the Silence 
 is the Voice of God ; and so the soul can fully 
 utter itself, feeling instinctively that here 
 vibrates, as through the countless centuries, 
 all the joys and sorrows of aspiring souls. 
 
HE VISITS ASIA MINOR AND GREECE 89 
 
 Yes, there is Night : but all anticipate the 
 Dawn. There is Silence ; but all await the 
 Voice. And in the heart of all is the old 
 story of Demeter, the great Earth-Mother, 
 the Goddess of the corn that is sown in 
 darkness and that rises in the white light 
 of Spring. Death and Life are near. They 
 meet. Fear and Hope, Night and Day, 
 touch. They mingle. It is a solemn hour ; 
 for it is, as it were, the standing on the 
 brink of Death, with the faith that Heaven 
 is there also. 
 
 But soon the doors of the great Cella^ 
 the inmost sanctuary, the holy of holies, 
 are opened for those who are prepared. 
 The Prayer beforehand was only Approach 
 to the Divine : but Communion now will be 
 Contact. That Prayer was but the Desire 
 for the Day ; the passionate Longing for 
 the Face of God. But Communion will be 
 Vision. It will be sunlight breaking upon 
 a thousand hills. So, one by one, they pass 
 in. They are known by their names, for 
 the names of those that have " won their 
 
po APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 freedom '* are inscribed in a scroll. Still 
 there is Silence like the silence of the grave. 
 It is the introitus^ the entrance into the 
 Great Mystery, the Mystery of Death. On 
 the lips of each is laid a golden key that 
 they may be sealed for ever, and may for 
 ever guard unuttered what is about to be 
 committed to them then. We may not 
 know all the rest. Yet we may perhaps 
 believe that a white basket, decked with 
 poppies and pomegranates — emblems of 
 Death bearing within itself the countless 
 seeds of Life — is brought around, contain- 
 ing other symbols of Life arising from 
 Death, for the worshippers to touch, and 
 they touch. Then is offered to each a cup 
 of corn-wine to drink, and each drinks, 
 and a marvellous refreshment follows the 
 draught, for it is a sort of divine com- 
 munion, an imparting to the participant of 
 a new and eternal life ; and the wondrous 
 words " Thou art become God from man " 
 are communicated to each enlightened soul. 
 Then they pass out joyfully into the golden 
 
HE VISITS ASIA MINOR AND GREECE 91 
 
 light of the irradiant day, and, as though 
 some cunningly devised door were suddenly 
 withdrawn, all the fresh glory of a new 
 world is laid before their illuminated eyes 
 — fair fields and multicoloured meadows, 
 bright with starlike flowers, all delicately 
 awake and trembling in the calm, sweet 
 sunlight of a new day. They are The Blessed 
 Fields^ the Fields of Rest and Joy, for those 
 that are worthy. Concurrently, heavenly 
 voices rise in hymns of gladness, holy to 
 hear ; and in strophe and antistrophe the 
 grand old Homeric hymn breaks forth in 
 a kind of glorious antiphonal thunder. 
 Through it comes the sound of moving feet, 
 the mystic dance, and the impressive drama of 
 Demeter and Kore is offered to all. The tense 
 Silence and awful Darkness are no more. 
 Here is movement, action, life ; and at the 
 close the whole company bursts forth into 
 songs of rejoicings and relief, and hymn on 
 hymn arises, until it would almost seem as 
 if already the frail forms of humanity there 
 present had really been lifted up, and had 
 
92 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 entered, by intensity of anticipation, into 
 the New Life, the Life which is eternal, 
 holy, and divine. 
 
 While at Athens Apollonius corrected the 
 gross abuse of gladiatorial displays ; for 
 brigands and cutpurses and housebreakers 
 and all manner of murderous men were 
 openly bought at high prices in the market, 
 and were then armed and forced to fight in 
 the arena, to please the public passion for 
 blood-letting. Thus, here and there, through 
 Asia Minor, Greece, and the isles of the 
 Archipelago, the Sage travelled, at times 
 performing (as some would believe) strange 
 and miraculous acts, such as evoking the 
 spirit of Achilles at Troy, discerning daemoni- 
 acal possession, revealing a Lamia and fore- 
 telling earthquake and troubles, but (be that 
 as it may) at least teaching men better 
 things and uplifting the general level of 
 religious and social life, praising order and 
 decency where conspicuous, and censuring 
 all that would call for rebuke. 
 
VII 
 
 HE VISITS ROME AND EGYPT 
 
 lY/TEANTIME it appeared to Apollonlus 
 that the Imperial City of Rome was 
 in need of his chastening zeal. Strange 
 spectacles were being witnessed there daily. 
 The Emperor Nero was to be seen frequently 
 driving chariots furiously through the streets, 
 singing on public stages, and even fighting 
 in gladiatorial combats. It seemed in the eyes 
 of Apollonius as if the whole city would be 
 demoralised by such an evil example in high 
 places unless corrected. He decided to visit 
 the town with his reforming and beneficent 
 measures. Frequenting the temples, as was 
 his custom, he quickened at once the public 
 spirit of devotion. To whatsoever shrine 
 he repaired, there also the people flocked ; 
 for so influential was he with the Gods, 
 93 
 
94 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 in their opinion, that they expected greater 
 favours in those temples where he was than 
 in any others ; and, in consequence, sweet- 
 smelling sacrifices and numberless oblations 
 were offered with an unknown fervour to 
 the Immortals. To the inhabitants he was 
 swiftly and favourably known by reason of 
 a signal manifestation of his healing powers, 
 for he had thrilled the city with a remark- 
 able proof of his peculiar persuasion with 
 the Gods. One evening, on the outskirts of 
 the mighty city, his eyes caught the sight of 
 a large funeral pyre which was being pre- 
 pared. Around it a vast multitude was 
 gathering in soiled garments and great grief. 
 He approached the place and, as is the 
 nature of the human mind, begged to learn 
 for whom it was. With much lamentation 
 he was informed that it was for a young girl 
 who, on the eve of her wedding day, had 
 died, and that her obsequies would be fol- 
 lowed by the flower of Rome's nobility, for 
 her family was of consular rank. Soon a 
 long and melancholy procession drew nigh. 
 
HE VISITS ROME AND EGYPT 95 
 
 all damp with rain, while the cries of the 
 mourners filling the air intensified the sorrow 
 of the scene. Meeting the sad convoy, the 
 blessed man bid the attendants to set down 
 the bier, and he inquired her name. The 
 procession halted, and all the wailing grew 
 hushed, for it was thought the holy man 
 was about to pronounce, as was sometimes 
 customary, a funeral address. But he, look- 
 ing upon the maiden, touched her hand, 
 and, his pity revealing itself in his gentle 
 eyes, he called her in a soft and compassion- 
 ate voice, and wakened the girl from her 
 seeming death. Straightway she sat up and 
 began to speak, and, like Alcestis when 
 recalled to life by Hercules, was able to 
 return to her father *s house. Thus it was 
 that he wooed back to life the soul which, 
 to all appearances, seemed extinct and took 
 away death from her who was to be the 
 banquet of the tomb, even as she lay gar- 
 landed upon the bier, perfumed and anointed 
 with odorous unguents. 
 
 It may be that the reforming zeal of Apol- 
 
96 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 lonius found vent in rash acts and utter- 
 ances or in censuring the Caesar's mode of 
 life too severely, for it is said that on one 
 occasion he rebuked the buffoonery of the 
 Emperor when he stated that "even the 
 Gods were to be forgiven if they took pleas- 
 ure in fools " ; but, at all events, the 
 Emperor, notwithstanding his democratic 
 pleasures and associations, made a decree in 
 the year 6§ a.d. banishing every philo- 
 sopher from Rome ; and Apollonius with 
 all the race of these republican thinkers was 
 compelled to quit the Imperial City. 
 
 On leaving Italy, Apollonius went west as 
 far as the Pillars of Hercules, stayed at 
 Sicily, and then revisited Greece, pursuing 
 his object of elevating the spiritual tone of 
 society. At Athens, the repentant hiero- 
 phant who had previously refused him 
 initiation now received him gladly into the 
 Eleusinian Brotherhood ; but there were 
 still habits and customs to be reformed, for 
 we find him denouncing those who " hawked 
 about little images of Dionysus and De- 
 
HE VISITS ROME AND EGYPT 97 
 
 meter " for sale, describing their trade as a 
 " species of horrid gain " and as a profana- 
 tion " feeding upon the Gods." 
 
 About this time (66-67 a.d.) the Emperor 
 Nero was in Greece celebrating the Olym- 
 pian Games, and was also continuing there 
 his musical and literary extravaganzas. This 
 superb Festival originally lasted five days. 
 The symbol of the Unity of Greece, it 
 renewed the thought and expressed the fact 
 that, beneath all superficial separation, the 
 great Nation of wide-scattered Greeks was 
 one in blood and speech and art. Here at 
 Olympia, where no woman was permitted 
 to attend, the Treaties of the various States 
 were proclaimed ; their Crowns of Friend- 
 ship conferred upon each other ; and their 
 glorious heroes and statesmen publicly 
 honoured ; so that the whok of Olympia 
 rang during the Feast with the choice and 
 cultured hymns of Greek poets and the 
 majestic periods of Greek orators. To his 
 accomplishments of artist and athlete Nero 
 added, while there, that of engineer ; and he 
 
98 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 attempted, but failed, to cut the Isthmus of 
 Corinth. The close proximity of the august 
 Presence was not altogether desirable, and 
 perhaps not even without danger, to Apol- 
 lonius, to whom " his digging was as 
 unfinished as his singing," and it behoved 
 the Sage to seek " pastures new." 
 
 One country besides India had always 
 claimed his admiration and affection — a 
 country associated not only by bonds of 
 religion and commerce with that great land 
 beneath the first risings of the stars, but also 
 with his beloved Hellas ; a country whose 
 capital, Alexandria, was then the home of 
 learning and philosophy, the university city 
 of the great realm, the centre of the highest 
 culture in the Roman and Greek worlds, and 
 whose far inner reaches and deserts were 
 homes of the purest monastic and ascetic 
 excellences. This splendid country was at 
 least free to him, and on arriving there he 
 was received with the greatest honour. The 
 people loved him, it is said, before they saw 
 him, looking upon him as more than human, 
 
HE VISITS ROME AND EGYPT 99 
 
 and making way for him in their streets as 
 for one that carries sacred things. 
 
 Here as elsewhere he lost no opportunity 
 in endeavouring to abolish blood sacrifices — 
 geese and bulls being the principal oflFerings 
 in Egypt — but, as often is the way with 
 well-intentioned reformers, he came into 
 conflict with the authorities. The High- 
 priest of Serapis, the Patriarch of Alexan- 
 dria, marvelled at his temerity in refusing 
 to sacrifice life, and exclaimed, "Who is 
 wise enough to reform the established wor- 
 ship of the Egyptians ? " 
 
 Here also the abuse of the sport of 
 horse - racing, with its incidental blood- 
 spilling, brought down the displeasure of 
 the Philosopher. '* Troy," he reminded 
 them somewhat sternly, "fell through one 
 horse." 
 
 While carrying on his proposed work 
 among the priests and temples, the future 
 Emperor Vespasian landed at Alexandria. 
 " Where is the Tyanean ? " was his first in- 
 quiry of the sacred priests, civil magistrates. 
 
loo APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 and deputies who formed the vast and pom- 
 pous procession arranged to greet his arrival. 
 "You will find him in the temple," 
 answered Damis the faithful disciple. 
 "Then let us repair thither," replied the 
 Prince, "that 1 may first offer prayers to 
 the Gods and then converse with this ex- 
 cellent man." On arriving he exclaimed, 
 " Make me Emperor." " It is already 
 done," answered the discreet Apollonius, 
 "for I have so asked it of the Gods, and 
 they have bestowed upon us a most wise, 
 generous, and beneficent Prince." 
 
 But in the far-off tracts of Upper Egypt 
 were the great ascetics of the West and 
 South : those who had renounced the world, 
 and had retired into mountains and deserts, 
 where they fasted and meditated in silence 
 and solitude — the naked ones, Gymno- 
 sophists, as they were called, in common 
 with all who had, so to say, taken the vow 
 of poverty ; for even Apollonius con- 
 sidered himself as a Gymnosophist. "At 
 the age of fourteen," he said, " 1 resigned 
 
HE VISITS ROME AND EGYPT loi 
 
 my patrimony to those that desired such 
 things, and naked I sought the naked." 
 
 With a small company of ten souls, he 
 set out for Ethiopia and the Upper Nile, at 
 first by camel and afterwards by barge. As 
 slowly his dahabeah ascended the River of 
 Egypt, moving like a sacred galley convey- 
 ing pilgrims to a shrine, the occasional 
 traveller or merchant would stay his cameFs 
 course and gaze at the sight, perceiving that 
 the boat was full of sages, " conjecturing it 
 so by the singularity of their garb, and by 
 the books that they held in their hands." 
 
 After many days* journey they came near 
 the places where the naked ones, yvfxvoiy 
 lived. Here, through desert waste and 
 mountainous tract, in countless caves and 
 cells, in solitary shrines and holes, thou- 
 sands of souls, eager and passionate for The 
 Blessed Fields^ lived alone in the awful silence 
 of endless outstretching sands and rocks, 
 moved to the hatred of the world and the 
 love of solitude by the same spiritual im- 
 pulse and the same strange longings for 
 
I02 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 the Divine Life which have stirred the great 
 religious movements of China, India, and 
 Western Asia, and which have initiated and 
 fertilised the richer mysticism of Christian 
 thought and worship. 
 
 In the brooding and almost eternal 
 silence, which, in some sense, seems part of 
 the very atmosphere of the Strong God, 
 those ancient Egyptians must have antici- 
 pated, in some degree, the rapturous 
 moments vouchsafed to their more blessed 
 successors, some centuries later, at Oxyr- 
 rhynchus, Tabenna, AntinoS, and in the 
 Nitrian desert. Through day and night, 
 through heat and cold, we know how these 
 later coenobites would stand, all tense in 
 prayer, waiting patiently the exquisite hour. 
 Would thoughts of desertion or despair or 
 a sense of weariness or accidie arise, the 
 love and expectation of the Consolatory 
 Presence would still surmount all. Over 
 the arid soul the gentle dew would surely 
 sometime fall, if only they were faithful ! 
 After the Night of Watching the gentle and 
 
HE VISITS ROME AND EGYPT 103 
 
 lovely Dawn would surely come ; and then 
 the White Hands of God would extend and 
 bless ; His Breath would come like sweet 
 odours, and His Words like rich oil. His 
 Mien would be gracious ; His Smile would 
 be life itself ; and in His Great Eyes would 
 be all their prayers — the prayers they had 
 forgotten ; the prayers they had thought 
 unheard. Thus these blessed saints, even 
 those quite outworn in body, would commit 
 themselves to " the Wise Physician Who 
 holds in His Hands the pulses of our weak- 
 ness," and in Him find a more than 
 abundant compensation for all the pleasures 
 of Alexandria, Rome, or Athens. But great 
 as the renunciation of our holy Fathers was, 
 it seems just to say that the renunciation of 
 these countless Gymnosophists was even 
 greater ; for they, in their venture of faith, 
 surrendered love and wealth and all that 
 makes life desirable, for benefits less posi- 
 tive and blessings less manifest. 
 
 In this Place of Meditation no trees 
 could be seen, save some groups of tall 
 
to4 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 palms which served as a meeting-place for 
 the numberless recluses, whose cells dotted 
 the hills and wide plains for miles around. 
 
 It was natural that these silent anchorites 
 would look askance at any stranger arriving 
 in their midst of whom they knew nothing. 
 And for some time they refrained from 
 communicating in any way with Apollonius 
 or his company of disciples. But when 
 many days had passed, and, morning and 
 evening, they had observed him paying his 
 adorations to the Sun, as was his custom, 
 and saw that he also was filled with some- 
 thing of their own spirit, Thesperion, the 
 chief of the community, sent a messenger 
 to the blessed man with an invitation to 
 discourse with him. 
 
 At their first meeting, Thesperion, still 
 doubtless not free from suspicion, spoke 
 first, and apparently in a manner which con- 
 tributed no large measure of honour to his 
 guest. The faithful disciple Damis was 
 greatly overcome and much cast down at 
 the Superior's speech ; but he recovered, it 
 
HE VISITS ROME AND EGYPT 105 
 
 is recorded, new life as Apollonius replied, 
 and he felt quite restored when he heard 
 all that his master said. 
 
 At a subsequent discussion Apollonius 
 expressed his disapproval of the Egyptian 
 practice of representing their Gods as hawks, 
 owls, wolves, dogs, and the like. " Beasts," 
 he stated, " may derive dignity from such 
 representations, but the Gods lose theirs " ; 
 and he also expressed the noble thought and 
 sentence that " the man who desires to 
 form in his mind the image of Zeus should 
 behold him with the same enraptured fancy 
 as Phidias did — throned on the Heavens 
 and compassed by the Hours and the Stars." 
 After the Tyanean's powerful speech we read 
 that " Thesperion was like unto one who 
 wished to change the conversation." Whether 
 it Was due to these little suspicions and con- 
 troversies or not, it is difficult to say, but 
 Apollonius concludes that the Sages of India 
 were superior to the Gymnosophists of 
 Egypt both in moral and spiritual excellence. 
 
 As he was so far up the River Nile, 
 
io6 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 Apollonius conceived the desire of endeav- 
 ouring to track it to its source ; and he 
 visited the Cataracts, which, he states, burst 
 with such intense violence over the great 
 rocks which formed the falls that his little 
 party could not contemplate the sight with- 
 out great pain to their hearing : their heads 
 grew dizzy with the deafening thunder of the 
 waters, until, stunned, they seemed as though 
 they were delirious and heard the drums of 
 all the desert sounding in their ears. 
 
 Failing in the attempt to find the risings 
 of the great river, the explorers returned to 
 Alexandria in time to learn of the capture 
 and utter destruction of Jerusalem by Titus 
 in 70 A.D., and Apollonius marked the 
 event by a letter of congratulation to the 
 Roman general complimenting him upon his 
 moderation ! 
 
VIII 
 
 HIS FURTHER TRAVELS AND RETURN 
 TO ROME FOR TRIAL 
 
 T70R some score of years after this event 
 Apollonius travelled and taught in Phoe- 
 nicia, Ionia, and Greece, but his biographer 
 leaves something of a lacuna in this part of 
 the Life; but it would seem that he had 
 considerable intercourse with Titus and also 
 with Vespasian and Nerva prior to their 
 elevation to the purple. His friendship with 
 the last-named and his unceasing zeal for 
 reform gave opportunity to those who dis- 
 liked his proposed changes to injure him in 
 the eyes of the Emperor Domitian. So 
 numerous and so insistent did accusations and 
 informations lie against him, that at length, 
 to clear himself, he determined to go to 
 Rome and meet his accusers face to face. 
 107 
 
io8 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 The charges against this restless spirit 
 were of different kinds and not few in 
 number. They included his style of dress 
 and mode of living ; his knowledge of 
 futurity and the adoration offered to him ; 
 the homage which he paid to Nerva ; for 
 statements which were believed to have been 
 uttered against the Emperor Domitian, and 
 for conspiring to obtain the Empire. The 
 real charge lay in the homage which it was 
 alleged he paid to Nerva as a candidate for 
 the purple. 
 
 Meanwhile he was arrested, cast into a 
 common gaol, and kept under strict guard. 
 Yet he maintained that dignity and fortitude 
 which was essentially his own, and at times 
 he harangued his fellow-prisoners with words 
 of encouragement, and found no little com- 
 fort both for himself and for them in such 
 thoughts as these : " Whilst we live we are 
 all prisoners, for the soul is bound to the 
 body and suffers much. The men who first 
 built houses built for themselves but a 
 second prison. Cities also are but common 
 
HIS RETURN TO ROME FOR TRIAL 109 
 
 prisons ; and the Earth itself is bound by 
 the Ocean as by a chain." Then apostro- 
 phising the poets he exclaimed, " Draw 
 nigh, ye poets, and sing to these afflicted 
 creatures, recounting how even Saturn of 
 old was fettered by Vulcan in Heaven itself" ; 
 and with such -like words he evoked the 
 stoical spirit in the most degraded natures. 
 After some time he was led forth to an 
 audience of the Emperor. Four guards 
 attended him, but they preserved a greater 
 distance from his person than was their 
 custom when guarding common prisoners. 
 The Augustus, crowned \yith a garland of 
 green boughs, received him in the Hall of 
 Adonis, which was at the time decorated in 
 honour of the feast of Adonis with shells 
 and flowers similar to what were borne by 
 the Assyrians in their sacred festivals. After 
 discussing the charges privately with him, 
 Domitian, more suspicious than ever, com- 
 manded that he should be shorn and placed 
 in a more loathsome prison than the former 
 one, loaded with heavy chains, and set 
 
no APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 amongst the vilest felons. The unhappy 
 Damis now lost all heart and weeping 
 exclaimed bitterly, " O Master, what will 
 become of us ? Who will defend you 
 now ? " " Time," answered the dauntless 
 Tyanean, " and the spirit of the Gods and 
 the love of Philosophy." This bold hope 
 proved true ; and at the trial which followed, 
 Apollonius, lifting up his eyes to Zeus, 
 spoke so ably that " a shout of applause arose 
 louder than what was suitable to the dignity 
 and gravity of an Imperial tribunal," and 
 he was acquitted by the Emperor himself. 
 
 Some time after thus in a real sense 
 " winning his freedom " the philosopher re- 
 turned to Greece, and was received every- 
 where with enthusiasm and respect ; and 
 this — the final period of his long life — may 
 be termed the period of his triumph. 
 Olympia itself was stirred at his presence, 
 and the people flocked to see him with more 
 eagerness than to witness the Olympic 
 Games. Crowds of disciples attached them- 
 selves to his person, and the flower of the 
 
HIS RETURN TO ROME FOR TRIAL in 
 
 land followed him, content to learn of his 
 wisdom. The name Apollonian was given 
 to these followers ; and near the Springs 
 of Hercyne, in the cave of Trophonius in 
 Boeotia, he wrote down for their use the 
 precepts of his great predecessor Pytha- 
 goras ; and the book was afterwards pre- 
 served by the Emperor Hadrian in his 
 palace at Antium. For two years he teaches 
 Greece, and then visits Ionia, Smyrna, and 
 Ephesus for the last time. At Ephesus he 
 was moved by that strange telepathic sym- 
 pathy which influenced him at times so 
 curiously, and he announced to the astonish- 
 ment of the Ephesians the assassination of 
 Domitian at the very time of the tragedy. 
 
 The new Emperor, Nerva, sent for the 
 aged philosopher, now heavy with his hun- 
 dred years, and invited him to come to 
 Rome and act as his counsellor ; but a 
 summons more august than that of the great 
 Caesar of the Roman Empire came to him. 
 It was the summons of Death — the call to 
 "the supreme Initiation into the Great Mys- 
 
112 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 teries," as Plutarch calls it in his fragment 
 On the Soul ; and in his own characteristic 
 way he met the dread command. Sending 
 away his faithful Damis on a mission, real 
 or fictitious, to the new Emperor, Nerva, he 
 died alone and followed out his own maxim 
 — for his tomb, it is said, could nowhere be 
 found — " Conceal your life, and if you 
 cannot do that conceal your death." 
 
IX 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 T71EWING the philosophy or " religion " 
 of this wonderful man, we see that it 
 was of a piece with all speculative systems 
 of thought. The mystery of Death was the 
 basis of it ; and the mystery of Death is the 
 background of all philosophy. The philo- 
 sopher deludes himself when he says he is 
 explaining Life. He is not. He is really 
 endeavouring to understand Death. He is 
 trying to interpret the dark shadow that 
 surely falls at even, or the chilly wind that 
 suddenly unsummers June, or the hidden 
 hand that silently extinguishes a star ; that 
 terrible finger which, without distinction, 
 infects all things, beautiful or base, with its 
 leprous touch — for the evil thing must also 
 die. It is this eternal disintegrating force, 
 
 H 113 
 
114 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 this perpetual separating power, interpene- 
 trating all life, inhabiting all thought and 
 form, which has unbalanced heathen philo- 
 sophy and left out the part that Love should 
 support. 
 
 And the philosophy of Apollonius stood 
 as no exception to the rule. His was not a 
 philosophy for women. It was never meant 
 for that. It was only a philosophy for 
 men. It compassed none of those more 
 tender notes, those sad wordless songs or 
 untold compassions which, like inexpressible 
 pities, find refuge only in a woman's heart. 
 And he himself deliberately refrained from 
 entering that Sanctuary : yea, into her dark- 
 ness or her silence he did not even stoop. 
 He could sow no seeds of love in her soul. 
 He could present to her no Mater Miseri- 
 cordi^y no Lady of Sorrows, no Sister of 
 surpassing tenderness to whom her sad and 
 trembling voice could rise, as from some 
 sacred grove, and tell of her grief for 
 children or her loss of love. And so al- 
 though he was gifted with the strange 
 
CONCLUSION 115 
 
 faculty of discerning men's minds, he yet 
 lacked that more attractive sympathy, that 
 singular gift of unlocking the troubled 
 hearts of women, which was so evident in 
 the being of St. Philip Neri or in that of 
 the Blessed John Vianney, whose peculiar 
 tendernesses drew all France to his confes- 
 sional for the exceeding sweetness of his 
 soul. 
 
 Thus he never really fathomed, in all its 
 mysterious depths and endless recesses, the 
 great well-spring of human affection. He 
 valued not that which, with us, is longed for 
 by so many and realised by so few. Only 
 the great contending male, solitary in his 
 aspirations, intense and awful in his quest 
 for God, was by him accounted worthy to 
 tell to Heaven the weightier sorrows of his 
 heart. Nature and the Gods were nearer to 
 him than woman ; for they knew the secret 
 which she did not know and which he alone 
 longed to know. He had need of them. 
 They partook of something over and beyond 
 Death, something which he desired above all 
 
Ii6 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 things — Life. Whereas she was but of to- 
 day and for to-day. Thus, like all Greeks, 
 he refused to value Love, and laid no serious 
 worth upon what men now prize as the 
 greatest of all virtues. He valued Life and 
 Life only. 
 
 Yet perhaps there is a deeper reason, a 
 more elemental cause, why Love finds no 
 part in Greek philosophy ; and which we 
 ourselves may find in the Hour of Darkness 
 and in the Night of Fear. For in the 
 instance of a great bereavement we might 
 well conceive of one thinking, in the mid- 
 night of his sorrow, as he would recall 
 the delectable perfections of some departed 
 friend, that there is nothing beautiful enough 
 to live. And truly thinking thus, from 
 that hour he could not help but cease to 
 love, repeating again and again, " Surely 
 there is nothing beautiful enough to live, 
 since the great Lord of Life and Love has 
 slain my exceedingly beloved friend, as 
 though He deemed him unworthy of the 
 gift of life " ; and thus reasoning, he would 
 
CONCLUSION 117 
 
 continue, " Who henceforth can be dear to 
 me, for it is vain to vesture a mortal creature 
 with immortal love ? The most noble graces 
 and the most perfect gifts can please me no 
 more, for now I know that the fairest women 
 and the most honourable men must also 
 some day die." Thus might one in old times 
 have spoken to himself in the haughtiness of 
 his soul, and would have refused to offer 
 another triumph to the triumphs of Death 
 by refusing to love. But after all — in the 
 Philosophic Absolute — who can climb the 
 heights of the magnificent Mountain Truth 
 which lifts its glorious head beyond the 
 outmost stars and pillars God Himself? 
 No man, nor any tribe, nor even the human 
 Race, nor yet the whole Creation of In- 
 telligences higher than Man. Yet if we 
 take away Love from Life we take away the 
 Wings that would lift us when we cannot 
 climb. 
 
 Viewing the fall of Apollonius's life we 
 find it does not differ from its height in re- 
 spect of spiritual Love. The Peace of Vast 
 
ii8 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 Plains and the Silence of Solitary Mountains 
 were ever in his heart, but he never heard 
 the singing of the Seraphim — the Seraphim 
 who, most aflame with Love, are nearest 
 God. He was never lifted up, during all 
 his life, into the burning plane of Adoration 
 and Love which Christians only know. And 
 in the extreme hour he turned from the 
 affections and comfort of his fellow-man. He 
 looked for Peace and not for Love. Peace is 
 indeed a blessed thing, longed for and prayed 
 for so earnestly and so ceaselessly by weary 
 humanity ; and it has been so much prized, 
 through all the Christian ages, that a special 
 significance has been ascribed to it in the 
 Eastern Church, and a special Litany, called 
 the Litany of Peace, reserved for use by 
 Her in all Her sacred Offices. And we 
 may say, perhaps not unwisely, that Death 
 came to Apollonius, in the words of such 
 another of Her Litanies, as "an Angel of 
 Peace, a faithful Guide, a Guardian of his 
 soul and body." 
 
 And yet again we find that beyond the 
 
CONCLUSION 119 
 
 Grave he seeks Peace. He leaves none 
 behind him. And this is quite sufficient 
 in our opinion to justify, if on no other 
 grounds, the entire dismissal of the foolish 
 invention of controversialists that the life 
 and death of Apollonius was drawn up by 
 his biographer as a counterwork to the life 
 and death of the Son of God. For at the 
 supreme epoch of " inevitable change " his 
 peace of mind was not made sorrowful with 
 the sense of a great betrayal. He has no 
 fears of an inevitable passion. He arranges 
 no sad Ccena^ utters no final farewell, pro- 
 phetic with the anguish of his death. He 
 bequeaths no cheering promise of a per- 
 petual Presence, no gift of Peace, to his 
 friends. He grants no succouring or up- 
 lifting prerogatives. He gives no Donatio 
 mortis causa^ so to say, to his disciples ; but 
 to the dulcet and inviting voices of virgins 
 issuing, as his followers would believe, from 
 the Singing Gates of Heaven, he departs 
 triumphantly and as one called to the throne 
 of the Gods. Thither he ascends, as a 
 
I20 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 
 
 God to the Gods. His is no death, for he 
 does not die. It is a sacred transformation, 
 an assumption, an apotheosis. To the mind 
 of the ancient it is magnificent, but to us it 
 lacks the sweet, sad note of humanity ; for 
 it lacks that one inevitable, one tremendous 
 crisis of our being, that one awful and con- 
 summate moment, when the stricken soul, 
 so long pursued, is at length overtaken by 
 the transcendent Love of God. 
 
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