An ancient pagan holy man

Who was Apollonius of Tyana?

More people should know about Apollonius of Tyana.

If what we are told about him is true, he was pretty special.

His birth was accompanied by miracles. A chorus of swans sang. A thunderbolt fell towards earth and went back up to heaven again.

He was a healer and an exorcist, as well as a clairvoyant who could see into the future. He could understand the language of birds.

The elephant in the room here is that Apollonius ended up gaining a certain notoriety as a pagan equivalent to Jesus of Nazareth. Similarities between the two figures were seized upon by ancient pagans and, much later, by Enlightenment rationalists. Christian writers, for their part, suggested that Apollonius was a satanic figure.

There is little to be gained from pursuing this tired old quarrel. Apollonius and Jesus were both revered as holy men with supernatural powers - just like numerous other characters in history - but it is much more productive to study each of them in his own context than it is to pit them against each other in a game of religious polemic. Rabbi Jeshua of Nazareth is best viewed in the context of first-century Jewish culture; and Apollonius is more interesting in his own right than as a tool for undermining his more famous counterpart.

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So - who was Apollonius?

One thing that we can be reasonably sure of is that he was a Pythagorean.

That raises another question - who were the Pythagoreans?

They were followers of Pythagoras.

Pythagoras himself is a very shadowy figure. He lived in the decades around 500 BC - before almost all the great writers and thinkers of the classical world, before the golden age of Athens, and before Rome was anything more than a town in central Italy. He probably grew up on the island of Samos before moving in later life to Croton in southern Italy. He and his followers may subsequently have been expelled from there to another southern Italian city, Metapontum.

To the best of our knowledge, Pythagoras wrote nothing. Our knowledge of him begins with fragments of writings about him which date to 150 years after his death. For other early philosophers, we have quotations from their own writings. In the case of Socrates, we have testimony from people who knew him. We have none of this for Pythagoras.

Most people remember Pythagoras today as the originator of the famous theorem on triangles - the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. In fact, this theorem is much older than Pythagoras. There is some evidence that he may have been interested in numbers, but we can be fairly sure that he wasn’t a mathematician in the sense in which we would understand the word. It only seems to have been after his death that a split developed among his followers between those with religious interests (the akousmatikoi) and those with mathematical and scientific interests (the mathematikoi). The man himself was first and foremost a religious guru. More specifically, he belonged to that long succession of religious teachers who have taught that asceticism is the path to the sacred.

The most confident claim that we can make about Pythagoras is that he laid down a distinctive way of life for his followers - an ascetic lifestyle, which included unusual dietary rules. He became famous in later times as a vegetarian. Yet even relatively early sources do not agree on whether he abstained from eating all meat or only some meats (and, if so, which). There is also evidence that he taught abstinence from beans, but the evidence on this is not unequivocal, and in any case no-one seems to have remembered the reason for the prohibition.

As far as doctrine is concerned, Pythagoras’s main contribution to religious thought seems to have been the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Greek religion was not especially interested in life after death, and the early Greeks believed that the dead lingered on in a kind of shadowy half-existence in Hades. But a few people seem to have thought that there was more to it than that, and Pythagoras was one of them. In particular, he was credited with teaching the doctrine of reincarnation. This included the migration of souls between humans and other animals. Abstaining from eating animals makes some sense if you believe that human souls might end up in them. It might also make sense if you are trying, Buddhist-style, to escape your cycle of incarnations by means of a process of self-purification.

Ordinary Greeks might have been forgiven for mistaking the Pythagorean path for what we would today call a cult. The early Pythagoreans come over as a kind of cross between monks and hippies. They weren’t alone, either - they had some similarity with other shadowy, mystical religious movements in early Greece, including one known as Orphism which likewise seems to have taught reincarnation. The Pythagoreans and their fellow mystics formed a kind of radical fringe of Greek religion: the side of it that wasn’t about marble temples or colourful myths. Some people couldn’t resist making fun of them. This is how the comic playwright Alexis (c. 375 - c. 275 BCE) wrote about them:

- ....Clever Pythagorean

discourses and refined philosophy

are what those men live on. This is their daily fare:

one plain loaf for each of them, and a cup

of water: that’s it!

- You’re telling me

that all these wise men live like they’re in prison?... (Athenaeus, 161b-c)

And also:

They have to put up with hunger, dirt,

cold, silence, gloom and not being able to wash. (Athenaeus, 161d)

It didn’t help that the Pythagoreans seem to have had some involvement in politics. Their distinctive combination of religious esotericism, fraternalism and political activity has been compared to the modern movement of Freemasonry.

So much for the origins of Pythagoreanism. By about the 300s BCE, it seemed that the movement had run out of steam and was on the decline. But the story wasn’t over; not by a long way.

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From around the first century BCE, the Pythagorean movement underwent a renaissance. Pythagoras came to be seem as a kind of semi-divine figure - a master of teaching and doctrine who had given the other great Greek philosophers their ideas. Writers forged entire treatises in the name of Pythagoras and his early followers in order to tell the world what they ought to have said. In the hands of these New Pythagoreans, Pythagoras and his legacy came to take on the appearance of a storehouse of wisdom on subjects ranging across metaphysics, magic, music, mathematics and morality.

Into this context stepped a man by the name of Apollonius, who came from Tyana in modern-day Turkey. He appears to have lived in the second half of the first century CE. His rather meagre surviving writings reveal the recognisable outlines of a New Pythagorean philosopher.

He advocated an ascetic, virtuous lifestyle, and showed a particular disdain for worldly wealth.

He is said to have written several treatises on philosophical and religious topics.

He seems to have had a reputation as a magician and a healer.

He seems to have acknowledged both the traditional gods of the Greek pantheon and a higher, transcendent godhead. He also seems to have opposed traditional ritual practices. This surviving fragment from his works is particularly interesting:

In this way, then, I think, one would best show the proper regard for the Deity, and thereby secure His favour and good will beyond all other men, if to Him whom we have called the First God, and who is One and separate from all others, and to whom the rest must be acknowledged inferior, one should sacrifice nothing at all, neither kindle fire, nor dedicate anything whatever that is an object of sense - for He needs nothing even from beings who are greater than we are: nor is there any plant at all which the earth sends up, nor any animal which it, or the air, sustains, to which there is not some defilement attached. Rather, one should always employ towards Him only that better speech - I mean the speech that does not pass through the lips - and should ask for good things from the noblest of beings by what is noblest in ourselves - that is the mind, which needs no instrument. This being the case, therefore, we ought not at all to offer sacrifice to the great God who is over all.

This radical rejection of traditional sacrificial offerings is fascinating stuff. It is the pagan equivalent of Martin Luther denouncing the Mass. It makes one wish that more of Apollonius’s works had survived.

Our main source for Apollonius’s life is a long biography written by one Philostratus (c. 170 - c. 245 AD), a Greek rhetorician who had connections to the Roman imperial house. In particular, he was a personal friend of the Empress Julia Domna, who appears to have inspired him to write the book. He wrote several other works as well, both fiction and non-fiction.

If we want to know about Apollonius and his place in ancient religious thought, Philostratus’s book initially looks like a promising resource. We might expect it to give us a particularly clear picture of the man. After all, most people in the ancient world didn’t have lengthy biographies written about them.

But Philostratus didn’t know or care much about philosophy. Nor is it entirely clear where Philostratus got his information from. He refers to a number of sources, in particular an earlier biography of Apollonius by a follower of his called Damis of Nineveh. But Damis’s work has not survived, and we have no way of knowing how accurate it was or how close Philostratus kept to it. Some have suggested that Philostratus made the source up.

Philostratus’s work reads like a novel - quite a good one, in fact. Its atmosphere is curiously unreal. Anecdotal and digressive, it has the general feel of a romance composed for entertainment rather than a work of strong intellectual fibre. It is certainly not a philosophical treatise, although there are some references to Pythagorean concerns such as reincarnation, vegetarianism and numerology.

On the whole, the Apollonius who comes through to us from Philostratus’s biography has the feel of a fictional character. Philostratus does not attribute any very profound or detailed teachings to him.

What is more, Philostratus presents Apollonius not just as a Pythagorean philosopher but as a kind of semi-legendary hero. He is exemplary in virtue and wisdom. He has supernatural gifts, including powers of clairvoyance and healing. He is honoured even by the gods. He travels around the known world - Mesopotamia, Iran, India, Spain and Egypt - and converses with kings and emperors. In the final part of the book, he miraculously escapes from a trial before the evil Emperor Domitian. Interestingly, Pythagoras himself was also said to have travelled around exotic parts of the world while he was developing his teachings. It looks like Apollonius was mythologised and divinised in the same sort of way as Pythagoras.

It is especially significant that the ideas expressed by the real Apollonius in the quotation cited above find little or no place in Philostratus’s work. His Apollonius does not spend his time discoursing on the ineffable Godhead and the uselessness of making sacrifices to it. Instead, he cheerfully hands out advice on traditional cultic practices.

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Like so many other ancient characters, we know a little about Apollonius - enough to make him interesting - but he becomes more hazy the closer we look at him. We have some sense of what he would have believed and taught, but our main source is deficient, if not actively misleading - Philostratus was writing a work of entertainment and not philosophy.

We have here a figure of legend behind who we can catch glimpses of a real person. Perhaps it is there that the comparison with Jesus of Nazareth is strongest.

We will probably never know exactly what this mysterious pagan holy man was like.

The stories are good, at least.