Apollonius of Tyana

Also Known As: Greek Apollonios ho Tyaneus; known in Arabic tradition as Balinus, Balinas the Wise
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: Apollonius was a Pythagorean holy man of the first century AD credited with foreseeing plagues and murders, unmasking demons, raising a dead bride and vanishing from an emperor’s courtroom.
Role in Mythos: He is the wonder-working sage of Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius, a biography written around a century after his death that turned a Cappadocian philosopher into a pagan holy man with a miraculous birth and a disputed ending.
Relation to Humans: Cities called on him in plague and danger, and his followers and later emperors honoured him as something close to divine. Christian writers, answering pagans who set his miracles beside those of Jesus, treated him as a rival to be argued down.

The beggar sat in the theatre at Ephesus with a wallet and a crust of bread, blinking his eyes as though he were blind. The city was dying of plague. Its people had begged a philosopher from Tyana to come and cure them, and he had come, and now he stood in front of the crowd, under a statue of Heracles, and told them to pick up stones and kill the old man. They were horrified. He insisted. The first stones flew, and the beggar looked up with eyes full of fire. When the heap was pulled away, the thing beneath it was not a man at all but a hound shaped like a Molossian dog and as big as the largest lion, pounded to pulp and frothing at the mouth like a mad dog. The Ephesians set up a statue of Heracles the Averter over the spot where the plague had been buried.

That is Apollonius of Tyana as his biographer wanted him remembered. The biographer matters more than usual here, because nearly everything told about the man comes from one book. Philostratus wrote his Life of Apollonius at the request of the empress Julia Domna, wife of Septimius Severus; she died in 217, and he finished the work after her death, probably in the 220s or 230s, well over a century after his subject was gone. He said he drew on the notebooks of a disciple named Damis, who travelled with the sage. Many modern scholars think Damis was invented by Philostratus, or that the notebooks were a forgery he trusted. Earlier lives by Moiragenes and by Maximus of Aegae are lost, and the letters that travel under Apollonius’s name have their authenticity disputed. Most historians accept that a Neopythagorean philosopher called Apollonius really lived in first-century Asia Minor. What he did there is another matter.

The legend begins before he was born. His mother, Philostratus says, saw an apparition of Proteus, the Egyptian god who changes shape in Homer, and when she asked what child she would bear, the god answered: himself. A dream sent her to gather flowers in a meadow when her time came. She fell asleep there, and the swans that fed in the meadow formed a dance around her, lifted their wings and cried out all together, and she gave birth. At that moment a thunderbolt seemed about to strike the ground, then rose again into the air and vanished. The people of Tyana, who had a sacred well of Zeus nearby, said the boy was the son of Zeus. Apollonius himself preferred to be called the son of his father, also named Apollonius, a rich and respected man of the town.

At fourteen he was taken to Tarsus to study rhetoric under Euthydemus of Phoenicia. He found the city too fond of luxury and moved down the coast to Aegae, where there was a temple of Asclepius and quiet enough for philosophy. He heard Platonists, Stoics, Aristotelians and Epicureans, and chose Pythagoras. At sixteen he took on the rule for life: no meat, which he called unclean, and no wine, which he said darkened the clear air of the soul. He dressed only in linen, went barefoot, let his hair grow and lived in the temple itself. Mornings there had a pattern: the plain cloth, the cool floor of the sanctuary underfoot, a sick man arriving because the god had sent him. Philostratus says Asclepius once directed a young man swollen with dropsy to Apollonius for his cure.

From there the Life becomes a travelogue with miracles in it. Philostratus sends him through Greece and Asia Minor, to Italy and Spain, into Mesopotamia, Egypt and Ethiopia, and to India, where two and a half of the book’s eight books are spent among kings and sages. Some details of the Indian journey clash with what is known of the region, and many historians regard the whole expedition as fiction. A more cautious reading keeps him mostly in the cities of his own Asia Minor: Tyana, Ephesus, Aegae, Antioch.

The story Philostratus himself called the best known is set at Corinth. A Lycian named Menippus, twenty-five years old and sensible, fell for a beautiful woman who said she was Phoenician and kept a house in the suburbs, where she promised him wine and her company. Apollonius watched the young man for a while and then told him plainly that he was cherishing a serpent, and a serpent was cherishing him. At the wedding feast he unmasked her. The golden goblets and the silver plate turned out to be weightless, and they fluttered away like air. The bride was one of the empusae, he said, the beings most people call lamias and hobgoblins. Pressed, she confessed that she had been fattening Menippus on pleasure in order to eat him, because she fed on young and beautiful bodies whose blood was pure and strong. Centuries later the English poet John Keats took the tale for his Lamia.

In Rome, the Life says, he met a funeral. A girl of a consular family had died in the hour of her wedding, and her bridegroom walked weeping behind the bier. Apollonius had them set it down, touched her, whispered something no one heard, and she woke. It was raining, and a vapour rose from her face. Philostratus admits that neither he nor anyone present could decide whether a spark of life had been missed or whether a dead girl had been brought back. Her family offered him 150,000 sesterces; he gave the money to the girl as a dowry.

The emperors were less grateful. Domitian put him on trial, and the charges were the shape of his legend: his strange dress, the fact that men called him a god, his prophecy of the Ephesian plague, and a rumour that he had sacrificed a boy. He answered each one and then, before midday, simply left the court by vanishing. At dusk he appeared to his companions Damis and Demetrius in a shrine of the nymphs at Dicaearchia, on the Bay of Naples. They took him for a ghost. He told them to take hold of him, and if he slipped their grasp, he was a shade from Persephone’s kingdom. He did not slip.

Domitian’s own end is the one miracle with a second witness. Philostratus has Apollonius stop in the middle of a lecture at Ephesus at noon and cry out to strike the tyrant, then announce that the emperor had just been killed in Rome; runners later confirmed it. The historian Cassius Dio, writing independently in the same generation, tells it too: on that day and at that hour Apollonius climbed a high rock at Ephesus, or perhaps somewhere else, gathered a crowd and shouted encouragement to Stephanus, Domitian’s assassin, as though watching the blows land.

Nobody knows how he died. Philostratus reports that he was eighty, or ninety, or past a hundred, and gives three endings. In one he died at Ephesus with two maidservants beside him. In another he walked into the temple of Athena at Lindos on Rhodes and disappeared. In the third, on Crete, the savage dogs guarding the temple of Dictynna fawned on him, the priests chained him as a sorcerer, and at midnight he freed himself and ran inside; the doors closed behind him, and a chorus of girls was heard singing him up from the earth. Afterwards, the Life adds, he appeared to a doubting young man at Tyana and recited verses on the immortality of the soul. His shrine at Tyana was maintained at imperial expense.

His powers, as the stories set them out, all grew from the Pythagorean discipline: a clean body and a clear soul could see what was hidden, whether a plague wearing a beggar’s face, a devourer wearing a bride’s, or a murder a thousand miles off. His limits were those of a mortal body. He could be arrested, chained and put on trial, and even his escapes happen by leaving rather than by fighting. His other weakness was his record. One biographer, writing for an empress, a century late, shaped almost everything that is known.

That shaping made him useful. The Historia Augusta says the emperor Severus Alexander kept a private shrine with statues of the best deified emperors and of holy souls, Apollonius among them, and, according to a contemporary writer, Christ, Abraham and Orpheus. Under Diocletian a governor named Hierocles set Apollonius’s miracles against those of Jesus to make the Christian ones look ordinary, and a Christian reply to him survives. The Arabic world knew him as Balinus, master of talismans; the Book of the Secret of Creation, written between about 813 and 833, has him reveal the teachings of Hermes. Even Philostratus’s own text has him reading the inscribed stelae in the temple of Heracles at Gades as a charm that held land and sea in their places. In late antiquity, protective figures credited to him stood in the cities of the eastern empire, and the writers who argued about whether they were demonic did not claim they failed to work.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Apollonius of Tyana?

Apollonius of Tyana was a Neopythagorean philosopher of the first century AD from Tyana in Cappadocia, in what is now Turkey. He became the hero of a miracle-filled biography, the Life of Apollonius by Philostratus, which presents him as a holy man who foresaw events, expelled demons and escaped death. Most historians accept that he existed, but doubt much of what the biography says.

Is the Life of Apollonius of Tyana reliable?

The Life of Apollonius is the main source, and it was written by Philostratus at the request of the empress Julia Domna, probably in the 220s or 230s, more than a century after Apollonius died. Philostratus claimed to use the notebooks of a disciple named Damis, but many scholars think Damis was invented or the notebooks forged. The Indian journey in particular is widely regarded as fiction.

What miracles is Apollonius of Tyana said to have performed?

In the Life of Apollonius he unmasks a plague demon at Ephesus, which is stoned and found to be a lion-sized dog, and exposes a Corinthian bride as an empusa planning to eat her husband. He also revives a girl who died on her wedding day in Rome and vanishes from the emperor Domitian’s courtroom. The historian Cassius Dio separately reports that Apollonius announced Domitian’s murder at the moment it happened in Rome.

How did Apollonius of Tyana die?

No one knows how Apollonius of Tyana died, and Philostratus gives three versions. He either died at Ephesus attended by two maidservants, vanished inside the temple of Athena at Lindos, or disappeared into the temple of Dictynna on Crete while girls’ voices sang him up from the earth. His age at death was given as eighty, ninety or over a hundred.

Why was Apollonius of Tyana compared to Jesus?

Apollonius of Tyana was compared to Jesus because both were credited with miracles, healing, raising the dead and an unusual end. Under Diocletian, the governor Hierocles used Apollonius’s miracles to argue that Jesus was nothing special, and a Christian reply to him survives. The emperor Severus Alexander is said to have kept statues of both in his private shrine.