The Life of Apollonius of Tyana: Book VIII: Chapter 7

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CHAPTER VII (i)

(i) "My prince, we are at issue with one another concerning matters of grave moment; for you run such a risk as never autocrat did before you, that namely of being thought to be animated by a wholly unjust hatred of philosophy; while I am exposed to a worse peril than was ever Socrates at Athens, for though the accusers taxed him in their indictment with introducing new beliefs about demons, they never went so far as to call him or think him a demon. Since, however, so grave a peril besets us both, I will not hesitate to tender you the advice of

CHAPTER VII (ii)

(ii) Who then will be my advocate while I am defending myself? For if I called upon Zeus to help me, under whom I am conscious of having passed my life, they will accuse me of being a wizard and of bringing heaven down to earth. Let us then appeal in this matter to one whom I deny to be dead, although the many assert it, I mean your own father, who held me in the same esteem in which you behold him; for he made you, and was in turn made by me. He, my prince, shall assist my defense, because he knows my character much better than yourself; for he came to Egypt before he was raised to the throne, as much to converse with me about the Empire as to sacrifice to the gods of Egypt. And when he found me with my long hair and dressed as I am at this moment, he did not ask me a single question about my costume, because he considered that everything about me was well; but he admitted that he had come thither on my account,

CHAPTER VII (iii)

(iii) And there is another point, my prince, which merits your attention. The various arts known to mankind, in spite of the differences of their functions and achievements, are yet all concerned to make money, some earning less, some earning more, and some just enough to live upon; and not only the base mechanic arts, but of the rest those which

1 arts as well as those which only border upon being liberal, and true philosophy is the only exception. And by liberal arts I mean poetry, music, astronomy, the art of the sophist and of the orator, the merely forensic kinds excepted; and by the arts which border upon liberal I mean those of the painter, modeller, sculptor, navigator, agriculturist, in case the latter waits upon the seasons; for these arts are not very inferior to the liberal professions. And on the other hand, my prince, there are the pseudo-liberal arts of jugglers, which I would not have you confuse with divination, for this is highly esteemed, if it be genuine and tell the truth, though whether it is an art, I am not sure. But I anyhow affirm wizards to be professors of a pseudo-liberal art, for they have get men to believe that the unreal is real, and to distrust the real as unreal, and I attribute all such efforts to the imaginative fancy of the dupes; for the cleverness of this art is relative to the folly of the persons who are deceived by them, and who offer the sacrifices they prescribe; and its professors are given up wholly to filthy lucre, for all their parade of skill is devised by them in hope of gain, and they try to persuade people who are passionately attached to something or another that they are capable of getting everything for them. Do you then find me so opulent as to warrant me in supposing that I cultivate the sort of false and illiberal wisdom, the more so as your own father considered me to be above all pecuniary considerations? And to show you that

CHAPTER VII (iv)

(iv) But without descending to such silly arguments, I would like to ask the accuser which of his counts I ought to take first. And yet why need I ask him? for at the beginning of his speech he dwelt upon my dress, and by Zeus, upon what I eat and what I do not eat. O divine Pythagoras, do thou defend me upon these counts; for we are put upon our trial for a rule of life of which thou wast the discoverer, and of which I am the humble partisan. For the earth, my prince, grows everything for mankind; and those who are pleased to live at peace with the brute creation want nothing, for some fruits they can cull from earth, others they win from her furrows, for she is the nurse of men, as suits the seasons; but these men, as it were deaf to the cries of mother earth, whet their knife against her children in order to get themselves dress and food. Here then is something which the Brahmans of India themselves condemned, and which they taught the naked sages of Egypt also to condemn; and from them Pythagoras took his rule of life, and he was the first of Hellenes

CHAPTER VII (v)

(v) Nor even is my mode of dress protected from their calumnies, for the accuser is ready to steal even that off my back, because it has such vast value for wizards. And yet apart from my contention about the use of living animals and lifeless things, according as he uses one or the other of which I regard a man as impure or pure, in what way is linen better than wool? Was not the latter taken from the back of the gentlest of animals, of a creature beloved of the gods, who do not disdain themselves to be shepherds, and, by Zeus, once held the fleece to be worthy of a golden form, if it was really a god that did so, and if it be not a mere story? On the other hand linen is grown and sown anywhere, and there is no talk of gold in connection with it. Nevertheless, because it is not plucked from the back of a living animal, the Indians regard it as pure, and so do the Egyptians, and I myself and Pythagoras on this account have adopted it as our garb when we are discoursing or praying or offering sacrifice. And it is a pure substance under which to sleep of a night, for to those who live as I do dreams bring the truest of their revelations.

CHAPTER VII (vi)

(vi) Let us next defend ourselves from the attack occasioned by the hair which we formerly wore, for one of the counts of the accusation turns upon

CHAPTER VII (vii)

(vii) But let us say no more about my hair, for it has been cut off, and the accusation has been forestalled by the same hatred which inspires the next count, a much more serious one from which I must now defend myself. For it is one calculated to fill not only you, my prince, but Zeus himself with apprehension. For he declares that men regard me as a god, and that those who have been thunderstruck and rendered stark-mad by myself proclaim this tenet in public. And yet before accusing me there are things which they should have informed us of, to wit, by what discourses, or by what miracles of word or deed I induced men to pray to me; for I never talked among Hellenes of the goal and origin of my soul's past and future transformations, although I knew full well what they were; nor did I ever disseminate such opinions about myself; nor came forth with presages and oracular strains, which are the harvest of candidates for divine honors. Nor do I know of a single city in which a decree was passed that the citizens should assemble and sacrifice in honor of Apollonius. And yet I have been much esteemed in the several cities which asked for my aid, whatever the objects were for which they asked it, and they were such as these: that their sick might be healed of their diseases, that both their initiations and their sacrifices might be rendered more holy, that insolence and pride might be extirpated, and the laws strengthened. And whereas the only reward which I obtained in all this was that men were made much better than they were before, they were

CHAPTER VII (viii)

(viii) Let me now, my prince, take the accusation which concerns Ephesus, since the salvation of that city was gained; and let the Egyptian be my judge, according as it best suits his accusation. For this is the sort of thing the accusation is. Let us suppose that among the Scythians or Celts, who live along the river Ister and Rhine, a city has been founded every whit as important as Ephesus in Ionia. Here you have a sally-port of barbarians, who refuse

CHAPTER VII (ix)

(ix) The accuser here interrupts me, you hear him yourself do so, my prince, and he remarks that I am not accused for having brought about the salvation of the Ephesians, but for having foretold that the plague would befall them; for this, he says, transcends the power of wisdom and is miraculous, so that I could never have reached such a pitch of truth if I were not a wizard and an unspeakable wretch. What then will Socrates say here of the lore which he declared he learned from his demonic genius? Or what would Thales and Anaxagoras, both Ionians, say, of whom one foretold a plenteous crop of olives, and the other not a few meteorological disturbances? Why, is it not a fact that they were brought before the law-courts upon other charges, but that no one ever heard among their accusations that of their being wizards, because they had the gift of foreknowledge? For that would have been thought ridiculous, and it would not have been a plausible charge to bring against men of wisdom even in Thessaly, where the women had a bad reputation for drawing the moon down to earth.

How then did I get my sense of the coming disaster at Ephesus? You have listened to the statement made even by my accuser, that instead of living like other people, I keep to a light diet of my own, and prefer it to the luxury of others, and I began by saying so myself. This diet, my king, guards my senses in a kind of indescribable ether or clear air, and forbids them to contract any foul or turbid matter, and allows me to discern, as in the sheen of a looking glass, everything that is happening

CHAPTER VII (x)

(x) But inasmuch as you bid me vindicate myself in the matter of the sacrifice, for I observe you beckoning with your hand for me to do so, hear my defense. It shall set the truth before you. In all my actions I have at heart the salvation of mankind, yet I have never offered a sacrifice in their behalf, nor will I ever sacrifice anything, nor touch sacrifices in which there is blood, nor offer any prayer with my eyes fixed upon a knife or the kind of sacrifice that he means. It is no Scythian, my prince, that you have got before you, nor a native of some savage and inhospitable land; nor did I ever mingle with Massagetae or Taurians, for in that case I should have reformed even them and altered their sacrificial custom. But to what depth of folly and inconsequence

CHAPTER VII (xi)

(xi) I must confess that there are also other points which the accuser who brings me to the bar on these accounts should have entertained and considered:

CHAPTER VII (xii)

(xii) However I will leave Euphrates to yourself; for unless you approve of flatterers you will find the fellow worse than I depict him; and I only ask you to listen to the rest of my apology. What then is it to be, and from what counts is to defend me? In the act of the accusation, my prince, a regular dirge is chanted over an Arcadian boy, whom I am accused of having cut up by night, perhaps in a dream, for I am sure I do not know. This child is said to be of respectable parentage and to have possessed all the

CHAPTER VII (xiii)

(xiii) Let me add that the very hour which my accuser alleges acquits me of this charge. For on that day, the day on which he says I committed this crime, I allow that, if I was in the country, I offered sacrifice, and that if I sacrificed, I ate of the victim. And yet, my prince, you repeatedly ask me if I was not staying in Rome at that time? And you too, O best of princes, were staying there; and

CHAPTER VII (xiv)

(xiv) What then, O sycophant, was I really doing on that night? Suppose I were yourself and was being asked this question, inasmuch as you are come to ask questions, why then the answer would be this: I was trumping up actions against decent and respectable people, and I was trying to ruin the innocent, and to persuade the Emperor by dint of hard lying, in order that while I myself climbed to fame, I might soil him with the blood of my victims. If again you ask me as a philosopher, I was praising the laughter with which Democritus laughed at all human affairs. But if you asked me as being myself, here is my answer: Philiscus of Melos, who was my fellow-pupil in philosophy for four years, was ill at the time; and

"With how little regard then for the truth this accusation has been drawn up, is clearly proved by the testimony of these gentlemen; for it appears that it was not in the suburbs, but in the city, not

CHAPTER VII (xv)

(xv) What then is the Arcadian doing in this case? What becomes of the absurd stories of victims slain? What is the use of urging you to believe such lies? For what never took place will be real, if you decide that it did take place. And how, my prince, are you to rate the improbability of the sacrifice? For of course there have been long ago soothsayers skilled in the art of examining slain victims, for example I can name Megistias of Acarnania, Aristandrus of Lycia, and Silanus who was a native of Ambracia, and of these the Acarnanian was sacrificer to Leonidas the king of Sparta, and the Lycian to Alexander of Macedonia, and Silanus to Cyrus the Pretender; and supposing there had been found stored in the entrails of a human being some information truer or more profound or surer than usual, such a sacrifice was not difficult to effect; inasmuch as there were kings to preside over it, who had plenty of cup-bearers at their disposal, besides plenty of prisoners of war as victims; and moreover these monarchs could violate the law with impunity, and they had no fear of being accused, in case they committed so small a murder. But I believe, these persons had the same conviction which I also entertain, who am now in risk of my life of such accusation, namely that the entrails of animals which we slay while they are ignorant of death, are for that reason, and just because the animals lack all understanding of

CHAPTER VII (xvi)

(xvi) I have then answered this Egyptian's act of accusation; but since I do not think I ought altogether to pass by the slanders of Euphrates, I would ask you, my prince, to judge between us, and decide which of us is more of a philosopher. Well then, whereas he strains every nerve to tell lies about myself, I disdain to do the like about him; and whereas he looks upon you as a despot, I regard you as a constitutional ruler; and while he puts the sword into your hand for use against me, I merely supply you with argument.

But he makes the basis of his accusation the discourses which I delivered in Ionia, and he says that they contain matter much to your disadvantage. And yet what I said concerned the topic of the

And there are other such strains referring to himself, such as those in which he declares that he yields the cause of his son to the Fates; and in the weighing of souls again the poets tell you that, although after his death he presented Minos the brother of Sarpedon with a golden scepter, and appointed him judge in the court of Aidoneus, yet he could not exempt him from the decree of the Fates. And you, my prince, why should you resent my argument when the gods put up with it, whose fortunes are

'For the gods alone there comes no old age, nay, nor even death; but all other things are confounded by all-mastering time…'