Selected Thoughts of Apollonius Tyanaeus

Apollonius of Tyana, Philostratus · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 5 pages

Five pages of passages excerpted from Philostratus's Life of Apollonius of Tyana in F.C. Conybeare's Loeb translation of 1912, arranged under *seven running headings* so that each saying can be found on its own. The subtitle notes that his travels are allegorically described after the signs of the Zodiac.

The headings show how wide the selection is. It opens with a piece of pure natural history — how to seduce goats with cinnamon — describing the aromatic slopes of the Caucasus, a goat that will whine after a piece of cinnamon like a dog and press her nose against the hand that holds it, the lofty frankincense trees, and the pepper trees growing in ravines out of men's reach where apes harvest the fruit and are protected by the local people, who make war on the lions for their sake. From there the sayings turn moral and are given one by one: on the duty of ordinary men as distinct from that of noble men; on justice; on the merits of individual instruction rather than teaching in the mass; on the true magician, and what distinguishes him from the practitioner of tricks; on the health of the body depending upon the purity of the soul; and on the futility of envy. The arrangement is deliberately unsystematic — a set of positions attributed to one man rather than an argument — and the reader is expected to take them a line at a time. Note that a fuller set of the same material appears in the section's compendium volume, Blooms of Mystic Verse and Spiritual Insight, where it has its own internal contents.

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