Apollonius of Tyana: The Pagan Christ of the Third Century

Front matter

APOLLONIUS OF TYANA,

THE

PAGAN CHRIST

Introduction

APOLLONIUS OF TYANA,

THE

PAGAN CHRIST

OF THE THIRD CENTURY.

APOLLONIUS OF TYANA AND THE IMPERIAL COURT OF SEVERUS AND HIS SUCCESSORS.

THE acknowledged triumph of Christianity during the reign of Constantine has always been considered one of those unaccountable revolutions and one of those historical surprises which, unconnected us they seem to be with any phenomena of the past, might almost be deemed miraculous. One longs to find out by what process the human mind passed so rapidly from a contemptuous and utter denial of the teachings of Christianity to an interest in and an avowed sympathy for the doctrines of the new creed. It has long been thought that this problem could not be solved; and yet, in point of fact, in this as in many other cases, the transition was caused by no sudden shock, and modern critics have discovered a series of what we may call middle terms which will henceforth tell very materially upon the history of the progress of religious thought in the world.

It was in the fourth century, immediately after the most violent persecutions, that Christianity, though embraced and professed by the minority only, succeeded in attaining to a commanding position in matters both social and political. During the third century, however, an attentive observer might have foreseen the dawn of this unexpected triumph from certain internal convulsions which were then affecting Paganism. An extraordinary change had taken place in the ideas of the Pagan world. People were very far from avowing themselves openly as Christians, and yet they were making decided efforts to Christianise the old creed, that of natural religion. An anxiety was evinced that this old creed should be imbued with more spiritualism, that it should become more moral, and, moreover, that it should be purified from all traditional absurdities and impurities. And, further, it was believed that the religious ideal which had been dreamt of could only be realised in an incarnation, in a perfectly holy and perfectly beautiful human life, which should enable that ideal to lay hold upon the consciences of men; hence various means were devised to furnish reformed Paganism with a like gift to the one enjoyed by the Christians, through the Gospel, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. In a word, an attempt was made to introduce a Pagan Christ. The absurdity, we might almost say, the childish simplicity of these attempts must not blind us to their importance and to their historical value. There is a. certain mixture of grandeur of conception and pettiness of realisation which constitutes the very moral essence of this remarkable era, in which the old religion, foreseeing its imminent decline, conceived the idea of prolonging its days by the adoption of those outward trappings and outward forms which belonged properly to its younger rival.

Section 1

I.

The biography of Apollonius of Tyana, written by Philostratus of Lemnos, is one of the most curious results of this attempt to remodel and revive Paganism. Philostratus was one of the many men of letters and science who had collected together round Julia Domna, the wife of Septimius Severus. The influence which Julia Domna exercised over the reign of her husband (A.D. 193—211), and more especially over that of his successor Caracalla, who died A.D. 217, is an acknowledged fact in history. It was in obedience to the express desire of his illustrious patroness that Philostratus wrote the biography of the learned Apollonius of Tyana, who lived, it was said, in the days of the first emperors, from Augustus to Domitian; in other words, during the whole of the first century. Other writers, as, for instance, Maximus of Egae and Maeragenes, had already touched upon the same subject. According to his own statement, Philostratus had made free use of a number of unpublished anecdotes, which had been complied by a faithful disciple and constant companion of Apollonius, and were known by a title equivalent to our term "Scraps." It would appear, further, that these early works were so notoriously imperfect, that a compete revisal of this strange history had become desirable.

The work of Philostratus is not only interesting in itself, and more amusing, if I might be allowed to say so, than many modern novels, but it is one of the most instructive books we possess. It throws considerable light upon the manners, ideas, and creeds of the period. We are enabled by its aid to understand more of the moral aspect of times which it is almost impossible to realize when studied by the light of Roman history. It admits us at once into the religious atmosphere which would of necessity influence the sympathies of Pagan thinkers. On all these grounds it richly deserves the high rank assigned to it by modern criticism, amongst the many documents which relate to the third century. Its interesting character will be more easily understood if we bear in mind the source from which it sprang. History has failed to notice the powerful influence of a priestly family composed entirely of women during its most flourishing days, and which, so long as the dynasty of Severus lasted, did imperceptibly, yet most really and powerfully, turn the tide of events and direct the current of thought in the Roman empire. By the expression "dynasty of Severus" I understand the reigns of the four emperors, beginning with Septimius Severus (A.D. 193), and ending with Alexander Severus, who died A.D. 235.

Septimius Severus ascended the throne during one of these critical revolutionary periods when it was doubtful whether the gigantic piece of state machinery founded by Julius Caesar and Augustus was not crumbling to pieces and doomed to be split up into five or six different kingdoms. On the death of Nero a similar shock had been experienced; Vindex, Galba, Otho, and Vitellius had succeeded each other with alarming rapidity. Fortunately for the stability of the empire, Vespasian, a soldier of great energy and greater genius, seized hold of the reins of government with a strong and determined hand, and restored public affairs to something like a condition of safety. Septimius Severus was a second Vespasian. After the death of Commodus, the last of the Antonines, everything was again thrown into confusion. Pertinax, a mere puppet in the hands of the troops, reigned for a few months only. Didius Julianus, Pescennius Niger, Albinus, and Septimius Severus were almost simultaneously proclaimed by the legions; but Septimius, an intrepid and energetic general, popular with the troops and feared by the senate, soon triumphed over his rivals, and reigned not ingloriously for eighteen years. He gained the affections of the soldiery by the distribution of great largesses, and yet he restored great strictness of discipline. One of the boldest steps he took was to disband the praetorian guard. He kept the troops constantly employed in foreign and distant expeditions, moving them about from the banks of the Euphrates to the mountains of Scotland; and meanwhile at home he kept down any approach to conspiracies amongst the aristocracy by sheer force: such was the sum total of his policy. He was a most war-loving emperor, and when lying on his death-bed, the last advice he gave to his sons Caracalla and Geta was this, that they should make any and every sacrifice to secure the allegiance of the army, and that with that once gained they might defy everything else. Little did he think then, that in refusing to choose a more solid foundation, he was slowly but surely preparing its downfall. Antonius Caracalla, the successor of Septimius, was as passionately devoted to the pursuit of arms as his father had been before him, but he possessed neither the same firmness of character nor the same administrative talent. He murdered his brother Geta, who would probably have murdered him had he not taken the initiative, and he played at the game of war for six years; eventually he was assassinated near Edessa by the praetorian prefect Macrinus, who wore the imperial purple for a very short period, as the army remained faithful in their allegiance to the family of Septimius Severus; and Elagabalus, the reputed son of Cara , was brought from the temple of the sun at Emesa, and proclaimed emperor by the troops. He was a mere child, fourteen years of age, precocious in vice and absurdly bigoted; he spent the whole of his time in the practice of religious ceremonies and ritual observances, in hopes of converting the world to the worship of his Syrian god. He, too, came to an untimely end; he was assassinated by the praetorians by the tacit consent of the senate, and was succeeded by his cousin Alexander Severus, in spite of his youth (he was barely thirteen years old), from A.D. 222 to A.D. 235. Alexander was a good emperor, but his qualities have been exaggerated by Christian writers. Learned, amiable, and careful of the public purse, he seems to have been deficient in military courage, and as the soldiery had long been accustomed to the prodigality of his predecessors, and neither loved nor feared so inoffensive a sovereign, they assassinated him near the frontiers of Germany, and chose as his successor a man after their own heart, the notoriously daring, muscular, and gigantic Maximinus.

Such is a condensed summary of the Augustan history during the period about the middle of which Philostratus published his life of Apollonius; it includes the lives of princes who, with the exception of the first, were below the ordinary average of men. And yet during this same period the empire remained comparatively tranquil, and passed without any noticeable convulsion into an entirely new era. It was in Caracalla's time that this very serious transformation was effected, which had long been dreamt of and intended by the imperial aristocracy, viz., that all who were freemen in the state should be created Roman citizens. It was the final blow to the old Roman commonwealth. From that time forth Rome became the conquest of the provinces. The religious universalism which is so main a feature in the teachings of Apollonius has its counterpart in the political universalism the introduction of which has given to the obtuse-minded Caracalla a position in history which he was far from anticipating; at the same time, however, when the true character of this period is closely examined, it will be found in a thousand different ways and on the most undoubted authority that the male history of this period is only the superficial view, and that side by side with these sovereigns, who were either worthless or dissolute, there reigned some of the most accomplished and distinguished of women.

In the foremost rank we must place Julia Domna, the wife of Septimius Severus, the daughter of a priest of the sun at Emesa, in Cœlesyria. Her husband had chosen her for a wife, even before his own accession to the throne, in consequence of an oracle which attributed to her a royal nativity. Julia Domna was beautiful enough to make the prediction easy of fulfilment in some way or other, and it may fairly be presumed that her beauty and sound sense, added to a lively imagination, contributed with the promising oracle to make a deep impression on the heart of the austere general. As soon as she had been made empress she gathered round her the finest intellects and greatest orators of the day; amongst them were Dion Cassius, the historian, the emi lawyers Paulus, Papinian, and Ulpian, and Philostratus, the biographer of Apollonius. The influence she exercised over her husband must have been extraordinary, for Plautianus, the favourite of Severus, never ceased to offer her the most systematic opposition, and at last fell a victim in the deadly strife. We may, perhaps, attribute the disparaging rumours which were circulated concerning the chastity of Julia Domna to the interested calumnies of Plautianus. Her husband was not the man to wink at such aberrations of duty, more especially if it be true that to conjugal infidelity she added political treason. Her evil reputation increased in the reign of her son Caracalla, though, by-the-bye, according to some historians she was only his stepmother, Caracalla being the son of Septimius by a former wife. On the same authority it is stated that the imperial buffoon was captivated by her admirably-preserved charms, and that he contracted with her an incestuous marriage, a circumstance which led to her being called Jocasta by her enemies. Bayle maintains the improbability of the whole story, and rests his opinion on the fact that it is not mentioned in any way by two contemporary historians, Dion Cassius and Herodian, neither of whom manifests the slightest predilection for the family of Severus, and both of whom mention Julia as the mother of Caracalla, without the slightest allusion to so disreputable a connection. We may safely infer, then, that it is a gross calumny invented by her enemies. She died a few days only after Caracalla, but she had long had an intimate and faithful companion in the person of her sister, Julia Maesa, a woman of great determination and greater ambition. She it was who brought the young Elagabalus from the temple of the sun, and introducing him to the troops, declared that he was the natural son of her daughter Soemis and Caracalla. Having triumphed over Macrinus, she and her daughter held the reins of government, whilst Elagabalus, the grandson of the former, was scandalising Rome by his habits as a sun-worshipper, and by his fanatical desire to introduce the Syrian worship of the sun. It was probably at their instigation that this sorry specimen of an emperor, who had already compelled the senate to admit his mother as one of its members and to give her a seat at its councils, instituted a new senate composed of women, whose duty it was to issue decrees on the subject of dress, precedence, right to kiss hands, carriages, pearls on shoes, &c., but who would hardly limit their deliberations to such trifling matters, although these only are recorded by the historians of the period, probably not without intention. When it became quite clear to Maesa that the earlier popularity of Elagabalus was rapidly on the wane, she at once made him adopt, though much against his will, his cousin Alexander Severus, the son of her own daughter Julia Mamaea, the last of this extraordinary family. Soemis and Elagabalus died at the same time (A.D. 222); Maesa died soon after, and Julia Mamaea reigned until the year A.D. 235, under the auspices of Alexander Severus, who, according to the unanimous consent of all historians, yielded the blindest submission to his mother's will. To the very last she guided her son's political career and regulated his moral conduct, and it must be added, in justice to her, that his private virtues contrasted most favourably with the dissolute and infamous life of his predecessor. She abused her power, however, to such a degree that she compelled him to separate from a young wife to whom he was tenderly and sincerely attached, and of whom his mother was jealous. Another of her mistakes consisted in her never having been able to control the army, which was in a constant state of revolt; so great was their insubordination that the soldiery assassinated Ulpian under the very eyes of the emperor, and refused to be conciliated by her bounties.

At last, when the veterans of Septimius Severus were replaced by fresh recruits, the army revolted more against Mamaea than against her son, and put both mother and son to death.

Hence, notwithstanding the periodical murders which seem to form a part of the institutions of the Roman empire, we find a regular dynasty of empresses, all of them issuing from an Eastern temple, and im with Eastern notions—women of extraordinary influence, and for nearly a quarter of a century—that is, from the death of Septimius to that of Alexander—in possession of supreme and absolute power. Now, when we can trace the existence of a prolonged female rule, more especially under the auspices of an absolute government, we may be quite sure that we shall soon find the direct consequences of female intervention in religious matters. And accordingly we find that in the contemporary writings, such as the histories of Dion Cassius and Herodian, in the Augustan history which is not of a much later date, and in the historical records of the Lower Empire, a consistent course of action in religious matters may be discerned, which, commencing in a somewhat mysterious way in the days of Julia Domna, is fully revealed under the auspices of Julia. Mamaea. The absurdities and follies of Elagabalus are explained by what we may term the theology of his family on the mother's side. And we must further bear in mind that Philostratus wrote his book at the bidding of Julia Domna, and that the book was completed a short time after her death.

The campaigns of Septimius Severus in the far East had extended the intellectual horizon. People began to see that the world was considerably larger than the Roman empire. The emperor had stayed some time in Tyana; he had been ill there, and his recovery may possibly have been attributed to the healing deity of the locality. His soldiers had brought home from their distant expeditions vague and wonderful accounts of the kingdoms of Persia and India, which their love of the marvellous had still further improved. In the Indian experiences of Philostratus there may be found an extraordinary mixture of reality and fanciful invention. Severus himself had begun to take a part in his wife's philosophic and literary amusements. It would seem that, having but little confidence in the future of all imperial institutions, and even in the combination of Greek and Roman civilisation, he looked with no unfavourable eye on the introduction of a foreign element into the moral life of his contemporaries. One circum , which is now an acknowledged fact, in the face of all appearances to the contrary, is, that he very materially modified the penalties and disabilities which affected both Jews and Christians, and that although he forbade all attempts to proselytise, the persecutions which arose during his reign must not be attributed to his enactments, or even to his wishes. Proculus, his favourite slave, was a Christian; the nurse of Caracalla was a Christian; and during his reign, when the influence of Julia Domna was paramount, the Christian Church enjoyed a period of perfect tranquillity. Matters remained unaltered under Elagabalus, although he entertained very decided religious opinions; but we have already seen that during his reign his grandmother, Maesa, and his mother, Soemis, were at the head of affairs. The condition of the Christians was, if anything, more favourable in the reign of Alexander Severus, who acted under the guidance of his mother, Mamaea. To Julia Domna must be awarded the credit of the first movement, in which all the other princesses of the same family joined, as they respectively came to the throne; notwithstanding the individual differences which characterised them. This brings us to A.D. 235. The main idea, therefore, which pervades the whole of the religious movement over which they presided will be found in the work written by Philostratus of Lemnos, under the title of The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, and ordered to be written by Julia Domna. We shall now proceed to examine this strange history.

Section 2

II.

Apollonius was born in Tyana, a Greek city of Cappadocia, but it is not certain in what year. From several coincidences, however, in his work, we may conclude that the time of his birth was nearly identical with that of Jesus Christ. During the period which preceded his birth his mother was favoured with a kind of annunciation, sent by the god of divination and penetrative science. Proteus appeared to her, and informed her that the child of whom she was then pregnant was an incarnation of himself. When the child was

born, a chorus of swans, the messenger-birds of Apollo, celebrated his birth, and a thunderbolt, after falling from heaven, was seen to reascend. This was understood to signify a salutation offered by the gods to the newly-born infant. Endowed with marvellous precocity, and with a beauty which attracted the attention of every one, Apollonius carried on his studies in the first instance at Tarsus, the birthplace of Saint Paul, under the auspices and guidance of a learned rhetorician; but the dissolute morals of the place compelled him to remove, and thence he went to Egae, where he became an ardent admirer of Æscalapius and a determined follower of Pythagoras. Of his own accord he submitted to all the strictest tests of the severe novitiate and the old spiritual exercises which the philosopher of Samos imposed rigidly upon all his disciples, and shortly after he was seen to appear in the garb and manner peculiar to the sect of the Pythagoreans, that is to say, clothed in a linen tunic, barefooted, with long hair, and abstaining from meat and wine. His ideas on the uselessness, or rather the sin , of bloody sacrifices—his remarks, which were characterised by a wisdom far above his years—the excellent advice he gave to those who came to consult Æsculapius—all contributed to strike the priests of that god with astonishment; and the general admiration in which he was held was only heightened when, at the age of twenty, he gave up his patrimony for the benefit of his family, and took a vow of perpetual chastity. After a lapse of five years, which, according to Pythagorean rule, he spent in absolute silence, he began to travel about in Asia Minor, Commencing his journey at Antioch. In every place the subjects of his teaching were the precepts of true wisdom, the respect due to the gods, the true mode of worshipping them, and the necessity of returning to those rites of more ancient times which had either fallen into disuse or been strangely altered. Disciples were already following him in every place. Meanwhile, however, he did not consider himself sufficiently advanced, and desiring, as he did, to attain to higher degrees of wisdom than had been reached by Pythagoras and Plato, he left for India, intending there, amongst the Brahmins, to drink deeply of the pre-eminently pure and divine science. Passing through Babylon, he visited the Magians. It was during this voyage that he was joined by a disciple from Nineveh, named Damis, and that he was enabled, besides the knowledge he possessed of all human languages (which, by the way, he had never been obliged to learn), to understand the language used by animals amongst themselves. Delighted to entertain such a guest, the King of Babylon kept him under his roof and listened to his teaching with the most profound attention for a period of eight months.

At last Apollonius proceeded on his travels to India, and crossed "the Caucasus," says Philostratus with all gravity, whose geographical ignorance, even as compared with that of the ancients, is marvellous. It is quite true that he is only repeating, with exemplary faithfulness, the statement of the historian Damis, whose imagination is of the liveliest. It is recorded of Damis, by himself, that as he crossed the Caucasus he saw the chains with which, in old times, Prometheus had been bound. We must do him the justice to say, however, that in order to sustain the character of a truthful and conscientious historian, he adds that he could not possibly tell "what metal they were made of."

After crossing the Caucasus, another king, an Indian potentate of matchless virtue—almost a Pythagorean in his mode of life—bestowed all kinds of admiration and praise upon Apollonius, and entertained him most hospitably. From this prince it was that he received his earliest information respecting the sages of India. They lived, he heard, on a mountain, from the summit of which they issued their rolling thunders, and drove back such rash mortals as attempted the ascent without their permission. The nearer you approached the mountain, the more wonderful were the things you saw. For instance, there was an insect there which distilled an oil the use of which was to burn up the walls of an enemy's town with flames that could not be extinguished. Farther up a woman might be seen who was black from the head to the waist, and white from the waist to the feet, and had been so formed designedly by Nature that she might receive the worship offered to the Indian Venus. In other places there were fields of pepper-plants, cultivated by apes, and enormous serpents, which could be caught by merely placing a red rag, inscribed with certain magic characters, over the spots they usually frequented; and in the heads of these serpents there were precious stones which possessed the same virtue as the ring of Gyges. Then you came to the holy mountain: it was surrounded by a mist which could either be thickened or dissolved at the will of the wise men. As you ascended the mountain, you met with a fire which purifies from all pollution, a well which delivers oracles, two large stone vases, which contain, the one wind and the other rain, both at the disposal of the sages, by whom it was asserted that the mountain was the navel or centre of India. There they worshipped fire, which they boasted had been brought down directly from the sun, the peculiar prerogative of Prometheus, and the symbol both to them and to him of inventive science. With his own eyes Damis saw these sages rise up into the air, to the height of two cubits, without any extraneous support and without any trickery whatsoever. The wise men do not live in houses, but when it rains they summon a cloud and shelter under it. They wear their hair long, have white mitres on their heads, and are clothed in linen garments, woven from a peculiar kind of flax which it is only lawful for themselves to gather. Their prodigious wisdom overwhelmed even Apollonius, who was not frequently astonished, They are in possession of absolute science; they know at once the past history of every one they see; they can answer all questions. When asked, "Who are you?" they answer, "We are gods." "Why?" "Because we are virtuous." The biographer of Apollonius, who, amidst all the virtues with which he has adorned his hero, has certainly omitted that of modesty, goes on to say that the latter was deeply affected by the intense wisdom of this reply. As might have been expected, Apollonius receives from the Brahmins a full, complete, and literal confirmation of the doctrines of Pythagoras. .The chief amongst them, one Iarchas, remembers having been "some other"—an ancient king or a demi-god in a country the praises of which he sings with that extreme humility which is so characteristic of the whole of that venerable corporation. Next to him we have Palamedes, one of the heroes of the Trojan war, who, in his new existence on earth, reappears as a Brahmin. It may be stated here by the way that Apollonius remembers having been a pilot in some former stage of existence, and how he had duped a number of Phœnician pirates who had tried to drag him into one of their predatory schemes. The conversations with the wise men of India are constantly interrupted by a series of events the marvellousness of which is always on the increase. At one time tripods are seen to move of their own accord; at another, vessels of brass containing a refreshing beverage present themselves to the lips of the thirsty; a cup is miraculously replenished the moment it has been emptied; there is a stone, too, which attracts all others to itself; and all this to illustrate a pantheistic doctrine, according to which the world is an animated creature, male and female in itself, in order to be self-creating, and under the government of one supreme god, who is aided by a number of subordinate gods, who form a part of the one great whole. Apollonius is soon initiated by his hosts in the science of astrology and divination. Damis was not admitted to these meetings, and as Apollonius thought fit to keep his secret knowledge to himself, Philostratus was unable to reveal the nature of the queen of sciences. At last, after five months of wonderment and study, Apollonius left the wise men who had stored his mind with such superhuman lore, and with whom he had lived on such familiar terms, and returned by way of the Erythraean Sea, the Euphrates, Babylon, and Asia Minor; then, not wishing to settle in Antioch, in consequence of the licentiousness of its morals, he directed his steps towards Ionia, and made a triumphant entry into Ephesus.

The period of initiations had now passed, and from that time Apollonius began his travels as a reformer and a prophet. Ephesus, a city notorious for its frivolity and effeminacy, was brought back by his teaching to the cultivation of philosophy and to the practice of virtue. The dissensions of Smyrna were allayed by his wisdom. After this he was recalled to Ephesus, where the plague was committing fearful ravages. In order to save the city from the visitation, he ordered an aged pauper to be stoned to death; and when the heap of stones by which he had been murdered and almost buried had been removed, a large black dog was found in the place where he ought to have been, from which circumstance it was concluded that the old pauper could have been nothing but an evil spirit. Thence he went to Greece, remaining for a short time in Troy, where he conversed with the shade of Achilles, and was informed that the fair Helen had never been in the city of Priam at all. In Lesbos he visited the temple of Orpheus, and landed at Athens, where he healed a young man who was possessed by devils, interrupting himself, in order to do this, in a sermon against the voluptuous dances of Attica. Then he visited all the oracles of Greece, proclaiming himself as a reformer and restorer of the ancient religious rites.