INTRODUCTION

100 years before, during the reign of the Emperor Nerva, and she begged him to use them to compose a literary biography of the sage. These memoirs had been composed by a disciple and companion of Apollonius named Damis, a native of the city of Nineveh, whose style, Philostratus says—like that of most Syrian Greeks—was heavy and lacked polish. Besides these memoirs, Philostratus used a history of Apollonius’s time at Aegae, written by an admirer named Maximus. He also used the many letters of Apollonius that were in circulation. His collection of these agreed partly, but not entirely, with those preserved for us and translated below. He tells us further that the Emperor Hadrian kept a collection of these letters in his villa at Antium. Philostratus also possessed various treatises by Apollonius that have not survived. Besides making use of these written sources, Philostratus traveled, not only to Tyana—where there was a temple specially dedicated to the cult of Apollonius—but to other cities where the sage’s memory was honored, in order to collect such traditions about him as were still current. From these sources, the work before us was drawn; for although Philostratus