INTRODUCTION

also knew the four books written by a certain Moeragenes about Apollonius, he tells us he paid no attention to them because they displayed an ignorance of many things concerning the sage. The learned Empress seems never to have lived to read Philostratus’s work, for it is not dedicated to her and cannot have been published before the year 217.

It has been argued that the work of Damis never really existed and that he was a mere invention by Philostratus. This view was adopted as recently as 1910 by Professor Bigg in his history of the origins of Christianity. But this seems unnecessarily skeptical. It is true that Philostratus puts into the mouth of the sage, on the authority of Damis, conversations and ideas which—as they reappear in Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists A collection of biographies of famous teachers of rhetoric.—can hardly have been reported by Damis. But because he resorted to this literary trick, it does not follow that all the episodes he reports on the authority of Damis are fictitious. Many of them possess great verisimilitude The appearance of being true or real. and could hardly have been invented as late as 217, when the life was completed. It is more likely that Damis himself was not entirely a credible writer, but rather one who, like the so-called