INTRODUCTION

It is possible that some of the stories told of Apollonius by Byzantine writers, notably John Tzetzes, derive from Moeragenes.

The story of the life of Apollonius as narrated by Philostratus is briefly as follows. He was born toward the beginning of the Christian era at Tyana in Cappadocia, and his birth was attended, according to popular tradition, by miracles and omens. At the age of sixteen, he set himself to observe in the most rigid fashion the almost monastic rule ascribed to Pythagoras: renouncing wine, rejecting marriage, refusing to eat any sort of flesh, and in particular condemning the sacrifice of animals to the gods—which in the ancient world furnished the occasion, at least for the poor, to eat meat. We must not forget that in antiquity, hardly any meat was eaten that had not previously been consecrated by sacrifice to a god; consequently, the priest was the village butcher, and the butcher was the priest. Like other devotees of the Neo-Pythagorean philosophy or discipline, Apollonius went without shoes or wore only shoes of bark. He allowed his hair to grow long, never let a razor touch his chin, and took care to wear nothing but linen, for it was considered by him, as it is by Brahmans, an impurity to allow any