ibed to his birth its due accompaniment
of signs and portents. At sixteen he set himself under Pythagorean
discipline; kept silence absolute for five years; traveled,
healing and teaching, and acquired a great renown throughout
Asia Minor. He went by Babylon and Parthia to India; spent
some time there as the pupil of certain Teachers on a sacred
mountain; they, it appears, expected his coming, received
him and taught him; ever afterwards he spoke of himself as a
disciple of the Indian Master Iarchus. Nothing in the book is
more interesting than the curious light it throws on popular
beliefs of the time in the Roman World as to the existence of
these Indian masters of the Secret Wisdom;--India, of course,
included the region north of the Himalayas. Later he visited the
Gymnosophists of the Tebaid in Egypt; according to the account,
these were of a lower standing than the Indian Adepts; and
Apollonius came among them not as a would-be disciple, but as an
equal, or superior.--He was persecuted in Rome by Nero; but over
awed Tigellinus, Nero's minister, and escaped. He met Vespasian
and Titus at Alexandria, soon after the fall of Jerusalem; and
was among those who urged Vespasian to take the throne. He was
arrested in Rome by Domitian, and tried on charges of sorcery and
treason; and is said to have escaped his sentence and execution
by the simple expedient of vanishing in broad daylight in court.
One wonders why this from his defense before Domitian, as
Philostratus gives it, has not attracted more comment; he says:
"All unmixed blood is retained by the heart, which through the
blood-vessels sends it flowing as if through canals over the
entire body."--According to tradition, he rose from the dead,
appeared to several to remove their doubts as to a life beyond
death, and finally bodily ascended into heaven. Reincarnation
was a very cardinal point in his teaching; perhaps the name of
Neo-Pythagoreanism, given to his doctrine, is enough to indicate
in what manner it illuminated the inner realms and laws which
Stoicism, intent only on brave conduct and the captaincy of one's
own soul, was unconcerned to inquire into. Another first century
Neo-Pythagorean Teacher was Moderatus of Gades in Spain. The
period of Apollonius's greatest influence would have corresponded
with the reigns of Vespasian and Titus, from 69 to 83; the
former, when he came to the throne, checked the orgies of vice
and brought in an atmosphere in