chapter twenty-four
PHILOSTRATUS
T.J.G. Whitmarsh
Philostratus’ In honour of Apollonius of Tyana (Apollonius) is an enco- miastic biography of a philosopher-cum-holy man, Apollonius of Tyana, written by Flavius Philostratus, one of the literary giants of the early third century ce. Although it shows a family resemblance to other forms of spiritual hagiography (including the Christian gospels), it is ultimately quite unlike anything else from antiquity: an intricate, knowing and generically experimental text, in this respect like much of this author’s production.1 What distinguishes Apollonius, however, is its scale and ambition. Commissioned (so the narrator tells us, ..) by the empress Julia Domna to add polish and sophistication to the account contained in the crude notebooks of one Damis of Ninos, Philostratus composed his largest and most inßuential work to the glory of a philosopher who would in generations to come be seen as a ‘pagan’ rival to Christ. As beÞts a work of this magnitude, Apollonius works with a huge spa- tial canvas, from India in the east to Pillars of Heracles in the west, and down to the deep south of Ethiopia; its Þnal two books are set in Rome, the symbolic hub of empire.2 e narrative as a whole represents a philo- sophical voyage initiatique, a rewriting on a global scale of Socrates’ quest for knowledge as described in Plato’s Apology (and similarly culminating in a courtroom). Alongside this interest in geographical plotting at the macro-level, Philostratus also shows a repeated interest in the descrip- tion of locales, particularly sacred ones. What is most interesting, how- ever, is that (as we shall discover in the course of this chapter) Apollonius works self-reßexively with a set of theories about space and how it should be narrated. Space is for Philostratus not an inert narratological category but a, perhaps the, central vehicle for thinking through the knotty prob- lem of what constitutes a theios an¯er, a ‘godlike man’.
1 See Bowie and Elsner . 2 On the symbolic geography of Apollonius, see Elsner . t.j.g. whitmarsh
Space and (Greek) Cultural Memory
e Þrst point to make is that the space described by our narrator is fundamentally intertextual. Particularly on his travels, Apollonius follows in the footsteps of famous predecessors. is is most obviously the case in the East and in Egypt, where Herodotus and the Alexander historians in particular oer ever-present hypotexts. Indeed, Apollonius is on several occasions implicitly correlated with Alexander, passing a number of sites where (we are informed) events in the Macedonian conquest occurred (e.g. .., , –; .). Most striking is the st¯el¯e marking the extent of Alexander’s conquests: When they had crossed that Hydraotes and passed several tribes, they came to the Hyphasis. About thirty stades further on they found altars with this inscription: ‘To my father Ammon, my brother Heracles, Athena of Forethought, Olympian Zeus, the Cabiri of Samothrace, the Sun of India, and Apollo of Delphi’.ey say there was also a bronze pillar (st¯el¯e) dedicated there with the legend ‘Alexander stopped here’.Wemust suppose that the altars were set up by Alexander to honour the limit (terma) of his empire, while the Indians across the Hyphasis dedicated the pillar, presumably in order to boast that Alexander had advanced no further.3 (.) e terma or ‘limit’ of Alexander’s empire is marked doubly, both natu- rally by the river Hyphasis (there is an echo here of Herodotus’ identiÞ- cation of the Araxes as the border of Cyrus’ territory) and artefactually by the altars and the pillars.4 e latter are particularly interesting, in that they are (according to the narrator) not only pre-interpreted, but also conßicting in their pre-interpretation: the altars are understood to be an imperialist celebration of Alexander’s achievements, a message that is then subverted by the alternative, indigenous perspective presented by the pillar. e crucial point, however, is that this Alexandrian boundary- marker is then transgressed by Apollonius: the philosopher outbids the ruler. is ostentatious trumping of the Alexander tradition is shared by Philostratus’ own text: this ‘limit’ (terma) also marks the end of the second book, but Apollonius and Philostratus alike proceed further into India.
3 Translations are adapted from C.P. Jones –. 4 e Alexander tradition makes abundant use of such monumental markers: see Stoneman .