XL

THE story proceeds to tell us that after all this,  Apollonius, liberated from the court, made up his mind to descend into the cave of Trophonius in Lebadea; but the people there would not allow him to do so, because they too regarded him as a wizard. Surely it is legitimate in us to be puzzled, when one compares what one reads at the beginning of the book of Philostratus, I mean the passage where he owns that he is puzzled at people having regarded his hero as a wizard, and expresses his surprise at the circumstance, remarking withal, that "although Empedocles and Pythagoras and Democritus had consorted with the same Magi without ever stooping to the magic art, and Plato had derived much from the priests and prophets in Egypt, and had mingled their ideas with his own discourses, without ever being held by anyone to be a magician, yet men so far had failed to recognise his hero as one inspired by the purest wisdom, but had long since accounted him a magician and still did so, because he had consorted with the Magi of Babylon and the Brahmans of India, and the Naked sages of Egypt." XL What answer then can we make to him, except this ? --  My good fellow, what was your hero up to in this line, for him alone to have been regarded both long ago and now as a wizard in contrast with these great men; who though, as you admit, they had made trial of the same teachers as he, yet were eminent both in the age in which thev nourished, and also bequeathed to posterity in their philosophy a gift of such excellence that its praises are still sung. Is such a contrast possible, unless he was caught by men of good sense meddling with things that were unlawful ? There are still among our contemporaries those who say that they have found superstitious devices dedicated in the name of this man ; though I admit I have no wish to pay attention to them. However as regards his death, although Philostratus follows in his book the accounts of earlier writers, he declares that he knows nothing of the truth ; for he says that people in Ephesus related that Apollonius died there, while others said that he died in Lindus after entering the temple of Athene, and others in Crete ; and after shedding so much doubt on the manner of his end, he yet inclines to believe that he went to heaven body and all. For he says that after he had run into the temple, the gates were closed and a strange hymn of maidens was heard to issue from the building, and the words of their song were : " Come, come, to heaven, come." But he says that he had never come across any sepulchre or "cenotaph of his hero, although he had visited the greater part of the whole earth ; but what he would like us to believe is that his hero never encountered death at all, for on a former occasion when he is  canvassing the manner in which he died, he adds the proviso : " If he did die." But in a later passage he declares in so many words that he went to heaven. This is why he avows, no less in the exordium of his book than throughout it, that it was by reason of his being such as he was that he wooed philosophy in a diviner manner than Pythagoras and Empedocles.