V

ANOTHER controversionalist, by way of beginning the affray, would without demur abuse and malign the man against whom he directed his arguments, on the ground that he was his enemy and adversary; I, however, my friend, used to regard the man of Tyana as having been, humanly speaking, a kind of sage, and I am still freely disposed to adhere to this opinion ; and I would like to set before you, if you  ask it, my own personal opinion of him. If anyone wishes to class him with any philosopher you like, and to forget all the legends about him and not bore me with them, I am quite agreeable. Not so if anyone ventures, whether he be Damis the Assyrian, or Philostratus, or any other compiler or chronicler, to overleap the bounds of humanity and transcend philosophy, and while repelling the charge of wizardry in word, yet to bind it in act rather than in name upon the man, using the mask of Pythagorean discipline to disguise what he really was. For in that case his reputation for us as a philosopher will be gone, and we shall have an ass instead concealed in a lion's skin; and we shall detect in him a sophist in the truest sense, cadging for alms among the cities, and a wizard, if there ever was one, instead of a philosopher.