Apollonius of Tyana

This is the sixth part of an article in nine pieces.
 

Damis of Nineveh

This sounds quite plausible, but many modern scholars think the memoirs of the Assyrian disciple are a literary fiction. This is not impossible. Neo-Pythagoreans were quite capable of fabricating 'old' texts. But the possibility that 'Damis' is a fabrication, does not mean that is a fraud. We can overestimate the extent of Philostratus' creativity.

Philostratus writes that Apollonius met his disciple in a town called Ninos, which is the usual Greek name for the ancient city that once had been the capital of the legendary Assyrian empire, Nineveh [note 7]. The author of the LoA maintains that Damis remained with his master until the end of his life on earth (LoA 1.19 and 8.28). However, he is only present in Philostratus' narrative during Apollonius' voyages to India, Egypt and Hispania, and during the second visit to Rome. Damis is conspicuously absent from the stories about the first trip to Rome and Apollonius' travels in Greece and Asia Minor. This suggests that Philostratus interpreted his orders to rewrite the memoirs of Damis in a rather broad sense, adding stories he had heard in the Greek mainland and in towns like Ephesus, Tyana, Aegae and Antioch. It does not prove, however, that the memoirs of Damis did not exist.

There are very strong indications that the Scraps from the manger contained information that Philostratus found embarrassing. For example, Damis mentions that Apollonius wrote a book On astrology; as we have seen above, Philostratus was skeptical about its existence, because he did not like magic (LoA 3.41). Related is the example of Apollonius' predictions of the year of the three emperors, which causes Philostratus to write

That he was enabled to make such forecasts by some divine impulse, and that it is no sound inference to infer (as some people do) that our hero was a wizard, is clear from what I have already said. But let us consider these facts also: wizards, whom for my part I reckon to be the most unfortunate of mankind, claim to alter the course of destiny by having recourse either to the torture of lost spirits or to barbaric sacrifices, or to certain incantations or anointings; and many of them when accused of such practices have admitted that they were adepts in such practices. But Apollonius submitted himself to the decrees of the Fates, and only foretold that things must come to pass; and his foreknowledge was gained not by wizardry, but from what the gods revealed to him. (LoA 5.12)

There are several additional arguments for the existence of the Damis source.

1. There are chronological inconsistencies with the parts of the LoA derived from Maximus of Aegae: the latter dates Apollonius' youth in the first quarter of the first century, which is hardly compatible with Damis' account of Apollonius' assumption into heaven after the accession of the emperor Nerva in 96 CE.
2. Damis correctly describes Babylon as a "living city"; Philostratus can not have found this information in a more common Greek or Roman text, as these all state that it was in ruins. The same can be said for Nineveh.
3. In the Indian episode of the LoA, which is derived from Damis, a new notion of the relationship between kings and philosophers is introduced, which is something we would not expect from an unphilosophical man like Philostratus, but can be expected in texts of a Pythagorean character.
4. In those parts of the LoA that are attributed to Damis, the author shows himself to be aware of the Alexander historians, especially Nearchus. However, in those parts that are clearly Philostratus' own, he manages to ignore remarkable sites like Gaugamela and Choara, although his heroes actually pass along these sites.

When we accept the existence of Damis, we are not forced to believe that the historical Apollonius traveled all the way to India, Kush (modern Sudan) and Hispania. It merely proves that there was a second century pseudo-biography that claimed that the Tyanean had made these voyages.

We can understand why these fantasies were added: they must have served as a weapon in the intellectual discourse of the second century. The gymnosophists of Kush represent the Cynics, a popular school of Greek philosophy, and the Indian sages represent the Pythagoreans; since Apollonius is presented as correcting the gymnosophists, the message of the Scraps from the manger must have been that neo-Pythagoreanism was superior to Cynicism. Another polemic in the memoirs of Damis can be found in the story of the hostility between Apollonius and Euphrates: neo-Pythagoreanism defeats Stoicism. This conflict was hardly important in the age of Philostratus, and suggests that Damis -whatever its precise nature- was in fact composed at an earlier age.

It should be noted that the fact that the Scraps from the manger were given to Philostratus by the empress Julia Domna is significant too. She was born in a Syrian town named Emesa, which was famous for its cult for a sun god, Elagabal. Now it is very remarkable that the neo-Pythagorean sage who is described by Damis, worships the Sun. This element is almost absent from earlier pythagorean works but can be explained when we accept that 'Damis' was written in Emesa.