"I stood for a moment on the scent, smelling this shrill and blood-raw music, signifying the atmosphere of the hall angrily, and hankering after it a little too. One half of this music, the melody, was all pomade and sugar and sentimentality. The other half was savage, temperamental and vigorous. Yet the two went artlessly well together and made whole. It was the music of decline. There must have been such music in Rome under the later emperors." – Hermann Hess, Steppenwolf
Apollonius of Tyana is a mysterious marginal figure in the history of the classical world, and is only known to us in any detail because of the chance survival of a lengthy and highly anecdotal book written by the Greek Sophist Philostratus the Elder (c. 170 – 247AD).
Despite this obscurity, there is something fascinating about Apollonius. Like the last late pagan emperor Julian (361-3), whose unlucky death closed so many doors, he represents an alternative dynamic of the Roman Empire, one that could have avoided the political dead end that Christianity proved to be. His legend casts a wan light over the ruins of that great empire, and points to some of the clues of its demise.
