Nevertheless, even were we with the scalpel of criticism to cut away every morsel of flesh from this body of tradition and legend, there would still remain a skeleton of fact that would still represent Apollonius and give us some idea of his stature.
Apollonius was one of the greatest travellers known to antiquity. Among the countries and places he visited the following are the chief ones recorded by Philostratus.[92]
From Ninus (i. 19) Apollonius journeys to Babylon (i. 21), where he stops one year and eight months (i. 40) and visits surrounding cities such as Ecbatana, the capital of Media (i. 39); from Babylon to the Indian frontier no names are mentioned; India was entered in every probability by the Khaibar Pass (ii. 6),[93] for the first city mentioned is Taxila (Attock) (ii. 20); and so they make their way across the tributaries of the Indus (ii. 43) to the valley of the Ganges (iii. 5), and finally arrive at the “monastery of the wise men” (iii. 10), where Apollonius spends four months (iii. 50).
This monastery was presumably in Nepāl; it is in the mountains, and the “city” nearest it is called Paraca. The chaos that Philostratus has made of Damis’ account, and before him the wonderful transformations Damis himself wrought in Indian names, are presumably shown in this word. Paraca is perchance all that Damis could make of Bharata, the general name of the Ganges valley in which the dominant Āryas were settled. It is also probable that these wise men were Buddhists, for they dwelt in a τύρσις, a place that looked like a fort or fortress to Damis.
I have little doubt that Philostratus could make nothing out of the geography of India from the names in Damis’ diary; they were all unfamiliar to him, so that as soon as he has exhausted the few Greek names known to him from the accounts of the expedition of Alexander, he wanders in the “ends of the earth,” and can make nothing of it till he picks up our travellers again on their return journey at the mouth of the Indus. The salient fact that Apollonius was making for a certain community, which was his peculiar goal, so impressed the imagination of Philostratus (and perhaps of Damis before him) that he has described it as being the only centre of the kind in India. Apollonius went to India with a purpose and returned from it with a distinct mission;[94] and perchance his constant inquiries concerning the particular “wise men” whom he was seeking, led Damis to imagine that they alone were the “Gymnosophists,” the “naked philosophers” (if we are to take the term in its literal sense) of popular Greek legend, which ignorantly ascribed to all the Hindu ascetics the most striking peculiarity of a very small number. But to return to our itinerary.
Philostratus embellishes the account of the voyage from the Indus to the mouth of the Euphrates (iii. 52-58) with the travellers’ tales and names of islands and cities he has gleaned from the Indica which were accessible to him, and so we again return to Babylon and familiar geography with the following itinerary:
Babylon, Ninus, Antioch, Seleucia, Cyprus; thence to Ionia (iii. 58), where he spends some time in Asia Minor, especially at Ephesus (iv. 1), Smyrna (iv. 5), Pergamus (iv. 9), and Troy (iv. 11). Thence Apollonius crosses over to Lesbos (iv. 13), and subsequently sails for Athens, where he spends some years in Greece (iv. 17-33) visiting the temples of Hellas, reforming their rites and instructing the priests (iv. 24). We next find him in Crete (iv. 34), and subsequently at Rome in the time of Nero (iv. 36-46).
In a.d. 66 Nero issued a decree forbidding any philosopher to remain in Rome, and Apollonius set out for Spain, and landed at Gades, the modern Cadiz; he seems to have stayed in Spain only a short time (iv. 47); thence crossed to Africa, and so by sea once more to Sicily, where the principal cities and temples were visited (v. 11-14). Thence Apollonius returned to Greece (v. 18), four years having elapsed since his landing at Athens from Lesbos (v. 19).[95]
From Piræus our philosopher sails for Chios (v. 21), thence to Rhodes, and so to Alexandria (v. 24). At Alexandria he spends some time, and has several interviews with the future Emperor Vespasian (v. 27-41), and thence he sets out on a long journey up the Nile as far as Ethiopia beyond the cataracts, where he visits an interesting community of ascetics called loosely Gymnosophists (vi. 1-27).