We next find him in Spain, making his headquarters in the temple of Hercules at Cadiz.
On his return to Greece by way of Africa and Sicily (where he spent some time and visited Ætna), he passed the winter (? of 67 a.d.) at Eleusis, living in the temple, and in the spring of the following year sailed for Alexandria, spending some time on the way at Rhodes. The city of philosophy and eclecticism par excellence received him with open arms as an old friend. But to reform the public cults of Egypt was a far more difficult task than any he had previously attempted. His presence in the temple (? the temple of Serapis) commanded universal respect, everything about him and every word he uttered seemed to breathe an atmosphere of wisdom and of “something divine.” The high priest of the temple looked on in proud disdain. “Who is wise enough,” he mockingly asked, “to reform the religion of the Egyptians?”—only to be met with the confident retort of Apollonius: “Any sage who comes from the Indians.” Here as elsewhere Apollonius set his face against blood-sacrifice, and tried to substitute instead, as he had attempted elsewhere, the offering of frankincense modelled in the form of the victim (v. 25). Many abuses he tried to reform in the manners of the Alexandrians, but upon none was he more severe than on their wild excitement over horse-racing, which frequently led to bloodshed (v. 26).
Apollonius seems to have spent most of the remaining twenty years of his life in Egypt, but of what he did in the secret shrines of that land of mystery we can learn nothing from Philostratus, except that on the protracted journey to Ethiopia up the Nile no city or temple or community was unvisited, and everywhere there was an interchange of advice and instruction in sacred things (v. 43).
Section X.
THE GYMNOSOPHISTS OF UPPER EGYPT.
We now come to Apollonius’ visit to the “Gymnosophists” in “Ethiopia,” which, though the artistic and literary goal of Apollonius’ journey in Egypt as elaborated by Philostratus, is only a single incident in the real history of the unrecorded life of our mysterious philosopher in that ancient land.
Had Philostratus devoted a chapter or two to the nature of the practices, discipline, and doctrines of the innumerable ascetic and mystic communities that honeycombed Egypt and adjacent lands in those days, he would have earned the boundless gratitude of students of the origins. But of all this he has no word; and yet he would have us believe that Damis’ reminiscences were an orderly series of notes of what actually happened. But in all things it is very apparent that Damis was rather a compagnon de voyage than an initiated pupil.
Who then were these mysterious “Gymnosophists,” as they are usually called, and whence their name? Damis calls them simply the “Naked” (γυμνοί), and it is very clear that the term is not to be understood as merely physically naked; indeed, neither to the Indians nor to these ascetics of uppermost Egypt can the term be applied with appropriateness in its purely physical meaning, as is apparent from the descriptions of Damis and Philostratus. A chance sentence that falls from the lips of one of these ascetics, in giving the story of his life, affords us a clue to the real meaning of the term. “At the age of fourteen,” he tells Apollonius, “I resigned my patrimony to those who desired such things, and naked I sought the Naked” (vi. 16).[106]