We will next turn our attention to a consideration of some of the sayings ascribed to Apollonius and the speeches put into his mouth by Philostratus. The shorter sayings are in all probability authentically traditional, but the speeches are for the most part manifestly the artistic working-up of the rough notes of Damis. In fact, they are definitely declared to be so; but they are none the less interesting on this account, and for two reasons.
In the first place, they honestly avow their nature, and make no claim of inspiration; they are confessedly human documents which endeavour to give a literary dress to the traditional body of thought and endeavour which the life of the philosopher built into the minds of his hearers. The method was common to antiquity, and the ancient compilers of certain other series of famous documents would have been struck with amazement had they been able to see how posterity would divinise their efforts and regard them as immediately inspired by the source of all wisdom.
In the second place, although we are not to suppose that we are reading the actual words of Apollonius, we are nevertheless conscious of being in immediate contact with the inner atmosphere of the best religious thought of the Greek mind, and have before our eyes the picture of a mystic and spiritual fermentation which leavened all strata of society in the first century of our era.
Section XV.
FROM HIS SAYINGS AND SERMONS.
Apollonius believed in prayer, but how differently from the vulgar. For him the idea that the Gods could be swayed from the path of rigid justice by the entreaties of men, was a blasphemy; that the Gods could be made parties to our selfish hopes and fears was to our philosopher unthinkable. One thing alone he knew, that the Gods were the ministers of right and the rigid dispensers of just desert. The common belief, which has persisted to our own day, that God can be swayed from His purpose, that compacts could be made with Him or with His ministers, was entirely abhorrent to Apollonius. Beings with whom such pacts could be made, who could be swayed and turned, were not Gods but less than men. And so we find Apollonius as a youth conversing with one of the priests of Æsculapius as follows:
“Since then the Gods know all things, I think that one who enters the temple with a right conscience within him should pray thus: ‘Give me, ye Gods, what is my due!’” (i. 11).
And thus again on his long journey to India he prayed at Babylon: “God of the sun, send thou me o’er the earth so far as e’er ’tis good for Thee and me; and may I come to know the good, and never know the bad nor they know me” (i. 31).