All passages of the VA in this article are quoted in the translation of Jones. I and II, The Loeb Classical Library, 16 and 17, Cambridge MA, 2005. As he puts it : "The Apollonius is as tricky and elusive as its subject (230)".Ģ C.P. Whitmarsh, Greek literature and the Roman empire : the politics of imitation, Oxford, 2001, p. For an interpretation of this passage as an interpretative cue, see especially T. Flinterman, Power, Paideia and Pythagoreanism : Greek identity, conceptions of the relationship between philosophers and monarchs and political ideas in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius, Amsterdam, 1995, p. The interpretative history of the Vita Apollonii (VA) of Flavius Philostratus, written between about 220 and 250 AD, reflects perfectly this 'protean' nature of its protagonist Apollonius of Tyana, a Cappadocian Pythagorean who lived in the first century AD.1 This immensely rich and vast work of elaborate prose has recently been honoured with a new translation and edition in the Loeb series by Christopher Jones,2 along with a newly published third volume containing Apollonius' letters, testimonia and Eusebius' Reply to Hierocles?ġ See J.J. The narrator comments: "Now for those who know the poets why should I describe how wise Proteus was, how shifting, multiform and impossible to catch, and how he seemed to have all knowledge and foreknowledge? But the reader must bear Proteus in mind, especially when the course of my story shows that my hero had the greater prescience of the two, and rose above many difficult and baffling situations just when he was cornered". In the beginning of the Vita Apollonii (1,4) the god Proteus appears in a dream to the pregnant mother of Apollonius, prophesying that she will give birth to him, Proteus. Pinning down Proteus: Some Thoughts on an Innovative Interpretation of Philostratus' Vita Apollonii
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