Page:Apollonius of Tyana - the pagan Christ of the third century.pdf/88

Rh is one of the writers mentioned by the biographer of Apollonius who lived before his time; but when we bear in mind how persistently the friend of Julia Domna exculpates his hero from the suspicion even of being connected with magic, when we find him complaining that the historians who had preceded him, more especially Maeragenes, had sadly misunderstood the actions and doctrines of Apollonius, when he adopts as almost exclusively his own the anecdotes recorded by Damis (the St. Mark, as it were, of the Pagan gospel) we cannot get rid of the suspicion that the historical reality of Apollonius consists in this, viz., that he was one of those itinerant preachers whose claims upon the public attention were partly absurd and partly real, who were at one and the same time preachers and impostors, and who were a numerous body in the two first centuries. If these preachers obtained any degree of popularity as they went about from place to place, however small it might be, they soon became the nucleus, as it were, of some legendary comet, and as soon