Brian Stableford will be better known to most as a writer of science fiction and supernatural fantasy, with such books as The Empire of Fear (1988) and the David Lydyard trilogy The Werewolves of London (1999), The Angel of Pain (1991) and The Carnival of Destruction (1994). But his interests are far wider. He has a degree in biology, a doctorate in sociology, and has written books on subjects as far afield as futurology and the Wandering Jew. For the following story he turned his attention to the mysterious Apollonius of Tyana who became famed as a miracle-worker throughout the Mediterranean in the first century AD.
We live, it seems, in an Age of Miracles – or lived in one, at any rate, for the miracles about Which the young men always seem to be talking all took place in their grandfathers’ time, when Claudius, Nero or Vespasian was Emperor in Rome. Strange to relate, I – who am certainly a grandfather, born in the seventh year of Nero’s rule – heard little or no talk of miracles at the time, when the word on all men’s lips, in Corinth at least, was philosophy.
One rarely hears that word nowadays; it seems that men have a greater appetite for miracles.
My ignorance of the Age of Miracles through which I lived seems all the more remarkable when I recall (as clearly as if it were yesterday, although fifty years and more have passed) that I was present when one of the most widely rumoured miracles took place, and am named in all accounts as the one who benefited from that miracle.
Lest any Christian should read this – although that seems unlikely, given that a literate Christian is almost a contradiction in terms – let me hasten to say that it is not one of the miracles of their beloved Jesus to which I refer. His crucifixion must have taken place near thirty years before I was born. The miracle-worker I was privileged to meet was a very different man: Apollonius of Tyana, whose associate Damis of Nineveh produced the memoir of his life which proclaimed him a great magician. What Damis sought to prove by this I do not know, but I do know that Apollonius would have despised him for it, for Apollonius was a true philosopher, who had no truck with magic, omens or gods.
So far as I can tell, the principal effect of Damis’ fantasies has been to call forth hymns of hate from the followers of Jesus, whose instinct is to damn all miracle-workers save their own as black magicians and addicts of the sinister. Apollonius has already been attacked in this wise by one Moeragenes, who never knew him at all. But I am only a white-beard philosopher, in a world where age and wisdom count for nothing. For all I know, the lies which Damis tells might secure the memory of Apollonius until the end of time, so that in a thousand years men will know nothing of his life except that he once wrought miracles, and saved a fool named Menippus from the wiles of a lamia.
Perhaps he did; perhaps it is I, Menippus, who am deluded into thinking the world a humdrum place, which might be understood if only men would put aside their silly obsessions with the naming of imaginary gods and the everpresent threat of demons.
I will admit that there is much in the memoir of Damis with which I can pick no quarrel. It may be revealing, however, that most of what seems to me to be true relates to matters of which neither Damis nor I had any direct knowledge, merely repeating the account which Apollonius gave of his own history.
Apollonius was born during the long reign of Augustus, at Tyana in Cappadocia. He was well-schooled and showed great precocity in the art of rhetoric. He became a philosopher of the school of Pythagoras and soon became notorious for preaching, according to the creed of that school, that animal sacrifice was a useless evil. He refused to eat meat, never wore any sandals save those made of bark, and wore no clothing save for that made of linen. He renounced his patrimony, refused all use of money, and once took a five-year vow of silence while he travelled the world.
This vow of silence added greatly to his reputation for holiness, which was responsible in its turn for the fact that so many people sought him out as a healer – but he told me that the reason for the vow was to make of himself a distanced observer, that he might use his eyes and ears all the better as he travelled east through Persia to India, then south through Phoenicia and Palestine to Egypt.
‘I suppose it was a foolish notion,’ he said to me once, ‘but I was young then, and young men are always ready to think in absolutes. I would never have kept the vow had I gone to Egypt before I went to India and there encountered the Gymnosophists – the naked philosophers of the Thebaid. Contemplation of their state cured me of any further wish to take the business of living to its imaginable extremes.’
‘But you did not begin eating meat,’ I pointed out to him, ‘nor wearing animal relics upon your body.’
‘You could not think that an extreme,’ he chided me, ‘were you not a young man, and one who has never known poverty.’
As to the reputation which Apollonius had as a healer and an exorcist, I believe that he was as clever as any man of his time – which is to say that the advice he gave to all men who were sick in body was to avoid meat and medicines, and the advice he gave to all men who believed themselves possessed was to avoid meat and magicians. I have offered the same advice throughout my own long life, and by my reckoning it leads to the recovery of three suffers in every five, which is at least one more in five than regain their health after consulting doctors or wizards. Damis, of course, gives a different account – but doubtless he has his reasons.
Which brings us to my own sad case – which Damis calls bewitchment, although I remember it, at worst, as lovesickness.
Apollonius visited Corinth in his sixtieth year, or shortly thereafter. He was welcomed into the household of the Cynic philosopher Demetrius, an avid follower of his doctrines, among whose pupils I was to be counted. I was twenty-five years old, and even Damis concedes that I was handsome and athletic.
Damis misstates the case when he says that I was betrothed to a foreign woman who represented herself as a wealthy Phoenician. I was certainly enamoured of a foreign woman, but she was an Egyptian servant named Nauma, a minor adjunct of the household of a Phoenician widow called Galanthis.
Galanthis had been some months a guest in the house of a rich merchant named Aradus, who had known her for many years through her husband, with whom he had had commercial connections. Aradus was the father of Bassus, a man of my own age with whom I had grown up, although some strain had been placed on our friendship by virtue of the fact that he too was inclined to think of himself as a philosopher although he was an unrepentant hedonist. I used to think of our arguments as a kind of sport but Demetrius took a dimmer view of them and regarded Bassus as a malign influence who threatened his authority over all his pupils.
I must confess that I was by no means the best or most faithful pupil of Demetrius. I had found, while under his tutelage, that I had little heart for the ascetic life towards which Demetrius was continually urging me. Although I recognized that they were mostly excuses for conscienceless self-indulgence, I was not unattracted by the rival doctrines of Bassus. I was firmly committed to the ideals of philosophy, but I was at that time quite uncertain as to which set of ideals was to be preferred. Should it not be possible, I wondered, for a man of wisdom to enjoy life to the full? Should it not be permissible to eat good meat, drink good wine, wear good shoes and love women – marry, even – while still cultivating the art and authority of the mind? Demetrius said that it was not, but Bassus said otherwise.
Such was the antipathy which grew up between Demetrius and Bassus that Bassus became increasingly determined to steal me for his own fledgeling school. He might have succeeded in doing so before Apollonius arrived in Corinth, had it not been for the fact that when I visited the house of Aradus in the month before the fateful visit time spent with Bassus always seemed to be time that ought to have been spent with Nauma. Paradoxically, it was not until I was well away from the house that the words of Bassus began to exert their grip upon me – by which time Demetrius was usually on hand to refute the arguments in the strongest possible terms.
Quite without meaning to, I became the most significant prize that had ever been put at stake in the war of ideas waged between the two men – and Nauma became involved, in spite of the fact that she had not the slightest interest in philosophy. Her one and only vocation was dancing; Galanthis had acquired her on account of her skill in that art – and, I hasten to add, for her skill in that art alone. Even Damis of Nineveh does not dare to allege – as my master Demetrius sometimes did – that my beloved was no more than a common whore.
‘She may be a servant,’ I told my master, aggrievedly, ‘but Nauma is far too precious to be sold in that manner.’
Only because Galanthis intends to wed Aradus herself,’ Demetrius insisted. ‘She dangles her serving-maids before him as a cunning fisherman displays the lure, but you may be sure that he shall not touch them – yet.’
‘Bassus says that his father is perfectly content as a widower,’ I told Demetrius. ‘He has slave-girls of his own.’
‘If Bassus says that, it is hope speaking,’ Demetrius retorted. ‘He fears for his father’s fortune should the Phoenician ever get her greedy hands upon it, and he has extended his debts to the limit with every moneylender in Corinth. Aradus may be a prince of fools, too long retired from the marketplace, but even he knows better than to pay his son’s debts. You may not see what Bassus is, but Aradus does – he knows that an appetite such as that, once unleashed, is likely to devour wealth as a plague of locusts devours a field of green wheat.’
It was, indeed, hope rather than faith that determined Bassus’ opinion. On the same day that Demetrius was told to expect Apollonius in Corinth, Aradus announced that his betrothal to Galanthis would be marked by a sumptuous feast. This was the ‘wedding-feast’ to which Damis refers in his memoir; it was not mine, although I and my beloved were certainly there – and so was Apollonius.
Damis claims that Apollonius used magic to unmask my beloved and expose her as a lamia – a serpentine demon whose intention was to drink my blood and feed on my flesh. He also claims that Apollonius proved that all the gold and silver at the wedding-feast was mere illusion. He did neither of these things, and I am certain in my own mind that he never told Damis exactly what did happen, although Damis seems to have learned more about the matter than he perceived at the time. He did recognize a serpent which the other diners could not see, and he did unravel a strange web of illusion in order to assist in the awkward business of my education – but the ‘magic’ he used was no more than memory and philosophy.
My first meeting with Apollonius was not a happy one, for Demetrius was in a very sarcastic mood when he introduced me. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is Menippus. I do not know whether he will be a member of my school much longer, for he dwells in the gardens of Tantalus, fascinated by the luxury of his dear friend Bassus and mesmerized by the allure of an Egyptian temptress who dances – so I am told – like a snake bewitched by a charmer’s pipe.’
I remember that Damis of Nineveh laughed aloud at this. Perhaps that is why he records in his memoir that his master advised me there and then that I was ‘cherishing a serpent’. In fact, Apollonius said no such thing, and looked at me with a certain sympathy when he saw how hurt and embarrassed I was by my master’s unkind words.
‘It is good that a man should pass through the gardens of Tantalus,’ Apollonius said. ‘How else is he to learn that their promise is false, their reward an illusion? There will be time enough to judge Menippus when he has made his own judgement as to the worth of what is dangled before him.’
I had a speech of my own prepared. ‘I met the merchant Aradus yesterday,’ I told the great sage. ‘He asked me if the world-renowned Apollonius of Tyana were indeed expected to arrive in Corinth today. When I said that you were, he told me that his dearest wish was that the enmity between his son Bassus and the Cynic Demetrius might be set aside for the day of his betrothal. Aradus would be greatly honoured if you and Demetrius would come together to the feast and give your blessing to the union between himself and Galanthis. He knows that you will not eat meat and do not like finery but he says that there would be fruit and bread a-plenty, and that such finery as he intends to display is not intended as an insult to the poor, but merely as a celebration of his own good fortune. He would dearly like Bassus and Demetrius to be friends again, and he hopes that your benign influence might serve to ease the bitterness between them.’
Demetrius scowled, but he dared not make any response until the great man had spoken.
‘You may tell Aradus that I will come,’ Apollonius said, ‘but you must warn him that I cannot settle other people’s quarrels with honeyed words. I am a philosopher, not an envoy of Rome. The purpose of my arguments is to arrive at the truth, not to negotiate settlements.’
‘I will tell him that,’ I promised. ‘He will be very glad that your presence will dignify his betrothal feast.’
‘So he should be,’ said Damis of Nineveh – although Apollonius frowned at his impoliteness.
‘There is no possibility of any reconciliation between the ideas of Bassus and those of better men,’ Demetrius said, pointedly. ‘His answer to the question of how men should live is that they should feed their appetites without restraint; the better answer is that men should become masters of their appetites. Luxury is the greatest barrier to the path of enlightenment.’
Demetrius looked to Apollonius for support, and I could see that he expected it; he saw the invitation to the feast of Aradus as one more phase in his battle with Bassus for the prize of my allegiance, and he trusted Apollonius to win the battle for him – but all Apollonius said in reply was: ‘There is more than one path to enlightenment – and there are many barriers that might blind a man to the truth.’
Damis of Nineveh was enthusiastic to lend his support to these words, but I am sure now that he never understood their meaning.
The day of the betrothal-feast was beautiful and clear; the most superstitious of men would have searched in vain for any omen of what was to come.
I had never seen such a repast as that which Aradus laid out for his guests, for he had gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure that the day would not be forgotten. Although he was no longer the busy man he had been fifteen years before, he remembered with great fondness the days when he had built up his petty empire. His ships brought abundant cargoes from Antioch, Caesarea and Alexandria, and carried the best of Corinth’s produce to Ancona and to Rome. He had been a man of great influence in his time, and he was still an example to the younger men who followed in his footsteps.
The governor himself, Marcellus Cato, had come to sit at Aradus’ right hand. He had his doctor and his astrologer in close attendance, and a dozen men-at-arms under the immediate command of a centurion named Calidius. Arrayed below the governor’s party were the wealthiest men in Corinth, landowners and merchants alike. They were men whose names were known to everyone: the men who determined the commerce of Corinth. Almost without exception they were accompanied by the sons and nephews who would one day inherit their wealth and their concerns. They were so many that the position left to mere philosophers – even to philosophers as famous as Apollonius of Tyana – was a long way down the line, but Apollonius made no objection to his placing and Demetrius swallowed his pride.
When we sat down Damis of Nineveh made as if to take the place at his master’s left, but the sage asked him to sit to the right of Demetrius, and gave me the place Damis had tried to claim. He asked me to put names to the people in the crowd, and I did so, adding further information when I thought it relevant – which compelled me to whisper in his ear, for some of the things I said were best not overheard.
‘The governor is a bitter man,’ I told him, ‘but not unreasonable. I know that Corinth does not rank as high in Roman estimation as its citizens think it should, and Marcellus Cato considers it a place of exile – far better, no doubt, than some tiny island in the Aegean, but no fit place for a nobleman. He was a friend of Nero but fell from favour when Nero died and was sent here by Vespasian. He has been awaiting his recall ever since Vespasian’s death, but that was seven years ago and it seems that the time may never come.’
‘Such is the fate of most of Nero’s friends,’ Apollonius observed. ‘He was emperor when I was in Rome, but he did not like me and I did not stay long. My tastes were too austere for him, my philosophy too sparse. He might have preferred your friend Bassus.’
‘Bassus affects to despise Rome,’ I told him, in a diplomatic whisper. ‘Even a man as fond of Greek ways as Nero would not meet his approval. Aradus is always lavish in his praise for the empire, but I think he conceals his real opinion.’
‘There is still a tendency in Greece to think of the Romans as barbarians,’ Apollonius agreed. ‘It is true that they have followed where Alexander led – but it is also true that they have held what Alexander’s successors lost.’
Having been seated at his right hand I could not help but try to see the feast as I imagined Apollonius saw it, through austere and forbidding eyes. The luxury of it might have seemed an unalloyed marvel had he not been there beside me, but in his presence I felt a creeping unease about its extravagance.
Galanthis was magnificently dressed in silks and golden threads, but with Apollonius beside me I could not help but see that the powders and paints with which she made up her face were masking wrinkles and flesh made soft by an indulgent life. She smiled a great deal, but my impression was that her smiles were forced, and that some dire anxiety was lurking beneath her good humour. Poor Bassus did not even bother to smile. Everyone knew that he did not want the wedding to take place, for fear that Aradus would alter his will, diverting a too-substantial part of his wealth to his new bride. Perhaps there was nothing to be gained by his pretending to enjoy himself, but I could not help but think that he was being unnecessarily churlish.
Even the food which I tasted was a little spoiled, by virtue of the fact that Apollonius hardly ate at all. The plate that had been set before him remained empty and his knife lay idle. He took what he needed between his fingers, one patient morsel at a time. I was not so deeply entranced by him that I neglected to try the dishes I had never seen before, but every time I filled my mouth I felt disappointed; it was, after all, only food – and even the best of the taste-sensations I had not previously experienced were not unusually pleasant. There was an astonishing profusion of sweetmeats, decked out in many colours and formed into many shapes – but their sweetness was, after all, only honey or beet-sugar, and the ones most cunningly wrought had been so hardened in the cooking as to endanger the teeth of anyone trying to bite into one.
‘You might try one of these,’ I said to Apollonius, who had finished eating long before I had sampled everything that intrigued me and had begun to make me feel uncomfortable. ‘The sticky centre is like the essence of an orange – but you must suck the outer part patiently until it dissolves; there is no short cut.’
Thank you, Menippus,’ said the sage, ‘but I find all such confections overly sickly. Is that the dancing girl of whom your master disapproves so strongly?’
It was indeed my beloved Nauma, decked out in all her finery as I had never seen her before, ready to play her part in the evening’s entertainment. She jangled as she danced, for her silks were sown with hundreds of little silver coins.
The tables set out for the feast were arranged in the form of an inverted U, so Nauma danced at first in the space between the twin ends of the base, but she slowly made her way up the ranks, crossing the distance between the two limbs again and again. I had seen her dance a dozen times before, in public and in private, but this was an occasion like no other and this was a dance like no other. One still hears people speak of the Judaean Salome, who beguiled her stepfather Herod and asked for the head of some petty prophet as a tribute, but I cannot imagine that she danced more delicately or more entrancingly than Nauma danced at the betrothal-feast of Aradus and Galanthis. I had not realized how noisy the room had been until she stilled the noise, claiming a pause for the sound of the lyres and tabors which played for her, and for the magic of her movements.
I do not hesitate, in this instance, to use the word ‘magic’. If there was any magic at the feast, it was certainly hers and hers alone. If there was any spell cast, it was she who cast it – but she cast it with the suppleness of her young limbs and the sinuousness of her lovely body, and the discipline of arduous training. When I saw her dance, I knew exactly why I loved her so dearly – and why every man in that great pavilion had cause to envy me.
A snake bewitched by a charmer’s pipe, Demetrius had said – but she was not that. Perhaps there was something in her swaying reminiscent of the flow of a serpent’s body, and something in her silks and silver trimmings that recalled the sparkle of sunlight on a serpent’s scales, but there was so much more. Nauma had arms and legs, hands and feet, full lips and glorious eyes. She was a human being, through and through. Even looking at her, as I was forced to do, in the knowledge that the ascetic Apollonius was sitting beside me, I lost myself in rapt contemplation of her beauty. I am sure that others did likewise, although I saw that some few of the merchants were distracted by the coins which she now began to release from her costume and scatter about the top of the table.
I might have found an unalloyed joy in Nauma’s performance had it not been that when she finally reached the climax of her dance she threw herself across the table, planting her painted lips upon the mouth of the astonished Aradus in evident tribute. I could not suppress a horrid shock of jealous rage as I saw him overcome his surprise in time to take full advantage of the kiss, pressing his lips avidly to hers. It was, I suppose, the kind of lascivious act that a man might be forgiven at his betrothal feast, but I could not help but remember what Demetrius had said to me about the cunning fisherman, and how Galanthis was using her delectable slave-girls as bait to entrap her groom.
For a moment, I did indeed see the wedding feast as the gardens of Tantalus, promising so much but without any real substance – but then I remembered that that was exactly how Demetrius wanted me to see it, in order that I might remain a Cynic like himself forever, and I wondered whether that was what I really wanted to be. I looked along the length of the tables, towards the high place where Bassus sat, but I could not catch his eye. He too was absorbed in watching Nauma, who had withdrawn from the embrace of Aradus to take her bow.
The noise returned explosively as the company burst out clapping and cheering. I looked back at Aradus, and saw that he was beating the table with his huge right hand. His mouth was closed, but there was an expression on his face that seemed close to bliss. I could not bear it, and turned to face Apollonius.
‘No doubt you have seen such dances before, in the course of your travels,’ I said to him, taking care to keep my voice level.
‘In Egypt,’ he said, ‘and in India too – but not in Rome. Nero had little more taste for pretty dancing girls than your master has.’ I could not judge the exact quality of his tone, but it seemed to have mellowed just a little. I studied his face, wondering whether a man of his great age could still be stirred in the loins, or whether he merely remembered a time when he might have reacted more passionately – but then the noise about the table changed again, transformed in an instant from wild applause into horror.
It was not until the centurion raced forward to take control that I realized what had happened. Calidius had to draw his sword in order to clear a space, so that his men might come forward and take up the still-writhing body of the stricken Aradus. They carried him away into the house, with Marcellus Cato’s doctor in hot pursuit.
Had the death of Aradus happened on any other day I would have been cast adrift on the sea of rumour, with no more opportunity to discover what had happened than any gossiping slave. I might never have discovered the truth. But this was the day that Apollonius of Tyana had come to Corinth, and Apollonius had the reputation of being a healer without equal. Within a quarter of an hour Marcellus Cato had sent a messenger to the sage imploring him to render what assistance he could to his own doctor; because I was still at Apollonius’ side, I went with him, along with Demetrius and Damis.
Damis and I were not allowed to go to the crowded bedside, so I had no opportunity to see what condition Aradus was in, but when Demetrius came out again into the antechamber I knew that the matter was very grave.
‘He is dying,’ Demetrius said. ‘No healer in the world could save him.’
‘Do not underestimate my master,’ Damis said. ‘I have seen him work wonders.’
Demetrius shook his head. ‘The man has suffered some kind of fit,’ he said. ‘He was overexcited by the sight of that accursed girl, inflamed by her lewd dancing. You saw how avidly he returned her kiss. There is a lesson in this, Menippus!’
I was hurt that he should try to make argumentative capital out of such a misfortune, but I had no time to reply. Bassus came hurtling from the room then, his face contorted with fury. He stopped as soon as he saw me – but I think he would have stopped for anyone who might give him a hearing.
‘Sorcery!’ he said. ‘Vile sorcery has killed him! That enchantress is behind it, I swear. She has killed my father! Menippus, you must help me drive her out of Corinth.’
I took this speech as an expression of grief. Bassus had never seemed overly fond of his surviving parent but a father is, after all, a father. I could not imagine that Galanthis had any reason for wanting to slay the man she had been on the point of marrying, nor was I prepared to entertain the possibility that she was a sorceress who could strike a man down with a curse, but my first impulse was to soothe my friend’s distress. I went to embrace him, hoping to calm his wrath, but Demetrius caught me by the shoulder.
‘Stay!’ my master said. ‘Clearly, the man is mad.’
‘Mad he is!’ The new voice came from the doorway of the bedroom, and I knew it was Galanthis before I turned to look. She waited until we were all staring at her before she continued. ‘There is only one man here who had motive for murder,’ she declared, ‘and there he stands.’ She was pointing a long-nailed finger at Bassus. ‘He feared the loss of all his expectations, and he made haste to strike – to deny the father who patiently bore the burden of his every excess a few lost years of happiness. Murderer! Patricide!’
What Bassus had said had astonished me, but this tirade left me thunderstruck. I could not believe that the Phoenician meant her accusations seriously, and imagined that they had been provoked by an ugly combination of grief and wrath – grief at the death of her intended spouse and wrath occasioned by his wild talk of sorcery.
Just as I had moved towards Bassus, Demetrius and Damis moved towards Galanthis. They did not embrace her but she took their movement for approval. ‘See!’ she said to Bassus. ‘They know what you are! Everyone shall know it!’
In his memoir – which separates the incident from the wrongly attributed betrothal-feast – Damis says that Apollonius argued with Bassus and called him patricide, but it was Damis and Demetrius who stood with the angry Phoenician and supported her words with their stares, while I clung hard to Bassus, making sure that he could not react violently to the slander. Demetrius met my eyes, and I could tell that he was instructing me to consider carefully what company I was keeping, but it was Damis who opened his mouth to speak and his manner suggested that he was not about to play the peacemaker.
What Damis would have said only Damis knows, and I suspect that the accusations he now credits to Apollonius were the product of a later fancy. At the time, he was silenced by the entry of Marcellus Cato, who pushed past Galanthis to take a stand between the two accusers. ‘Be silent!’ he commanded them both. ‘It is my place to discover whether any murder has been done, and my place to determine the responsibility. Are you mad, both of you? Whatever you think or feel, at least be quiet while the poor man lies upon his bed, fighting for his life.’
Bassus’ reaction to this instruction was to throw up his hands and turn on his heel. He marched off, not bothering to look at me again, let alone invite me to follow. I could not help thinking that it was not the behaviour expected of a philosopher, nor even of a man of common sense.
‘A man should be master of his feelings,’ murmured Demetrius, unable to resist the temptation, ‘not their slave.’ His eyes were still fixed on me, and for once I had no reply. I looked at the ground between my feet.
Galanthis hesitated for a moment, but then she went back into the bedchamber, presumably to wait by the bedside of her husband-to-be. The governor followed her. I heard no more voices raised in anger within the chamber – merely a low hum of whispered discussion.
‘My master will know the truth,’ Damis said, loftily. ‘Nothing escapes him, though lesser men are oft deluded.’ He named no ‘lesser men’ but it was obvious that distaste for Roman upstarts was not confined to Greece. I considered the possibility that the men of Nineveh and Babylon – whose empire had fallen to Alexander as Alexander’s had fallen to Rome – might see Greeks and Romans in much the same harsh light.
Eventually, Apollonius came out, accompanied by the governor’s doctor and astrologer. Marcellus Cato and Calidius followed two or three paces behind, with the steward of the household.
‘It was a natural fit,’ the doctor opined, ‘brought on by age and excitement.’
‘I am not so sure,’ the astrologer said. ‘There might indeed be sorcery at work here. I can sense its presence.’
The governor, who seemed to be well used to such disagreements, sighed in exasperation. ‘What do you say, Cappadocian?’ he asked Apollonius.
‘I have seen the symptoms before,’ Apollonius replied, equably. ‘When a man has a reputation as a healer, he is forever being summoned to the sick and dying, and he learns to read the signs. This is a puzzling case, in that I have never seen the signs so dire, but I can say with certainty that no sorcery was involved.’
‘Nor was any poison,’ said the steward, quickly. He was so anxious to avoid questions being asked regarding his own areas of responsibility that he did not wait to see whether anyone would raise the question.
‘Certainly not,’ Marcellus Cato was quick to say. He had been sitting beside the stricken man, taking his food from the same plates and pouring his wine from the same flasks.
‘The food was tasted,’ Calidius growled. ‘Wherever a Roman governor comes to eat, the food is tasted – even in Corinth.’ The tone of his voice implied, unjustly, that Corinth was no safer than Damascus or Castra Regina.
‘I smell sorcery,’ said the astrologer, still smarting beneath Apollonius’ contradiction. ‘No matter what the Cappadocian says . . .’
‘Utter nonsense,’ said the doctor. ‘A natural fit. The man had cultivated his pleasures excessively. Long overindulgence in food and wine leads in the end to an exhaustion of the flesh.’ He glanced at Apollonius as he said this, obviously expecting approval. The sage said nothing, although Demetrius nodded his head vigorously.
The governor was still looking at Apollonius. ‘Is that true, Master Philosopher?’ he said. ‘Was it the merchant’s way of life which determined the manner of his death?’
For the merest instant I thought I saw the ghost of a smile hovering upon the sage’s lips. ‘I believe you have stated the case exactly, sir,’ he said.
The governor bowed his head in acknowledgement of the compliment. ‘In the absence of evidence to the contrary,’ he said, glancing at his astrologer as he stressed the word evidence, ‘it seems to me that this is a clear case of death by natural causes. When the son and the wife-to-be have calmed down, I will hear what they have to say – but if they wish to bring forward any accusations that would make this sad affair the business of Rome, they had better have proof, for I will tolerate no baseless slanders.’ His gaze flickered back and forth, from the astrologer to the doctor to the steward, then from Apollonius to Demetrius to Calidius, and finally from Damis to me. He knew that what he said would be reported back to Bassus, and what he said was intended to be thus reported. In a quieter voice, speaking to Apollonius alone, the governor added: ‘You had better go now, Master Philosopher.’
Apollonius nodded, and allowed Demetrius to lead him away. I followed, with Damis of Nineveh.
Apollonius was not called to give any further testimony in the case. Bassus made no further accusations against Galanthis, nor she against him – but that did not stop the rumours. Whatever barriers there are to enlightenment there are none to vile whispers.
Word flew to the city walls and beyond, saying that Aradus had been murdered by sorcery or poison, and that Bassus had done it to make sure of his inheritance. It transpired that the will of Aradus had not been changed to the disadvantage of Bassus, although the dead man had left behind a letter requesting that Bassus should treat Galanthis generously, and this revelation added fuel to the speculation. The fact that Galanthis accepted the situation was construed as evidence that he had bought her silence and the more ingenious rumour-mongers went so far as to wonder whether the two of them had conspired together to cause the death of Aradus because they were secret lovers impatient to acquire his wealth.
Throughout the next two days I was pestered by people who knew that I had been with Apollonius when he had been summoned to Aradus’ bedside. I soon became impatient with them because I had troubles of my own, whose pressure on my heart and mind increased inexorably. My first thought after quitting the company of Demetrius and Apollonius had been to find Nauma and see how she was faring – but she was nowhere to be found. The house of Aradus was in such confusion that it was not easy to pursue my search, and I was eventually persuaded to leave it for the morrow, but when I went back again and still found no trace of her I became very anxious.
Galanthis said that she did not know where Nauma was, and did not seem to care. None of the Phoenician’s other servants had seen her go, or knew of anywhere she might have gone. I could not believe that she had left the city without even pausing to say goodbye to me, but there was no trace of her within its walls.
It was a mystery – far more of a mystery, so far as I was concerned, than the death of Aradus. It seemed obvious to me that the two events were connected somehow, and it seemed so to the rumour-mongers too, who quickly began to speculate that Nauma had been the instrument of Bassus and Galanthis, and had been sent away lest she tell what she knew. I was sure that this was untrue, because Bassus swore to me that he had no knowledge whatsoever of the girl’s whereabouts, but I was sorely confused as to what the real situation might be.
In the end, I decided to take my problem to Apollonius. I felt, however, that I had to speak to him alone, for I knew Demetrius would certainly be angry with me and I suspected that Damis would laugh at me. While I awaited my opportunity I tried to look at the matter as he would undoubtedly look at it, through the eyes of a philosopher, so that I would not seem too much of a fool when I laid it out before him.
Night had fallen for the second time since the betrothal feast by the time I finally found the chance to be alone with Apollonius. Demetrius and Damis had gone to their beds, and so had everyone else – even Cynics need sleep, but Apollonius, it seemed, had progressed beyond mere Cynicism to some further realm of mental existence.
‘I need the benefit of your wisdom,’ I told him.
‘Perhaps you do,’ he agreed. ‘Come walk with me, and we shall see what benefit we can derive from careful discussion.’
We walked together in the moonlight, up the hill that stands above the southern quarter of the town. We paused on a ridge, from which we could look back over the rooftops, towards the quays where the merchants’ ships loaded and unloaded their goods. While we went I told him everything – not merely that Nauma had disappeared, but everything. I told him how I felt about her, and how it had weakened my faith in the doctrines of Demetrius and forced me to take the ideas of Bassus more seriously than before. I told him that I could not see why philosophers could not live like other men rather than in retreat from society, or why they were better not to marry. I told him that I could not see why love was such a threat to the philosophical calmness of mind, although I was beginning to understand that the passions aroused by its loss might blot out the capacity for reason.
‘Your reason does not seem to me to have been entirely blotted out,’ Apollonius said. ‘Tell me, Menippus, what is it that you fear most? Is it the possibility that you may never see your lovely dancer again, or the possibility that she might not have been what you supposed?’
I paused to consider that question carefully, knowing that my answer would determine what he thought of me. In the end, I said: ‘What I fear most is that she might have been murdered, to prevent her telling what she knew about the death of Aradus.’ I knew it was a risk, but I had carefully thought over what Apollonius had said when he was asked to judge the cause of the merchant’s death – and I remembered the ghost of a smile which had haunted his final statement.
‘Ah!’ he said. ‘I doubt that you need fear that. Would you really rather think that she is alive, but does not care about you? Many men, I suspect, would rather think that she had loved them so dearly that only death could keep her from them.’
‘I would rather she were alive,’ I said. I hope that I was telling the truth. ‘I would rather that, even if it meant that she was only amusing herself with me until the time came to do what she had to do.’
‘And what do you think she did?’ he asked me, although he knew as well as I did.
I was unable to look him in the eye, but I answered him. ‘When she kissed Aradus at the conclusion of her dance,’ I said, slowly, ‘something passed from her mouth to his. He did not open his mouth to cheer, you see, when she had finished, although he pounded the table with all his might. It was one of those sweetmeats, I suppose. The poison was hidden inside a hard sugary coat, unreleased until he had sucked it through.’
Apollonius said nothing in reply to that. He looked out over the city of Corinth as if he were weighing it in the balance – and not merely the city but everything it signified: its history; its commerce; its role in the affairs of empire.
‘What kind of poison was it?’ I asked him, delicately.
‘I had seen the symptoms before,’ he said, eventually. ‘Always in association with the bite of a snake – usually the Egyptian cobra. In Alexandria they call it Cleopatra’s last lover’
‘The asp,’ I said, to demonstrate that I had knowledge of my own.
‘What puzzled me when I attended Aradus,’ Apollonius went on, ‘is that the bite of the asp is very rarely fatal, in my experience. Whatever they may say about Cleopatra, I have never seen anyone but a small child die of a cobra bite. In India they have much bigger snakes called hamadryads, whose bite is said to be far more deadly, but I saw snake-charmers in India who had little or no fear of the creatures they employed. It’s not easy to know which rumours are to be trusted and which are not, is it, Menippus?’
It did not seem necessary to confirm my agreement with that judgement.
‘Surely she cannot have known what she was doing,’ I said, ‘else she’d never have allowed such a treacherous thing into her mouth. If she was ordered to do it by her mistress, why? If she was paid to do it, by whom? And how was the poison obtained? There is no cobra nearer than Persia or Palestine.’
‘I watched the snake-charmers of India most carefully,’ Apollonius told me. ‘They would not have told me their secret, of course, even if I had not been silent at the time, so I felt that I had to find it out. I made a game of it – I made games of many such quests while I was clinging to my silly vow. At first I thought that they were simply quick enough to avoid the strikes of their playthings – there are creatures call mongooses which kill cobras easily enough by means of their agility. Then I wondered whether the charmers might build up a tolerance to the bites. In the end, I caught one unawares while he was preparing his toys. He was milking its venom into a wooden cup, extracting the creature’s entire supply of poison. He had five snakes in all; I imagine that he built up a concentration of venom far greater than any ordinary bite was likely to communicate. He simply threw it away – I thought at the time that it was profligate, that such a commodity might be saleable. Perhaps it can be stored indefinitely in a vial, or preserved in some sticky syrup like the one in the centre of one of those horrible sweetmeats you urged me to try.’
The sweetmeats had not seemed horrible to me while I sucked them at the feast – but they have always seemed so since I talked to Apollonius.
‘Who gave it to her?’ I wanted to know. ‘Was it Galanthis?’
‘Galanthis had nothing to gain,’ Apollonius said. ‘She is dependent on the generosity of Bassus now – and you know better than I what that is worth.’
‘Bassus, then?’ I whispered. ‘Can he really have been so desperate?’
‘You know better than I,’ Apollonius repeated.
‘I don’t believe it,’ I said. ‘In any case, had he been minded to put his father away he’d never have chosen such a method and he’d have found a far more convenient time. But who, then?’
‘Who is left?’ he parried.
I still remembered the ghost of his smile. He had already delivered his verdict: it was the manner in which Aradus had lived his life that had determined the manner of his death.
‘Marcellus Cato?’ I suggested. ‘Is it possible that the governor murdered Aradus? Is that why you said nothing when he declared that no murder had been committed? Did you think he would strike you down if you denounced him?’
‘I think he recognized the hand of his masters, as I did,’ Apollonius said. ‘Perhaps he was meant to. There are those in Rome who reckon that it is always a good idea to remind dissatisfied exiles that they have not been forgotten. Calidius is a more likely assassin. It was he who fetched me to see the body, he who studied me most carefully as I made my replies. I think we understood one another well enough, Calidius and I. I am an ancient philosopher, he is an ambitious centurion – we have no reason to quarrel. The likelihood is that he and the girl were working in collusion. You must hope so, if you told me the truth. A mere pawn would be dead by now, but not a skilled executioner whose services would soon be needed elsewhere.’
I thought about those possibilities for a minute or two before moving on to the next question. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why should Rome want Aradus dead?’
‘I’m a philosopher,’ Apollonius said, ‘not an oracle. I can only guess.’
I did not need to tell him that I rated a philosopher’s guesses far more highly than an oracle’s pronouncements. I simply said: ‘Go on.’
‘We must consider the time and the place,’ he said. ‘Assassins usually work by night, brutally and secretly. When they work by day, it is because they have a point to make. If Cato might have been expected to find a message in the incident, so might others. This was not merely a murder; it was the interruption of a feast celebrating the betrothal of two people long connected by their business. Did you look closely at any of those coins which the dancer let fall?’
‘No,’ I admitted.
‘I have never used money,’ Apollonius said. ‘It has always been a point of pride – but perhaps it was also a stubborn refusal to submit to temptation. Money is so fascinating, is it not? Such a wonderful invention. Whatever tales we tell of the military genius of Alexander, the true heart of the Greek empire was coin. Before Athens, all cities grew their own food in their own fields; Athens was the first to obtain its food by trade, putting its artisans to work in the manufacture of goods for the marketplace, and it was money which made the marketplace possible. For four centuries after Solon, it is said, the Athenian drachma held its real value: sixty-seven grains of silver before Alexander, sixty-five thereafter – and then came Rome. The denarius held its real value while Augustus was emperor, but Tiberius and Claudius began the debasement which Nero completed. Now, the value of a coin is determined by the authority of the emperor whose head is stamped upon it rather than by the value of the metal it contains. Anyone with the skill to make alloys and a crude stamp can increase the supposed value of their metal four- or five-fold by making an image of the emperor. Small wonder that they do – and small wonder that the Romans resent that kind of usurpation. They think of forgery as the rot that might eat away their empire from within, refusing to admit that the real rot is the pretence that an emperor’s authority can sustain more value in a coin than it would have in ordinary barter.’
I did not know for sure that Aradus had been a forger, or a dealer in false coin, but I knew that it was more than likely. Corinth lay on the trade routes linking Rome to the east, to lands which resented Roman dominion even more than Greece. It was common knowledge that since Nero had debased the coinage so dramatically every metalworker in Asia Minor was seeking to take advantage of the excessive purchasing power of their stock-in-trade. Every merchant at the top table had probably taken a hand in such dealings – and Marcellus Cato too.
‘All that glisters is not gold,’ I murmured, ‘and all that sparkles is not silver.’ I did not mean it literally, and Apollonius knew it.
‘I dare say that she liked you well enough,’ he said, softly. ‘You’re a handsome youth, after all – but she always knew that you were a philosopher. You are a philosopher, Menippus, no matter what Demetrius may think – and there are more paths than one to enlightenment, and more ways than one to cross the barriers which block the way. Be a Cynic by all means, but be a realist too. Love if you can; marry if you must – but choose your lovers and your wife with the same care you’d use in choosing a philosophy. There’s a good deal of false coin in every marketplace in the world, and I doubt that the world will ever see the end of it now it’s begun.’
He was still staring over the rooftops at the distant quays.
‘They say that Corinth was a great city,’ I reflected, ‘before the Romans came . . .’ I didn’t bother to finish the sentence. All cities had been great before the Romans came, just as all merchants had been honest and all pigs had had wings.
Apollonius said nothing more. He waited for me to move on, and I did. I led the way back down the hill, thinking about murder and justice and love. I didn’t ask Apollonius why he hadn’t declared that Aradus had been murdered, preferring to let his scrupulously truthful words be misinterpreted and misused. It wasn’t that he was scared of retribution; it was because he was a philosopher. Rome was the murderer and false money the motive; Rome was also the law and the falsifier of the money. Apollonius stood aside from all of that; the truth he sought was a higher and finer kind.
‘A man does not have to be as self-denying as you are in order to cultivate wisdom,’ I told him, defensively. I meant every word, but I was amazed by my own temerity in framing it as a positive statement rather than a cringing question. ‘There is room even in a wise man’s heart for a little lust and a little comfort.’
‘Perhaps there is,’ he answered. ‘I purged myself so ruthlessly in the fever of my youth that I could not recover any such impulse if I tried, but you might find a better way. At any rate, you must find your own way. By all means learn all you can from Demetrius and Bassus, but in the end it is yourself that you must know, yourself that you must make, yourself that you must prove.’
I knew that. I know it still, and I am not dissatisfied with what I am. I would not want to be a magician or a prophet, even in an Age of Miracle-Workers.
‘I do love her,’ I told him, as we parted. ‘I fear that without her love, I’ll never be as good a man as I might have been.’
‘She might return, in time,’ Apollonius said, more kindly than I deserved. ‘If she loves you, she’ll come back.’
She never did, of course.
[Author’s Note: The only account of the life of Apollonius of Tyana to have survived into modern times is that written by Philostratus in the 3rd century AD. This was allegedly based on memoirs compiled by Damis of Nineveh, a disciple and companion of Apollonius, although some commentators have suspected that these never existed, Philostratus having invented them to lend weight to his rather fanciful account. The statements and opinions attributed by Menippus to Damis in the story are, of course, all derived from Philostratus.]