Apollonius of Tyana and the Pythagorean Holy Man

Alongside its more technical mathematical and metaphysical writers, Neopythagoreanism also produced a distinctive figure absent from the classical Pythagorean tradition, the itinerant holy man who combined philosophy with claimed miracle working and ascetic discipline. Apollonius of Tyana, active in the first century CE, is the best known example, remembered through a later biography by Philostratus as a wandering teacher who traveled from Spain to India, practiced vegetarianism and silence in the old Pythagorean manner, and was credited by admirers with prophecy and healing. Whether Philostratus' account reflects a historical figure accurately or is substantially legendary is disputed by modern scholars, and the text was written under imperial patronage roughly a century after Apollonius' death, which historians treat as a reason for caution about its more extraordinary claims. The image mattered regardless of its accuracy, since later antiquity, including some pagan critics of early Christianity, held Apollonius up as a rival holy man whose life paralleled and, in their argument, rivaled that of Jesus, a comparison that shows how thoroughly Neopythagorean asceticism and reputed wonder working had become entangled with the wider religious currents of the Greco-Roman world in which the movement operated.