they took place. Apollonius is said to have been an incarnation of
the God Proteus; his birth was announced by the falling of a thunderbolt
and a chorus of swans; his death signalized by a wonderful voice calling
him up to Heaven; and after death he appeared to a youth to convince him
of the immortality of the soul.[330] He is reported to have known the
language of birds; to have evoked the spirit of Achilles; to have
dislodged a demon from a boy; to have detected an Empusa who was
seducing a youth into marriage; when brought before Tigellinus, to have
caused the writing of the indictment to vanish from the paper; when
imprisoned by Domitian, to have miraculously released himself from his
fetters; to have discovered the soul of Amasis in the body of a lion; to
have cured a youth attacked by hydrophobia, whom he pronounced to be
Telephus the Mysian.[331] In declaring men's thoughts and distant
events, he indulged most liberally; adopting a brevity which seemed
becoming the dignity of his character, while it secured his prediction
from the possibility of an entire failure. For instance: he gave
previous intimation of Nero's narrow escape from lightning; foretold the
short reigns of his successors; informed Vespasian at Alexandria of the
burning of the Capitol; predicted the violent death of Titus by a
relative; discovered a knowledge of the private history of his Egyptian
guide; foresaw the wreck of a ship he had embarked in, and the execution
of a Cilician Propraetor.[332] His prediction of the Propraetor's ruin was
conveyed in the words, "O that particular day!" that is, of execution;
of the short reigns of the Emperors in his saying that many Thebans
would succeed Nero. We must not omit his first predicting and then
removing a pestilence at Ephesus, the best authenticated of his
professed miracles, as being attested by the erecting of a statue to him
in consequence. He is said to have put an end to the malady by
commanding an aged man to be stoned, whom he pointed out as its author,
and who when the stones were removed was found changed into the shape of
a dog.[333]

That such marvellous occurrences are wanting either in the gravity, or
in the conclusiveness, proper to true miracles, is very plain; moreover,
that they gain no recommendation from the mode in which they are
recorded will be evident, if we extract the accounts given us by
Philostratus of those two which alone among Apollonius's acts, from
their internal c