Abject Joy by Ryan S. Schellenberg

Author:Ryan S. Schellenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Philosophers, Astrologers, and Other Divine Heralds

Others rejected the moral authority of the magistrate more explicitly. “Who will judge between me and the emperor,” Philostratus has Apollonius of Tyana ask on his way from the prison to Domitian’s courtroom, “for I will show him to be wronging philosophy?” (Vit. Apoll. 8.2.1). For a proudly independent sage like Apollonius, there was no verdict weightier than truth, and truth could be accessed not by dominion but only by philosophy (cf. Epictetus, Diatr. 3.7.31–36). From this perspective, although he may look like a fearful and sovereign judge, the emperor was in fact just another potential student, a man whose elevated position left him particularly in need of the sage’s moderating counsel (7.36.4; cf. Musonius Rufus, Diatr. 8). Certainly he did not merit the awe he usually inspired (cf. 7.22.3). And so, although he could easily have fled, and was endowed too with the power to slip free of his chains, Apollonius entrusted himself to his divinely ordained fate and faced his imprisonment and trial with equanimity.82 Prison, it seems, bothered him not at all (7.28, 36). Nor did his accuser’s schemes. When an informer slipped into the jail hoping to catch him in a compromising comment, Apollonius saw through the ruse immediately: “If I’m going to criticize the emperor, I’ll speak to him directly,” he retorted, vaunting his unflinching directness of speech (7.27). And when, later, he stands before Domitian, this is exactly what he does (7.33).83

In Philostratus’s tale, prison figures above all as the instrument of the tyrant, his desperate but ultimately futile attempt to silence the truth of the unsubmissive philosopher. It was not only Apollonius. Apt to mistake the philosopher’s cloak (ὁ τρίβων) for the getup of the diviner (ὡς μαντικῆς σχῆμα)—a common source of confusion, as we will see—Nero imprisoned Musonius Rufus for the sole crime of wisdom (4.35). If the teaching of his student Epictetus is any indication, Musonius would have seen his imprisonment as an uncomfortable but not completely unwelcome way to demonstrate his philosophical mettle. As Epictetus insists, “A judge’s dais and a prison is each a place, the one lofty, the other lowly [βῆμα καὶ φυλακὴ τόπος ἐστὶν ἑκάτερον, ὁ μὲν ὑψηλός, ὁ δὲ ταπεινός]; but the orientation of your will can be kept the same, if you want to keep it the same, in each. And then we will be rivals of Socrates, when we can write paeans in prison” (Diatr. 2.6.25). Attempting to buoy up his deflated fellow prisoners, Apollonius too speaks of rivaling the resolute sufferers of lore: “When we ponder the many wise and blessed men whom vicious mobs have bound and tyrants have trampled, let us also accept these things, lest we be left behind” (7.26.6; cf. Heb 12:1–13).

Philostratus’s narrative brings two wise and blessed prisoners in particular to mind, Dionysus and Socrates. “Tell me what I must suffer,” the disguised Dionysus had demanded of the archetypal god-fighting despot Pentheus in Euripides’s Bacchae. “What fearful thing will you do to me?” (492).

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