ABSTRACT
If someone who is not a god, but more than a man, talks to other men, what kind of rhetoric will he use? This question arises when we consider an important tradition in the history of ancient philosophy and spirituality. In this tradition, the first place is held by philosophers who are supposed to do more than fulfill the wish that Plato expressed when he said, in his Theaetetus, that philosophers must become as godlike as humanity will allow (ὁμοίωσις τῳ θεῳ̑ ϰατὰ τò δυνατόν) 2 and are really considered as divine beings. They belong to the type of philosopher, magician, and holy person known as the θει̑ος ἁνήϱ, who emerged in the third century A.D. as a complete model of wisdom in the Pythagorean Platonism that was then prominent in the philosophical field 3 and was exemplified by men who often lived in the previous centuries. One of them was Apollonius of Tyana who lived in the first century A.D. In the third century, Philostratus wrote an admiring account of his life. In his Lives of the Sophists, Philostratus draws a picture of rhetoric in the early Roman Empire; he emphasizes a particular side of it in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana. Apollonius is an assiduous traveler, speaker, and miracle worker. He criticizes the rhetorical tradition and the oratory of his time and puts speech to a use of his own. He practices a rhetoric of authority and truth that implies a concept of teaching, morals, metaphysics, a whole worldview: in short, a philosophy.
