Apollonius of Tyana

One of the major characters in “Lamia” (as we hinted once before) was a real person—the philosopher Apollonius of Tyana, who lived in the first century in Greece, but traveled to Babylon, India, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Rome. “Noteworthy for his beauty” in his youth, he lived to a ripe old age: between eighty and one hundred, “yet were not his powers weakened, nor his mind dulled.” “True, the statue in the temple at Tyana shows many wrinkles on his forehead but his age was said to have been more pro...