that with all their grammatical errors the note-books of Damis would have given us a truer portrait of the great philosopher than the more finished phrases and elaborate oratorical devices of Philostratus. The biographer had also access to a book written by Maximus of Ægæ, containing a record of Apollonius’s doings at that place. It requires an acute critic to gauge how much of Philostratus’s narrative is literary embellishment and interpolated matter, and how much is actually derived from the original records. Even the Gospels of the Evangelists hardly present a more difficult task to the critic anxious to discriminate between the original and the glosses with which it is overlaid. The other difficulty from which the record of Apollonius’s life and teachings has suffered is due to the religious disputes which arose through the rapid growth of Christianity and its conflict with the previously existing religions of the Roman world. We may argue legitimately enough that the power of working miracles is no proof of the truth of the doctrines expounded by any religious teacher. But the fact remains that in proselytising for Christianity the fullest use was made of the miracles recorded as accomplished by Jesus in the Gospels, in support of the contention in favour of the Divine origin of their worker, and of his work. Illogical though this argument may appear to the philosophic mind, it is not surprising that it should have carried great weight, and indeed it must be admitted that it does so even at the present day. What more natural, then, than that one of the disputants on the other side should have produced a polemical pamphlet in which he attempted to show that such an argument was a two-edged weapon, and that in fact it was possible to produce better evidence in favour of the miracles attributed to the pagan philosopher Apollonius than for those of Jesus of Nazareth, and to argue that, this being the case, even assuming the authenticity of the Gospel narrative, there was no more justification for regarding the Jewish prophet as a God than the Tyanian philosopher? Such a criticism of the claims of the Christians was in fact written by Hierocles, a philosopher of some note and successively governor of Palmyra, Bithynia, and Alexandria, about the first decade of the fourth century A.D., under the title of _Philalethes_, or _The Truth-lover_.