Apollonius of Tyana - in Fiction

In Fiction

• Apollonius appears as a fictional character in the 1935 novel The Circus of Dr. Lao and its 1964 film adaptation, 7 Faces of Dr. Lao. In these, Apollonius works in the circus as a fortune-teller, who is under a curse — he sees the future, but can only speak the exact truth, thus seeming to be cruel and hateful. In the film version, he is blind and weary after many years of predicting disappointment for his clients.
• The plot of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt's 1948 fantasy novel The Carnelian Cube hinges on a magical artifact passed down by Apollonius.
• In the 1975 work The Illuminatus! Trilogy, Apollonius appears in discussion with Abbie Hoffman.
• Apollonius appears as a fictional character in the 1977 television series The Fantastic Journey in the seventh episode named Funhouse. In this episode, Apollonius attempts to take possession of the scientist Willaway in a funhouse but is thwarted by Varian, "a man from the future possessing awesome powers".
• Apollonius appears as a fictional character in the 1996 short story "The Garden of Tantalus" by Brian Stableford, which combines two of the accounts from Life of Apollonius of Tyana and removes the mystical aspects, turning it into a detective story. The narrator, Menippus from the account of Apollonius and the lamia, blames Damis for making Apollonius a magician by elaborating on what little of the story he knew. The story was published in Classical Whodunnits (1996).
• Apollonius serves as mentor to a main character in Steven Saylor's historical novel Empire for much of the work.
• In Keats' poem about the lamia myth, he mentions Apollonius' intervention, revealing Lamia's true form to her lover Lycius (commonly called Menippus in the myth).
• in Friedrich Schiller's gothic novel "The Ghost-Seer", the Sicilian trickster suggests Apollonius as one of the possible identities of the Incomprehensible.
• Apollonius of Tyana has a major role in the background to Richard Cowper's story "The Custodians". The story assumes that Apollonius discovered a scientific way of "seeing" the future and that his method was re-discovered by a Medieval sage. A succession of "Custodians" at a monastery in South France, using an "Apolloniän Nexus" then saw and wrote down events fifty years in their future, until a final one in the 20th Century saw in advance - but could not prevent - a destructive nuclear war.