THE TWO FIRST BOOKS OF PHILOSTRATUS. CONCERNING THE LIFE OF APOLLONIUS TYANEUS: WRITTEN ORIGINALLY IN GREEK, AND NOW PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH: TOGETHER WITH PHILOLOGICAL NOTES UPON EACH CHAPTER. BY CHARLES BLOUNT, GENT.

Fine condition, please contact me for original scans and clarification. Blount (1653-1693) was one of the leading deists of his time. He published the first of his major works, Anima Mundi in 1678 or 1679. It is an essay on pagan doctrines about the nature of the human soul and its destiny in the afterlife, drawing heavily on Montaigne and similar authors. His Philostratus consists largely of his own notes to Philostratus, with roughly four pages of Blount to one of Philostratus. His commentary draws attention to analogies between Christ and Apollonius of Tyana, the miracle working mystic (or sham magician) Greek philosopher born just before Christ. John Leland in his View of the Principal Deistical Writers (1754) notes that Blount's work was "manifestly intended to strike at revealed religion." Justin A.I. Champion in The Dictionary of Seventeenth-Century British Philosophers notes: "The classical texts with, with its parallel between the life of the magus Apollonius and Christ, was problematic enough; the inclusion of a digest of skeptical materialist, and irreligious material unencumbered with warnings of heterodoxy was to provide a provocative and dangerous resource to the literature public. There were consequently moves to have the work suppressed and even burnt." The book recounts the career of the wandering Greek Pythagorean mystic, Apollonius Tyaneus (d. c. A.D. 98), whose virtuous life and miraculous exploits were embellished to the point where they bore an unmistakeable resemblance to the life of Christ. He was credited, for instance, with raising a Roman woman from the dead, and his own death was shrouded in mystery. "Concerning the matter of his death", says Philostratus, "if he did die, the accounts are various". Composed at the suggestion of Julia, wife of the Emperor Severus, the account of Philostratus is generally regarded as a work of pious fiction. Nevertheless, from the time of the early church down to the present, Philostratus's controversial "Life" has furnished the adversaries of Christianity, including Voltaire and the present translator, Charles Blount (1654-1693), a prominent English freethinker, with the means to dispute the uniqueness of the Christian tradition. Lowndes states that, according to Dr. A. Clarke, "his piece was published with the design to invalidate the testimony of the Evangelists concerning the miracles of our blessed Lord. A few copies only were dispersed before the work was suppressed." Lowndes adds in parentheses that the book is still "common enough" (ie. in the early 19th century). Wing P2132. Lowndes IV, p. 1860.