Damis the Epicurean

Damis is a character in, and his memoirs the putative source of, Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana. Many scholars have doubted the existence of these memoirs, some the very existence of the man. Against the latter party Graham Anderson has advanced an ingenious argument, which attempts to prove that the Damis whose existence has been doubted is identical with a bearer of the same name to whom existence has hardly ever been ascribed. His evidence comprises: (1) Lucian's dialogue Zeus the Tragedian, in which a certain Damis appears as the Epicurean tormentor of the popular divinities; (2) a tale now extant in mediaeval Persian, in which a philosopher named Dini performs a similar function; (3) the testimony of Origen that Moiragenes numbered among the men seduced by Apollonius ‘the illustrious Euphrates and a certain Epicurean’ (Contra Celsum 6.41). Between these reports he detects the following parallels: