Apollonian Apostles

Author Edwin E. Gordon imagines conversations between some of the pioneers in the study of music aptitude: Arnold Bentley, Raleigh Drake, Thayer Gaston, Jacob Kwalwasser, Carl Seashore, and Herbert Wing. Together these imagined conversations create a portal through which to explore the nature of music aptitude, its multiple facets, how we can measure it ... and what to do with the measurements once we have made them.

Miracle-workers and magicians are diffcult characters for contemporary readers of Greco-Roman narratives to comprehend and to distinguish. Hindered both by our modern definitions of "miracle" and "magic," we need to focus our attention on those ancient texts that deal with such characters and their differentiation. Two such texts, the Acts of the Apostles and Philostratus' Life of Apollonius, come from quite different religious backgrounds, but demonstrate remarkably similar subtle cultural scripts at play. A detailed investigation of the social interactions in these two narrative worlds brings these characters and their communities alive and reveals how legitimate miracle-workers were distinguished from illegitimate magicians by the Mediterranean population of the Greco-Roman world.