This chapter examines the idea of the prophetically able holy man, or theios anêr, and argues that the attribution of sagehood to prophets in the Hellenistic Jewish tradition paved the way to the creation of the idealised prophet-sage of the Greek theios anêr tradition. This process radically altered the way in which Greeks – including pagans, Jews, and Christians – conceptualised the role of the prophet. The merging of the rational-dialectical epistemic claims of the sage with the revelatory epistemology of the prophet in authors like Philo established a potentially universal scope to the prophet-sage’s knowledge; while both the prophet and sage had defined epistemologies and limits in traditional Greek and Jewish thought, the new-prophet sage understood nothing less than the ‘structure of the cosmos and the activity of the elements’.

Lucian’s satires on Peregrinus of Parium and Alexander of Abonoteichos illustrate the growing importance of religion in contests over cultural authority in the second century CE. Prophecy in particular plays a central role in the establishment of Peregrinus’s and Alexander’s authority, and in the satirist’s reframing of these men as charlatans. In fabricating his own prophecies, and thus competing with these would-be holy men at their own game (however satirically), Lucian threatens to reveal himself as just another fame-seeker within the agonistic display culture of the high Roman empire.