Apollonius had a second career after antiquity, conducted in Arabic under the name Balinus. Late antique readers already remembered him less as a Pythagorean holy man than as a maker of talismans: Byzantine writers describe apotropaic devices attributed to him standing in public places, warding off scorpions, gnats and floods. That reputation travelled east. In the Arabic corpus Balinus is the master of talismans, and under his name circulated one of the most consequential books in the history of esotericism, the Sirr al-khaliqa, the Secret of Creation, compiled around the eighth or ninth century. Its final section carries the earliest known text of the Emerald Tablet, the short cryptic credo, as above so below, that Latin translators would later hand to European alchemy as the summary of the art. The frame story has Balinus discover the tablet in a crypt beneath a statue of Hermes, clutched in the hands of a corpse, which is how a first century Cappadocian wonderworker came to be the fictional finder of Hermetic scripture.
None of this connects to the historical Apollonius by anything stronger than his name and his talismanic fame, and that is the point worth keeping: the figure was portable. Each age rewrote him to its own need, and it was the Arabic rewriting, not the Greek life, that shaped the course of alchemy in both the Islamic world and Europe.