Pythagorus (6 page)

It is reasonable to believe, with Iamblichus, that Pythagoras did not remain on Samos without interruption during the years before he finally moved to Croton in Italy, but visited oracles, spent time at Delphi, and went to Crete and Sparta to learn their laws, which were different from Samos'. Iamblichus first mentioned Pythagoras' taking an interest in public affairs at this time. Porphyry also believed that Pythagoras left Samos briefly to undergo an initiation ceremony on Crete: The supplicant seeking initiation to ‘the priests of Morgot, one of the Idaean Dactyls', was purified with a meteorite (‘the meteoric thunderstone'), lying at dawn face down on the seaside and at night beside a river, crowned with a wreath of black lamb's wool. Then, wrapped in black wool, he descended into the Idaean cave and remained for twenty-seven days. After that, he made a sacrifice to Zeus and was allowed to see the couch the priests made up every year for Zeus. Pythagoras, having gone through the initiation, inscribed an epigram on the tomb of Zeus, which began ‘Zan lies dead here, whom men call Zeus' – implying, it would seem, that he knew or had known this god on a more personal basis than other men did.

As time passed, Pythagoras' renown spread, learned men came from abroad to confer with him, potential students flocked to him. He also served Samos in an administrative capacity, as was expected of important scholars in this era in the Hellenic world. However, he often retreated to a cavern outside the city for discussions with a few close associates. Samians today identify a cave on the steep, wooded slopes of Mount Kerketeas, the island's highest mountain, as Pythagoras' cave. Nevertheless, as public responsibilities increased, it became impossible for Pythagoras to continue his studies. Furthermore, Porphyry observed, he saw ‘that Polykrates' government was becoming so violent that soon a free man would become a victim of his tyranny', and ‘that life in such a state was unsuitable for a philosopher.' Involvement at a court like Polykrates' was dangerous for a man who spoke honestly. Also motivated by a failure of the Samians in all things relating to education, Pythagoras departed for southern Italy. He had heard, said Iamblichus, that in Italy ‘men well disposed towards learning were to be found in the greatest abundance.'

CHAPTER 3

‘Among them was a man of immense knowledge'

530–500 B.C.

At the beginning of the
seventh decade of the sixth century B.C., a vessel with Pythagoras on board sailed across the waters west of Tarentum towards the toe of the Italian boot and the port city of Croton. The date is the best established in Pythagoras' life. One of the most reliable of the earliest sources, Aristoxenus of Tarentum, gave it as 532/531 B.C.
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Just short of a promontory where Croton's men and women worshipped at their own sanctuary of the goddess Hera, the ship came into harbour. The passengers disembarked at docks bustling with other voyagers, slaves, sailors, and craftsmen and labourers from the shipyards, for Croton was a major port and shipbuilding centre in this region of the Mediterranean. Goods traded or transferred there came from up and down the coasts of the Italian peninsula, not only from the Greek cities but also from the Latin communities farther north and from numerous other regions of the Mediterranean.

There have been few archaeological excavations within the city of Croton proper. Modern Crotone covers the ancient Croton of Pythagoras, and frustrated archaeologists have to content themselves with sporadic work during the excavation of foundations for new buildings. Nevertheless, enough is known to allow for an idea of the arrangement of the city as Pythagoras found it.
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Behind the harbour the ground rose steeply to a hill where Achaean settlers had first built their homes two centuries before his arrival. This hill had later become an acropolis until Crotonians began lavishing more attention on the temple of Hera on the promontory. Sixth-century B.C. Croton apparently included three large blocks of houses oriented perpendicular to the coastline with a divergence of 30 degrees between them, an impressively geometrical layout but not unusual in its time, as evidenced by the Geomoroi. Pythagoras walked in narrow streets precisely aligned and crossing at right angles with narrower lanes isolating individual houses. Crotonians had constructed these buildings of rough blocks of stone, sometimes unbaked bricks, roofed with tile, with large pieces of pottery and tiles protecting the wall footings. They lived in rooms clustered around courtyards, with almost no windows facing the streets and lanes. A man who had also experienced Babylon would have drawn the impression that the people of Croton were more trusting and friendly than those who lived in similar houses there, for entryways in Croton opened straight into the courtyard.

Pythagoras may not have been a complete stranger here, for Croton's harbour and shipyards were on the coastal sea route from Greece to the Strait of Messina, Sicily, and the Tyrrhenian Sea, and there were stories connecting his merchant seafarer father with the Tyrrhenian coast. The climate in Croton was magnificent and the region famous for being particularly healthful. The sea was not the opaque cobalt of Pythagoras' native waters, but a transparent, cheerful blue, and the coastline seemed infinitely long, for every rise in the terrain revealed curving bays and coves and headlands as far as the eye could see. Forests clothed the low hills and some of the headlands and the shores of coves near the city, and grew thickly in the mountains on the northern and western horizons. Trees were one of Croton's most valuable economic resources, as they were for Samos, providing timber for the shipyards.

Pythagoras surely knew that his new city had produced at least one amazing athlete and a fine medical man. Croton's Olympic successes made her the envy of the Greek world, and no young Greek, no matter how sequestered in intellectual pursuits, could have escaped knowing about this athletic preeminence. Every four years, the city's athletes voyaged east to Olympia in mainland Greece to compete, and from about two decades before Pythagoras' birth had enjoyed a continuous spate of triumphs. Milo of Croton won the wrestling competitions in six Olympic games, covering a span of at least twenty-four years – a long success streak for any athlete, ancient or modern – and at six Pythian Games, a similar competition at Delphi.
[2]
Everyone had heard how he had hoisted an ox onto his shoulders and carried it through the stadium at Olympia. In the field of medicine, Democedes of Croton had practised in Athens and become physician to Samos' tyrant Polykrates. Such was Democedes' reputation and success that he would later be employed by the Persian Darius the Great. However, if Pythagoras had indeed heard – as Iamblichus reported – that in Croton men were ‘disposed to learning', that must have meant they were ‘ready to learn', for Croton was not yet renowned for scholarship or thought.

Croton's most important religious site, Hera Lacinia, was situated on a promontory at the end of a peninsula that jutted out into the sea near the town. When Pythagoras first arrived, major construction at the temple had only barely begun, if it had begun at all, but soon the buildings at Croton's temple of Hera would rival Samos' temple to the same goddess. The treasures would include one of the most beautiful items still surviving anywhere from the ancient world, a diadem of exquisitely worked golden flowers, now in a glass case in Croton's museum. Pythagoras may have seen it wreathing the head of the goddess' statue. Crotonian donors to the temple were wealthy, cosmopolitan citizens who venerated her, the mother of Zeus, as the protector of women and all aspects of female life, and as Mother Nature, who looked after animals and sea travellers.

Hera's golden diadem, dating from the sixth or fifth century B.C., from the temple of Hera Lacinia at Croton

Crotonians ruled their city in a manner that must have seemed blessedly old-fashioned to a man accustomed to living under Polykrates. The government was an oligarchy, as Samos' had been before the tyranny. They called themselves the Thousand, and all of them claimed descent from colonists who had come two centuries before Pythagoras from Achaea, on the Greek mainland. The population there had outgrown the arable land in narrow mountain valleys and, led by a man named Myskellos, had taken ship to the west to try their luck around the gulf between the toe and the heel of the Italian boot.
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They were not ‘colonists' in the sense of remaining subservient and connected to a mother country. What was true for many Greek cities – though no definition fit all – was true for Croton and her neighbours: ‘hiving off', as happens with bees, was a better descriptive word than ‘colonisation'. Greeks of the independent maritime cities of southern Italy and Sicily had done well to leave their tight mainland valleys and were likely, in Pythagoras' time, to be as rich and cosmopolitan as those who lived in Athens. Archaeological finds show that Myskellos' settlers were not the first people to live at Croton, but had pushed the earlier inhabitants into the hinterlands and mountains.

Relations among the cities around the instep of the boot were often antagonistic, but Croton was apparently not walled or fortified. Perhaps the considerable distances between the cities made that unnecessary. Nevertheless, Crotonians visited the other communities. They might have hesitated to go to Sybaris, Croton's chief rival and enemy during Pythagoras' time, basking in ‘sybaritic' languor on a broad, fertile coast-al plain about seventy miles to the north. However, stories placed Pythagoras on several occasions in Metapontum, another seventy miles north of Sybaris. Both Sybaris and Metapontum had been, like Croton, Achaean settlements, while Spartans had settled Tarentum, about thirty miles beyond Metapontum following the coastline, or 140 miles across the water from Croton. The people who lived in these cities may have clung to some identity as Achaean or Spartan, but the wider Greek world lumped them together as Italiotai, while neighbours to the northwest, in the Latin and Etruscan regions, called them Graeci. To the Greeks the region was Megale Hellas; to the Latins, Magna Graecia. In the end the Latin name would stick, because one of those Latin neighbours, about 350 miles northwest on the western side of the peninsula, was Rome, destined later to dominate the entire region and much of the western world and near east.

Those who lived in southern Italy at the time of Pythagoras had no premonition that some unusually ambitious construction projects in Rome – transforming a small, centuries-old community into a city designed on Etruscan lines, outgrowing one hilltop after another and expanding down the slopes into marshier territory, draining the swamps in the valley and paving it to make a forum – were only the first manifestations of a proclivity for building and conquering and expanding that would eventually make Magna Graecia seem a near suburb. Greek historians took no notice of Rome until she was in the process of completing her conquest of the Italian peninsula, 250 years after Pythagoras. Rome, for her part, was too busy with city planning, building, and wars during Pythagoras' lifetime to take much notice of what was happening in Magna Graecia. However, as Rome emerged as a world power, she would create for herself a tradition and history that traced her ancient ancestry to Greece's enemies at Troy, the Trojans, and made Pythagoras the teacher of one of her early kings, Numa. Pythagoras surely did not teach Numa, who died well before his birth, but well-educated Romans could not bring themselves to believe that their ancestors in Pythagoras' time knew nothing about this great sage. However, though Croton and her neighbours were trading actively and as equals, probably even superiors, with Rome and other Latin and Etruscan centres, Croton's more important friends and foes were closer to home on the southern coastline and in the wider Aegean and Mediterranean seafaring world to the east, south, and west. As the crow flies, and even by the more circuitous but safer coastal sea route, Croton was nearer to the Greek mainland than to Rome.
[3]

Pythagoras was about
forty
years old when he settled in Croton, where he would live for about thirty years. He rapidly gained respect and soon was gathering a loyal group of associates into a society that bore his name and treated him with reverence. ‘He said it himself' became a proverb among them – the last word on any subject. Those who joined him included ordinary citizens, noblemen, and women.

Iamblichus and Porphyry based their descriptions of Pythagoras' approach to the people of Croton on the writings of a pupil of Aristotle named Dicaearchus, one of the earliest sources available to any Pythagoras scholar. Originally from Messina in Sicily, a short voyage from Croton, Dicaearchus was at the height of his career in 320 B.C., about 180 years after Pythagoras died. When Iamblichus added details – and he included more than Porphyry or Diogenes Laertius – he gave no indication where he got them. The impression is that he could safely assume his readers knew – or thought they knew – a great deal about Pythagoras. The name was the equivalent of modern figures who can be mentioned in the news or a sitcom, even in caricature, with no need to explain.

There was a possible lost source of information about Pythagoras' years in Croton that would add credibility to the details of the tradition, if one could be certain it existed. The most sceptical scholars disdain it, while others point out that it is improbable that it did not exist. Porphyry thought it did. Referring to a time after Pythagoras died and many of his associates had been killed, he wrote:

The Pythagoreans now avoided human society, being lonely, saddened and dispersed. Fearing nevertheless that among men the name of philosophy would be entirely extinguished . . . each man made his own collection of written authorities and his own memories, leaving them wherever he happened to die, charging their wives, sons and daughters to preserve them within their families. This mandate of transmission within each family was obeyed for a long time.
3

Such journals, as Porphyry implied, possibly gave the semi-historical tradition a better footing in fact than it would otherwise have had and were responsible for its being strong in details many of which are not the sort identifiable as the usual stuff of pure legend. Weighing against their existence is the fact that some pseudo-Pythagorean books later claimed to be such journals, and these forgeries may have been responsible for Porphyry's, and others', faith in the journals' reality. On the other hand, the existence of fictionalised journals does not necessarily mean there were no authentic ones, only that there was a strong rumour there had been, and that the claim to be a Pythagorean ‘memory book' could make a book a sure sell.