Pythagorus (8 page)

Though Pythagoras undoubtedly made serious enemies, for many years that seemed not to hamper him or his supporters very much. Pythagorean leadership extended the area Croton dominated much further both while Pythagoras lived there and in the fifty years after his death or exile – as far as Caulonia in the south (almost to the doorstep of the old enemy, Locri) and to the sanctuary of Apollo Aleo at Ciro Marina in the north (well on the way to Sybaris). The acquisition of Ciro Marina was something to be celebrated, since already at this early date it was famous for its fine wine. To the west, Croton's influence extended almost to the Tyrrhenian Sea, to Terina. That was the best Croton would ever do. She was no Rome.

Porphyry, more than
Iamblichus or Diogenes Laertius, stressed the silence of the Pythagoreans and recognised not only its value but also how disastrous it would prove for the Pythagorean tradition. It is frustrating to find that, though Porphyry mentioned Pythagoras winning over the Crotonian rulers and described the invitations to address the youth and women – and though it was Porphyry who identified Dicaearchus as the source of this information – he made no claim to be able to report with any certainty the details of what Pythagoras told his audiences. He attributed this lack of information to Pythagorean silence. Because all three biographers tended to err on the side of believing their sources too readily rather than too little, Porphyry's reluctance makes what he said on the matter of Pythagorean silence particularly credible. According to him, Pythagoras and those who followed him during his lifetime did not reveal their ideas, principles, or teachings, or the details of their discipline to others. They wrote nothing down, keeping ‘no ordinary silence'. In great part because of this secrecy, much information about Pythagoras had come down through the centuries in scattered, fragmentary, hearsay form, consisting of what other people
thought
he and his associates taught and what their way of life was.

Porphyry was not alone in stressing Pythagorean silence. Diogenes Laertius made it clear that there were two kinds: On the one hand, ‘silence' meant keeping doctrine secret from outsiders; on the other, it meant maintaining personal silence in order to listen and learn – and that applied especially among followers in ‘training'. For five years they were silent, listening to discourses. Only after that, if approved, were they allowed to meet Pythagoras himself and be admitted to his house. The advantage to be gained from remaining silent was an ancient theme that also appeared in the Wisdom chapters of the Hebrew Scriptures and was picked up by early Christian church fathers a few generations after Iamblichus.

Did the first type of silence extend to putting nothing in writing? Of the three third- and fourth-century biographers, Diogenes Laertius was the only one to insist that Pythagoras wrote down some of his doctrines, but the section of his biography titled ‘Works of Pythagoras' is confusing and unconvincing. He began on shaky ground with the words:

Some say, mistakenly, that Pythagoras did not leave a single written work behind him. However, Heraclitus the natural scientist pretty well shouts it out when he says: ‘Pythagoras, son of Mnesarchus, practised inquiry more than any other man, and selecting from these writings he made a wisdom of his own – a polymathy, a worthless artifice.'

It would seem, contra Diogenes Laertius, that what Heraclitus ‘shouted out' was that Pythagoras could read and plagiarise, not that he wrote anything down. Diogenes Laertius was right, however, that Heraclitus' words were worth careful scrutiny, because his lifetime probably overlapped Pythagoras' and his comments about him are among the oldest that survive. Though in Heraclitus' own philosophy he often sounded like a Pythagorean, if he ever had anything good to say about Pythagoras there is no record of it. He had little better to say about anyone else. He was contemptuous of most of humankind, and in particular of polymaths, coming out with such disparaging remarks as ‘Much learning does not teach thought – or it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hecataeus.' Be that as it may, there is no reason to take Heraclitus' diatribe as evidence that Pythagoras wrote a book.

Diogenes Laertius was not equally convinced about all claims for Pythagoras' authorship, but he believed that Pythagoras had written three books that still existed in his lifetime. If so, they then rapidly disappeared or were discredited, for Porphyry, only a few years later, wrote, ‘He left no book'. There was plenty of reason to be sceptical about the authorship of the books that Diogenes Laertius listed, considering the number of Pythagorean forgeries that had appeared during the Hellenistic and Roman eras. However, information that Pythagoras wrote poems under the name of Orpheus came from an earlier, more reliable source. Ion of Chios, a scholar, playwright, and biographer born shortly after Pythagoras died, tried to determine the true source of some poems that were widely supposed to have been written by Orpheus. He decided that the author was Pythagoras and that Pythagoras had attributed them to Orpheus.

CHAPTER 4

‘My true race is of Heaven'

Sixth Century B.C.

A childhood in a prosperous
agrarian family that was also involved in the mercantile world centred in Samos, with its temple of Hera, had placed Pythagoras at a crossroads of different beliefs about life after death. If there was an orthodox view of the afterlife and immortality in the ancient Greek world, it was that reflected in Homer's epics and later in the official cults of the cities and in much of the great literature. A human soul, or
psyche
, survived after death, but this survival was not an attractive one. For the Homeric heroes, the true ‘self' was the body, and the good life was closely tied with it. What good was survival in a form that could not enjoy feasting, combat, human love, sex, comradeship? Death was separation from these, leaving the soul in a weak, witless state – a shadow, a dream, smoke, a twittering bat. Only the gods had a better sort of immortality, but not in the sense that they survived death, for they never died. Furthermore, they jealously guarded their immortality. Woe betide any human who tried to overstep the limits and attain the immortality of the gods.

Alongside this mainstream, people who lived in the countryside, and some in the cities, too, clung to hundreds of small clusters of beliefs, so ancient that no one could trace their origins, that provided better answers to questions raised by an unfair world and suggested there would be future compensation for its injustice and suffering. One ‘mystery cult' had been centred in the town of Eleusis, and when Eleusis became part of Athens a few years before Pythagoras was born, the cult outgrew its local origins and spread across the Hellenic world. It required initiation into the mysteries of the earth mother Demeter and her daughter Persephone, an adoption into the family of the gods that carried with it a happier life in the next world. After initiation, normal everyday affairs could continue with no onerous new requirements.

The Orphic cult, by contrast, involved a complicated set of beliefs in which the soul was a mixture of the divine and the earthly. Developing the divine part and suppressing the earthly required a relentless pursuit of purity, including ceremonies of ritual cleansing and the avoidance of eating meat. This was the work of more than one lifetime. A soul was reborn again and again, with its conduct in one life determining its fate in the next. The ultimate goal was to become one with Bacchus, or ‘a Bacchus'.

Orphism had roots before the historical era in the worship of Dionysus, another name for Bacchus, probably at first a fertility god and only much later connected with wine and drunkenness. He was a god of the Thracians, an agricultural people who lived north of mainland Greece in the area bounded by the Aegean Sea, the Black Sea, and the Danube River. The Greeks regarded them as primitive barbarians, and the fifth-century historian Herodotus described them as people who ‘led miserable lives and were rather stupid'. When Dionysus/Bacchus worship reached Greece at about the beginning of the historical era, it was greeted with hostility, but its unorthodoxy and savagery gave it an irresistible fascination that was portrayed in Euripides' play
The Bacchae
. The cult exalted the status of women and, if the playwright is to be believed, married and unmarried women retreated into the mountains in large bands to dance in ecstasy and to tear apart wild animals and eat them raw. A tradition of strong, involved women may have come to the Pythagoreans through Orphism, but in a less bloodthirsty guise.

By the time of Pythagoras, Orphic communities were all over the Greek world, including southern Italy and Sicily. The primitive worship of Dionysus/Bacchus had evolved into something more ascetic, stimulating the mind instead of (or as well as) the body and psyche. Cult members attributed its reformation to Orpheus, whom frenzied Bacchic women had reputedly torn to pieces for his efforts. Orpheus was probably a real person clothed in legend. He seems to have been regarded first as a priestly figure, while his lyre and connection with music, and the status of a semi-mythical hero, came later. Some called him a god.
1

If the stories about Pythagoras' youthful travels were genuine, he was familiar with religious traditions in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and perhaps (if Josephus was right) with the beliefs of the Hebrews near Mount Carmel or in Babylon. Regardless of the authenticity of the details, the impression that comes across, reinforced by the story of his initiation into the rites of the priests of Morgos on Crete, was of a man intent on exploring in depth and becoming personally involved in many religious ideas and beliefs.

In Croton, Pythagoras and his followers did not abandon the polytheism of the Homeric/Olympic tradition. Some thought Pythagoras was an incarnation of Apollo, and that god's association with moderation, intelligence, and order was in accord with Pythagorean ideals. As for other gods, the fact that the building boom at the temple of Hera occurred when Pythagoras' influence was strong in Croton is probably no coincidence. However, when Pythagoras chose what he would believe and teach with regard to immortality, he came down decisively with the Orphic cult, with the doctrine of transmigration of the soul or reincarnation. This was no secret. It was ‘very well known to everyone', wrote Porphyry.

An early fragment bears witness that Pythagoras believed a good man would be rewarded in the next life. The fragment is from Ion of Chios, the near contemporary of Pythagoras who attributed an Orphic poem to him, and who, though perhaps not a member of the Pythagorean community, adopted Pythagorean ideas:

So he [a good human being], endowed with manliness and modesty, has for his soul a joyful life even in death, if indeed Pythagoras, wise in all things, truly knew and understood the minds of men.

Pythagoras went further than belief in reincarnation. He claimed he could remember his past lives. This, too, had roots in Orphism. An inscription on an Orphic document known as the Petelia tablet instructs a soul how to show itself worthy of joining the divine and worthy of ‘Memory', an Orphic reference to the special kind of memory that Pythagoras claimed to have.
2

The earliest reference to Pythagoras' ability to remember his past lives is from the fifth century B.C. poet-philosopher Empedocles, who came from Acragas in Sicily and like Ion was born near the time Pythagoras died. He was often called Empedocles the Pythagorean, but much of his philosophy was different from Pythagorean teaching. On the doctrine of transmigration he was in enthusiastic agreement:

There was among them a man of immense knowledge

who had obtained vast wealth of understanding,

a master especially of every kind of wise deed [or ‘cunning act'].

For when he reached out with all his mind

he easily saw each and every thing

in ten or twenty human lives.

Iamblichus, without a murmur, accepted Pythagoras' ability to recall his past lives, but not all the details of how he acquired that ability and what he remembered. The memories began with Pythagoras' life as Aethalides, a son of the god Hermes – the sort of paternity Iamblichus found impossible to believe. However that may be, Hermes allowed Aethalides to choose a gift, anything short of the immortality of the gods. Aethalides asked to be able to remember everything that had happened to him in his former lives. So it came about that Pythagoras could recall not only his life as Aethalides but also as Euphorbus, as Hermotimus, and as Pyrrhus, a Delian fisherman, and much else besides. Euphorbus was a hero in the Trojan War who was immortalised in Homer's
Iliad
. Iamblichus and Porphyry both pictured Pythagoras singing the funeral verses Homer wrote for Euphorbus, accompanying himself ‘most elegantly' on a lyre:

The shining circlets of his golden hair

Which even the Graces might be proud to wear,

Instarred with gems and gold, bestrew the shore

With dust dishonoured, and deformed with gore.

. . . .

Thus young, thus beautiful Euphorbus lay,

While the fierce Spartan tore his arms away.
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Diogenes Laertius gave the full version of a tale that many thought constituted proof of Pythagoras' memories, but that Iamblichus rejected as being ‘too popular in nature' and Porphyry thought ‘too generally known' to require telling:
[1]
After Euphorbus died by the hand of King Menelaus in the Trojan War, his soul (either directly or after several other lifetimes) passed into Hermotimus. Hermotimus, in turn, was able to prove this had indeed happened. In some versions of the story it occurred at Branchidae in western Turkey; in others, at Argos on the Greek mainland; but, wherever it happened, Hermotimus entered a temple where a decaying shield was nailed up on the wall, little of it intact except an ivory boss. This relic had either been left by Menelaus as a tribute to Apollo or was simply among spoils of the Trojan War. At the sight of the rotten old shield, Hermotimus burst into tears. People standing near questioned him, and he muttered that he himself, as Euphorbus, had carried it at Troy. The bystanders thought he was insane, but he told them that they would find the name Euphorbus inscribed on the back. They unfastened the shield from the wall and discovered, in archaic lettering, that very name.
4
Hermotimus eventually died and became Pyrrhus, a fisherman of Delos, and, some time after Pyrrhus, Pythagoras. Nor was that the full extent of Pythagoras' memories. His soul had passed into many plants and animals, and he could recall his suffering in Hades, as well as the sufferings endured by the others there.

In the doctrine of transmigration as Pythagoras taught it, a soul was not irrevocably doomed to an eternal round of animal and vegetable existences. Escape was possible, as it was in Orphism. The possibility and method of this escape came to stand at the heart of the Pythagorean view of the world. There was a divine level of immortality from which each soul was a ‘torn off fragment', a mere ‘spark of the divine fire', held captive in a long train of dying bodies.
5
The goal of a wise human was to break free of bondage to this treadmill of earthly reincarnation and rejoin the sublime level.

By tradition, Pythagoras coined the term ‘philosopher', meaning ‘lover of wisdom', but it is probably more correct to say that he gave it a new meaning. A philosopher did not merely love wisdom, he pursued it with all his might, because that was the way to regain the true, divine life of the soul. The historian Aristoxenus wrote of the Pythagoreans he knew: ‘Every distinction they lay down as to what should be done or not done aims at conformity with the divine. This is their starting-point; their whole life is ordered with a view to following God, and it is the governing principle of their philosophy.'
6
All philosophy and inquiry – all use of the powers of reason and observation to gain an understanding of nature, human nature, the world, and the cosmos, including what would later be called ‘science' – was linked with, indeed
was,
the effort to purify the soul and escape the wheel of reincarnation. This connection, for the Pythagoreans, was the most exalted living-out of the doctrine of the ‘unity of all being'.

Such a relentless pursuit had been recommended in much more ancient wisdom literature, including Proverbs in the Hebrew Scriptures (‘Old Testament'). However, nowhere else did the search for the wisdom of God or the gods include so comprehensively the search for knowledge about the physical universe. As the scholar W. K. C. Guthrie put it:

It is to this idea of assimilation to the divine as the legitimate and essential aim of human life that Pythagoras gave his allegiance, and he supported it with all the force of a philosophical and mathematical, as well as a religious, genius. In this lies the originality of Pythagoreanism.
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In a less reverent vein, Diogenes Laertius quoted the poet Xenophanes of Colophon, who lived most of his adult life in Sicily and Italy and was probably a contemporary of Pythagoras, though he survived him by many years. Xenophanes wrote satirical poems, and in these lines he made light of Pythagoras' belief in reincarnation:

And once when he passed a puppy that was being whipped

they say he took pity on it and made this remark:

‘Stop, do not beat him; for it is the soul of a dear friend –

I recognised it when I heard its voice.'
[2]

This verse is usually taken to mean that Pythagoras claimed to recognise the voice of a friend who had died and been reincarnated as the puppy, but for a Pythagorean it would have had a more profound meaning. A ‘dear friend' was any member of a vast kinship, embracing all of nature including animals and vegetables and the souls of humans. In no other Greek society was that kinship so celebrated as among the Pythagoreans, or so firmly believed to be not a melting pot but a beautifully ordered unity: in the words of W. K. C. Guthrie, ‘a
kosmos
– that untranslatable word which unites, as perhaps only the Greek spirit could, the notion of order, arrangement or structural perfection with that of beauty.'
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Some Pythagoreans extended the unity to time. Aristotle's pupil Eudemus wrote that ‘if we are to believe the Pythagoreans and hold that things the same in number recur – that you will be sitting here and I shall talk to you, holding this stick, and so on for everything else – then it is plausible that the same time too recurs.'
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