The Music of Pythagoras (2 page)

Numbers and mathematics had been in use for eons before Pythagoras was born, sometimes with more sophisticated understanding than his and his followers’. Their insight in the realm of music was extraordinary in a different way—different from the practical use of numbers or from an artist’s appreciation for a beautiful geometric figure. Different even from the more abstract thinking of an early Babylonian teacher or student who found it an interesting exercise to do the math for a grain pile far larger than could ever be constructed. Imagine a carpenter looking at the hammer and chisel that he holds in his hands, that he has been taking for granted as a useful part of his daily work, and in an instant of dumbfounded recognition seeing that he holds the keys to unlock the doorway to vast hidden knowledge. That was what numbers became for the Pythagoreans and, through them, for the future. With this fresh appreciation—indeed, veneration—of the power of numbers, Pythagoras and his followers made one of the most profound and significant discoveries in the history of human thought. They stood at the sort of threshold that humanity has crossed only a few times. This particular door would not close again.

The brutally pared-down picture of Pythagoras and the events of his life offered by the twentieth century was no more satisfactory a representation than the one that overcredulous earlier centuries had accepted. All that could be said for it was that it was probably
not wrong
. But, for me, it has caused a dramatic refocusing of my attention onto the enormous, rich, multilayered, continuously reimagined story of “Pythagoras”—as seen separately from the life and person of the historical Pythagoras. That is the reason this book ends in the twenty-first century rather than in antiquity.

Amazingly it is the uncertainty about what really occurred and who Pythagoras really was and what he accomplished that has allowed something astounding to happen through the centuries. One truly powerful idea did come authentically from Pythagoras and his earliest
followers—the recognition that numbers are a pathway from human ignorance to an understanding of the deepest mysteries of a universe that on some profound level makes perfect sense and is all of a piece. That vision has been a premier guide in the development of science and remains so today. However, the scarcity of sure knowledge about nearly everything else connected with Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans has encouraged generation after generation, beginning as early as Plato and still continuing in the twenty-first century, to reimagine him, to recreate him, to fashion their own variations on the theme of Pythagoras. As composers do in music, such figures as Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, heroes of the French Revolution, Bertrand Russell, Einstein, and those who are now seeking extraterrestrial intelligence have taken a very slim theme indeed and composed intricate, sometimes whimsical, sometimes weird, often magnificent variations—a metaphor not inappropriate for a story that began with the strings of a lyre.

Two and a half millennia of writing and thinking and myth-making and composing variations about Pythagoras in one context after another, with one agenda after another, have of course multiplied the difficulties for a “biographer.” Even more difficult to sort out than the outspoken detractors and obvious distortions and forgeries are those who, encountering Pythagorean or pseudo-Pythagorean thought, have joyfully recognized its links with their own thoughts and taken off from there, calling it
all
Pythagorean, even attributing their best ideas to Pythagoras himself—as Isaac Newton, of all people, did. Or calling
none
of it Pythagorean, but leaving the way open for others to say it was. Perhaps an author should abandon all hope of nonfiction and write a novel. To a certain extent, that is what two and a half millennia have written.

All of which might cause one to conclude that this book must be a postmodern parable. It would be difficult to find a better example of ideas, a life story, or a person being re-imagined time after time, century after century. Instead, I have come to see “Pythagoras” as a cubist painting, a Picasso or a Braque—either of whom would have insisted that there is more truth in their cubist paintings than in a photolike portrait. Life and history are impossible to fit together in a completely satisfying, coherent picture—and are continually reinvented in the eye of the beholder.

This book begins with something resembling a conventional “biography,” indulging in calculated speculation, recounting legends and rumors, reporting intriguing and sometimes conflicting information, trying to discern what most likely happened—or might have happened—given the time and place and context. Much of the information comes through the research of three authors who wrote biographies of Pythagoras seven to eight hundred years after his death, in the third and early fourth centuries
A.D
., who in their time pieced together second-, third-, and fourth-hand accounts, legends and hearsay, oral tradition, what people believed or guessed, and other writers’ references to lost works—ancient material that ranges from the reliable to the well-meaning and intelligent to the ridiculous. Pythagoras was already a cubist painting, but these three accounts more than any other sources have influenced what the world has thought it knew and still thinks it knows about him.

From the time of those biographies, the Pythagorean story wound its way into the Middle Ages and eventually into the modern world. It followed what is by no means a satisfying linear path. There are threads and trends, but more remarkable is the unavoidable impression that the idea of Pythagoras existed and still exists on an almost subliminal level. It shows up not only where you might expect it, underpinning the work of Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, and Stephen Hawking, but also in odd, unlikely places such as the architecture of Palladio and the philosophical interpretation of the French Revolution, and a grandfatherly figure in a novel by Louisa May Alcott. In spite of all the twentieth-century skepticism, impressive thinkers like Bertrand Russell, Arthur Koestler, and Jacob Bronowski regarded Pythagoras as a towering, foundational figure. Pythagorean principles have become imbedded in our worldview, and the original Pythagorean cracking of the code underpins the continuing development of science.

Lament the lost story of the life and person of Pythagoras, if you will, but join me in attempting to understand why and how it has birthed and nurtured such a rich tradition and wealth of interpretation, and in celebrating what is not a myth or a lie or even a legend . . . but one beautiful instance of realization about the truth of the universe.

Sixth Century
B.C
.

I
N IMPERIAL
R
OME, THERE WAS
a popular myth that the ancient sage Pythagoras had been the son of Apollo. The story was spread in the first century
A.D
. by Apollonius of Tyana, an itinerant wonder-worker who claimed he was the reincarnated Pythagoras and could speak with authority. The empress Julia Domna, wife of the emperor Septimus Severus, saw to it that Apollonius’ tales were well publicized, in the hope of rivaling Jesus of Nazareth, whose followers believed that he was the son of the god of the Hebrews.

A century after Julia Domna (eight centuries after Pythagoras), the story of Pythagoras’ divine patrimony came into the hands of the neo-Platonist philosopher and historian Iamblichus of Chalcis, who was writing a book titled
Pythagorean Life
.
¹
Living in a superstitious age, he was not a particularly skeptical biographer when it came to the miraculous. He weighed carefully not whether he should believe “marvelous” tales, but which to believe, and he balked at the report that Pythagoras was descended from a god. It was “by no means to be admitted.” Iamblichus did not, however, merely ignore myths that he could not accept as truth, nor should a historian have done so when sorting out the sixth century
B.C
.—this era that Jacob Bronowski called the “hinge of legend and history.” Iamblichus liked to speculate about why a myth
had arisen. Here is his version of Pythagoras’ birth story, sanitized of what he saw as unduly supernatural details:

In the first third of the sixth century
B.C
., a merchant seaman named Mnesarchus embarked on a voyage, unaware that his wife was in the early stages of pregnancy. As most important merchants of his time who had the opportunity would have done, he included Delphi on his itinerary and enquired of the oracle—the Pythian Apollo—whether the remainder of his venture would be a success. The oracle replied that the next portion of the journey, to Syria, was going to be particularly productive. Then the oracle changed the subject: Mnesarchus’ wife was already pregnant with a son who would be surpassingly beautiful and wise, and of “the greatest benefit to the human race in everything pertaining to human achievements.” This was an astounding pronouncement, but Iamblichus insisted it was no indication that the son was not Mnesarchus’ child. It was to honor the oracle, not to imply the patrimony of Apollo, that Mnesarchus changed his wife’s name from Parthenis to Pythais and decided to name the boy Pythagoras. The voyage continued, and Pythais gave birth at Sidon in Phoenicia. Then the family returned to their home on the island of Samos. As the oracle had predicted, the mercantile venture had been a success and added substantially to their wealth. Mnesarchus erected a temple to the Pythian Apollo. No identifiable trace of it has survived, but Samos is sprinkled with the ruins of temples and shrines from that period that cannot now be attributed either to a particular god or donor.

The two other authors who lived during the time of the Roman Empire and wrote “lives” of Pythagoras in the third and early fourth centuries
A.D
.—Diogenes Laertius and Porphyry—were in agreement with Iamblichus that there was ample evidence Pythagoras’ mother Pythais was descended from the earliest colonists on Samos.
²
*
However, there is no other part of Pythagoras’ life story, until the events surrounding his death, about which the discussion among them became so animated and contradictory as it did regarding his father Mnesarchus’ origins. Iamblichus’ research indicated that both parents traced their ancestry to the first colonists on Samos. Porphyry was in possession of a conflicting report from a third century
B.C
. historian named Neanthes—a stickler for juxtaposing conflicting pieces of information—that Mnesarchus
was not Samian by birth. Neanthes had had it from one source that Mnesarchus was born in Tyre (in Syria) and from another that he was an Etruscan (Tyrrhenian) from Lemnos. The similarity of the names “Tyre” and “Tyrrhenian” had perhaps caused the confusion. Porphyry referred to an additional source, a book with an enticing title, On the Incredible Things Beyond Thule, that also mentioned Mnesarchus’ Etruscan and Lemnos origins. Diogenes Laertius, the earliest of the three biographers, pointed out that the responsible ancient historian Aristoxenus of Tarentum—with excellent contacts, such as Dionysius the Younger of Syracuse and Pythagoreans in the fourth century b.c.—also had said Mnesarchus was a Tyrrhenian. All three biographers agreed that if Mnesarchus was not Samian by birth, he was naturalized on Samos. Diogenes Laertius also threw in that he had learned from one Hermippus, a native of Samos in the third century
B.C
., that Mnesarchus was a gem engraver.

The island of Samos, Pythagoras’ childhood home, is the most precipitous and thickly forested of the Greek islands. Jacob Bronowski called it a “magical island. Other Greek islands will do as a setting for The Tempest, but for me this is Prospero’s island, the shore where the scholar turned magician.”
³
The boy Pythagoras would have been familiar with forest-clad mountain slopes, deep wooded gorges, and misty outlines of half-barren coastlines on a cobalt sea. For a family of the landholding class, life in the countryside, in this climate where flowers bloom most of the year and grape vines and olive groves proliferate, was pleasant, probably luxurious, even more so with goods Mnesarchus brought home from trips abroad. In poetry of which only fragments survive, Asius described the Samian aristocracy as wearing “snow-white tunics,” “golden brooches,” “cunningly worked bracelets,” and wrote of their “tresses” that “waved in the wind in golden bands.”
⁴

In the port city and the precincts of Samos’ temple of the goddess Hera were goods, treasures, and curiosities to carry a young man’s imagination to the borders of the world. The temple had acquired a collection of valuable ornaments from Iran, Mesopotamia, Libya, Spain, and even farther away. Archaeologists have found no other Greek site so rich in foreign material, no ancient site anywhere with so wide a geographical spectrum of offerings. Not only Hera acquired treasures. Imported household and luxury items brought foreign textures, smells, and colors into Samian homes and no doubt fed the dreams and adventurous spirits
of young men like Pythagoras and his brothers. Samos was in close touch with the much more ancient and mysterious culture of Mesopotamia.

What is known of Samos’ history is a combination of folk memory, oral history, and archaeology. By legend, the first settlers were led by Ankaios, a hero son of Zeus who had sailed with Hercules and Orpheus on the voyage of the Argonauts in pursuit of the Golden Fleece. At the behest of the Pythian oracle at Delphi, Ankaios had decided to establish a colony and brought families from Arcadia, Thessaly, Athens, Epidaurus, and Chalcis. The oracle dictated the name of the future great city of the island, Samos. “
Sama
” implied great heights, and Samos has high mountains. Ancient stories traced Pythagoras’ family’s lineage to Ankaios himself.

Today, more than thirty centuries after Samos was pioneer territory, archaeologists are able to put dates to the stories. They agree that the ancient history of Samos was largely consistent with legend. Ionians from Epidauria arrived in the late second millennium
B.C
., and the Pythian oracle at Delphi was busy in operation then, though Apollo was not yet associated with it. The colonists who came, perhaps led by Ankaios, were part of large migrations from mainland Greece to the islands of the eastern Aegean and the shores of Asia Minor.