The Music of Pythagoras (27 page)

Sextus Empiricus, living at the turn of the second to third centuries
A.D
., got all this information from an earlier source, but why have scholars concluded it was Posidonius? The clue lies in a sad story set in Posidonius’ adopted home, the island of Rhodes. The sculptor Chares of Lindos was engaged to construct an enormous bronze statue, the Colossus at Rhodes. He submitted his estimate of the cost. Then the citizens decided they wanted a statue twice as large. How much would that add to the cost? Chares merely doubled his original estimate—a fatal error. “Twice as large,” he remembered too late, did not only mean twice as tall. He had to increase all the dimensions. Chares realized his mistake when all the money was used up on the first phase of the work, and he committed suicide. Sextus included this story in a discussion of numbers and ratios, and scholars see it as Posidonius’ fingerprint on Sextus’ explanation of Pythagorean theory. The information Sextus preserved was probably what Cicero learned about Pythagoras when he studied with Posidonius.

By the mid-first century
B.C
., a cultlike group flourished in Rome under the leadership of Nigidius Figulus, a “Pythagorean and magus” in whose Pythagoreanism the line between science and magic grew fuzzy to the point of extinction. Pythagoreanism “for Nigidius and his friends meant primarily a belief in magic,” wrote the historian Elizabeth Rawson.
⁸
Nigidius’ reputation for having second sight and occult powers qualified him to work up a birth horoscope of the later-to-be-emperor Augustus, which correctly foretold a brilliant future. Romans of that era did not consider such a scholar out of the mainstream or on the lunatic fringe. Cicero wrote in the introduction to his own translation of Plato’s
Timaeus
that Nigidius “arose to revive the teachings of the Pythagoreans which, after having flourished for several centuries in Italy and Sicily, had in some way been extinguished,” and that he was “a particularly
acute investigator of those matters which nature has made obscure.”
⁹
Nigidius was an educated, prolific author of books on the planets, the zodiac, grammar, natural philosophy, dreams, and theology, with an extensive knowledge of religions and cults from much of the known world.

Romans often invoked Pythagoras’ name to represent wisdom and integrity. The scholar and satirist Marcus Terentius Varro, considered by many the most learned Roman of the first century
B.C
., began his book
Hebdomades
with Pythagorean-sounding praise of the number 7 and a quotation about astronomy from Nigidius. When Varro died he was buried, according to Pliny, in the “Pythagorean mode,” in a clay coffin with myrtle, olive, and black poplar leaves.
¹⁰
Cicero, for his part, attempted to undermine the credibility of one “Vatinius,” a supporter of Julius Caesar, by righteously accusing him of impiety: for he “calls himself a Pythagorean and, with the name of that most thoroughly learned man, tries to shield his monstrous, barbarous behavior.”
¹¹
Cicero seems never to have joined a Pythagorean cult, but he made a pilgrimage to Metapontum to visit the house where tradition said Pythagoras died.

Pythagoras made appearances in many of Cicero’s works. In a scene from
On the Commonwealth
, set at Scipio Africanus’ country estate, Africanus and his nephew Quintus Tubero, the first of several expected visitors to arrive, recline on couches in the Roman fashion, awaiting another guest, Panaetius, who investigates problems of astronomy “with the greatest enthusiasm.”
¹²
In anticipation of his arrival, Scipio mentions a matter that has come up in the Senate about a “second sun,”
*
then remarks,

SCIPIO AFRICANUS:
I always feel that Socrates was wiser, since he resigned all interests of this sort and declared that problems of natural philosophy either transcended human reason or in no way concerned human life.

TUBERO:
I cannot understand, Africanus, how the tradition became established that Socrates rejected all such discussions and investigated only the problems of human life and
conduct. Indeed, what more trustworthy authority can we cite than Plato? And Plato, in many passages of his works, even where he represents Socrates as discoursing about ethics and politics, makes him eager to introduce arithmetic, geometry, and harmony, after the manner of Pythagoras.

SCIPIO:
What you say is true, but I presume you have heard, Tubero, that after the death of Socrates, Plato went first to Egypt to continue his studies, and later to Italy and Sicily that he might thoroughly master the discoveries of Pythagoras. He was very intimate with Archytas of Tarentum and Timaeus of Locri and acquired the papers of Philolaus.
^[
*
]
Since at that time the name of Pythagoras was greatly honored in those places, Plato devoted himself to the Pythagoreans and their researches. Thus, as he had been devotedly attached to Socrates and had wished to attribute everything to him, he interwove the charm and argumentative skill of Socrates with the mysticism of Pythagoras and the well-known profundity of his varied lore.

Tubero thinks of Pythagoras in connection with arithmetic, geometry, and harmony. Scipio associates him with mysticism and profound, “varied lore.” Later in the same conversation, they invoke his authority on the natural foundation of laws protecting life:

Pythagoras and Empedocles, men of no ordinary attainments but scholars of the first rank, assert that there is a single legal status belonging to all living creatures. They proclaim moreover, that everlasting punishment awaits those who have wronged anything that lives.
¹³

Cicero even weighed in on the bean issue: Pythagoreans avoided them because they cause “considerable flatulence and thus are inimical to those who seek peace of mind.”
¹⁴

It was in Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio” that he sounded most
Pythagorean—and also much like Plato. The “Dream” concluded Cicero’s
De republica
, and in a graceful parallel, he modeled it on the “Myth of Er” that ended Plato’s
Republic
. Cicero’s “Dream” takes him to a region accessible only to those who through music, learning, genius, and devotion to divine studies have achieved permanent reunion with the highest level of existence. His ears are filled with a sound “strong and sweet,” and he asks Scipio what it is. Scipio replies,

That is a sound which, sundered by unequal intervals, that nevertheless are exactly marked off in due proportion, is produced by the movement and impulse of the orbs themselves, and, commingling high and low tones, causes varying harmonies in uniform degree; for such swift motions cannot be produced in silence, and nature ordains that the extremities sound low at one end, high at the other. Hence the course of the starry heaven at its highest, where the motion is exceedingly rapid, moves with a sharp, quick sound; while the moon in its course (which is the lowest of all) moves with a heavy sound; for earth, the ninth of these bodies, biding immovable in one place, ever holds fast in the center of the universe.
¹⁵

Because Venus and Mercury “are in unison,” there are only seven sounds—matching the number of strings on the seven-stringed lyre—“seven distinct tones, with measured intervals between.” By imitating this harmony with strings and voices, “skilled men have opened for themselves a way back to this place, as have others who with outstanding genius have all their lives devoted themselves to divine studies.”
¹⁶
Cicero’s metaphor to explain why most humans never hear the celestial music was that their ears are deafened to the sound, just as “where the Nile at the Falls of Catadupa pours down from lofty mountains, the people who live hard by lack the sense of hearing because of the cataract’s roar.”
¹⁷
He gave no indication that he knew Pythagoreans had thought the Earth was not the center of the cosmos. In fact, nowhere in the surviving ancient literature is there a hint of anyone bringing the concept of an audible “music of the spheres” together with the cosmology that included the central fire and the counter-earth, even though the musical ratios had probably played a role in the development of the Pythagorean ten-body model of the cosmos.

In a different realm of scholarship, one extremely successful younger Roman contemporary of Cicero, the architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, authored an overview of architecture of his era,
De architectura
or
Ten Books on Architecture
. He recommended Pythagorean ratios and extrapolations on them for the dimensions of rooms, not using any shapes for temples other than one whose length was twice its width (ratio 2:1), or circular. Greek forums were square, but Vitruvius’ had a width 2/3 its length, because an audience for gladiatorial combat was better accommodated in that space. For houses, “the length and breadth of courts [atria] are regulated in three ways,” two of which employed Pythagorean ratios: “The second, when it is divided into three parts, two are given to the width.” The third: “A square being described whose side is equal to the width, a diagonal line is drawn therein, the length of which is to be equal to the length of the atrium.”
¹⁸
This design was based on Socrates’ lesson in Plato’s
Meno
. “By numbers this cannot be done,” wrote Vitruvius. Socrates had used no numbers. The length of that diagonal was incommensurable; so was the length of one side of Vitruvius’ room. He frequently mentioned Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans. The Pythagorean theorem was a shortcut in designing staircases, and he unhesitatingly attributed it to Pythagoras.

Vitruvius’ book referred to an unusual application of musical fourths, fifths, and octaves used in an amplification system in Greek theaters. A Roman theater, he pointed out, being made of wood, had good acoustics, but in a Greek theater, made of stone, the voices of the actors needed amplification:

So [the Greeks placed vessels] in certain recesses under the seats of theatres, fixed and arranged with a due regard to the laws of harmony and physics, their tones being fourths, fifths, and octaves; so that when the voice of the actor is in unison with the pitch of these instruments, its power is increased and mellowed by impinging thereon.
²⁰

This was by way of demonstrating that an architect must be the master of many subjects—not so difficult as it might seem, thought Vitruvius, for a very Pythagorean reason:

For the whole circle of learning consists in one harmonious system. . . . The astronomer and musician delight in similar proportions, for the positions of the stars answer to a fourth and fifth in harmony. The same analogy holds in other branches of Greek geometry which the Greeks call
indeed, throughout the whole range of art, there are many incidents common to all.