The Music of Pythagoras (33 page)

The Visigoths who sacked Rome in 410 did not consolidate their victory by establishing a new government. For a while the imperial government limped along, sometimes surprisingly effectively, though virtually all of the western part of the Empire was now overrun by Germanic tribes who continued to make and break agreements and alliances with Roman and local authorities and to war among themselves. German settlers in Italy rather quickly converted to Christianity, many of them at first to the form known as Arianism which had been declared a heresy by the Council of Nicaea in 325; but eventually they entered Roman Catholicism.

In 429, the Vandals accomplished an end run through Spain, invaded North Africa, and became a new pirate threat in the Mediterranean. A quarter century later, it was their turn to sack Rome. Again, the invaders did not stay, but when they left they carried a former empress and her daughters back with them to Africa. On August 23, 476, the German troops, who by then actually made up most of the Roman army in Italy, elected their general Odoacer as king and overthrew the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus. The Roman Empire in the West, long in its death throes, at last expired. In theory, the emperor of the eastern Roman Empire, Zeno, now ruled the entire Empire, but Odoacer, though in no position to reestablish anything like the former Empire, was, in effect, an independent ruler, while various German factions in Italy could only war uselessly among themselves and with other tribes who continued to appear on the horizon. In the western
Empire, including its former vast holdings to the north in Europe, one might assume that the Dark Ages had begun. They had not, quite.

Boethius, born in 480, after the overthrow of the last Roman emperor, was a Roman aristocrat in an era when conventional wisdom would seem to indicate there should no longer have been such a thing. Roman life as usual had not, however, completely ended in the city and its environs. The Roman civil service continued to operate, courts administered Roman law, Roman and Gothic landholders were paying their taxes, and learning and culture had not disappeared. The Roman Senate was still meeting, and Boethius became a Senator. He was also a philosopher, theologian, poet, mathematician, and astronomer—one of the last generation to study at what was still calling itself the Academy in Athens—and he was deeply troubled to see his contemporaries losing the ability to read Greek, which had for centuries been part of Roman education.
*
No longer could they experience Plato, Aristotle, the neo-Platonists, or many of the Christian church fathers in their original language. Boethius vowed to remedy this potentially disastrous loss: “I will translate into Latin every work of Aristotle that comes into my hands, and all the dialogues of Plato.”
¹⁸
Much else also, it turned out.

Boethius accomplished an astounding amount of translation before he made an unfortunate career decision. Rome was far from a dead city, but it was no longer the city from which Italy was ruled. The Ostrogoth leader Theodoric, in Ravenna, had taken over from the Visigoths in 493, when Boethius was thirteen, murdering (some said personally) the king, Odoacer, whom the German army had elected. Having grown up in Constantinople and married a Byzantine princess, Theodoric admired classical culture and liked to surround himself with intellectuals. Boethius was particularly attracted to him because Theodoric hoped to reconcile the Romans and the Goths, and that shared goal also drew Theodoric to Boethius. Boethius decided to attach himself to Theodoric’s court in Ravenna.

He did not last long there. In 523, he was falsely accused of treason and the use of magic. Theodoric imprisoned him and executed him the next year, but not before Boethius in his prison cell had done his
deepest thinking and most eloquent writing—a book redolent of Platonic ideas, called
Consolations of Philosophy
. Throughout the Middle Ages, Boethius was considered on the level of one of the church fathers, if not exactly one of them, but in this book he wrote not of the Christian command, but of the Pythagorean command, to “follow God.”

Boethius, probably a late medieval representation

For centuries, medieval scholars in Latin Europe would know the Greek authors through the Latin translations and commentaries Boethius had written. In large part thanks to him and Macrobius, the flame of classical Greek philosophy was kept burning in the monasteries of the Middle Ages. Also because of Boethius, Nicomachus’ version of neo-Pythagorean mathematics became the bane of every student’s existence.

The impact in the Middle Ages of another of Boethius’ books, a multivolume work called
De institutione musica
, was almost as great as that of his
De institutione arithmetic
, which preserved Nicomachus’ mathematics. Islamic philosophers would refer to it when they wrote about music from a Pythagorean point of view, and it would become a staple when medieval educators adopted the Pythagorean quadrivium. The first three volumes of
De institutione musica
were probably a translation
or close paraphrase of Nicomachus’
Introduction to Music
, since lost. The approach was Pythagorean, emphasizing the importance of the musical ratios, linking specific notes of the scale to the Sun, Moon, and planets, and referring frequently to Pythagoras. Boethius divided “music” into three subjects:
musica mundana
was the harmony of the spheres,
musica humana
the relationship of music to the human soul, and
musica instrumentalis
what we normally think of as music.

In the sixth century, the old Roman Empire in the East had a new name, the Byzantine Empire, and was still alive and flourishing brilliantly. Greco-Roman civilization had certainly not died there. Alexandria was a wealthy, thriving city, as were Jerusalem and Antioch; Constantinople had replaced Rome as the capital of the civilized world, and its emperor was for all intents and purposes the head of the Christian church. Before mid-century, the Byzantine general Belisarius drove the Vandals out of North Africa, conquered the southern part of Spain, and retook Rome. The Byzantine Empire soon held Ravenna—ending Theodoric’s brief golden age there—as well as Genoa, most of Sicily, and southern Italy, including Calabria (the old Magna Graecia) which would not be lost until the middle of the eleventh century. However, the reconquest of Italy, rather than restoring prosperity there, destroyed what little was left. It was in the Near and Middle East and North Africa that the old traditions of teaching and learning continued, and where Christian scholars were carefully preserving ancient texts and knowledge of the ancient Greek language.

The preservation and treasuring of classical philosophy and learning would continue in those regions for many centuries, but not under the aegis of the Christian Byzantine Empire. In the seventh century, followers of Mohammed poured out of the east. In Syria and Egypt there was scarce resistance, and the great cities surrendered quickly with little damage when the conquerors assured the Jewish and Christian populations that they could continue as usual with their beliefs and worship. This was fortunate for still-existing ancient texts, which came into Islamic hands and were regarded as a precious heritage. By 718, the Arabs held all of Spain, where they would continue as a small but powerful elite, ruling in a manner that was astoundingly tolerant in religious matters and open to cultural influences from all over the Mediterranean and Islamic world.

In the monasteries of Christian Latin Europe, scholars eked out a
meager intellectual living on the works of Macrobius and Boethius and a few other classical Latin authors, copying and preserving them with excruciating care, occasionally hearing and hardly believing rumors that the lost literary and philosophical treasures of Greece and Rome still existed in a far-off place. But it was under the rule of Islam in the Middle East, North Africa, and Moorish Spain that most of the preservation of ancient knowledge and writings, and the development of newer mathematics and astronomy based on them, moved forward from the eighth century to the eleventh.

Eighth–Fourteenth Centuries

B
Y THE EIGHTH CENTURY, THE
book destined to be Ptolemy’s most celebrated work had reached Baghdad. Islamic scholars translated it into Arabic, and
Almagest
, “The Greatest,” was its ninth-century Arabic title. While Islamic mathematicians and astronomers were advancing beyond the methods and models of Hellenistic scholars, no one apparently questioned the Earth-centered model of the cosmos or seems to have been aware of Philolaus’ Pythagorean ten-body model with the central fire and counter-earth. Al Fargani, a brilliant ninth-century Arab astronomer, estimated the sizes of the spheres in which the planets move and worked out relationships among their distances, but musical ratios were not part of his calculations or those of other Islamic astronomers. Those with an ear for Pythagorean harmony of the spheres in the Islamic world were men concerned with the effects of instrumental and vocal music on the health of the body and the well-being and morality of the human soul. They were following the lead of a ninth-century writer named Honein Ibn Ishak al-‘Ibadi, or Hunayn.
¹

The mission of the Bayt al-hikma, or House of Learning, an academy in ninth-century Baghdad, was to retrieve the knowledge of antiquity and make it available to readers in Arabic. Baghdad was a cosmopolitan city where ideas flowed freely and minority religions were regarded as
no serious threat. Hunayn, though not a Muslim but a Nestorian Christian, was both a member of this academy and the chief court physician to the caliph.
*

Hunayn’s fluent Greek made him useful for more than his medical expertise. He translated books from Greek into Arabic for Islamic patrons and into Syriac for Christians, and he also produced Arabic translations of the works of his ancient medical predecessor Galen, and of the Hebrew Scriptures (from a Greek version).

Curious about the way music affects the human body and psyche, Hunayn wrote the first known treatise on music in Islamic literature, full of Pythagorean/Platonic themes of unity, harmony, Forms, the estrangement of the soul from the divine, and the possibility of their eventual reunion. “Living in solitude, the soul sings plaintive melodies, whereby it reminds itself of its own superior world,” he wrote, and described how life often works to seduce the soul away from this superior world. For him, music, rather than numbers, was the great underlying connector: “The excellence of music is evident by the fact that it appertains to every profession, like a man of understanding who associates himself with everybody.” Hunayn compiled a collection of aphorisms, anecdotes, letters, and excerpts from a variety of Greek sources that he titled
Maxims of the Philosophers (Nawadir al-falasifa)
.
²
He took these from compilers like Plutarch, not from the originals, but the excerpts frequently began with “Plato used to say,” or “Aristotle said,” or “Alexander asked Aristotle,” invoking Archytas and Euclid as well. Numbers were involved in some of the excerpts, but no real mathematics.
^†

Hunayn had a sense of humor:

Once a philosopher went out for a walk accompanied by his disciple. They heard a voice and a guitar. The philosopher said to
his disciple: “Let us approach the guitar; perhaps we can learn some sublime Form.” But as they came closer to the guitar, they heard a bad tone and an inartistic song. The philosopher then said to his disciple: “The magicians and astrologers assert that the voice of an owl indicates death for man. Were this true, the voice of this man should indicate death for an owl.”
³

Some of Hunayn’s collected aphorisms were later incorporated into a mammoth Islamic encyclopedia that appeared about a hundred years after his own lifetime, produced by a tenth-century community known as the Ikhwan al-Safa’, or Brethren of Purity, in Basra in southeastern Iraq. Like the scholars of Hunayn’s House of Learning, the Brethren attempted to preserve all they could of the ancient scientific and philosophical material that had come into Islamic hands. Their chief undertaking was an encyclopedia called the
Rasa’il
, in fifty-two volumes. Its purpose was to cover human knowledge in its entirety. Some ancient books were paraphrased, but few passages were taken verbatim in translation. Instead, the
Rasa’il
was an extravagant re-envisioning of earlier doctrines, an example of a second phase of the work to which so many Islamic scholars were devoted. One of the greatest, Al-Kindi, described it as striving to “complete what the ancients have not fully expressed, and this according to the usage of our Arabic language, the customs of our age, and our own ability.”
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