by Will Durant
All went well with Sybaris until it slipped into war with its neighbor Crotona (510). We are unreliably informed that the Sybarites marched out to battle with an army of 300,000 men15 The Crotoniates, we are further assured, threw this force into confusion by playing the tunes to which the Sybarites had taught their horses to dance.16 The horses danced, the Sybarites were slaughtered, and their city was so conscientiously sacked and burned that it disappeared from history in a day. When, sixty-five years later, Herodotus and other Athenians established near the site the new colony of Thurii, they found hardly a trace of what had been the proudest community in Greece.
II. PYTHAGORAS OF CROTONA
Crotona lasted longer; founded about 710 B.C., it is, as Crotone, still noisy with industry and trade. It had the only natural harbor between Taras and Sicily, and could not forgive those ships that discharged their cargoes at Sybaris. Enough trade remained to give the citizens a comfortable prosperity, while a wholesome defeat in war, a long economic depression, a brisk climate, and a certain Dorico-Puritan mood in the population conspired to keep them vigorous despite their wealth. Here grew famous athletes like Milo, and the greatest school of medicine in Magna Grecia.*
Perhaps it was its reputation as a health resort that drew Pythagoras to Crotona. The name means “mouthpiece of the Pythian” oracle at Delphi; many of his followers considered him to be Apollo himself, and some laid claim to having caught a flash of his golden thigh.17 Tradition assigned his birth to Samos about 580, spoke of his studious youth, and gave him thirty years of travel. “Of all men,” says Heracleitus, who praised parsimoniously, “Pythagoras was the most assiduous inquirer.”18 He visited, we are told, Arabia, Syria, Phoenicia, Chaldea, India, and Gaul, and came back with an admirable motto for tourists: “When you are traveling abroad look not back at your own borders”;19 prejudices should be checked at every port of entry. More surely he visited Egypt, where he studied with the priests and learned much astronomy and geometry, and perhaps a little nonsense.20 Returning to Samos and finding that the dictatorship of Polycrates interfered with his own, he migrated to Crotona, being now over fifty years of age.21
There he set up as a teacher; and his imposing presence, his varied learning and his willingness to receive women as well as men into his school, soon brought him several hundred students. Two centuries before Plato he laid down the principle of equal opportunity for both sexes, and did not merely preach it but practiced it. Nevertheless he recognized natural differences of function; he gave his women pupils considerable training in philosophy and literature, but he had them instructed as well in maternal and domestic arts, so that the “Pythagorean women” were honored by antiquity as the highest feminine type that Greece ever produced.22
For the students in general Pythagoras established rules that almost turned the school into a monastery. The members bound themselves by a vow of loyalty, both to the Master and to one another. Ancient tradition is unanimous that they practiced a communistic sharing of goods while they lived in the Pythagorean community.23 They were not to eat flesh, or eggs, or beans. Wine was not forbidden, but water was recommended—a dangerous prescription in lower Italy today. Possibly the prohibition of flesh food was a religious taboo bound up with the belief in the transmigration of souls: men must beware of eating their ancestors. Probably there were dispensations, now and then, from the letter of these rules; English historians in particular find it incredible that the wrestler Milo, who was a Pythagorean, had become the strongest man in Greece without the help of beef24—though the calf that became a bull in his arms* managed well enough on grass. The members were forbidden to kill any animal that does not injure man, or to destroy a cultivated tree. They were to dress simply and behave modestly, “never yielding to laughter, and yet not looking stern.” They were not to swear by the gods, for “every man ought so to live as to be worthy of belief without an oath.” They were not to offer victims in sacrifice, but they might worship at altars that were unstained with blood. At the close of each day they were to ask themselves what wrongs they had committed, what duties they had neglected, what good they had done.25
Pythagoras himself, unless he was an excellent actor, followed these rules more rigorously than any student. Certainly his mode of life won for him such respect and authority among his pupils that no one grumbled at his pedagogical dictatorship, and autos epha—ipse dixit—“he himself has said it”—became their formula for a final decision in almost any field of conduct or theory. We are told, With touching reverence, that the Master never drank wine by day, and lived for the most part on bread and honey, with vegetables as dessert; that his robe was always white and spotless; that he was never known to eat too much, or to make love; that he never indulged in laughter, or jests, or stories; that he never chastised any one, not even a slave26 Timon of Athens thought him “a juggler of solemn speech, engaged in fishing for men”;27 but among his most devoted followers were his wife Theano and his daughter Damo, who had facilities for comparing his philosophy with his life. To Damo, says Diogenes Laertius, “he entrusted his Commentaries, and charged her to divulge them to no person out of the house. And she, though she might have sold his discourses for much money, would not abandon them, for she thought obedience to her father’s injunctions more valuable than gold; and that, too, though she was a woman.”28
Initiation into the Pythagorean society required, in addition to purification of the body by abstinence and self-control, a purification of the mind by scientific study. The new pupil was expected to preserve for five years the “Pythagorean silence”—i.e., presumably, to accept instruction without questions or argument—before being accounted a full member, or being permitted to “see” (study under?) Pythagoras.29 The scholars were accordingly divided into exoterici, or outer students, and esoterici, or inner members, who were entitled to the secret wisdom of the Master himself. Four subjects composed the curriculum: geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. Mathematics came first;* not as the practical science that the Egyptians had made it, but as an abstract theory of quantities, and an ideal logical training in which thinking would be compelled to order and clarity by the test of rigorous deduction and visible proof. Geometry now definitely received the form of axiom, theorem, and demonstration; each step in the sequence of propositions raised the student to a new platform, as the Pythagoreans put it, from which he might view more widely the secret structure of the world.31 Pythagoras himself, according to Greek tradition, discovered many theorems: above all, that the sum of the angles within any triangle equals two right angles, and that the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Apollodorus tells us that when the Master discovered this theorem he sacrificed a hecatomb—a hundred animals—in thanksgiving;32 but this would have been scandalously un-Pythagorean.
From geometry, inverting the modern order, Pythagoras passed to arithmetic—not as a practical art of reckoning, but as the abstract theory of numbers. The school seems to have made the first classification of numbers into odd or even, prime or factorable;33 it formulated the theory of proportion, and through this and the “application of areas” created a geometrical algebra.34 Perhaps it was the study of proportion that led Pythagoras to reduce music to number. One day, as he passed a blacksmith’s shop, his ear was attracted by the apparently regular musical intervals of the sounds that came from the anvil. Finding that the hammers were of different weights, he concluded that tones depend upon numerical ratios. In one of the few experiments which we hear of in classical science, he took two strings of equal thickness and equal tension, and discovered that if one was twice as long as the other they sounded an octave when he plucked them; if one was half again the length of the other they gave a fifth (do, sol); if one was a third longer than the other they gave a fourth (do, fa);35 in this way every musical interval could be mathematically calculated and expressed. Since all bodies moving in space produce sounds, whose pitch depends upon the size and speed of the b
ody, then each planet in its orbit about the earth (argued Pythagoras) makes a sound proportioned to its rapidity of translation, which in turn rises with its distance from the earth; and these diverse notes constitute a harmony or “music of the spheres,” which we never hear because we hear it all the time.36
The universe, said Pythagoras, is a living sphere, whose center is the earth. The earth too is a sphere, revolving, like the planets, from west to east. The earth, indeed the whole universe, is divided into five zonesarctic, antarctic, summer, winter, and equatorial. More or less of the moon is visible to us according to the degree in which that half of it which is facing the sun is also turned toward the earth. Eclipses of the moon are caused by the interposition of the earth, or some other body, between the moon and the sun.37 Pythagoras, says Diogenes Laertius, “was the first person to call the earth round, and to give the name of kosmos to the world.”38
Having with these contributions to mathematics and astronomy done more than any other man to establish science in Europe, Pythagoras proceeded to philosophy. The very word is apparently one of his creations. He rejected the term sophia, or wisdom, as pretentious, and described his own pursuit of understanding as philosophia—the love of wisdom.39 In the sixth century philosopher and Pythagorean were synonyms.40 Whereas Thales and the other Milesians had sought the first principle of all things in matter, Pythagoras sought it in form. Having discovered numerically regular relations and sequences in music, and having postulated them in the planets, he made the philosopher’s leap at unity by announcing that such numerically regular relations and sequences existed everywhere, and that the essential factor in everything was number. Just as Spinoza would argue* that there were two worlds—one the people’s world of things perceived by sense, the other the philosopher’s world of laws and constancies perceived by reason—and that only the second world was permanently real; so Pythagoras felt that the only basic and lasting aspects of anything were the numerical relationships of its parts.† Perhaps health was a proper mathematical relationship, or proportion, in the parts or elements of the body. Perhaps even the soul was number.
At this point the mysticism in Pythagoras, nurtured in Egypt and the Near East, disported itself freely. The soul, he believed, is divided into three parts: feeling, intuition, and reason. Feeling is centered in the heart, intuition and reason in the brain. Feeling and intuition belong to animals as well as men;‡ reason belongs to man alone, and is immortal.42 After death the soul undergoes a period of purgation in Hades; then it returns to earth and enters a new body in a chain of transmigration that can be ended only by a completely virtuous life. Pythagoras amused, or perhaps edified, his followers by telling them that he had been in one incarnation a courtesan, in another the hero Euphorbus; he could remember quite distinctly his adventures at the siege of Troy, and recognized, in a temple at Argos, the armor that he had worn in that ancient life.43 Hearing the yelp of a beaten dog, he went at once to the rescue of the animal, saying that he distinguished in its cries the voice of a dead friend.44 We catch again a glimpse of the trade in ideas that bound sixth-century Greece, Africa, and Asia when we reflect that this idea of metempsychosis was at one and the same time capturing the imagination of India, of the Orphic cult in Greece, and of a philosophical school in Italy.
We feel the hot breath of Hindu pessimism mingling, in the ethics of Pythagoras, with the clear, bright air of Plato. The purpose of life in the Pythagorean system is to gain release from reincarnation; the method is through virtue; and virtue is a harmony of the soul within itself and with God. Sometimes this harmony can be artificially induced, and the Pythagoreans, like Greek priests and doctors, used music to heal nervous disorders. More often harmony comes to the soul through wisdom, a quiet understanding of underlying truths; for such wisdom teaches a man modesty, measure, and the golden mean. The opposite way—the way of discord, excess, and sin—leads by inevitable fate to tragedy and punishment; justice is a “square number,” and sooner or later every wrong will be “squared” with an equivalent penalty.45 Here in germ are the moral philosophies of Plato and Aristotle.
Pythagorean politics is Plato’s philosophy realized before its conception. According to the common tradition of antiquity the school of Pythagoras was a communistic aristocracy: men and women pooling their goods, educated together, trained to virtue and high thinking by mathematics, music, and philosophy, and offering themselves as the guardian rulers of the state. Indeed it was Pythagoras’ effort to make his society the actual government of his city that brought ruin upon himself and his followers. The initiates entered so actively into politics, and took so decidedly the aristocratic side, that the democratic or popular party of Crotona, in an ecstasy of rage, burned down the house in which the Pythagoreans were gathered, killed several of them, and drove the rest out of the city. Pythagoras himself, in one account, was captured and slain when, in his flight, he refused to tread upon a field of beans; another story lets him escape to Metapontum, where he abstained from food for forty days and—perhaps feeling that eighty years were enough—starved himself to death.46
His influence was lasting; even today he is a potent name. His society survived for three centuries in scattered groups throughout Greece, producing scientists like Philolaus of Thebes and statesmen like Archytas, dictator of Taras and friend of Plato. Wordsworth, in his most famous ode, was an unconscious Pythagorean. Plato himself was enthralled by the vague figure of Pythagoras. At every turn he takes from him—in his scorn of democracy, his yearning for a communistic aristocracy of philosopherrulers, his conception of virtue as harmony, his theories of the nature and destiny of the soul, his love of geometry, and his addiction to the mysticism of number. All in all, Pythagoras was the founder, so far as we know them, of both science and philosophy in Europe—an achievement sufficient for any man.
III. XENOPHANES OF ELEA
West of Crotona lies the site of ancient Locri. The colony was founded, says Aristotle, by runaway slaves, adulterers, and thieves from Locris in mainland Greece; but perhaps Aristotle had an Old World disdain for the New. Suffering disorder from the defects of their qualities, the colonists applied to the oracle at Delphi for advice, and were told to get themselves laws. Possibly Zaleucus had instructed the oracle, for about 664 he gave to Locri ordinances which, as he said, Athena had dictated to him in a dream. This was the first written code of laws in the history of Greece, though not the first to be handed down by the gods. The Locrians liked it so well that they required any man who wished to propose a new law to speak with a rope around his neck, so that, if his motion failed, he might be hanged with a minimum of public inconvenience.*47
Rounding the toe of Italy northward, the traveler reaches flourishing Reggio, founded by the Messenians about 730 under the name of Rhegion, and known to the Romans as Rhegium. Slipping through the Straits of Messina—probably the “Scylla and Charybdis” of the Odyssey—one comes to where Laus stood; and then to ancient Hyele, the Roman Velia, known to history as Elea because Plato wrote it so, and because only its philosophers are remembered. There Xenophanes of Colophon came about 510, and founded the Eleatic School.
He was a personality as unique as his favorite foe, Pythagoras. A man of dauntless energy and reckless initiative, he wandered for sixty-seven years, he tells us,48 “up and down the land of Hellas,” making observations and enemies everywhere. He wrote and recited philosophical poems, denounced Homer for his impious ribaldry, laughed at superstition, found a port in Elea, and obstinately completed a century before he died.49 Homer and Hesiod, sang Xenophanes, “have ascribed to the gods all deeds that are a shame and a disgrace among men—thieving, adultery, and fraud.”50 But he himself was not a pillar of orthodoxy.
There never was, nor ever will be, any man who knows with certainty the things about the gods. . . . Mortals fancy that gods are born, and wear clothes, and have voice and form like themselves. Yet if oxen and lions had hands, and could paint and fashion images as men do, they would make the pictures and
images of their gods in their own likeness; horses would make them like horses, oxen like oxen. Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; Thracians give theirs blue eyes and red hair. . . . There is one god, supreme among gods and men; resembling mortals neither in form nor in mind. The whole of him sees, the whole of him thinks, the whole of him hears. Without toil he rules all things by the power of his mind.51
This god, says Diogenes Laertius,52 was identified by Xenophanes with the universe. All things, even men, taught the philosopher, are derived from earth and water by natural laws.53 Water once covered nearly all the earth, for marine fossils are found far inland and on mountaintops; and at some future time water will probably cover the whole earth again.54 Nevertheless all change in history, and all separateness in things, are superficial phenomena; beneath the flux and variety of forms is an unchanging unity, which is the innermost reality of God.
From this starting point Xenophanes’ disciple, Parmenides of Elea, proceeded to that idealistic philosophy which was in turn to mold the thought of Plato and Platonists throughout antiquity, and of Europe even to our day.
IV. FROM ITALY TO SPAIN
Twenty miles north of Elea lay the city of Poseidonia—the Roman Paestum—founded by colonists from Sybaris as the main Italian terminus of Milesian trade. Today one reaches it by a pleasant ride from Naples through Salerno. Suddenly, by the roadside, amid a deserted field, three temples appear, majestic even in their desolation. For the river, by blocking its own mouth here with centuries of silt, has long since turned this once healthy valley into a swamp, and even the reckless race that tills the slopes of Vesuvius has fled in despair from these malarial plains. Fragments of the ancient walls remain; but better preserved, as if by solitude, are the shrines that the Greeks raised, in modest limestone but almost perfect form, to the gods of the corn and the sea. The oldest of the buildings, lately called the “Basilica,” was more likely a temple to Poseidon; men who owed their living to the fruit and commerce of the Mediterranean dedicated it to him towards the middle of this amazing sixth century B.C., which created great art, literature, and philosophy from Italy to Shantung. The inner as well as the outer colonnades remain, and attest the columnar passion of the Greeks. The following generation built a smaller temple, also Dorically simple and strong; we call it the “temple of Ceres,” but we do not know what god sniffed the savor of its offerings. A yet later generation, just before or after the Persian War,55 erected the greatest and best-proportioned of the three temples, probably also to Poseidon—fittingly enough, since from its porticoes one gazes into the inviting face of the treacherous sea. Again almost everything is columns: a powerful and complete Doric peristyle without, and, within, a two-storied colonnade that once upheld a roof. Here is one of the most impressive sights in Italy; it seems incredible that this temple, better preserved than anything built by the Romans, was the work of Greeks almost five centuries before Christ. We can imagine something of the beauty and vitality of a community that had both the resources and the taste to raise such centers for its religious life; and then we can conjure up less inadequately the splendor of richer and vaster cities like Miletus, Samos, Ephesus, Crotona, Sybaris, and Syracuse.