The simplicity and charm of this list – and its lack of pomposity – lend it an air of authenticity. These teachings may merely have been Iamblichus’ late-Roman ideas put in Pythagoras’ mouth, but it was the sort of advice that would have been remembered in an oral history or memory book and would have appeared, either from earlier Pythagorean sources or newly minted, in the teachings of the various groups that considered themselves Pythagorean in the centuries separating Pythagoras from Iamblichus. Iamblichus’ account goes on to say that the elders were impressed. They built the temple and many sent their concubines packing. They asked Pythagoras to address the young men in a formal setting, and also to address the women of the city, whose inclusion was a strong theme in the Pythagorean tradition.
In Pythagoras’ address to the young men, said Iamblichus, he repeated what he had taught those he met in the gymnasium, adding that they should not revile anyone or revenge themselves on anyone who reviled them, and that they should practise listening, as a way of learning to speak. Iamblichus interjected a personal opinion that because of these moral teachings to the youth, Pythagoras really did deserve to be called divine.
In Pythagoras’ address to the women, wrote Iamblichus, he expressed high regard for female piety – particularly important in a city whose goddess was connected with all matters pertaining to women. He recommended equity and modesty and appropriate offerings rather than blood and dead animals or anything extravagant. Women should be cheerful in conversation and behave so that others could speak only good of them. A woman should know that it was all right to love her husband more than she loved her parents. She should not oppose her husband, but apparently it was acceptable to discuss matters with him and disagree, because Pythagoras said that if her husband gave way to her, she must not overinterpret that and think he had made himself subject to her. Again Iamblichus reported success that seems too good to be true: Marital faithfulness in Croton became proverbial. Women offered their costliest garments in the temple of Hera.
Though Iamblichus went into greater detail than Diogenes Laertius or Porphyry, the latter two were not silent when it came to what Pythagoras taught the Crotonians. Diogenes Laertius reported a teaching Iamblichus failed to mention: Some men have a ‘slavish disposition’ and are ‘born hunters after glory’, like men in a Great Game contending for prizes. Others are covetous, like those who come to the game for ‘purposes of traffic’. Others are spectators. These are the seekers after the truth. Twenty-six centuries after Pythagoras (and about seventeen after Diogenes Laertius), Bertrand Russell would make much of this Pythagorean distinction. Diogenes Laertius also mentioned Pythagoras’ advice not to pray for specific things, because you do not know what is good for you.
Iamblichus summed up Pythagoras’ teaching in what he called the ‘epitome of Pythagoras’s own opinions’, which he would continue to stress in private and in public: one should by all means possible amputate disease from the body, ignorance from the soul, luxury from the belly, sedition from the city, discord from the household, and excess from all things whatsoever. Iamblichus also praised Pythagoras’ teaching method – not to spout facts and precepts but to teach things (such as the power of remaining silent) that would prepare his listeners to learn the truth in other matters as well.
Porphyry described the splendid physical impression Pythagoras made: ‘His presence was that of a free man, tall, graceful in speech and in gesture.’ He was ‘endowed with all the advantages of nature and prosperously guided by fortune.’[4]
Iamblichus numbered the followers who soon gathered around Pythagoras at six hundred. Members of the brotherhood were advised to regard nothing as ‘exclusively their own’, wrote Diogenes Laertius. Friendship implied equality. They were to own all possessions in common and bring their goods to a common storehouse. Apparently, to judge from an incident later, in Syracuse, a good many Pythagoreans complied with this advice. Because of this ‘common sharing’, Pythagoras’s followers became known as Cenobites, from the Greek for ‘common life’.
However, not all Pythagoreans had equal status within the community. The six hundred were Pythagoras’ ‘students that philosophised’, wrote Iamblichus, Porphry, and their source, Nicomachus. There was a much bigger group, called the Hearers, about two thousand men who along with their wives and children would gather in an auditorium ‘so great as to resemble a city’ and built for the purpose of coming to learn laws and precepts from Pythagoras. It hardly seems a practical possibility that these people, presumably including many of Croton’s most prosperous, influential citizens, all ‘stopped engaging in any occupation’. However, according to the three biographers they did all live together for a while in peace, they held one another in high esteem, and they shared at least a portion of their possessions. Many, it seems, revered Pythagoras so greatly that they ranked him with the gods as a genial, beneficent divinity, but Iamblichus observed that, contra Nicomachus’ account, they perhaps did not all think of Pythagoras quite as a god. In his treatise On the Pythagoric Philosophy, Aristotle wrote that the Pythagoreans made a distinction among ‘rational animals’: There were gods, and men, and beings in between like Pythagoras.
When Pythagoras first arrived, Croton was at a low ebb of military prestige and clout. The communities of Magna Graecia were in a chronic state of conflict, internal and external, each attempting with varying success to dominate and enslave the next. The latest dismal chapter in this story had been Croton’s embarrassing defeat by the army of the city of Locri at the Sagras river, a few miles to her south. Iamblichus called Croton ‘the noblest city in Italy’, but in 530 B.C. she was licking her wounds from that disaster, while Sybaris was still a jewel in the crown of Greek colonial cities.
Croton nevertheless controlled considerable territory. Her normally acknowledged chora extended at least as far as what are now the river Neto to the north, in the direction of Sybaris, and the river Tacino to the south. The coastal lands between those two river mouths (with the city centred between) were hers, and away from the coast Croton’s territory extended into the mountains, where the tributaries of the two rivers originate among precipitous slopes and deep, narrow valleys[5] reminiscent of the early colonists’ homeland in Achaea. In the two centuries since Myskellos had brought those settlers, the coastal forests had begun to disappear, and the farmlands most vital to the life of Croton’s people were large clayey plains to the south of the city, watered by numerous springs and two more rivers and divided into farmsteads that cultivated wheat and cereals. Other cleared areas to the north were suitable for livestock.
Inevitably a community expected a man like Pythagoras to assume a public role, and he and his associates soon did, either by advising the oligarchical leaders or as part of the oligarchy. They became influential, probably extremely so, not only in the city and its environs but in other communities of the region. Porphyry reported that Pythagoras was so extraordinarily persuasive that Simicus, the tyrant of Centoripa, ‘heard Pythagoras’s discourse, abdicated his rule, and divided his property between his sister and the citizens’. Local lore still today agrees with the early historians that Pythagoras inspired a love of liberty in the cities of Magna Graecia and restored their individual independence, and that he and his followers were so successful in rooting out partisanship, discord, and sedition, and in establishing just laws, that the cities flourished in peace for several generations and became models for others before again falling into disputes and warfare. ‘Love of liberty’ may be a later ideal attributed with hindsight to the Pythagoreans. Political thinking during Pythagoras’ period in the Greek world saw good government not in terms of how much liberty was allowed but in terms of order and the well-being of the community.5 Diogenes Laertius had information that Pythagoras gave the Crotonians a constitution, and that he and his followers were an ‘aristocracy’ in the highest, literal sense of the word: ‘rule by the best’.
In 510 B.C., twenty years after Pythagoras’ a
rrival in Croton, Milo, of Olympic wrestling and ox-toting fame and by then a follower of Pythagoras, led Croton’s army against her opulent neighbour Sybaris. Like a latter-day Thales, Milo reputedly exercised his own brand of military hydraulics, diverting the river Crathis to flood the enemy city, and the army of Pythagorean Croton razed Sybaris to the ground. Modern Sibari occupies a different site from Greek Sybaris. Because the more ancient Sybaris perished forever with the defeat by Croton, the archaeological site there, buried beneath a Roman town and part of the Appian Way, has yielded a treasure trove of artefacts. Among them are covered pots from the seventh century B.C. the size of modern sugar bowls, whose lids are decorated with what later would be called Pythagorean triangles. It was a super-wealthy, cultured – indeed, ‘sybaritic’, – city that Milo destroyed, but though archaeologists have done extensive work, the only trace visible to modern visitors is a water-filled hole beneath excavations of the Roman town.
With Sybaris gone, Croton’s influence and power in the region reached a zenith, and historians credit Pythagoras and the teaching and training he initiated with bringing about this rise in Croton’s fortunes. If Diogenes Laertius, Porphyry, and Iamblichus are to be believed – and modern scholarship does not say them nay – he was an ancient example, and arguably the most successful one in history, of Plato’s ‘philosopher king’.
Or was it all a sham? There is a darker version of the tradition that has Pythagoras and his followers ruling in an autocratic, repressive way. In this retelling, the war with Sybaris began when Croton, at Pythagoras’ insistence, gave sanctuary to five hundred citizens of Sybaris who had been stripped of their property and banished. A social reform in Sybaris had justifiably confiscated the excessive wealth of these five hundred and distributed it to the poor, and Pythagoras’ sympathy for the formerly rich exiles revealed him in an unfavourable light as a defender of an autocratic and repressive status quo. This story does not actually conflict with the reputed egalitarianism of the Pythagoreans, for there is no evidence that their egalitarianism applied to society in general outside the Pythagorean brotherhood. No one knows what reasons Pythagoras might have had for wishing to restore the status quo in Sybaris, or whether his reforms in Croton were motivated by personal demagoguery, a desire to strengthen the aristocratic class structure, or a wish to transform the communities to conform to higher moral standards. All the early biographers – and fervent revolutionaries of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe – were sure it was the last.
Independent evidence speaks to Pythagoras’s impact on the economics of Croton.6 Numismatists credit him and his first followers with the introduction of a coinage with an incuse (hammered-in) design, the earliest coinage used in Croton and the area she ruled. These coins were both beautiful and difficult to create, and those familiar with the history of minting recognise the oddity and significance of their sudden appearance in this time and place, with apparently no gradual evolutionary process leading up to or explaining their emergence. The history of coinage does not normally work this way. Not that these were the first coins. There were earlier coins – for example, in Lydia, the region east of Miletus, before 700 B.C. But an innovation like the coins in Croton would seem to indicate a polymath – a ‘genius of the order of Leonardo da Vinci’, in the words of the historian C. T. Seltman.7 Given the area where the coins were used and the timing of their appearance, the inventor by default must have been Pythagoras, son of a prominent merchant with experience in a world-wide market, familiar (if his father was a gem engraver) with beautiful small design, and skilled with numbers. Aristoxenus, who had friends among the Pythagoreans of the fourth century B.C., wrote that Pythagoras introduced certain types of weights and measures but ‘diverted’ the study of numbers from mere mercantile practice, implying that Pythagoras also understood the use of numbers in connection with such practice. It is difficult to believe that he had nothing to do with the invention and introduction of the remarkable Crotonian coinage.
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.
[1]Iamblichus linked the date with the Olympic victory of Eryxidas of Chalcis, his own home city. Diogenes Laertius agreed that it had to have been between 532 and 528 B.C.
[2]Milo is also known as Milon. His name has come to symbolise extraordinary strength. He was the most famous wrestler in the ancient world.
[3]In the twenty-first century, 2,600 years later, the people of former Magna Graecia still do not totally identify with the modern, centralised Italy. Old attitudes and identities die hard.
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