By the first century B.C., it had become widely accepted that Pythagoras himself had left no writing, though Diogenes Laertius would later claim otherwise. Works like the Notebooks and a three-part book supposedly by Pythagoras (actually from the late third century B.C.) on education, politics, and physics were no longer generally credited, but that did not end the forgeries. It became fashionable to ‘discover’ writings by Pythagoreans like Lysis, the fictional Timaeus, Archytas, and the women Theano and ‘Phyntis, Daughter of Callicrates’. Some offered advice and maxims for daily living. Others claimed to be authentic Pythagorean scientific and philosophical treatises. Many give themselves away today by showing heavy influence from Plato and his pupils, from Aristotle, and from the Stoics, or because their authors made inept attempts to imitate the Doric dialect spoken by the Greeks in Magna Graecia in Pythagoras’ time.27 Even when it was not in ‘Doric’, the writing often had a flowery, pseudo-poetic flavour. (Think of modern attempts to sound like ‘merrye olde England’ and the only slightly more sophisticated efforts of Victorian authors to reproduce medieval speech.) Other Pythagorean forgeries betray themselves simply by their banality; had these been the works of Pythagoras and his followers, the Pythagoreans would hardly have been worth remembering.[9]
According to one count, at the height of the era of Pythagorean forgeries, there were eighty works ‘by Pythagoras’ in circulation and two hundred purporting to be by his early followers.28 How could so many readers have been fooled? Not all were. Callimachus, in the mid-third century B.C., declared that a poem Pythagoras was supposed to have written was not authentic. He worked at the Library of Alexandria, and if anyone could spot a forgery, he could. Most readers cannot, however, be seriously blamed for failing to recognise that the pseudo-Pythagorean books were not genuine. The words from the fragment of Posidonius, to the effect that a certain view ‘was originally that of Pythagoras but Plato developed it and made it more perfect’, reflected the assumption that Pythagorean and Platonic doctrines were virtually one and the same – that Plato’s philosophy derived from Pythagoras. For readers who believed that, and especially for those who were not aware of how different the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle were from each other, it was an easy step to believe that Aristotle also got his ideas from Pythagoras. So when Platonic and Aristotelian ideas showed up in works claiming to come from before the lifetimes of these two philosophers, why wonder? Was it not from these very documents that Plato and Aristotle had learned?
Pseudo-Pythagorean literature continued to appear for several centuries and was immensely popular. You could pick up a knowledge of ‘Pythagorean doctrine’, unaware or ignoring that it combined some genuinely old material with simplified or summarised Plato and Aristotle, mixed with a good dose of Stoicism, and (in the later books) given a neo-Platonic overcast. You could memorise the maxims of the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, or require your children to do so. As was true of The Prophet by Khalil Gibran in the twentieth century, you might not notice, or might not care, that what came in the format of authentic ancient wisdom was mostly a contemporary poetic invention and interpretation. The maxims were wise and some of them beautiful. You could find out what ‘Pythagoras’ had recommended regarding the medicinal and magical powers of plants. If it caused you to feel better, this, rather than any scholarly debate, proved the efficacy and authenticity of the book. You could learn what ‘Archytas’ had contributed to knowledge about architecture, agriculture, flutes, ethics, mechanics, wisdom, prosperity, adversity, and ‘intermediary comfort’ – never mind that he had actually had little or nothing to say about some of these subjects. Roman and Hellenistic readers could devour these works, share them, discuss them, make gifts of them, have them read beautifully at weddings and funerals, find themselves uplifted and improved by their high-minded ideas and sometimes enlightened by information that was helpful or challenging no matter where it came from. Romans could feel that they knew something about – and had derived benefit from – their own, magnificent, nearly home-grown sage.
The pseudo-Pythagorean texts outlasted the Roman Empire. On the World and the Soul, supposedly by ‘Timaeus of Locri’, was still being recopied in the Middle Ages by scholars who believed this was the early Pythagorean work from which Plato got his cosmology. Copernicus translated Lysis’ Letter to Hipparchus. One begins to realise the enormous research difficulties, distinguishing Pythagorean fact from fiction, that would confront Diogenes Laertius, Porphyry, and Iamblichus.
[1]Cicero’s life, and his political life, began when Rome was a republic and ended after the assassination of Julius Caesar and the beginning of the reign of Octavian (Caesar Augustus). He was a strong supporter and defender of the republic and strove on its behalf during the civil wars.
[2]The Romans continued to use this formation effectively through the years of their republic and in the expansion of their Empire.
[3]Alcibiades’ reputation for lack of discipline and unscrupulousness was later used to support the charges brought against Socrates of corrupting the youth of Athens, which resulted in Socrates’ death sentence.
[4]Pliny lost his life when his insatiable curiosity about natural phenomena tempted him too close to the erupting Vesuvius.
[5]Cicero made several references to this celestial phenomenon that had appeared in the year 129 B.C. The scientific name is parhelion, in the vernacular a mock sun or sun dog. The appearance is of two extra suns, one on each side of the Sun. This happens when the Sun is shining through a thin mist of hexagonal ice crystals falling with their principal axes vertical. If the principal axes are arranged randomly in a plane perpendicular to the Sun’s rays, the appearance is of a halo around the Sun.
[6]Timaeus of Locri was the central character in Plato’s Timaeus, but there was no real person by that name. Writings attributed to him cannot be considered examples of Pythagorean doctrine. They are an interpretation of Plato’s Timaeus, from the first century B.C. or the first century A.D.
[7]Diogenes Laertius copied the excerpt not from the original but from an earlier author named Alexander Polyhistor who in turn – this was in the first half of the first century B.C. – copied it from a still older book.
[8]In view of all the other anachronisms in the Notebooks, scholars have ruled out the possibility that they were, after all, authentically early and primitively foreshadowed Aristotle’s cosmos.
[9]One clue has turned out to be a red herring: the suggestion that inclusion of superstition and ‘marvellous’ events in a work represented more ‘primitive’ thinking and dated the material earlier. Tales about a talking river or being in two places at the same time indicated that what you were reading was authentically early, so it was claimed. However, the late fourth century and the third, second, and first centuries B.C. and the early A.D. centuries were as accepting of magic, marvels, and portents as the fifth and sixth centuries B.C. had been – arguably more so. Such elements were expected in the biography of an important leader. Aristotle wrote during this period, when people may have been more ready to believe in a golden thigh than their forebears would have been at the time of Pythagoras. Clement of Alexandria, an eminent Christian scholar of the second and early third centuries A.D., described a ‘standard educational curriculum . . . astrology, mathematics, magic, and wizardry’ – a quadrivium that would seem appropriate for Harry Potter’s Hogwarts School. ‘The whole of Greece’, Clement lamented, ‘prides itself on these as supreme sciences’ (Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 2.1.2. 3–4. Quoted in translation in J. Robert. Wright, ed., Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Old Testament IX [Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press, p. 18]). For Diogenes Laertius, Porphyry, and Iamblichus, the fact that material included the miraculous did not invalidate the information or call the source into question. There was probably a mystical or magical element to the earliest Pythagoreanism, but late Greek, Alexandria
n, and Roman writers were eager to report and exaggerate it. It is difficult to see through the veil of a superstitious age and judge how sceptical an earlier era was, but it is clear that one cannot decide that information was more authentically ancient simply because it included more of the ‘marvellous’.
CHAPTER 12
Through Neo-Pythagorean and Ptolemaic Eyes
First and Second Centuries A.D.
Fascination with Pythagoras among Roman and Alexandrian philosophers and scholars of the first century B.C. led to a movement in the first and second centuries A.D. called middle-Platonic or neo-Pythagorean. Books and fragments from men powerfully drawn to what they believed were Pythagorean philosophical and mathematical ideas survive from this period. Some of these writers called themselves Pythagoreans. All regarded Pythagoras as a wellspring, in some cases as the unique wellspring, of a precious intellectual and philosophical heritage that had reached them through Plato.1 The association of Pythagoras with magic and the occult also continued. Nigidius Figulus’ first-century-B.C. version of Pythagoreanism contributed to a growing popular image of Pythagoras – and, oddly, Archytas – as magicians. Nigidius’ desire to bring back Pythagoreanism as a way of life and an ongoing approach to the world would attract others in the centuries to follow.
The most important neo-Pythagorean philosophers were, to a man, not from Rome but from other parts of the Empire – Alexandria, predictably, but also from what is now Turkey, from Syria, and even from the Atlantic coast of Spain. The cultlike groups flourished in Rome itself. Information about one of these came through Lucius Annaeus Seneca, an eminent Roman statesman and orator of the first century A.D. Seneca was a pupil of Sotion, who belonged to a philosophical movement known as the Sextians. The founders, Quintus Sextius and his son, were men of strong moral fibre whose ideal was moral perfection. Theirs was a staunch, Roman approach in which the important thing about a philosophy was how it affected a man’s everyday behaviour and practical life. Sextians were hard to distinguish from Stoics, but two of their practices were definitely considered to be ‘Pythagorean’: they did not eat the flesh of animals and they performed a self-evaluation at the end of each day, to take stock of personal moral improvement or decline. While no trace of that practice can be found in early Pythagorean communities, it had begun to be associated with ‘Pythagoreans’ in the first century B.C., and Cicero called it a ‘Pythagorean custom’. Seneca described it, as he had learned it from Sotion: A Sextian asked himself, ‘What bad habit have I cured today?’ ‘What temptation have I resisted?’ ‘In what ways am I a better man?’ Similar questions had appeared in the pseudo-Pythagorean booklet called the Pythagorean Golden Verses:
Never let slumber approach thy wearied eyelids
Ere thrice you review what this day you did:
Wherein have I sinned? What did I? What duty is neglected?
All, from the first to the last, review; and if you have erred, grieve in your spirit, rejoicing for all that was good.2
Sotion had also urged Seneca to adhere to a vegetarian diet, for ‘souls and animals return in regular cycles. Great men have believed this is so. If these things are true, you avoid guilt by abstaining from meat; if false, you gain in self-control.’3 Seneca’s father, who abhorred philosophy, frowned on all this, but Seneca ignored him and avoided meat for more than a year, until under the reign of Tiberius it became dangerous to practise what might be interpreted as a foreign cult.
Another cultlike movement in the mid to late first century A.D. was led by the colourful, eccentric Apollonius of Tyana. Claiming to be the reincarnated Pythagoras, he travelled the Mediterranean world as an itinerant pagan missionary and miracle worker during the reigns of Nero and Vespasian. In a Cilician temple, not far from his birthplace in the Cappadocian region of what is now Turkey, Apollonius established his own ‘Academy’ and ‘Lyceum’, ‘until every type of philosophy echoed in it.’4 He wrote a biography of Pythagoras, which some have quipped must have been an autobiography, but no one could rival his knowledge of Pythagorean legends and lore from earlier centuries.
More than a hundred years after Apollonius died in 97 A.D., the Roman empress Julia Domna discovered him, probably through a book that she found in the imperial library. This powerful second wife of the emperor Septimus Severus surrounded herself with philosophers and intellectuals; at her request, one of them, Philostratus, agreed to write Apollonius’ biography. Julia Domna may have been hoping to undermine the influence of Christianity in the Empire by setting up Apollonius as a competitor to Jesus. Others would put his story to that use.
In Philostratus’ book Life of Apollonius of Tyana, he had Apollonius retracing Pythagoras’ journeys in search of wisdom.5 In India – not Egypt or Mesopotamia – Apollonius discovers the source of Pythagorean doctrine, including reincarnation with memory of past lives. In other chapters, he is in touch with sacred wisdom closer to home, wrapping himself in his philosopher’s cloak and entering a cave shrine in central Greece, announcing ‘I wish to descend on behalf of philosophy’, and emerging after seven days, not there, but at Aulis, clutching a book. He has asked the oracle what is the most complete and pure philosophy and has written down the answer. That book, wrote Philostratus, ‘contained the views of Pythagoras, since the oracle was in agreement with this type of wisdom.’ From the time of the emperor Hadrian, the book that Apollonius was supposed to have brought out of the cave was in the imperial library. Many pilgrims and tourists came to look at it in the early third century, around the time of Julia Domna.
According to Philostratus’ biography, Apollonius preached abstinence from meat, wine, and sex as necessary for one wishing to draw closer to the spiritual world and see the future. His ‘Pythagorean’ doctrine included supernatural wisdom, universal tolerance, and a way of life dedicated to purification that would eventually release the soul from the prison of the physical body, but no suggestion of witchcraft or magic – extraordinary in an age when hardly anyone discounted them. Philostratus emphasised instead that Apollonius’ divine nature allowed him to perform supernatural feats, including escaping persecution by two Roman emperors and reviving a dead girl. Many devotees believed what they read and erected shrines to Apollonius. The emperor Caracalla built a temple to him in Tyana, Apollonius’ birthplace. Though he was still venerated as late as Byzantine times, Apollonius did not, eventually, have the staying power of his Christian rival.
Popular interest in Pythagoras was not confined to the Sextians and Apollonius. In the second century A.D., the oracles at Delphi, and at Didyma and Claros on the (now) Turkish coast not far from Samos, adopted a distinctly Pythagorean turn of phrase. The holy man Alexander of Abonuteichos mixed quasi-medical beliefs with his Pythagoreanism.
On a more elevated intellectual level, though ‘neo-Pythagoreanism’ was never a unified philosophy, two themes bound together most of the thinkers grouped under that banner: the old assumption that Plato’s philosophy was derived from Pythagoras, and a growing belief that there was one supreme transcendent god. That trend had begun in the second half of the first century B.C., when Eudorus of Alexandria – considered the first important neo-Pythagorean – broke new ground with his own Pythagorean interpretation of Plato, contending that in Pythagorean doctrine the One, the ‘supreme god’, transcended the opposites limited-unlimited and one-plurality. In his table of opposites, One was centred at the very top, not belonging to either column. That alteration would have tremendous importance for philosophy and religion. With Eudorus, ‘Pythagoras’ began to be a code word for a way of thinking in which the One transcended all, something beginning to look like monotheism. Eudorus’ interpretation of the Pythagoreans had them believing the invisible supreme god and source of harmony was within reach of human minds. The highest human aspiration was ‘becoming like god, but Plato had said it more clearly by adding “as far as possible”.’6 Eudorus was laying the groundwork for many who would follow him.
The Grecian-Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria was younger than Eudorus by about two generations. The Alexandrian Jewish community to which his family belonged was as old as the city, a large, thriving population that had worked hard for more than three centuries to stay on good terms with their Egyptian and Greek neighbours.7 Under Roman rule, their situation was both helped and hindered by the fact that the Romans gave them special privileges. Roman-Jewish relations were, nevertheless, precarious. Philo served on an Alexandrian/Jewish delegation to Rome that floundered when the emperor Caligula, who thought himself a god, insisted his own statue be erected in the temple in Jerusalem.
Philo was a devout man who made pilgrimages to Jerusalem, where the great temple still stood, but his wealthy, influential parents had made sure he received a thoroughly Hellenistic-Greek education. He was both a devout Jew and a Platonist.
Like Eudorus, Philo interpreted Plato as having taught that one supreme god was primary to everything in the universe, and thought Plato got these transcendental leanings from Pythagoras. Philo quoted Philolaus: ‘One god, who is forever, is prince and ruler of all things, stable, unmoved, himself similar to himself, different from others.’8 The soul’s journey towards God was the ultimate task of life, and, for Philo, the Hebrew Scriptures exemplified that journey. He saw the lives of Moses and Abraham as the pilgrimage of the soul towards God.9 Adam was intellect; Eve, sensation; Cain and Abel, a soul’s being torn in opposite directions of evil and good. Philo’s Pythagorean interpretation of Genesis gave special attention to the ‘fourth day’, when God completed the creation of the heavens. The number 4 contained the musical ratios found in the structure of the heavens and represented the four stages in the creation of the planets, point–line–surface–solid. The musical ratios also contained the number 3, representing the three dimensions of created bodies – length, breadth, depth. Numbers were the ideas and the tools of God in creation; they also made it possible for humans to understand the heavens.
Pythagorus Page 21