The Music of Pythagoras

by Kitty Ferguson

  A century after Julia Domna (eight centuries after Pythagoras), the story of Pythagoras’ divine patrimony came into the hands of the neo-Platonist philosopher and historian Iamblichus of Chalcis, who was writing a book titled Pythagorean Life.1 Living in a superstitious age, he was not a particularly skeptical biographer when it came to the miraculous. He weighed carefully not whether he should believe “marvelous” tales, but which to believe, and he balked at the report that Pythagoras was descended from a god. It was “by no means to be admitted.” Iamblichus did not, however, merely ignore myths that he could not accept as truth, nor should a historian have done so when sorting out the sixth century B.C.—this era that Jacob Bronowski called the “hinge of legend and history.” Iamblichus liked to speculate about why a myth had arisen. Here is his version of Pythagoras’ birth story, sanitized of what he saw as unduly supernatural details:

  In the first third of the sixth century B.C., a merchant seaman named Mnesarchus embarked on a voyage, unaware that his wife was in the early stages of pregnancy. As most important merchants of his time who had the opportunity would have done, he included Delphi on his itinerary and enquired of the oracle—the Pythian Apollo—whether the remainder of his venture would be a success. The oracle replied that the next portion of the journey, to Syria, was going to be particularly productive. Then the oracle changed the subject: Mnesarchus’ wife was already pregnant with a son who would be surpassingly beautiful and wise, and of “the greatest benefit to the human race in everything pertaining to human achievements.” This was an astounding pronouncement, but Iamblichus insisted it was no indication that the son was not Mnesarchus’ child. It was to honor the oracle, not to imply the patrimony of Apollo, that Mnesarchus changed his wife’s name from Parthenis to Pythais and decided to name the boy Pythagoras. The voyage continued, and Pythais gave birth at Sidon in Phoenicia. Then the family returned to their home on the island of Samos. As the oracle had predicted, the mercantile venture had been a success and added substantially to their wealth. Mnesarchus erected a temple to the Pythian Apollo. No identifiable trace of it has survived, but Samos is sprinkled with the ruins of temples and shrines from that period that cannot now be attributed either to a particular god or donor.

  The two other authors who lived during the time of the Roman Empire and wrote “lives” of Pythagoras in the third and early fourth centuries A.D.—Diogenes Laertius and Porphyry—were in agreement with Iamblichus that there was ample evidence Pythagoras’ mother Pythais was descended from the earliest colonists on Samos.2* However, there is no other part of Pythagoras’ life story, until the events surrounding his death, about which the discussion among them became so animated and contradictory as it did regarding his father Mnesarchus’ origins. Iamblichus’ research indicated that both parents traced their ancestry to the first colonists on Samos. Porphyry was in possession of a conflicting report from a third century B.C. historian named Neanthes—a stickler for juxtaposing conflicting pieces of information—that Mnesarchus was not Samian by birth. Neanthes had had it from one source that Mnesarchus was born in Tyre (in Syria) and from another that he was an Etruscan (Tyrrhenian) from Lemnos. The similarity of the names “Tyre” and “Tyrrhenian” had perhaps caused the confusion. Porphyry referred to an additional source, a book with an enticing title, On the Incredible Things Beyond Thule, that also mentioned Mnesarchus’ Etruscan and Lemnos origins. Diogenes Laertius, the earliest of the three biographers, pointed out that the responsible ancient historian Aristoxenus of Tarentum—with excellent contacts, such as Dionysius the Younger of Syracuse and Pythagoreans in the fourth century b.c.—also had said Mnesarchus was a Tyrrhenian. All three biographers agreed that if Mnesarchus was not Samian by birth, he was naturalized on Samos. Diogenes Laertius also threw in that he had learned from one Hermippus, a native of Samos in the third century B.C., that Mnesarchus was a gem engraver.

  The island of Samos, Pythagoras’ childhood home, is the most precipitous and thickly forested of the Greek islands. Jacob Bronowski called it a “magical island. Other Greek islands will do as a setting for The Tempest, but for me this is Prospero’s island, the shore where the scholar turned magician.”3 The boy Pythagoras would have been familiar with forest-clad mountain slopes, deep wooded gorges, and misty outlines of half-barren coastlines on a cobalt sea. For a family of the landholding class, life in the countryside, in this climate where flowers bloom most of the year and grape vines and olive groves proliferate, was pleasant, probably luxurious, even more so with goods Mnesarchus brought home from trips abroad. In poetry of which only fragments survive, Asius described the Samian aristocracy as wearing “snow-white tunics,” “golden brooches,” “cunningly worked bracelets,” and wrote of their “tresses” that “waved in the wind in golden bands.”4

  In the port city and the precincts of Samos’ temple of the goddess Hera were goods, treasures, and curiosities to carry a young man’s imagination to the borders of the world. The temple had acquired a collection of valuable ornaments from Iran, Mesopotamia, Libya, Spain, and even farther away. Archaeologists have found no other Greek site so rich in foreign material, no ancient site anywhere with so wide a geographical spectrum of offerings. Not only Hera acquired treasures. Imported household and luxury items brought foreign textures, smells, and colors into Samian homes and no doubt fed the dreams and adventurous spirits of young men like Pythagoras and his brothers. Samos was in close touch with the much more ancient and mysterious culture of Mesopotamia.

  What is known of Samos’ history is a combination of folk memory, oral history, and archaeology. By legend, the first settlers were led by Ankaios, a hero son of Zeus who had sailed with Hercules and Orpheus on the voyage of the Argonauts in pursuit of the Golden Fleece. At the behest of the Pythian oracle at Delphi, Ankaios had decided to establish a colony and brought families from Arcadia, Thessaly, Athens, Epidaurus, and Chalcis. The oracle dictated the name of the future great city of the island, Samos. “Sama” implied great heights, and Samos has high mountains. Ancient stories traced Pythagoras’ family’s lineage to Ankaios himself.

  Today, more than thirty centuries after Samos was pioneer territory, archaeologists are able to put dates to the stories. They agree that the ancient history of Samos was largely consistent with legend. Ionians from Epidauria arrived in the late second millennium B.C., and the Pythian oracle at Delphi was busy in operation then, though Apollo was not yet associated with it. The colonists who came, perhaps led by Ankaios, were part of large migrations from mainland Greece to the islands of the eastern Aegean and the shores of Asia Minor.

  Archaeologists have also discovered that these Ionian settlers were not the first to set foot on Samos, which accords with another legend—that many of the Mycenaeans who besieged Troy and sent the great wooden horse into the doomed city settled on the Turkish coast and nearby islands. Excavations show that there were people living on Samos more than a thousand years before the Ionian settlers, and some were probably Mycenaean. Any who arrived after the Trojan War were actually relative latecomers.

  Perhaps it helped smooth relations between that earlier population and the new Ionian colonists that the newcomers immediately recognized the prehistoric fertility “Mother Goddess” of Samos as the goddess they already knew and worshipped as Hera. So strong was the conviction that this was Hera, that a site sacred to the Mother Goddess, on the banks of the Samian river Imbrasos, was identified as Hera’s birthplace. A wicker bush there was believed to have sheltered her birth. By the time Pythagoras was born, what for millennia had been a plain stone altar and a simple structure protecting a wooden effigy and a wicker bush had become one of the most magnificent temple complexes in the world. The great temple of Artemis at Ephesus, nearby across the Strait of Samos, did not quite succeed in copying its splendor.

  Before the second millennium B.C. ended, another wave of settlers, this one led by a man named Prokles, from Pityous, disembarked on the beaches of Samos and seized control of the island. Prokles’ p
eople ruled for about four hundred years, until the eighth century B.C. Then the descendants of the earlier settlers turned the tables. These wealthy landowners called themselves Geomoroi, or “those who shared out the land.” The period of their dominance was the “geometric” period, a term that applied not only on Samos but to a phase of history in the surrounding Greek areas as well.5 The word “geometry” came from the way the Geomoroi “geometrically” divided up their land. Pythagoras’ ancestors, at least on his mother’s side, were among them.

  The centuries of Geomoroi rule were an era of increasing prosperity for Samos, and also the time when the richest cultural interchange occurred between her and the peoples of Egypt and the Near East. Her location near the west coast of present-day Turkey placed Samos at the crossroads of the great sea-trading routes that linked the Black Sea with Egypt, and Italy and mainland Greece with the Orient. The mainland coast across the narrow Strait of Samos was the western terminus of overland trading routes that brought caravans bearing exotic goods from the East. Samos became a hub for ships that traveled all over the known world. Her sailors took larger, innovative new vessels, designed and constructed by Samian shipbuilders, beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, perhaps even to southern England. The semi-mythical Kolaios reputedly made that voyage and donated a tithe of his profits to Hera’s temple. Samos controlled fertile areas across the strait on the mainland, ensuring an ample grain supply. By the sixth century B.C., when Pythagoras was born, she was founding colonies in Minoa, Thrace, and Cilicia. Samian expatriates were living in Egypt, bolstering trade relations with the pharaohs.

  Though the island’s prosperity continued to soar, the era of Geomoroi rule had ended by the time Pythagoras was born. In the late seventh century B.C., the aristocratic Geomoroi had succumbed to a tyrannical regime. The takeover reputedly occurred while most citizens were outside the city at the temple, enjoying a festival of the goddess.

  Pythagoras was born in about 570 B.C., or perhaps a little earlier. Kolaios would have returned at about that time from his heroic voyage. Though the Geomoroi had lost control of the island, Samos’ climb toward her economic and cultural zenith continued. This was her golden age. For Pythagoras’ mother’s Geomoroi family, the ascent of the tyranny must have been a serious blow in terms of power and perhaps wealth. However, Mnesarchus was a merchant whose commercial situation would have improved rather than suffered in the upheaval. Theirs was surely a fortuitous marriage, with Parthenis bringing her family’s ancient aristocratic heritage and lands, and Mnesarchus bringing a newer fortune earned in the thriving Samian mercantile empire.

  Mnenarchus’ profession makes it likely that Pythagoras did not spend his entire childhood and youth on Samos. According to the historian Neanthes (one of the most reliable sources used by the three biographers), he traveled to Tyre and Italy and elsewhere with his father. Also according to Neanthes, and others as well, he had two older brothers, Eunostus and Tyrrhenus, and perhaps a foster brother to share these adventures. If the story is correct that Pythagoras’ father was not only a merchant but also a gem engraver, then his sons would have been trained in that craft. Iamblichus was sure that Pythagoras had the best possible schooling and studied with learned men on Samos and even in Syria, especially with “those who were experts in divinity.” It is plausible that the family continued to have trading or personal connections with the area around Sidon, in Syria, where Iamblichus’ biography said Pythagoras was born.

  Describing Pythagoras as a youth, Iamblichus strayed into the over-blown adulation that he would adopt in later chapters of his book, but a more realistic picture emerges of a young man gifted with a natural grace and manner of speech and behavior that made a good impression even on people much older than himself. Iamblichus wrote that he was serene, thoughtful, and without eccentricity. Statues in Samos’ museums—kouroi, dating from that period—suggest that this was the ideal: a human youth, but hinting at something more centered, mysterious, and holy.

  On Samos, Pythagoras was at the epicenter of the commercial world, but not at the epicenter of Greek science and natural philosophy. He was, however, only a narrow strait away from Miletus, where Thales, called “the first to introduce the study of nature to the Greeks,” had his headquarters. About fifteen years before Pythagoras’ birth, Thales observed and recorded an eclipse. That event has been taken to mark, or at least to symbolize, the beginning of Greek science and natural philosophy, and, because Thales’ observation was an eclipse, it is possible to identify the date: May 28, 585 B.C.

  Little is known about Thales except that he studied nature and astronomy and, unsatisfied with mythological explanations, pondered questions about how the world began and what was there before anything else. Plato, in his dialogue Theaetetus, used Thales as an example of a man too preoccupied with his studies:

  Thales, when he was star-gazing and looking upward, fell into a well and was rallied (so it is said) by a clever and pretty maid-servant from Thrace, because he was eager to know what went on in the heaven but did not notice what was in front of him, nay, at his very feet.6

  Thales did have a practical side. He was famous for coming up with simple, ingenious solutions to problems that stumped others. News probably reached Samos, if the story was true (and even if it was not), that when the army of King Croesus, of fabled wealth, was brought to a standstill for lack of a bridge over the river Halys, Thales had a channel dug upstream of their position that diverted the river to the other side of the army, so that without having moved a step they found they had crossed it.7

  It might be said that Thales had a special affinity for water, be it in the river or the well, for he thought that water itself was the first principle from which all other things had sprung, and that the world itself floats on water “like a log or something else of that sort,” as Aristotle later commented a bit dismissively. Pythagoras’ biographer Diogenes Laertius wrote that Thales lived to be so old that he “could no longer see the stars from the earth.” He was known as one of the “Seven Sages” of early Greek history, each of whom was connected with one great saying; Thales’ was “Water is best.” Would that all philosophers had been so concise.

  Growing up on Samos, Pythagoras surely knew about Thales. Iamblichus thought that he made trips across the strait even in his early youth to sit at the feet of the elderly sage. Pythagoras acquired a nickname: “the long-haired Samian.” Apollonius the wonder-worker provided Pythagoras’ biographers with the information that Pythagoras also studied with the astronomer Anaximander, another scholar at Miletus. As was true of Thales, one date is fairly firmly associated with Anaximander: he was sixty-four years old when he died in 546. He would have been in his mid-twenties when Thales recorded the eclipse, and middle-aged to elderly by the time Pythagoras could have been his pupil.

  Anaximander himself may have been a pupil of Thales, but their ideas were not alike. Anaximander used mathematics and geometry in attempts to chart the heavens and the Earth, and he drew one of the earliest maps of the world. To a young man eager to acquire cutting-edge knowledge, it would have been intriguing to learn that Anaximander rejected ideas that the Earth floated on anything or hung from anything or was supported from elsewhere in the heavens. The Earth, said Anaximander, remains motionless and in place because the universe is symmetrical and the Earth has no reason to move in one direction and not another. He introduced the notion of the “limitless” or “unlimited” as fundamental to all things. This idea surfaced again prominently when Pythagorean doctrine was written down by Philolaus in the next century.

  For Anaximander, when the “unlimited” was “separated,” the result was contrasts, such as male-female, even-odd, hot-cold. Contrasts were central to his creation scheme. Separation into opposites later became a major element in Pythagorean thinking. Most significantly, Anaximander believed that there was unity underlying all the contrasts, diversity, and multiplicity in the universe—an idea that would emerge much more strongly with the Pythagoreans. The parallels
between Anaximander and the Pythagoreans might seem to indicate that Pythagoras must have studied with Anaximander, but Anaximander’s ideas could have reached Pythagoras or Philolaus by other routes. The young Pythagoras may also have known Anaximander’s pupil Anaximenes.

  Iamblichus credited Thales with convincing Pythagoras to travel to Egypt. This kindly, modest teacher, wrote Iamblichus, apologized for his extreme old age and the “imbecility of his body” and urged his talented pupil to move on, claiming that his own wisdom was in part derived from the Egyptians and that Pythagoras was even better equipped than he had been to benefit from their teaching. Thales had either visited Egypt or knew it from the accounts of others, for he wrote a description of the Nile floods (water, again) and speculated that they were caused by winds blowing from the north in the summer, which prevented the waters of the river from flowing into the Mediterranean.8 Porphyry thought that what Thales and Pythagoras had most to learn from the Egyptians was geometry: “The ancient Egyptians excelled in geometry, the Phoenicians in numbers and proportions, and the Chaldeans in astronomical theorems, divine rites, and worship of the gods.” “It is said,” Porphyry hedged, that Pythagoras learned from all of them.9

  Recounting the tales and traditions about Pythagoras’ associations with Thales, Anaximander, and possibly Anaximenes on the mainland coast near Samos, and the educational odyssey he was about to undertake, Porphyry and Iamblichus resorted often to those words “it is said,” without revealing who said it. The stories were part of a long-standing semi-historical tradition. Unfortunately, in the centuries preceding Iamblichus, Porphyry, and Diogenes Laertius, this tradition had been embellished to the point of pollution by a spate of “pseudo-Pythagorean” literature. The three historians tried to circumvent this problem by using earlier sources, but they could not, or at least did not, completely disregard some information that was probably spurious.