The Music of Pythagoras

by Kitty Ferguson

  The tradition that Pythagoras studied with Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes and even visited Egypt and Mesopotamia is not farfetched. Samos’ position in the world geographically and economically, and what seems probable about Pythagoras’ own economic circumstances and family, make these stories credible. He had reason to feel comfortable in the wider world because of his father’s trading ventures and connections, was wealthy enough to travel and have the leisure to pursue an adventurous, eclectic self-education, and was probably insatiably curious. If Pythagoras did not make journeys like these, what could have prevented him?

  Iamblichus wrote that Thales did not stop at telling Pythagoras he should go to Egypt. He warned him to be sparing of his time and careful about what he ate. Pythagoras confined himself to “such nutriment as was slender and easy of digestion” so that his sleep could be short, his “soul vigilant and pure,” and his body in a state of “perfect and invariable health.” Perhaps he did follow his old teacher’s advice and succeed in maintaining this enviable conditioning, but according to Iamblichus, he did not immediately hasten to Egypt. He went by way of Sidon, probably his birthplace.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Entirely different from the

  institutions of the Greeks”

  Sixth Century B.C.

  YOUNG PYTHAGORAS’ JOURNEY, as Iamblichus recounted it, was the ancient equivalent of a high-risk modern junior year abroad. He bedded down in a temple on the Mediterranean coast, at the foot of Mount Carmel, a mountain associated with the prophet Elijah and his God as well as with local pagan deities. There is a much-disputed claim by the historian Josephus that Pythagoras was influenced by Jewish teaching. He could have encountered it here, although many of the Jewish population were in exile in Babylon. Iamblichus wrote that he “conversed with prophets” and was initiated into the mysteries of Byblos and Tyre, not for the sake of superstition, but “from an anxiety that nothing might escape his observation which deserved to be learnt in the arcane or mysteries of the gods.” For a man who himself lived in a superstitious age, Iamblichus was surprisingly eager to emphasize that Pythagoras was not influenced by the “superstition” of this area, though he made no such disclaimer about what Pythagoras might have picked up in Egypt or Mesopotamia. Iamblichus was writing at a time when many feared that Christianity, with roots in Jewish belief, would destroy Greek philosophy.

  After a while, Pythagoras continued his journey to Egypt, and Iamblichus went into greater narrative detail than usual to relate an adventurous, delightful story. Fortuitously, or so it seemed at first, an Egyptian ship landed on the Phoenician coast near the temple where Pythagoras was living. The sailors were pleased to welcome him aboard, thinking they could sell such a comely young man at a good price. During the voyage, they changed their minds. There was something different about this modest youth from what one normally expected of a human being. The sailors reminded one another how he had appeared, descending the sacred Mount Carmel, how he had said nothing except to ask, “Are you bound for Egypt?” and then had come aboard and sat silently and out of their way for two nights and three days without taking food or drink, or sleeping—at least when any of them were watching. The voyage was, furthermore, going exceptionally well, with fair weather and favorable winds. The sailors delivered Pythagoras safely to the Egyptian coast and helped him off the ship (he was weak from fasting and lack of sleep), then built an altar in front of him and heaped it with fruit. When they left, he ravenously consumed the fruit. One may take this story as evidence of his godlike nature, or as suggesting that he was a canny young traveler, giving careful attention to self-preservation.

  Iamblichus’ sources indicated that in Egypt Pythagoras frequented temples, sat at the feet of priests and prophets, sought out men celebrated for their wisdom, and visited “any place in which he thought something more excellent might be found,” “astronomizing and geometrizing.” Isocrates, an older contemporary of Plato in the early fourth century B.C., eagerly latched on to the information that Pythagoras spent time in Egypt. Isocrates was intent on showing that the Greeks owed their learning to the Egyptians and had added very little. In his disparaging words, Pythagoras “went to Egypt, and having become their pupil was the first to introduce philosophy in general to Greece, and concerned himself more conspicuously than anyone else, with matters to do with sacrifices and temple purifications, thinking that even if this would gain him no advantage from the gods it would at least bring him high repute among men. And that is what happened.” As in the tale of Pythagoras’ sagacious handling of the Egyptian sailors, here is a hint that for all his reputed purity, he was not naive but perhaps even rather opportunistic.

  Egypt at the time when Pythagoras could have been there was ruled by the pharaoh Amasis II (Ahmose II), later an acquaintance of Samos’ tyrant Polykrates. It was unusual but not unprecedented for a Greek to visit Egypt. In the seventh century B.C., the pharaoh Psamtek I had hired Greek mercenaries, and in Pythagoras’ day there were Greeks living in Naukratis in the Nile delta, for Amasis was eager to promote trade with the Greek cities and even made a donation toward a rebuilding project at Delphi. However, he restricted Greek merchants to the one city and did not allow them to move around the country as much as Pythagoras is supposed to have done.

  Porphyry reported a different version of Pythagoras’ Egyptian sojourn. His source was On Illustrious Virtuous Men, by Antiphon. By this account, Pythagoras set off with a letter of introduction from Polykrates to Amasis. This would place the journey too late, for Polykrates’ reign began in 535, shortly before Pythagoras moved to Croton. Nevertheless, Porphyry’s account is interesting: Pythagoras went first to the priests of Heliopolis, who sent him on to Memphis, saying the priests there were more ancient. These, in turn, on the same excuse, sent him to Diospolis (ancient Thebes), a journey of more than three hundred miles to the south. The priests of Diospolis had nowhere else to send him, but thought that if they made things difficult enough he would go away. They gave him “very hard precepts, entirely different from the institutions of the Greeks,” which he doggedly performed, winning their admiration to the extent that they taught him their secret wisdom and permitted him to sacrifice to their gods, something not normally allowed a foreigner. Pythagoras would later adopt the practice of secretiveness with respect to his own teachings, as was not common in the Greek world.

  If Pythagoras did go to Egypt, what could he have learned? In the temple complexes there were “Houses of Life” with many learned men copying manuscripts, large libraries, and sometimes schools. The ruling classes were literate, as we must suppose Pythagoras was, but he did not know the languages of Egypt. If the priests accepted him, as Porphyry believes they must have, then Pythagoras, though older than the schoolboys, would have had to start on an elementary level with a language, alphabet, and numbers that were foreign to him, before he could begin to understand priestly liturgy and wisdom. He would have studied the cursive hieratic script, perhaps copied out books of Egyptian literature, then advanced to hieroglyphs. He would have learned a decimal system with numbers the equivalent of 1, 10, 100, 1,000, and 10,000, but no symbol for zero. To multiply, an Egyptian added a number to itself the necessary number of times. To divide, he subtracted a number from itself until the remainder was too small to continue. Pi was unknown, but one could come close to calculating the area of a circle by measuring the diameter, subtracting 1/9, and squaring the result.

  Such mathematical knowledge was for practical use: for construction or—when it came to the circle—for measuring such things as the capacity of a granary—but this was a culture whose worldview seamlessly included what was tangible physical fact and what was mythological or metaphorical, drawing no boundaries between practical and esoteric knowledge, or between everyday reality and the holy. The Egyptians’ elaborate preparations for another world after death had a practical motive: to supply what one needed to get there and live there. Magic was a high category of knowledge, as were religious ritual, myth, and m
edicine. Pythagoras would have studied the Egyptian hierarchy of gods and goddesses and beliefs about the afterlife, but not a doctrine of reincarnation.1 He also would not have learned vegetarianism, for the upper classes ate beef and other meat fairly often.

  The Egyptians had long excelled in surveying. The near perfect squareness and north–south orientation of the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza is evidence of their astounding precision, and Pythagoras could not have missed seeing that pyramid if he traveled as Porphyry thought he did. It dated from about 2500 B.C., two thousand years before him. We cannot know with certainty that the Egyptians in the sixth century still had the technical genius of those distant predecessors, but surveying for land boundaries, city plans, and buildings was routine, and the older, magnificent structures that are still wonders of the world today were much fresher and much more impressive to someone who had not encountered human-made objects on this scale.

  From the temple roofs, Pythagoras might have assisted with observations of the cycles of the moon and the movements of the stars and learned how these were related to the Egyptian twelve-month calendar and 365-day year. Egyptians thought their country was the center of the cosmos and that there were definite connections between the stars and events on Earth. For example, the star Sirius (Sopdet), invisible for several months, reappeared in mid-July as a morning star, signaling the onset of the yearly inundation of the Nile and the beginning of the new year.

  The Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza with the Sphinx in the foreground

  Different temples had different specialties. If Pythagoras did not move on too quickly from Heliopolis (in Porphyry’s scenario) he might have learned a creation theology that explained the diversity of nature arising from a single source, the god Atum, meaning “the All.” Atum existed in a state of unrealized potential not far different from the “unlimited” in Anaximander’s teaching and later in Pythagorean thinking. At Memphis, where, as Porphyry told it, Pythagoras spent a little time before being sent on, he could have learned a more remarkable theology of divine creativity that provided an agent through which an idea in the mind of the creator became a physical reality. In many early cultures, a spoken or written word was understood to have creative power. In creation as viewed in Genesis, God spoke, and it was so. The theology of the priests at Memphis divided that creative “word” into two different roles. A link was required, a divine intermediary between an idea in the mind of the creator and the actual physical creation. Memphis theology had arrived at a concept that would later be expressed in the opening of the Christian Gospel of John, where the Logos—Jesus, the second member of a trinity—bridges the creative gap between God and man: “through him [not “by him”] all things were created, without him nothing was created that has been created.” Plato’s “demiurge” bridged the same gap. The god who performed that role in the theology of Memphis, Ptah, operated in similar manner on the human level, enabling an idea in a human mind (a craftsman or artist) to become a real-world product. This role or force was “effectiveness” or “magic.” Without it you had speech or an idea or something written on a page. With it you had creative power. Pythagoras and his followers would later assign that creative role to numbers, though, by some interpretations, Pythagoreans would understand numbers to be the idea in the mind of the creator, and the creation, and the link between the two.

  At Thebes, where Porphyry thought Pythagoras finally spent a long period and was accepted by the priests into their most secret mysteries, Egyptian theology had a monotheism close to that expressed in the Christian concept of the Trinity, but with more “members.” The god Amun (meaning “Hidden”) was the greatest among the gods—“unknowable” and transcendent. The others were different manifestations of him.

  Porphyry had Pythagoras returning to Samos from Thebes, but Iamblichus wrote an exciting addition to the story: Pythagoras was taken captive by “soldiers of Cambyses” and brought from Egypt to Babylon. If Iamblicus was right, Pythagoras arrived there during the reign of the Chaldean dynasty, which began in 625 B.C., in the century before Pythagoras’ birth, and lasted until 539, well into his lifetime. During this period, Babylon enjoyed the second golden age in its long history—an age scholars call neo-Babylonian. However, Iamblichus’ timing, as implied by the words “soldiers of Cambyses,” is a problem. Cambyses I was a Persian prince in a royal line ruling in the southwestern part of present-day Iran. He was the father of Cyrus the Great, to whom Babylon would later fall, and whose empire would far exceed hers. Cambyses reigned from about 600 to 559 B.C. Pythagoras was probably only eleven years old in 559. There were frequent clashes between the Egyptians and the Babylonians, and Babylonian soldiers surely took some captives, but not until after 529 (when Pythagoras was already in southern Italy) did Cyrus the Great’s son Cambyses II conquer Egypt.

  Iamblichus estimated that Pythagoras lived in Babylon for about twelve years. Any adventurous young man would have envied him this opportunity, for Babylon was a splendid, exotic, cosmopolitan city at the height of her power and wealth, far older than Samos, and far more worldly and sophisticated than Egypt. A period of supreme success and prosperity a thousand years earlier—the era of the 1894–1595 B.C. “Dynasty of Babylon” and especially the reign of Hammurabi—had been one of the pinnacles of ancient civilization. In the millennium that had passed between that period and Pythagoras’ lifetime, Mesopotamia had experienced wave after wave of migration, military clashes, and dynastic shifts, and one city after another had grappled for its moment in the Mesopotamian sun. Now it was again Babylon’s turn. If Iamblichus’ dates were near correct, Pythagoras’ visit probably caught the wake of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, when Babylon was ruled by lesser, short-lived kings of the same dynasty. Nebuchadnezzar had died in 562 B.C., when Pythagoras was about eight years old.

  Pythagoras would have arrived in Babylon either by caravan across the plain or by boat on the Euphrates.2 Either way, the towering seven-level ziggurat was visible long before the city came into view. Though young in comparison with the Giza pyramid (and no match for it in height—the ziggurat was about 300 feet high, the pyramid 481 feet), the ziggurat nevertheless was an exceedingly ancient monument, a relic of Babylon’s earlier golden age. Nebuchadnezzar had made sure that it was splendidly restored to connect his own reign with that former glory. The principal approach to the city from the north was an avenue sixty-six feet wide, built of giant limestone paving slabs covering a foundation of brick and asphalt. On either hand, sixty lions—fashioned of red, white, and yellow tile on the high walls—stalked the men and women on the road. At the city’s Ishtar Gate, bulls and dragons took over from the lions. This entrance was one of eight massive, bronze-armored portals in a double-walled, moated fortification system that surrounded the city. Inside, the avenue continued and crossed the Euphrates on a bridge with supports high enough and far enough apart to allow the largest ships to pass. A temple complex housed the jewel-studded shrine of Marduk, god of the city, in a chamber lined with gold. Pythagoras and others who were not royalty or among the most elite of the priests would not have entered this chamber, but they would have known about it.

  Beyond the temple precincts, the city spread on both sides of the Euphrates and included a royal palace with state rooms, private quarters, courtyards, and a harem for the queen and concubines brought from all parts of the empire. If they are not only legendary (the archaeological evidence is ambiguous but not entirely absent), the Hanging Gardens were part of this complex, and they, like the ziggurat, were a prominent landmark visible from a distance above the surrounding buildings—a terraced hill of earth, supported by massive vaults built so that their floors were waterproof and could support enough soil to plant large trees, watered from the nearby Euphrates by complicated irrigation machinery. Similar irrigation wizardry and a series of canals watered gardens and orchards in the newer part of the city and carried water to distant suburbs. The practical knowledge of mathematics and geometry that made possible these buildings and the
surveying for the irrigation was evidence of how well the scribes of Babylon understood these subjects—or, at least, had understood them many centuries before, when the building techniques were developed. It is likely that the theory and deeper mathematical understanding underlying the techniques had been forgotten by the time of Pythagoras, though the techniques themselves had become routine and were still in use.

  Because people who came to Babylon for whatever reason often chose to stay, her streets and passages were a cacophony of languages. There were Hurrians, Cassites, Hittites, Elamites, Jews, Egyptians, Aramaeans, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and all mixes thereof. Centuries of captives (including the Jews brought from Judea and Israel, who were there during Nebuchadnezzar’s reign), conquerors, and visitors had lived in the city long enough and mixed sufficiently well to interbreed, until Babylon had become, in the words of the twentieth-century scholar H. W. F. Saggs, “a thoroughly mongrel city.” Ancient tablets give evidence of an astounding variety of jobs, careers, and crafts, and a rich array of goods that arrived, some by caravan but mainly by way of the river. Women had authority over slaves or servants in their households, but probably wore veils in public.

  Pythagoras, exploring these streets and passageways and listening to all the languages, would have seen house walls that glowed in bands of light and shade, an effect ingeniously produced by a “saw-toothed” treatment that made the surface reflect the brilliant desert sunlight in this variegated manner. He would have stayed in private houses oriented almost entirely toward interior courtyards, their entrances guarded by a porter and a confusing, indirect entryway to discourage unwanted visitors and peeping toms. Whether he lived in a house like that or in the temple precincts—for his success among the priests and scribes should not have been any less here than in Egypt—his diet was probably mostly vegetarian, not by choice but because, in a city fed from irrigated fields surrounded by desert wastelands, meat was a luxury item.