Another cultlike movement in the mid to late first century A.D. was led by the colorful, eccentric Apollonius of Tyana. Claiming to be the reincarnated Pythagoras, he traveled 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 emphasized 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 centered 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 neighbors.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 toward 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 toward 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.
While mulling over the issue of whether such a thing as “time” existed before the creation of the universe, Philo got caught up in the question of whether the Pythagoreans or Aristotle had been the first to suggest that the universe is eternal, and mistakenly cited Occelus of Lucania’s On the Nature of the Universe as evidence that it had been the Pythagoreans. Anticipating the concept of time set forth by the Christian philosopher St. Augustine of Hippo, Philo insisted that “there was no time before the world, but it came to be either with the world or after it.”10
Some have called Philo a Greek philosopher who remained grounded in his religion; others, a Hebrew mystic who used the tools of Greek thought in the service of religion.11 He combined the practice (in both Greek and Hebrew traditions) of drawing lessons from Homer or the Hebrew Scriptures with his fine understanding of Greek philosophy and developed a philosophical interpretation of the Scriptures that he hoped would win respect among Greek intellectuals. But his impact on Greek philosophers was not as great as he hoped. No later pagan philosopher appears to have mentioned him directly.12 Rather, it was the early Christian writers who followed his lead and used the allegorical method as he did for reconciling revealed truth with intellectually worked-out truth. Clement of Alexandria and Origen were admirers (Clement dubbed him Philo the Pythagorean) and generations of early and medieval Christian scholars carefully preserved and copied his work, so that an extraordinary amount of what Philo wrote survives intact.*
The Roman poet Ovid, a contemporary of Philo, captured in his Metamorpho
ses the more popular image of Pythagoras: the all-knowing sage of legendary antiquity with an aura of universal, unworldly wisdom. Ovid revived the old legend about the Roman king Numa and had Pythagoras speak through him, in an oration that stressed the doctrine of reincarnation and abstention from meat, mostly on the grounds of respect and sympathy for animals. Ovid was not attempting to philosophize along Pythagorean lines or argue Pythagorean doctrine. The oration was part of a larger picture he painted in his poem, in which everything is changing, shifting, being transformed, nothing endures, and “Nature, the great inventor, ceaselessly contrives.” Hence the title, Metamorphoses.
Plutarch, later in the first and second centuries A.D., was more influential than Philo or Ovid in forming the image of Pythagoras for the future. His Parallel Lives paired biographies of celebrated Greeks and Romans, part of an effort to find ways of resolving the differences between the Roman culture of power and Greek intellectual culture. How much to trust Plutarch for historical and biographical details has been a frustrating and often unanswerable question, but that has not prevented his Lives from being the text on which readers from the Renaissance to the present day have based their understanding and picture of the ancient world. Plutarch was one of Shakespeare’s favorite authors.† Copernicus also read Plutarch, and he quoted, in Greek, from Plutarch’s Placita, in a letter to Pope Paul III—a passage in which Plutarch had written that “Philolaus the Pythagorean” claimed the Earth moved around a central fire. Like Plato and Cicero, Plutarch wrote an elaborate myth about the fate of the soul.13 For his last thirty years he was a priest of Apollo at Delphi, and he came up with a Pythagorean interpretation of the god’s name, equating him with the One: a meant “not,” pollon meant “of many.” Hence a-pollon was One. Given Plutarch’s influence, it is significant that he linked Pythagoras with the Pythagorean theorem. It is largely because of Plutarch that nearly everyone believes Pythagoras discovered it.
Plutarch, from a sixteenth-century engraving
Of all who thought that Plato derived his ideas from Pythagoras, no other was so convinced and outspoken as Moderatus of Gades, known as the “aggressive Pythagorean.” He lived in the second half of the first century, in Gades (later Cádiz) on the west coast of Spain, by then part of the Empire. Moderatus could be called the Pythagorean conspiracy theorist, for he insisted that not only Plato but also Aristotle, Speusippus, Aristoxenus, and Xenocrates were plagiarists who had “taken for themselves the fairest fruit of Pythagorean thought” and designated as “Pythagorean” only the most superficial and trivial aspects of the school, so as to make a mockery of Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans.14 The aphorisms were among those “superficial and trivial aspects,” and Aristotle’s listing of them was, to Moderatus, a malicious act. He scorned the acusmatici, and his answer to the argument that Aristoxenus also had scorned them was that Aristoxenus’ attitude was a particularly subtle part of the propaganda project against the true Pythagoreans.
Moderatus had a fresh take on the Pythagorean use of numbers, which helped explain how he thought the plagiarism had been engineered. The Pythagoreans, “for the sake of a lucid exposition,” wisely resorted to “explanation by means of numbers” because it was so difficult to explain the first principles and primary Forms clearly in language.15 For example, to say the One was above all else did not mean that the number 1 itself was the supreme fundamental of the universe. Instead, One stood for a great unifying principle, implying equality, everything that causes stability and unchangingness, the absence of “otherness.” In a “language” of numbers, the Pythagoreans had expressed everything that Plato would later attempt to express in words. Moderatus had got neatly past Aristotle’s stumbling block, the notion that numbers were, for the Pythagoreans, both abstract things and the physical building materials of the universe. In fact, he had made a jump into the twentieth century, when some found it easier to describe the quantum world and the origin of the universe in mathematical formulas than in imprecise descriptive words.
There had been hints before of a way of looking at the world in which physical matter was evil or at least negative, and in Moderatus this view came much more to the fore. Physical matter was a “shadow,” and that, to him, meant something more negative than it had to Plato. It was “not-being.” But Moderatus thought that everything including matter came from the One, and the One was “the Good.” He failed to address the question of how anything wholly good can produce evil, but the problem of the origin of evil was looming on the philosophical horizon.
At the opposite extreme of the Empire, in about A.D. 125, Theon of Smyrna wrote Mathematics Useful for Understanding Plato. It included arithmetic, harmonics, astronomy, geometry, the symbolism of the numbers 1 through 10, different forms of the tetractus, and the tetractus’ link with music and the cosmos.16 “The one who bestowed it was Pythagoras,” wrote Theon, “and it has been said that the tetractus appears indeed to have been discovered by him.” One passage sounded like a collage of almost everything that had been Pythagorean, or been thought to be, up to Theon’s time. But if Theon’s mathematics were “useful,” the mathematics of Nicomachus of Gerasa, a generation later, in the mid-second century, would prove, for better or worse, much more so over a very long period of time. Nicomachus was one of those mathematicians who rejected Euclid’s abstract theorems of numbers and their proofs, preferring to stick to what he thought were “Pythagorean mathematics” and to offer only numerical examples. His Introduction to Arithmetic was intended to be not an original contribution, but, essentially, a textbook, and that was what it turned out to be for most of Europe for more than a thousand years, until the Renaissance. The opening passages were a paean to Pythagoras, and largely because of that, for centuries—long past the Renaissance, in fact—the Pythagoreans were regarded as the source of Greek mathematics. W. K. C. Guthrie was not overstating the case when he wrote,
Everyone comes upon the name of Pythagoras for the first time in school mathematics; and this has been true from the earliest stages of the Western cultural tradition. None of the ancient textbooks which formed the basis of the medieval curriculum forgets Pythagoras. . . . the origin of this tradition: Nicomachus.17
Nicomachus also wrote a Handbook of Harmony that linked the ratios of music with the movements of the heavenly bodies. That book has survived complete, while his two-volume, avowedly Pythagorean Theology of Numbers survives in fragments. Nicomachus set up a correlation between the numbers 1 through 10 and the gods of Olympus that Iamblichus and Proclus would later use in a last-ditch defensive effort against Christianity, on behalf of Greek philosophy and pagan religion.18 Nicomachus’ Life of Pythagoras, now lost, was a source for the Pythagorean miracle stories.*
The neo-Pythagorean philosophical tradition ended on a strong note with an extraordinary writer and thinker named Numenius of Apamea. Born in Syria, he produced his most important work, only fragments of which survive, around A.D. 160. His books were available, however, long enough for Porphyry and others to read and discuss them in the next century when they studied with the philosopher Plotinus.*
Numenius believed that the teaching of Plato’s Academy in its purest form came from Pythagoras, but he wanted to know where Pythagoras had, in turn, got his ideas and knowledge. He took at face value all the stories of Pythagoras’ travels, and he unearthed what seemed to him “Platonic” philosophy (that Plato got via Pythagoras) among the Egyptians, the ancient peoples of India, and the Magi of Mesopotamia, as well as in the Hebrew Scriptures. His goal was to trace knowledge to the earliest, highest, primal sources, because, in his opinion, it had all been downhill from there. “Who is Plato but Moses speaking Greek?” he asked, and retold the story of Moses and the plagues in Egypt from a more Egyptian point of view, in which Pharaoh’s magicians had more success combating the plagues than they did in the Hebrew Scriptures.
According to Numenius’ most ambitious work, his six-volume On the Good, “the Good” or “the First God” (what other neo-Pythagoreans called
the One) was not completely inaccessible. Sense perceptions were not helpful, but a human could work on finding access. In an exquisite passage, Numenius described the degree of solitude necessary for an approach to the Good or the First God:
Like someone seated in a lookout post, who, straining his eyes, manages to catch a glimpse of one of those little fishing vessels, a one-man skiff all alone, isolated, engulfed in the waves, even so must one remove oneself far from the things of sense, and consort alone with the Good alone, where there is neither human being nor any other living thing, nor any body great or small, but some unspeakable and truly indescribable wondrous solitude—there, are the accustomed places, the haunts and celebrations of the Good, and it itself in peace, in benevolence, the tranquil one, the sovereign, mounted graciously upon Being.19
Numenius also urged a more active approach: disregarding “sensibles” and devoting oneself enthusiastically to learning the sciences and studying numbers, so as to attain the knowledge of what is Being.20 He did not regard Plato as a high point in the history of knowledge—rather as part of a downward slide—but he was not unappreciative and gave him a backhanded compliment: “He was not superior to the great Pythagoras, but perhaps not inferior either.” He called Socrates a Pythagorean, and Plato a brilliant mediator between Pythagoras and Socrates.
Numenius introduced a doctrine of “three gods” that he called “typically Pythagorean.” Though it might have been possible to find hints of the idea in the work of other neo-Pythagoreans (Moderatus, for example, thought the Pythagoreans believed in three “unities”), in Plato, and in the pseudo-Pythagorean literature, “typically Pythagorean” was an overstatement. Numenius’ “three-god” passages suggest he was clinging to the theology of Pythagoras/Plato and the polytheism of the pagan world, while at the same time reaching for the concept of the Christian trinity—a prodigious intellectual and theological balancing act. He saw a philosophical need for a trio of roles in the creation and sustenance of the universe and came close to what others would call the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The Music of Pythagoras Page 20