Porphyry shared Numenius’ interest in ancient sources of Pythagoras’ knowledge. He concluded that the Egyptians, the Hebrews, and the ancient peoples of India and Mesopotomia had possessed not only invaluable but identical primordial wisdom, and that Pythagoras was the earliest to have this wisdom among the Greeks, with Plato later putting it most fully into words. True to his teacher Plotinus, Porphyry preferred a rational, intellectual approach to truth, but his enthusiasm for the richness and mystery of ancient sources of wisdom, and the fact that he lived in highly superstitious times, prevented him from dismissing miraculous reports about Pythagoras. He also had what Dodds described as “an incurable weakness for oracles,”10 for which the rationalism of Plotinus had not succeeded in providing a permanent remedy. Porphyry died in A.D. 305, when he was seventy years old, soon after taking Marcella, to whom he had written many eloquent letters having to do with Platonic thought, as his young bride.
Iamblichus wrote the third and longest of the three biographies of Pythagoras. He was Porphyry’s pupil, but also a rival. Porphyry may have had an incurable weakness for oracles and not denied the existence of supernatural experience, but Plotinus had convinced him that the approach to ultimate truth and reunion with the divine was through the intellect, the rational, and had nothing to do with magic. Not so Iamblichus. For him, that reunion could only be achieved through ritual and magical evocation. His treatise De Mysteriis has been dubbed a “manifesto of irrationalism.”11
Iamblichus was born in about A.D. 260 in Chalcis, in Syria, and was a wealthy man who owned slaves and suburban villas, but he dedicated his life to contemplation, teaching, and writing, had many devoted disciples, and became widely renowned as the “divine” Iamblichus. The emperor Julian, in the next century, exclaimed that Iamblichus was “posterior indeed in time but not in genius to Plato.”
Iamblichus was much more focused on Pythagoras than was Porphyry, whose Life of Pythagoras was one volume out of a ten-volume Lives of the Philosophers. Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Way of Life (his biography of Pythagoras) was the introductory book to a work of nine or ten volumes with the collective title On the Pythagorean School, all of which were about Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans. Iamblichus attempted to put into this compendium everything that was known about Pythagoras and Pythagorean doctrine and philosophy, reflecting the view that Plato got most of his ideas from Pythagoras. However, in spite of his focus, to Iamblichus a mastery of philosophy meant more than knowledge of everything Pythagorean. It meant an understanding of Aristotelian logic and Plato’s dialogues. This was, in its way, Iamblichus’ attempt to provide what Plato had recommended, a thorough grounding in everything one could know about and through numbers, followed by dialectic, and Iamblichus’ contemporaries held him in high regard for his ability to reduce Plato’s and Aristotle’s thoughts to a more manageable form. He tried to make converts for Platonism by using logical arguments and warnings of fearful consequences for those who failed to pursue a philosophical life. Iamblichus died in about A.D. 330, during the reign of the emperor Constantine.
From that time on, neo-Platonic philosophy would include a Pythagorean emphasis on mathematics and numbers, adding some numerology that had no Pythagorean roots. Neo-Platonists would assume that Plato’s Timaeus derived from Pythagoras via a real Timaeus of Locri who wrote On the Nature of the Cosmos and the Soul—which was actually one of the pseudo-Pythagorean books. In the fifth century A.D., the philosopher Proclus would open his Commentary on the Timaeus: “It is agreed by all that, since he acquired the book which the Pythagorean Timaeus composed On the Universe, Plato undertook to write the Timaeus in the Pythagorean manner.” “Pythagorean thought” had assumed the form in which it was going to survive for a thousand years and reach Copernicus.
BY A.D. 400, efforts to block the impact of the Christian Gospels in the Greco-Roman world had failed. Proclus, the last major Greek philosopher—born in Constantinople, educated in Alexandria and Athens, and later head of what remained of Plato’s Academy—would go on for much of the next century opposing Christianity, but that was an exercise in futility, with unintended consequences. He and those who read him were largely responsible for a great spread of neo-Platonism throughout the Roman, Byzantine, and, later, Islamic regions of the world, but, more than that—and it would surely have caused him chagrin to learn of it—Proclus’ work, thanks to a mistaken identity, became a major influence in Christian theology. His philosophy was adapted by a writer of his own century who was for a long time confused with the New Testament figure Dionysius the Areopagite, a first-century convert of the Apostle Paul. In the writing of this “pseudo-Dionysius,” the philosophy of Proclus passed into Christian thought.
The advance of Christianity in the Empire took place on several levels. In at-home, family piety, it replaced the old household gods. House churches, with a few families and individuals (before there were larger Christian communities) competed with pagan cults all over the Empire with steadily increasing success. Among intellectuals, Christian authors co-opted excerpts from pagan books when the wording seemed equally applicable to a Christian context, or when they hoped to undergird Christian teaching by pointing out that the pagan material represented an independent witness to truths now more fully explained. Some of these fragments survived without much change at all. In fifth-century Christian sermons and books, phraseology and imagery appeared that clearly had originally come from a pagan oracle.12 During its first three centuries, Christianity had very little interest in or influence on politics, but that changed with the conversion in 312 of the emperor Constantine, who ruled first in Rome and finally from Byzantium over both the eastern and western halves of the Empire. Christianity became the official religion, and after that the Empire was mostly ruled by Christians, though some of them followed Arian teachings and did not accept the full divinity of Jesus.
Christianity’s victory would have been much more difficult had it not been able, to such a large extent, to accept and assimilate the great pagan intellectual and philosophical traditions. It might have been as short-lived and ineffectual as most of the mystery cults if its leaders had listened to men and women who advised complete rejection of pagan Greek and Roman culture and learning. However, beginning with the Apostle Paul, many Christian theologians and writers were educated men with tremendous respect—indeed, great love—for this heritage. When Paul first arrived in Athens, he expected that this city, which felt like his intellectual home and obviously treasured learning and wisdom, would welcome with open arms and minds the new knowledge he brought. At first it seemed he was right, and the Athenians’ eventual rejection of his views was one of the lowest points of Paul’s life.
To many early Christian intellectuals it seemed, as it had to Paul, that most of the older culture, wisdom, and knowledge of their intellectual world, which had so informed and inspired them, was consistent with the greater truth they believed they now knew. All had been, in a way, an intellectual preparation. They felt compelled to bring the pagan philosophical heritage into the embrace of Christian thought, make it part of Christian education, and show that there was a continuum. The early church became a guardian of the treasures of classical literature, both in its actual preservation of the books and in the way many key ideas were assimilated into Christian writing and thinking. The Gospel of John in the New Testament opens with the words “In the beginning was the Word.” In the original Greek, “Word” is logos, and probably the best translation of logos is not “word” but “reason” or “rationality.” With that in mind, it is possible to read John’s words with Platonic and Pythagorean eyes:
In the beginning was Reason. And Reason was with God, and Reason was God. Reason was with God in the beginning. Through Reason all things were made; without Reason nothing was made that has been made. In Reason was life, and that life was the light of men. . . . Reason became flesh and lived among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.13
The prodigious efforts of intellectuals like Augustine to seize upon similarities and work through conflicts in hope of finding deeper levels of agreement encouraged the Christian church to undertake a mission to preserve classical Greek and Roman literature in a more deliberate fashion. In Italy at Monte Cassino, a monastic center of scholarship called St. Benedict’s was established in A.D. 529, and other centers soon followed, particularly in the sixth and seventh centuries, when Irish missionaries reached England and then the Rhine, and Gothic missionaries reached the Danube. Because hardly anyone on the mission frontiers spoke Greek, Greek writings failed to spread much beyond the borders of the late Roman Empire, but even remote monasteries were able to preserve some Latin works while one horde of invaders after another swept across Europe—Goths, Vandals, Franks, and later Norsemen. The treasured, scattered works would be the only ancient classical literature known in Latin Europe for centuries. It is difficult in the twenty-first century—because so much ancient literature has been recovered—to realize how dim and fragmentary knowledge of the past became, how pitifully little was remembered, how completely civilization had to start over in the Middle Ages.
Of the few works that survived, one was a Latin translation by a fourth-century Greek Christian scholar, Chalcidius, of the first fifty-three chapters of Plato’s Timaeus. Others were a fragment of Cicero’s translation of the same dialogue, the works of the “encyclopedist” Macrobius, Nicomachus’ Introduction to Arithmetic in a slightly revised Latin translation, and De institutione musica, possibly also a paraphrase of Nicomachus. The latter two were produced by Boethius, a Roman of the late fifth and early sixth centuries. Why these and not others? Much had to do with the language in which a work was written or into which it was translated. Now we return to Rome as her great empire began to disintegrate.
From the close of the third century and the reign of the emperor Diocletian, the Roman Empire had no longer been ruled by one emperor. Sometimes there had been two, sometimes more. Though the administrative division line between the Empire in the east and the Empire in the west was not deliberately drawn along a language frontier between areas that spoke Greek and those that spoke Latin, over time it began to seem so, as Greek and Latin came to dominate in their respective regions. With the institution of bishoprics, a parallel division took place in the church, with Christians in the East regarding the patriarch of Constantinople as their religious authority while those in the West followed the bishop of Rome, the pope.
It was a dangerous, uncertain time in both parts of the Empire, with barbarian tribes pushing one another around the European map and not stopping when they reached borders that had been secure for centuries, close to Rome and Constantinople. On New Year’s Eve of 406, the Rhine froze, rendering the river useless as a natural boundary between Roman Gaul and tribes on the other side. The Roman legions previously guarding the Rhine had been recalled to hold defenses against barbarians nearer to home, and Vandals, Alans, and Sueves poured into Gaul, moving inexorably south and west across the countryside, marauding, plundering, and burning, meeting virtually no resistance. Feeling pressure on too many frontiers, and with her former lands in Gaul now “like an enormous funeral pyre,” Rome was nearing the end of her tether, but, though her Empire was divided, the city herself had remained unconquered for more than a thousand years, and it was unthinkable that this could change.16 Then in A.D. 410 the Visigoths sacked Rome. It would be more than another half century before the last emperor of the western Empire ceased to rule, but this date marked a loss of morale and political identity that would never be recovered. Some thought the Christian God had failed the city.
During this period, a writer named Ambrobius Theodosius Macrobius pulled together, as Pliny had done, a body of knowledge from a vast variety of sources with little or no attempt to discriminate between what was authentic and what legend, forgery, reinterpretation, and inaccurate retelling.17 He said he was not a Roman, though he served Rome in official capacities at home and in Spain and Africa. He also seems not to have been a Christian, in an era when most offices as highly ranked as those he held were filled by Christians. But whatever else he was or wasn’t, Macrobius was indeed an “encyclopedist,” and prone to expanding on the original. Largely thanks to him, Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio” would be popular in the Middle Ages, but when Macrobius wrote about the “Dream,” what Cicero had covered in a few pages took him nearly sixteen times that many, for he added commentary and inserted the opinions of other authors. The result was not very original, but for scholars in the Middle Ages it would be a treasure.
Macrobius preserved, in Latin, much that would otherwise not have survived, particularly from the neo-Pythagoreans and neo-Platonists, whom he knew primarily through the writings of Porphyry. Medieval scholars would learn from him that Pythagoras discovered the ratios of musical harmony, and would read the story that this happened in a blacksmith shop. They would know Macrobius’ quotation from Cicero about the harmony of the spheres and would glean from him ideas about connecting the musical ratios and the planetary distances, but nothing of a link between specific notes and specific planets, though both Nicomachus and Ptolemy had worked these out before Macrobius’ time. The Pythagorean view of numbers underlying everything in the universe, and the way it was exemplified by linking the harmonic ratios with the arrangement of the cosmic bodies, would become standard in medieval writing on music theory, but not so well formulated as it had been by ancient scholars, getting vaguer and less well understood as time passed.
The Visigoths who sacked Rome in 410 did not consolidate their victory by establishing a new government. For a while the imperial government limped along, sometimes surprisingly effectively, though virtually all of the western part of the Empire was now overrun by Germanic tribes who continued to make and break agreements and alliances with Roman and local authorities and to war among themselves. German settlers in Italy rather quickly converted to Christianity, many of them at first to the form known as Arianism which had been declared a heresy by the Council of Nicaea in 325; but eventually they entered Roman Catholicism.
In 429, the Vandals accomplished an end run through Spain, invaded North Africa, and became a new pirate threat in the Mediterranean. A quarter century later, it was their turn to sack Rome. Again, the invaders did not stay, but when they left they carried a former empress and her daughters back with them to Africa. On August 23, 476, the German troops, who by then actually made up most of the Roman army in Italy, elected their general Odoacer as king and overthrew the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus. The Roman Empire in the West, long in its death throes, at last expired. In theory, the emperor of the eastern Roman Empire, Zeno, now ruled the entire Empire, but Odoacer, though in no position to reestablish anything like the former Empire, was, in effect, an independent ruler, while various German factions in Italy could only war uselessly among themselves and with other tribes who continued to appear on the horizon. In the western Empire, including its former vast holdings to the north in Europe, one might assume that the Dark Ages had begun. They had not, quite.
Boethius, born in 480, after the overthrow of the last Roman emperor, was a Roman aristocrat in an era when conventional wisdom would seem to indicate there should no longer have been such a thing. Roman life as usual had not, however, completely ended in the city and its environs. The Roman civil service continued to operate, courts admin
istered Roman law, Roman and Gothic landholders were paying their taxes, and learning and culture had not disappeared. The Roman Senate was still meeting, and Boethius became a Senator. He was also a philosopher, theologian, poet, mathematician, and astronomer—one of the last generation to study at what was still calling itself the Academy in Athens—and he was deeply troubled to see his contemporaries losing the ability to read Greek, which had for centuries been part of Roman education.* No longer could they experience Plato, Aristotle, the neo-Platonists, or many of the Christian church fathers in their original language. Boethius vowed to remedy this potentially disastrous loss: “I will translate into Latin every work of Aristotle that comes into my hands, and all the dialogues of Plato.”18 Much else also, it turned out.
The Music of Pythagoras Page 22