by A. A. Long
The details of Pythagoras’ version of metempsychosis and its attendant view of the soul are impossible to recover. Common elements in later versions found in Pindar, Empedocles, and Plato provide possibilities but not certainty.14 Is everybody reborn or just a select few? Are we reborn just into human and animal lives or also into plants? Is there a set number of rebirths or is it an endless cycle? Plato and Empedocles envisage a fall from an original blessed state followed by a fixed period of incarnations after which it is possible to return to our original condition. Herodotus talks of being reborn into every form of animal before being reborn as a man (II. 123).
Is the soul that transmigrates the unified personal soul that is responsible for our consciousness and activity in this life? This is the case in Plato, but in Empedocles what transmigrates is called a daimôn and not a soul (psychê), and Pindar (fr. 131 Schroeder) calls it an image of life (eidôlon) that sleeps while we are awake and our soul is active. Pythagoras’ view of the soul is more likely to have resembled Empedocles’ than Plato’s. Nonetheless, the doctrine of transmigration inevitably raises the question of the relationship between our present consciousness and that part of us that is reborn and thus is an important influence in the development of the Platonic view of the soul, even though it is unlikely that Pythagoras assumed that view.15
The other main emphasis of the early evidence is Pythagoras’ vast knowledge. This reveals itself in his authority in religious matters, his ability to perform miraculous deeds, and his broad appeal as a teacher of a tightly structured way of life that was a combination of quasi-magical taboos and moral precepts. Pythagoras’ religious authority is buttressed by connecting him to the ancient wisdom of Egypt. Rites in Greece forbidding burial in wool are mistakenly known as Orphic and Bacchic but are in reality Egyptian and Pythagorean (Herodotus II.81); Isocrates says that Pythagoras brought knowledge from Egypt to Greece and specifically that he “showed more evident zeal for things concerned with sacrifice and holiness in temples than others” (Busiris 28).
Such claims of knowledge and authority inevitably led to violently different reactions to Pythagoras. We have already seen that Xenophanes mocks the doctrine of metempsychosis, but the sharpest criticism comes from Heraclitus. He calls Pythagoras “the chief of swindlers” (DK 22 B81) and says that he “practiced inquiry beyond all other men and, having picked and chosen from these writings, made a wisdom of his own, a polymathy, an evil trickery” (B129). His most famous criticism is found in fragment B40: “Much learning does not teach understanding, else it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hecataeus.” On the other hand, Empedocles speaks of Pythagoras’ learning in tones of the utmost respect:
There was a man among them who knew remarkable things, who possessed the greatest wealth of intelligence, who was especially accomplished at all sorts of wise deeds. For, whenever he reached out with all his intellect, easily he beheld each of the things that are in ten and even twenty generations of men (DK 31 B129).16
These “wise deeds” may have been one of the main sources of controversy. Empedocles is probably referring to the type of wonder working that he claimed for himself, the ability to control the winds and rain as well as to raise the dead (B111). The fragments of Aristotle’s writings on Pythagoras confirm this suggestion by emphasizing a series of miraculous characteristics and feats, such as his ability to be in two places at one time, his golden thigh (probably a sign of religious initiation), and his killing of a poisonous snake by biting it (fr. 191 Rose). Claims to such extraordinary abilities and a reputation for vast knowledge drawn from far and wide might well have seemed “evil trickery” to an outsider like Heraclitus.
Early in the fourth century, both Plato, in the passage at the beginning of this chapter, and his rival as an educator, Isocrates, emphasize Pythagoras’ impact as a teacher of a way of life. Isocrates says that:
He surpassed the other [teachers] so much in reputation that all the young wanted to be his pupils and their elders were happier to see their children associating with him than attending to the affairs of the household. And it is not possible to disbelieve this, for even now people marvel more at those who style themselves as his pupils for their silence than at those who have the greatest reputations as speakers. (Busiris 29)
What was the content of the teaching? The way of life must have been designed at least in part to ensure the best possible sequence of rebirths. Our most extensive body of evidence for its rules are the fragments of Aristotle’s work on Pythagoras. Along with the miraculous deeds what bulks largest in Aristotle’s account is a set of maxims handed down orally and known as the akousmata (things heard) or symbola (signs that distinguished Pythagoreans from others). These akousmata reveal a tightly structured life. There is a series of dietary taboos, such as the famous prohibition against eating beans, clothing taboos (the gods should be worshiped in white robes), and injunctions that govern almost all aspects of life, including even the most trivial actions (e.g., “Don’t pick up fallen crumbs,” fr. 195 Rose).
It is not surprising that a devoted few might have found such a restrictive life attractive, but the wide appeal suggested by the passages in Plato and Isocrates requires explanation. This breadth of appeal is further indicated by the fact that some of the leading figures of Croton and other southern Italian towns were followers of the way of life so that Pythagoreans had a large impact on politics (Polybius II.39). They were not a political party in the modern sense but were perhaps analogous to clubs of serious moral purpose such as the Masons. One could pursue a number of professions (general, physician, political leader) and still be a Pythagorean. However, their regimented rules of conduct, club meetings, and fanatical devotion to fellow Pythagoreans (e.g., the story of the Pythagorean friends Damon and Phintias – Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean life 233, from Aristoxenus) aroused suspicion and envy. They were the object of violent attacks, one in Pythagoras’ lifetime c. 510 B.C. and another in the middle of the fifth century, which led to the burning of the club house in Croton and the decline of Pythagorean influence in southern Italy.17
Part of the appeal of the Pythagorean way of life was based on the charisma of Pythagoras himself. Burkert accepted the model that makes Pythagoras a shaman, a type of religious leader first studied in Siberian tribes. The shaman’s authority is based on the ability to enter an ecstatic state and journey to the beyond.18 These journeys might be the germ of the idea of the transmigrating soul, but there is no evidence for transmigration proper in shamanism. Shamanism could explain Pythagoras’ miraculous deeds, but it does not account for the Pythagorean way of life. Since the way of life lasted long after Pythagoras’ death, its appeal must be based on more than just his personal authority. I would suggest that its attraction, in addition to the hopes for one’s soul in the next life, was the moral discipline that it imposed. The previously quoted passage from Isocrates makes a contrast between the eloquence displayed by pupils of the typical Greek rhetorical education of the day and Pythagorean silence. This might be a reference to secret doctrines. Exclusive societies are likely to have some secret doctrines (Aristotle, fr. 192 Rose), although such secrecy in Pythagoreanism is often overstated and, as Aristotle’s testimony shows, much of Pythagoreanism was common knowledge. The doctrine of metempsychosis was widely known from the time of Xenophanes onward. Isocrates’ remarks have much more rhetorical force if he is referring to a pervasive Pythagorean self-discipline of silence that is attested in the tradition (a five-year period of silence for initiates, D.L. VIII.10) rather than the ability of Pythagoreans to keep a few doctrines secret.
The self-discipline represented in Pythagorean silence and in adherence to the multitude of taboos is founded on a more basic belief that our actions are under constant scrutiny by divine powers. Thus the Pythagoreans were said to be surprised if anyone claimed never to have met a divinity (Aristotle, fr. 193 Rose). Moreover, the structure of the world is related to a system of rewards and punishments. The planets ar
e the avenging hounds of Persephone (Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras 41), queen of the underworld; thunder is a warning to souls in Tartarus (Aristotle, APo II. 11 94b33); and the sun and the moon are the isles of the blessed where the good may hope to go (Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean life 82). There are strong parallels to the cosmological myths that Plato includes at the end of a number of his dialogues and whose function is in part to show a mythic ordering of the cosmos in which we are subject to divine judgement for our deeds. As in Plato’s myths, number symbolism also played a role in the Pythagorean view of the world. One of the akousmata says that number is the wisest thing, and Pythagoreans may have sworn by Pythagoras as “the one who gave the tetraktys” (Sextus Empiricus, M. VII.94), the first four numbers whose total is ten, which was the perfect number for early Pythagoreans. Since another akousma calls the tetraktys “the harmony in which the Sirens sing” (Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean life 82), it may be that the first four numbers were also valued because they were involved in the whole number ratios corresponding to the concordant musical intervals of the octave (2/1), fifth (3/2), and fourth (4/3). However, none of the late stories that assign the discovery of these correspondences to Pythagoras are in fact scientifically possible. The harmony that the sirens sing may also allude to the influential idea that the heavens made music by their motions, the famous “harmony of the spheres.”
Granted that Pythagoras had a larger impact on the society of his day than any other early Greek philosopher, in what sense is it legitimate to call him a philosopher? Metempsychosis did exercise an important influence in Greek philosophy through its adoption by Empedocles and most importantly by its prominence in Plato. However, the Pythagorean way of life seems far removed from the “examined” life for which Socrates called. Pythagoreanism has no room for free examination of ideas and philosophical argument but is based on the authority of the founder. The later tradition reports that Pythagoreans felt no need to argue for positions and rested content with the assertion that “he himself said it” (D.L. VIII.46). Nonetheless, the primary goal of all Greek philosophy from Socrates onward was not just rational argument but the living of a good life. Pythagoras can justly claim to have been the first thinker to set forth a comprehensive plan for a good life, a plan of life based on a view of the world that influenced Plato’s myths if not the Socratic elenchus.19
EMPEDOCLES
Another way to approach Pythagoras is through his early successors, and here Empedocles is important. Since Empedocles introduced a rational cosmological scheme in response to Parmenides and was also a wonder-working sage, he is often thought to show that Pythagoras too could have combined these characteristics. Recent scholarship has shown convincingly that Empedocles strove to form a unity from these two strands of thought, and has questioned the traditional view that he wrote two separate poems, one on nature and another religious poem known as Purifications.20 However, while the example of Empedocles shows that one thinker could attempt to combine the two strands, this provides no evidence that Pythagoras did so as well. In fact examination of the evidence for Empedocles suggests again that Pythagoras had little to say on natural philosophy.
Empedocles is frequently treated as a Pythagorean in the later tradition. Diogenes Laertius, in his Lives of the philosophers, includes him among the Pythagoreans (VIII. 51), and some even made him Pythagoras’ pupil, although Empedocles was born about the time Pythagoras died (490 B.C.). However, neither Plato nor Aristotle regarded him as a Pythagorean and few modern scholars have done so. It seems likely nevertheless that Empedocles was influenced by Pythagoras, since two generations earlier, near Empedocles’ own home in Acragas in Sicily, Pythagoras was preaching the metempsychosis that appears in Empedocles’ poetry and since Empedocles refers to Pythagoras with such reverence (see p. 72).
However, the ancient tradition made few connections between Empedocles’ physical theory and Pythagoreanism, and there is no compelling reason to do so. Empedocles advanced, for the first time, the influential theory of the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water). He introduced Love and Strife as cosmic principles, whose conflict leads to the combinations of the elements that produce the phenomenal world as a phase between the completely homogeneous mixture of the elements in a sphere under Love and complete separation of the elements under Strife. None of the antecedents of this theory is likely to be Pythagorean. The four elements have their origins in Ionian speculation: Strife is a prominent element in Heraclitus; Love seems to be Empedocles’ own innovation; and the sphere has connections to Parmenides. It is true that Love is connected to harmony, which is important in Pythagoreanism (it is also Heraclitean). Harmony is in turn represented in Empedocles (B96) as combining the elements according to ratios in order to form bone (four parts fire, two earth, and two water). This reference to number as governing the structure of things is the main aspect of Empedoclean cosmology identified as Pythagorean by the later tradition, and it may be that Empedocles is here taking the first step in adapting Pythagorean number symbolism to rational cosmology and that this idea was developed fully in the next generation with Philolaus. However, the use of numerical patterns in ordering the cosmos also goes back to Anaximander at the beginnings of the Ionian tradition.
Regarding the soul and its fate, matters are different. Since Pythagoras wrote nothing, Empedocles’ writings came to be treated as basic Pythagorean texts in these areas. Sextus Empiricus (M. IX. 126-30) says that “the followers of Pythagoras and Empedocles… say that we have a kind of communion not only with each other and the gods but also with irrational animals,” and goes on to quote two fragments of Empedocles:
Will you not stop the ill-sounding bloodshed? Do you
not see that you are eating one another, in the carelessness of your thought? (B136)
Father slays his dear son in changed form, having lifted him up in
offering and praying in his great folly… (B137)
Sextus concludes: “This, then, is what the Pythagoreans recommended.” It is no accident that stories sprang up that Empedocles was the first to break Pythagorean taboos on speaking about such things and was excommunicated (D.L. VIII.54-5). Indeed Empedocles’ fragments on the cycle of reincarnation have an intoxicating vitality and specificity:
There is an oracle of necessity,… if someone stains his own limbs in
slaughter by sin… daimones who have as their lot a life of long ages,
thirty thousand years he wanders away from the blessed ones, being
born as mortal creatures of all forms, through time exchanging one
troublesome path of life for another, for the might of aither pursues
him into the sea and the sea spits him out into the dust of earth and
earth into the rays of the shining sun which threw him into the currents
of aither. One receives him from the other and all hate him. Of these I
am one, an exile from the gods and a wanderer, trusting in raving strife. (B115)
Even in the area of religion, Empedocles by no means simply parroted Pythagorean doctrine. Aristotle’s evidence (fr. 4 Rose) suggests that Pythagoras may only have taught abstention from certain types of meat, and it was left to Empedocles to advocate strict vegetarianism and to present the horrifying vision of a father eating his own son reborn in animal form. Moreover, Empedocles tries to integrate the discussion of reincarnation with his physical theory. The daimôn passes through each of the four elements in its reincarnations and is said to have trusted in Strife. The homogeneous mixture of the elements under Love may be the blessed state of the daimones before the fall.21 It would be surprising that Empedocles constructed a unique physical theory to ground metempsychosis, if Pythagoras had already presented a detailed cosmology as a framework for the migrating soul. Despite Empedocles’ praise of Pythagoras, he has transformed Pythagorean influence into a creation of his own.
Nonetheless it would be wrong to see Empedocles as the genius who gave form to a primitive Pythagoreanism. There
is an important difference in emphasis between Pythagoras and Empedocles. Both wielded great charismatic authority, and the opening lines of Empedocles’ poem remind us of later accounts of Pythagoras’ arrival in Croton.
Whenever I come to a flourishing city, I am reverenced by men and
women, countless numbers follow along asking where the path to gain
is. Some asking for oracles and others seek to hear a healing word for
all sorts of diseases… (B112)22
However, there is no evidence that Empedocles’ philosophy had anything like the social dimension of Pythagoreanism. Empedocles himself may have participated in politics, but there were no Empedoclean clubs wielding political influence, no Empedoclean way of life that lasted for generations after his death.
PHILOLAUS
It is only in the generation after Empedocles, a little before the atomists, that Aristotle finds the beginning of a natural philosophy by “the so-called Pythagoreans” (Metaph. 1.5 985b23). No names are mentioned, but the Pythagoreans prominent in this period were Hippasus, Lysis, Eurytus, and especially Philolaus. Sometime in the fifth century B.C., there was a split in Pythagoreanism. Akousmatikoi, who claimed to follow the original teachings (akousmata) of Pythagoras attacked another group, the mathêmatikoi, as being in reality followers of Hippasus (Iamblichus, Comm. math. 76.19 – from Aristotle). Aristotle’s “so-called Pythagoreans” who “first laid hold of mathematics and advanced it” (Metaph. 1.5 985b24) seem to be this latter group. Hippasus (fl. 470?), its founder, is consistently portrayed as a rebel, in one case as a democrat challenging the aristocratic Pythagorean leadership in Croton, but more commonly as the founder of Pythagorean study of mathematics and natural science. Legend said he was drowned at sea in punishment for mathematical work on the dodecahedron. His method of demonstrating the relation between whole number ratios and the concordant musical intervals, in contrast to the methods assigned to Pythagoras, is based on sound physics. Aristotle reports that, like Heraclitus, he made fire the basic principle. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that he wrote anything (D.L. VIII.84).23