The Music of Pythagoras (18 page)

Because a body could go so out of synchrony in sickness and death as to lose any suggestion of harmony, Plato’s Simmias worried that his soul could not be immortal. Echecrates, another Pythagorean character in the dialogue, also comments uneasily,

This teaching that the soul is a kind of
harmonia
has had, and still has, a strong hold on me, and when you mentioned it I was reminded that I too had believed it. Now, it is as if I were starting at the beginning again. I terribly need another argument that can persuade me that the souls of the dead do not die with them.
¹¹

The argument Echecrates and Simmias needed to hear—the best Pythagorean shoring up of their faltering faith—had appeared earlier in the same dialogue when Socrates expressed surprise that Simmias and his friend Cebes, both described as students of Philolaus, were ignorant of Philolaus’ teaching about suicide. Socrates admits that this is part of a “secret doctrine”: We are put into the world by the gods, who take care of us, and we must not leave the world until the moment they have
chosen, even though death, when finally permitted, is like getting out of prison. A Philolaus fragment in the writing of the early Christian scholar Clement of Alexandria echoes the idea: “This Pythagorean Philolaus says: ‘The ancient theological writers and prophets also bear witness that the soul is yoked to the body as a punishment, and buried in it as in a tomb.’ ”
¹²
Unfortunately, souls had a tendency to become too fond of bodily existence. Plato attempted to put this issue in its proper perspective in one of the most Pythagorean statements of his
Phaedo
:

[The soul that is not completely purified] has always associated with the body and tended it, filled with its lusts and so seduced by its passions and pleasures as to think that nothing is real except what is bodily, what can be touched and seen and eaten and made to serve sexual enjoyment.
¹³

Though Plato’s characters Simmias, Echecrates, and Cebes had misgivings, Philolaus, Plato, Socrates, the Pythagoreans before them—including Alcmaeon—and Pythagoras himself all clearly believed that souls were immortal. Bodily health was harmony; sickness and death a breakup of that harmony, but this physical harmony was not the
ultimate
harmony. There was a universal harmony to which every Pythagorean aspired to escape from the tedious round of earthly reincarnations. The soul was set in the body by means of numbers and an immortal
harmonia
, and its quest for the divine level was dependent on number. Plato’s thinking took off from there.

Most of the ancient world regarded natural phenomena as beyond human understanding or explanation, subject to the whims of capricious deities and best dealt with in imaginative stories. Philolaus referred to the central fire as the “home of Zeus,” perhaps to make his contemporaries feel comfortable with the notion. But what we learn from him is that the first Pythagoreans, led by a man who was, by some descriptions, more shaman than scientist or mathematician, were trying a new way of securing a foothold on the climb to understanding nature and the universe, through numbers. The earliest pre-Socratic philosophers—Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes—for all their yearning to get at the roots of things did not connect or confirm their philosophical ideas with numbers or mathematics. The Mesopotamians of the First Babylonian Dynasty had found numbers useful and enjoyed using impressive mathematics in exercises that had no practical applications, but apparently did not think that numbers and mathematics were a way to reach a profounder, all-encompassing truth. Philolaus wrote that “nature itself admits of divine and not of human knowledge,” but he was convinced that number relationships underlay the origin of the universe and the soul’s relationship with the divine, making it possible for humans to figure such things out. This insight was a fresh departure, a sea change of enormous proportions, and Pythagoreans such as Philolaus regarded the relationship of rational humans to a rational universe with awe. The kinship was reflected in a doctrine of the unity of all being. A fragment in
Against the Mathematicians
, by the skeptic philosopher and physician Sextus Empiricus (second–third century
A.D
.) states: “The Pythagoreans say that reason is the criterion of truth—not reason in general, but mathematical reason, as Philolaus said, which, inasmuch as it considers the nature of the universe, has a certain affinity to it (for like is naturally apprehended by like).”

Bust of Plato

That “certain affinity”—the fact that human mathematical reasoning does match up with what is really happening in nature—was not something that the Pythagoreans, or Philolaus, or anyone since them could or can explain. It was enough to know that numbers were tied in a fundamental way to the origin and nature of the cosmos.

Fourth Century
B.C
.

I
N ABOUT THE YEAR
389
B.C
., Plato left his home in Athens and boarded a ship setting sail westward into the Ionian Sea. His destination was Tarentum, one of the old colonial cities of southern Italy, in the coastland known to him as Megale Hellas. He was going in search of Pythagoras.
¹

In the 110 years since his death, Pythagoras had become the stuff of legend. Some believed he had been the wisest man who ever lived, almost a god. There were stories that a wealth of precious knowledge had perished with him and his followers in upheavals that had destroyed their communities in 500 and 454
B.C
. Though no one alive was old enough to have known Pythagoras, Plato had heard that in Megale Hellas there were still men calling themselves Pythagoreans. So, in his thirty-eighth year, he sailed to the shores where Pythagoras at about that same age had preceded him and walked and taught and died. The stones of the promontories, the pleasant coastlines, the very dust of the roads, ought to remember him.

Plato’s investigation began in Tarentum, on a small peninsula at the western extreme of the instep of the Italian boot, the first port of call for
ships crossing from Greece.
*
The only story connecting Pythagoras with that city was that he had convinced a bull there not to eat beans, but Tarentum had been far enough from Croton for refugees from the fifth-century attacks to have settled, felt reasonably safe, and started their own exile Pythagorean community. It had survived, and Plato knew that its most prominent member now was Archytas of Tarentum—“Archytas the Pythagorean.”

In Archytas, Plato found a man who embodied Pythagorean ideals both in his lifestyle and his studies. Archytas was an outstanding scholar and mathematician working in the Pythagorean
mathematici
tradition, and also an able civic leader. Meeting him must have confirmed for Plato that the years of Pythagorean rule in Megale Hellas had been an era of peace and stability, strengthening his conviction that men who knew philosophy and mathematics made splendid rulers. Plato and Archytas were within a year of each other in age. The visit in 389 was the first of several during which Plato conversed with him and his Pythagorean friends, absorbing knowledge and information that only a handful of men in the world could have given him. Megale Hellas would continue to draw Plato, not only because of Archytas.

At the time of Plato’s first visit, the southern Italian cities were living under the encroaching shadow of a formidable enemy—Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, close across the water in Sicily. “Tyrant” did not necessarily have negative connotations then. The term meant a ruler whose claim to power was not hereditary, and, indeed, Dionysius had begun in the lowly position of clerk in a city office. However, he also fit the later, ugly definition. Tactics that made him hugely successful shocked even his contemporaries. Dionysius reigned for nearly forty years, preserving Syracuse’s independence during repeated invasions while most of the rest of Sicily fell to the Carthaginians from North Africa. Syracuse became one of the most powerful cities in the world,
her fleet for a time the strongest in the Mediterranean. It was certain that if Dionysius chose to move against his Italian neighbors, no one could stop him. Plato had come to an unstable, dangerous region, but instead of heading directly back to safer Athens, he decided to experience at first hand the court of a powerful, gifted ruler. Here was no theoretical governance. It was the real thing.

Dionysius’ capital was, or was in the process of becoming, a splendid, well-fortified city, built strategically on an island separated from the mainland of Sicily by a narrow swath of water. There was a Pythagorean community in Syracuse, begun like the one in Tarentum by fifth-century Pythagoreans who in this case had fled west across the Gulf of Messina, but Plato was more interested in the court of Dionysius. He was becoming increasingly intrigued with public affairs, and he seems to have enjoyed—perhaps too well for his own good—rubbing shoulders with powerful courtiers among whom he felt more than able to hold his own. On this first visit, Plato met one of the most influential men in Syracuse, the tyrant’s brother-in-law Dion. Plato was impressed with Dion . . . and Dion with Plato.

Not long after Plato’s visit, Dionysius’ invading forces wreaked devastation on the south Italian cities, and the entire region fell to Syracuse. In terms of the map, the football had kicked the boot. Meanwhile, back in Athens, Plato went on to establish his Academy, adopting a “Pythagorean curriculum” that he had learned from Archytas: a “quadrivium” of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. The inclusion of music was an exceptionally Pythagorean touch.

The ruthless Dionysius died in 367, survived by his son, Dionysius the Younger. Unfortunately for Syracuse—though perhaps to the relief of many in the region—the son was a much less able leader than the father. Plato’s acquaintance Dion, the new ruler’s uncle, was dubious about his nephew’s ability to keep Syracuse as dominant as the old tyrant had left it. For whatever well-meaning or devious reasons (history records the events but not the motivation) Dion decided to improve his nephew by seeing to his belated education. The father had been an innately brilliant leader with literary pretensions (though his writing was widely judged to be embarrassingly bad), but the son needed assistance if he was to rule effectively and continue to frustrate the Carthaginians’ desire to complete their takeover of Sicily. Dion recalled his conversations with Plato twenty years earlier and some of Plato’s dialogues that
he had read since then, in which Plato had been developing the idea that men like Pythagoras and Archytas—philosophers for whom the “quadrivium” was bread and butter—should be the political rulers. To fill such shoes and be a “philosopher king,” as Plato coined the term, Dionysius the Younger needed training only Plato could provide. Dion decided to try to convince Plato, by then sixty-one and famous in Athens and far beyond, to return to Syracuse and tutor him.

In spite of what must have been a yearning to foster a philosopher king in a world power like Syracuse, Plato was not initially keen about Dion’s proposal, thinking it would be a risky undertaking and unlikely to succeed. Archytas convinced Plato to change his mind. Partly tempted by the opportunity for more conversations with Archytas, Plato sailed for Syracuse. For a while, he was on sufficiently good terms with Dionysius the Younger to do some networking on Archytas’ behalf. A friendly relationship between Dionysius and Archytas was advantageous for the city of Tarentum. However, Dionysius did not study with Plato long. Before the year 366 ended, he banished Dion; Plato, suspecting that his own best interests did not lie in this court, prudently took his leave.

Yet five or six years later, in 361–360
B.C
., Plato was back, invited by the tyrant himself. Dionysius sent an emissary named Archedemus, a friend of Archytas, on a special ship to summon Plato. The banished Dion also had a clandestine hand in his return. He asked Plato to engineer a reconciliation between him and Dionysius.

Plato arrived and Dionysius’ lessons resumed, but any hope of transforming Dionysius into a philosopher king was, again, short-lived. It cannot have helped that Plato was at court partly at the behest of the banished Dion. Plato was soon not only out of favor but in danger for his life. He got word to Archytas, and that resourceful man, using the influence he retained with Dionysius, sent an ambassador with a ship from Tarentum and persuaded the tyrant to release Plato. Afterward Archytas was not only known as “Archytas of Tarentum” or “the Pythagorean” but also as “Archytas who saved Plato’s life.”

Dion captured Syracuse three years later and was assassinated three years after that at the behest of another Syracusan acquaintance of Plato. Dionysius regained control for a short period, but he seems never to have had much talent or inclination for ruling, and it may have come as a relief to him in 344 when the Corinthian general Timoleon compelled him to surrender and retire to Corinth. There he became a
language teacher. Perhaps Plato’s efforts had not been entirely wasted and a former tyrant was well qualified to teach.