The Music of Pythagoras (28 page)

Music, wrote Vitruvius, assists an architect “in the use of harmonic and mathematical proportion. He would, moreover, be at a loss in constructing hydraulic and other engines, if ignorant of music.”
²¹

MEANWHILE, THE INSIDIOUS
trickle of pseudo-Pythagorean works that had begun in the third century
B.C
. had become a veritable industry by the first, with publishers and authors trying to meet a continuing demand for books supposedly written by Pythagoras or his earliest followers, or by Philolaus or Archytas. Rome and Alexandria were the places to buy, sell, and collect these scrolls, but those who snapped them up were not only Roman and Alexandrian readers. King Juba II of Numidia, who came to Rome for his schooling, was one of the most avid collectors.
²²
The pseudo-Pythagorean books are no help in discovering the real Pythagoras, and would represent unfortunate pitfalls for Pythagoras’ biographers, but they are time capsules of what scholars and the public in the third through first centuries, and well beyond, thought Pythagoras had taught and who he had been.

The
Pythagorean Notebooks
were relatively early, from the period when Alexandria was the center of Hellenistic culture and Greco-Roman culture was still largely a thing of the future, and they did not survive long even in complete copies. Their originals are almost as lost in the past as their supposed author. No one knows who wrote them, but it was not Pythagoras, for the author clearly had read the
Timaeus
and was familiar with Plato’s unwritten doctrines. In an excerpt preserved by Diogenes Laertius, one of the first sentences mentioned the
Indefinite Dyad.
*
Traces of pre-Platonic material received an unintentional Platonic update, while passages that depended on later knowledge appear to have been intentionally reworked with an early-Pythagorean twist. Regarding the gestation period of a human embryo: “According to the principles of harmony, it is not perfect till seven, or perhaps nine, or at most ten months.” The “harmony” sounded Pythagorean, and “ten months” like a Pythagorean stretch of nature, but other passages having to do with medical matters seem to have mimicked Hippocrates, for whom there was also a large body of “pseudo” literature. A discussion of the significance of opposites in the cosmos rapidly segued into Aristotle, made to sound more “primitive.” Aristotle had written that the region below the orbit of the Moon is impure and changeable, but beyond it, all is pure and unchanging, while the
Notebooks
told of the “mortal” area near the earth being stale and “pregnant with disease,” and the “upper air” “immortal and on that account divine.”
^†
Modern scholarship dates the
Notebooks
to the second or third centuries
B.C
., not earlier, and certainly not to the sixth century.

Another best-selling pseudo-Pythagorean work was
Lysis’ Letter to Hipparchus
, supposedly authored by the Lysis who moved to Thebes after the dispersal of the Pythagoreans in Magna Graecia. Lysis was a real person, teacher of the general Epaminondas, but he did not write this letter. In it, “Lysis” accuses Hipparchus, another Pythagorean, of “philosophizing in public, which Pythagoras deemed unworthy.” To prove that Pythagoras frowned on such lack of discretion, the letter writer tells of Damo, “daughter of Pythagoras.” Diogenes Laertius quoted:

When he had entrusted his commentaries to his daughter Damo, he charged her not to divulge them to anyone outside of the house. Though she might have sold his discourses for much money, she did not abandon them; for she thought that obedience to her father’s injunctions, even though this entailed
poverty, was better than gold, and for all that she was a woman.
²³

Linguistic analysts place the
Letter
in the first century
B.C
., but some scholars prefer to think it was written at the time of the appearance of the
Pythagorean Notebooks
in order to support their authenticity.
²⁴
The claim would have been that the
Notebooks
were the very discourses that Damo had refused to sell, just recently rediscovered. If the
Letter
was a concoction to support the
Notebooks
, then it was written earlier than 100
B.C
. and probably earlier than 200
B.C
. But no scholar today believes that
Lysis’ Letter to Hipparchus
was written in the fifth century
B.C
. by the historical Lysis.

The fate of another book,
On the Nature of the Universe
by Occelus of Lucania, is an example of the confusion that occurred even when scholars were well-intentioned. Although Occelus probably lived in the second century
B.C
., in the early half of the first century
A.D
. his book was mistakenly regarded as an authentic early Pythagorean text. Occelus and his family considered themselves to be Pythagoreans, but the innocent Occelus had apparently been writing for himself, not trying to pass his book off as something written earlier.
²⁵
However, no less a scholar than Philo of Alexandria, the first-century Grecian-Jewish philosopher, was fooled. Occelus had insisted that the cosmic order was eternal; there was no need for a doctrine of creation. Philo, unaware that Occelus lived after Aristotle, treated his book as evidence that early Pythagoreans, not Aristotle, were the first to introduce the idea that the world is eternal.
²⁶

By the first century
B.C
., it had become widely accepted that Pythagoras himself had left no writing, though Diogenes Laertius would later claim otherwise. Works like the
Notebooks
and a three-part book supposedly by Pythagoras (actually from the late third century
B.C
.) on education, politics, and physics were no longer generally credited, but that did not end the forgeries. It became fashionable to “discover” writings by Pythagoreans like Lysis, the fictional Timaeus, Archytas, and the women Theano and “Phyntis, Daughter of Callicrates.” Some offered advice and maxims for daily living. Others claimed to be authentic Pythagorean scientific and philosophical treatises. Many give themselves away today by showing heavy influence from Plato and his pupils, from Aristotle, and from the Stoics, or because their
authors made inept attempts to imitate the Doric dialect spoken by the Greeks in Magna Graecia in Pythagoras’ time.
²⁷
Even when it was not in “Doric,” the writing often had a flowery, pseudo-poetic flavor. (Think of modern attempts to sound like “merrye olde England” and the only slightly more sophisticated efforts of Victorian authors to reproduce medieval speech.) Other Pythagorean forgeries betray themselves simply by their banality; had these been the works of Pythagoras and his followers, the Pythagoreans would hardly have been worth remembering.
*

According to one count, at the height of the era of Pythagorean forgeries, there were eighty works “by Pythagoras” in circulation and two hundred purporting to be by his early followers.
²⁸
How could so many readers have been fooled? Not all were. Callimachus, in the mid-third century
B.C
., declared that a poem Pythagoras was supposed to have written was not authentic. He worked at the Library of Alexandria, and if anyone could spot a forgery, he could. Most readers cannot, however, be seriously blamed for failing to recognize that the pseudo-Pythagorean books were not genuine. The words from the fragment of
Posidonius, to the effect that a certain view “was originally that of Pythagoras but Plato developed it and made it more perfect,” reflected the assumption that Pythagorean and Platonic doctrines were virtually one and the same—that Plato’s philosophy derived from Pythagoras. For readers who believed that, and especially for those who were not aware of how different the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle were from each other, it was an easy step to believe that Aristotle also got his ideas from Pythagoras. So when Platonic and Aristotelian ideas showed up in works claiming to come from before the lifetimes of these two philosophers, why wonder? Was it not from these very documents that Plato and Aristotle had learned?

Pseudo-Pythagorean literature continued to appear for several centuries and was immensely popular. You could pick up a knowledge of “Pythagorean doctrine,” unaware or ignoring that it combined some genuinely old material with simplified or summarized Plato and Aristotle, mixed with a good dose of Stoicism, and (in the later books) given a neo-Platonic overcast. You could memorize the maxims of the
Golden Verses of Pythagoras
, or require your children to do so. As was true of
The Prophet
by Khalil Gibran in the twentieth century, you might not notice, or might not care, that what came in the format of authentic ancient wisdom was mostly a contemporary poetic invention and interpretation. The maxims were wise and some of them beautiful. You could find out what “Pythagoras” had recommended regarding the medicinal and magical powers of plants. If it caused you to feel better, this, rather than any scholarly debate, proved the efficacy and authenticity of the book. You could learn what “Archytas” had contributed to knowledge about architecture, agriculture, flutes, ethics, mechanics, wisdom, prosperity, adversity, and “intermediary comfort”—never mind that he had actually had little or nothing to say about some of these subjects. Roman and Hellenistic readers could devour these works, share them, discuss them, make gifts of them, have them read beautifully at weddings and funerals, find themselves uplifted and improved by their high-minded ideas and sometimes enlightened by information that was helpful or challenging no matter where it came from. Romans could feel that they knew something about—and had derived benefit from—their own, magnificent, nearly home-grown sage.

The pseudo-Pythagorean texts outlasted the Roman Empire.
On the World and the
Soul, supposedly by “Timaeus of Locri,” was still being
recopied in the Middle Ages by scholars who believed this was the early Pythagorean work from which Plato got his cosmology. Copernicus translated
Lysis’ Letter to Hipparchus
. One begins to realize the enormous research difficulties, distinguishing Pythagorean fact from fiction, that would confront Diogenes Laertius, Porphyry, and Iamblichus.

First and Second Centuries
A.D
.

F
ASCINATION WITH
P
YTHAGORAS
among Roman and Alexandrian philosophers and scholars of the first century
B.C
. led to a movement in the first and second centuries
A.D
. called middle-Platonic or neo-Pythagorean. Books and fragments from men powerfully drawn to what they believed were Pythagorean philosophical and mathematical ideas survive from this period. Some of these writers called themselves Pythagoreans. All regarded Pythagoras as a well-spring, in some cases as the unique wellspring, of a precious intellectual and philosophical heritage that had reached them through Plato.
¹
The association of Pythagoras with magic and the occult also continued. Nigidius Figulus’ first-century-
B.C
. version of Pythagoreanism contributed to a growing popular image of Pythagoras—and, oddly, Archytas—as magicians. Nigidius’ desire to bring back Pythagoreanism as a way of life and an ongoing approach to the world would attract others in the centuries to follow.

The most important neo-Pythagorean philosophers were, to a man, not from Rome but from other parts of the Empire—Alexandria, predictably, but also from what is now Turkey, from Syria, and even from the Atlantic coast of Spain. The cultlike groups flourished in Rome itself. Information about one of these came through Lucius Annaeus
Seneca, an eminent Roman statesman and orator of the first century
A.D
. Seneca was a pupil of Sotion, who belonged to a philosophical movement known as the Sextians. The founders, Quintus Sextius and his son, were men of strong moral fiber whose ideal was moral perfection. Theirs was a staunch, Roman approach in which the important thing about a philosophy was how it affected a man’s everyday behavior and practical life. Sextians were hard to distinguish from Stoics, but two of their practices were definitely considered to be “Pythagorean”: they did not eat the flesh of animals and they performed a self-evaluation at the end of each day, to take stock of personal moral improvement or decline. While no trace of that practice can be found in early Pythagorean communities, it had begun to be associated with “Pythagoreans” in the first century
B.C
., and Cicero called it a “Pythagorean custom.” Seneca described it, as he had learned it from Sotion: A Sextian asked himself, “What bad habit have I cured today?” “What temptation have I resisted?” “In what ways am I a better man?” Similar questions had appeared in the pseudo-Pythagorean booklet called the
Pythagorean Golden Verses
:

Never let slumber approach thy wearied eyelids

Ere thrice you review what this day you did:

Wherein have I sinned? What did I? What duty is neglected?

All, from the first to the last, review; and if you have erred, grieve in your spirit, rejoicing for all that was good
.
²

Sotion had also urged Seneca to adhere to a vegetarian diet, for “souls and animals return in regular cycles. Great men have believed this is so. If these things are true, you avoid guilt by abstaining from meat; if false, you gain in self-control.”
³
Seneca’s father, who abhorred philosophy, frowned on all this, but Seneca ignored him and avoided meat for more than a year, until under the reign of Tiberius it became dangerous to practice what might be interpreted as a foreign cult.