TO THINK LIKE GOD

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• Publisher: Parmenides Publishing
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN:
  9781930972001
• eBook ISBN:
  9781930972445
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Philosophy

CHAPTER II
The Pythagoreans

TRADITION VERSUS THE HISTORICAL ACCOUNT

In the history of the south Italian colonies, scanty as it is, there is a strong element of fancy, almost of myth. . . . In a word, scarcely an event in early south Italian history is not tinged with romantic or miraculous colour.

—T. J. Dunbabin⁶⁶

Conflicting Reports and Forgeries

To present a reliable account of Pythagoras’ life, death, and the anti-Pythagorean revolts is an almost impossible task. This is certainly not due to a lack of available testimony; on the contrary, we seem flooded with far too many versions of the same events. If we take only the circumstances of how Pythagoras’ death relates to the uprisings, we are confronted with the following, often contradictory testimony⁶⁷:

• Pythagoras was in Croton during the revolt.

• No, he was not present because he foresaw the coming difficulties and managed to move quietly to Metapontum.

• No, not only was he present, but he was inside a burning Pythagorean meetinghouse and just barely escaped.

• No, he was not in the meetinghouse, but he was in Croton, where he fled to the harbor, subsequently traveling from city to city in desperate search for shelter, only to be turned away repeatedly.

• No, he went only as far as a field of beans, where he was caught.

• No, he made it to Metapontum, but starved to death in the Temple of the Muses, beleaguered by his foes.

• No, he refused to eat on purpose, being heartbroken over the terrible fate of his followers.

• No, that is not the way he died; he had his throat cut after being captured near the field of beans.

• No, he was not even in Italy at that time, having journeyed abroad to take care of his old teacher, who was ill.

• No, his teacher had passed away a long time ago, and Pythagoras had moved to Metapontum

• some twenty years before these difficulties emerged.

• No, Pythagoras himself was long dead when all of this transpired.

• And so on.

These conflicting versions have come to be called the “traditional account” of Pythagoras’ fate—that is, traditional as opposed to historical. Even though most of these stories contradict each other, they are all part of the legend surrounding him, both in antiquity as well as today. This makes it quite impossible for the modern researcher to separate fact from myth. And the same difficulties hinder us from discovering more about the development of his society or the circumstances surrounding its demise. At best, one can speak of a “historical tradition,” with strong emphasis on the latter. A traditional account need not differentiate between verifiable events, legend and lore, and the “improvements” by subsequent writers. It need only pass on whatever stories were typical at the time on a given subject, usually those individual anecdotes that were most memorable. The popularity of little cookie-cutter sayings, or sound bites, is certainly not just a modern phenomenon, nor is the type of romanticism that feeds on the legendary, the larger-than-life.

Still, this kind of starry-eyed favoritism is not the worst thing to befall the documentation of Pythagoreanism, which is particularly evident when dealing with its “philosophical” doctrine. The sad truth is that much of what among nonexpert publications are indiscriminately propounded as genuine Pythagorean teachings are nothing but forgeries. The list of the spurious includes works such as The Golden Verses of Pythagoras, The Sacred Discourse, The Pythagorean Notebooks, On the Nature of the Cosmos and the Soul by Timaeus of Locri, and On the Nature of the Universe by Ocellus Lucanus.⁶⁸ The trend to propagate counterfeit Pythagorean works for profit or prestige may have arisen as early as the third century B.C.,⁶⁹ some 300 years after Pythagoras, and it continued unabated well into the new millennium. We even hear of attempts to mass-produce such fakes, as in the case of King Juba II of Mauretania (early first century A.D.), himself a well-educated author who had amassed a vast library of speculative texts, but who was widely known for being a passionate collector of Pythagoras’ writings.⁷⁰ The laws of supply and demand seem to have motivated multitudinous attempts to accommodate this need. Perhaps quite a few “suppliers” were suddenly surprised to find the lost books of Pythagoras in their grandmother’s attic. In any case, the total number of questionable works is undoubtedly in the hundreds.⁷¹

Almost No Mention of Pythagoras in Plato and Aristotle

Our first quasi-biographical data on Pythagoras originates after Plato and Aristotle, and it is conveyed by sources that are far less reliable. Oddly, these two philosophers barely mention him by name. Plato cites him only once in the Republic, and only to point out that the Samian had gifted his followers with a unique way of living—the so-called “Pythagorean life” — which made them stand out from the rest of mankind.⁷² And Aristotle, otherwise our best source on Pythagorean teachings, rarely mentions their alleged originator.⁷³ When Aristotle refers to the followers of this doctrine, he sometimes speaks of them as “those called Pythagoreans,” as if in quotation marks; the reason behind this qualification is still largely unresolved today. ⁷⁴ Some have speculated that he intended to differentiate between the political party and the “philosophical” school.⁷⁵ It is unfortunate that the work that Aristotle specifically dedicated to Pythagoreanism is irrecoverably lost.⁷⁶ Only a few references to it are preserved in the works of other, less dependable writers. The one historical statement that can be linked to Aristotle—very loosely, I might add—that has anything relevant to say about Pythagoras is a claim that the Samian foretold to his followers the coming of political strife, a hunch that supposedly compelled him to leave the city ahead of time and move secretly to Metapontum, a neighboring colony to the north of Croton.⁷⁷ All the other information preserved by Aristotle deals with Pythagorean doctrine or belief, but most, if not all, of it involves late fifth-century Pythagoreanism.⁷⁸ Whether a few of these ideas may have their roots in the early teachings—that is, to the old sage himself—cannot be ascertained.⁷⁹ So, lacking input from Plato and Aristotle, we have no choice but to turn to the testimony of subsequent biographers.

The Main Sources of Pythagorean Lore

There are six principal sources for the Pythagorean tradition (I have, as we have seen, no other way to refer to it). Three are from the fourth and third centuries B.C.: Aristoxenus of Tarentum, Dicaearchus and Timaeus of Tauromenium. The other three are much later and belong to the second and third centuries A.D.: Diogenes Laertius, Porphyry, and Iamblichus.⁸⁰

Aristoxenus of Tarentum (b. c. 370 B.C.⁸¹), a famous writer and musician, was a pupil of Aristotle. He is considered one of our most knowledgeable sources, largely because of his own claim that he was personally acquainted with the so-called Last Pythagoreans, a group of exiles, or their descendants, who had eventually migrated to mainland Greece. However, some speculate that he had an axe to grind with Plato and Aristotle—he criticizes them severely—and therefore, might have had an ulterior motive to make Pythagoreanism appear in the best possible light, if only to show how aberrant other philosophical directions were, or how much some of these other schools had “stolen” from Pythagoras.⁸² One of the most egregious falsities that goes back to Aristoxenus is the inclusion of two legendary lawmakers, Zaleucus and Charondas, in the ranks of the Pythagoreans. Both lived close to a century before Pythagoras, yet they are portrayed as willing followers of the wise master, who, seemingly, was so versed in all things that he even taught these legislators the art of lawmaking before he was born.⁸³ (Perhaps he did so in a previous life?)

Dicaearchus (b. c. 375?⁸⁴) was not only a fellow Aristotelian student but also a famous explorer, writer, and universal scholar who entertained a particular interest in the history of Pythagorean politics. His assessments seem a bit more objective than those of Aristoxenus.⁸⁵ He focuses largely on Pythagoras’ activity as a politician and public educator. Regarding the anti-Pythagorean uprisings, he seems to speak mostly of the events of the second revolt, and from him we have the much-quoted phrase that “everywhere [in Southern Italy] there were great riots, which even now the inhabitants of these places remember and tell about, calling them the riots in the time of the Pythagoreans.”⁸⁶ He is one of the principal sources on Pythagoreanism for Cicero (106–43 B.C.), the famous Roman philosopher/statesman, who mentions, as he is writing, that he has a sizeable stack of Dicaearchus’ ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on References, Translations, Citations, Notes, Bibliography, and Some Idiosyncrasies
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• I. Pythagoras
• II. The Pythagoreans
• III. In Want Of a Mathematics For The Soul
• IV. Pythagorizing Versus Philosophizing
• V. Parmenides
• VI. The Poem of Parmenides
• VII. The Poem’s Most Difficult Points Explained
• VIII. Guidelines For An Evidential Account
• IX. Methods of Proof and Disproof
• X. Irrationals and The Perfect Premise
• XI. Mind and Universe: Two Realms, Two Separate Approaches
• Appendix
• Subdivided Bibliography