The Music of Pythagoras (7 page)

There was a possible lost source of information about Pythagoras’ years in Croton that would add credibility to the details of the tradition, if one could be certain it existed. The most skeptical scholars disdain it, while others point out that it is improbable that it did not exist. Porphyry thought it did. Referring to a time after Pythagoras died and many of his associates had been killed, he wrote:

The Pythagoreans now avoided human society, being lonely, saddened and dispersed. Fearing nevertheless that among men the name of philosophy would be entirely extinguished . . . each man made his own collection of written authorities and his own memories, leaving them wherever he happened to die, charging their wives, sons and daughters to preserve them within their families. This mandate of transmission within each family was obeyed for a long time.
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Such journals, as Porphyry implied, possibly gave the semi-historical tradition a better footing in fact than it would otherwise have had and were responsible for its being strong in details many of which are not the sort identifiable as the usual stuff of pure legend. Weighing against their existence is the fact that some pseudo-Pythagorean books later claimed to be such journals, and these forgeries may have been responsible for Porphyry’s, and others’, faith in the journals’ reality. On the other hand, the existence of fictionalized journals does not necessarily mean there were no authentic ones, only that there was a strong rumor there had been, and that the claim to be a Pythagorean “memory book” could make a book a sure sell.

In Iamblichus’ account, probably taken from Dicaearchus, Pythagoras began his approach to the Crotonians by conversing with some of the youth of the city whom he met in the gymnasium. There could hardly have been a surer way to endear himself to their elders than by advising young people to honor their parents, practice temperance, and cultivate a love of learning, but Pythagoras must have had amazing charisma, for such teaching seems unlikely to have aroused enthusiasm among the young.

Hearing of him from their sons, members of the Thousand invited Pythagoras into their assembly to share any thoughts that would be advantageous to Crotonians in general. Such an invitation was not unusual in a Greek city, especially when a man’s pedigree in his native country was as unimpeachable as that of any of the local worthies. The Apostle Paul, soon after his arrival in Athens, was similarly invited to speak before the Areopagus, where Athenians and foreigners “spent their time talking about and listening to the latest ideas.”
⁴
In a cosmopolitan city like Croton, high-ranking citizens were eager to meet a man recently arrived from an even more cosmopolitan area abroad.

Pythagoras complied with the request. Some of his advice (as reported by Iamblichus) was predictable, some unusual: Build a temple to the Muses to celebrate symphony, harmony, rhythm, and all things conducive to concord, he proposed. Symphony, harmony, and concord were going to be central to Pythagorean doctrine, and also to the neo-Pythagoreanism of Iamblichus’ era. Consider yourselves the equals of those you govern, not their superiors, Pythagoras advised the rulers. Establish justice, with members of the government taking no offense when someone contradicts them. End procrastination. At home, make a deliberate effort to win the love of your children, for while other compacts are engraved on tablets and pillars, the marital compact is made incarnate in children. Never separate parents from their children—the greatest of evils. Avoid sexual relations with any other than a marital partner. If you seek an honor, seek it as a racer does, not by trying to injure competitors but merely by trying to achieve the victory for yourself. If you seek glory, strive to
become
what you wish to
seem
to be.

The simplicity and charm of this list—and its lack of pomposity—lend it an air of authenticity. These teachings may merely have been Iamblichus’ late-Roman ideas put in Pythagoras’ mouth, but it was the sort of advice that would have been remembered in an oral history or memory book and would have appeared, either from earlier Pythagorean sources or newly minted, in the teachings of the various groups that considered themselves Pythagorean in the centuries separating Pythagoras from Iamblichus. Iamblichus’ account goes on to say that the elders were impressed. They built the temple and many sent their concubines packing. They asked Pythagoras to address the young
men in a formal setting, and also to address the women of the city, whose inclusion was a strong theme in the Pythagorean tradition.

In Pythagoras’ address to the young men, said Iamblichus, he repeated what he had taught those he met in the gymnasium, adding that they should not revile anyone or revenge themselves on anyone who reviled them, and that they should practice listening, as a way of learning to speak. Iamblichus interjected a personal opinion that because of these moral teachings to the youth, Pythagoras really did deserve to be called divine.

In Pythagoras’ address to the women, wrote Iamblichus, he expressed high regard for female piety—particularly important in a city whose goddess was connected with all matters pertaining to women. He recommended equity and modesty and appropriate offerings rather than blood and dead animals or anything extravagant. Women should be cheerful in conversation and behave so that others could speak only good of them. A woman should know that it was all right to love her husband more than she loved her parents. She should not oppose her husband, but apparently it was acceptable to discuss matters with him and disagree, because Pythagoras said that if her husband gave way to her, she must not overinterpret that and think he had made himself subject to her. Again Iamblichus reported success that seems too good to be true: Marital faithfulness in Croton became proverbial. Women offered their costliest garments in the temple of Hera.

Though Iamblichus went into greater detail than Diogenes Laertius or Porphyry, the latter two were not silent when it came to what Pythagoras taught the Crotonians. Diogenes Laertius reported a teaching Iamblichus failed to mention: Some men have a “slavish disposition” and are “born hunters after glory,” like men in a Great Game contending for prizes. Others are covetous, like those who come to the game for “purposes of traffic.” Others are spectators. These are the seekers after the truth. Twenty-six centuries after Pythagoras (and about seventeen after Diogenes Laertius), Bertrand Russell would make much of this Pythagorean distinction. Diogenes Laertius also mentioned Pythagoras’ advice not to pray for specific things, because you do not know what is good for you.

Iamblichus summed up Pythagoras’ teaching in what he called the “epitome of Pythagoras’s own opinions,” which he would continue to stress in private and in public: one should by all means possible
amputate disease from the body, ignorance from the soul, luxury from the belly, sedition from the city, discord from the household, and excess from all things whatsoever. Iamblichus also praised Pythagoras’ teaching method—not to spout facts and precepts but to teach things (such as the power of remaining silent) that would prepare his listeners to learn the truth in other matters as well.

Porphyry described the splendid physical impression Pythagoras made: “His presence was that of a free man, tall, graceful in speech and in gesture.” He was “endowed with all the advantages of nature and prosperously guided by fortune.”
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Iamblichus numbered the followers who soon gathered around Pythagoras at six hundred. Members of the brotherhood were advised to regard nothing as “exclusively their own,” wrote Diogenes Laertius. Friendship implied equality. They were to own all possessions in common and bring their goods to a common storehouse. Apparently, to judge from an incident later, in Syracuse, a good many Pythagoreans complied with this advice. Because of this “common sharing,” Pythagoras’s followers became known as Cenobites, from the Greek for “common life.”

However, not all Pythagoreans had equal status within the community. The six hundred were Pythagoras’ “students that philosophized,” wrote Iamblichus, Porphry, and their source, Nicomachus. There was a much bigger group, called the Hearers, about two thousand men who along with their wives and children would gather in an auditorium “so great as to resemble a city” and built for the purpose of coming to learn laws and precepts from Pythagoras. It hardly seems a practical possibility that these people, presumably including many of Croton’s most prosperous, influential citizens, all “stopped engaging in any occupation.” However, according to the three biographers they did all live together for a while in peace, they held one another in high esteem, and they shared at least a portion of their possessions. Many, it seems, revered Pythagoras so greatly that they ranked him with the gods as a genial, beneficent divinity, but Iamblichus observed that, contra Nicomachus’ account, they perhaps did not all think of Pythagoras quite as a god. In his treatise
On the Pythagoric Philosophy
, Aristotle wrote that the Pythagoreans made a distinction among
“rational animals”: There were gods, and men, and beings in between like Pythagoras.

W
HEN
P
YTHAGORAS
first arrived, Croton was at a low ebb of military prestige and clout. The communities of Magna Graecia were in a chronic state of conflict, internal and external, each attempting with varying success to dominate and enslave the next. The latest dismal chapter in this story had been Croton’s embarrassing defeat by the army of the city of Locri at the Sagras river, a few miles to her south. Iamblichus called Croton “the noblest city in Italy,” but in 530
B.C.
she was licking her wounds from that disaster, while Sybaris was still a jewel in the crown of Greek colonial cities.

Croton nevertheless controlled considerable territory. Her normally acknowledged
chora
extended at least as far as what are now the river Neto to the north, in the direction of Sybaris, and the river Tacino to the south. The coastal lands between those two river mouths (with the city centered between) were hers, and away from the coast Croton’s territory extended into the mountains, where the tributaries of the two rivers originate among precipitous slopes and deep, narrow valleys
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reminiscent of the early colonists’ homeland in Achaea. In the two centuries since Myskellos had brought those settlers, the coastal forests had begun to disappear, and the farmlands most vital to the life of Croton’s people were large clayey plains to the south of the city, watered by numerous springs and two more rivers and divided into farmsteads that cultivated wheat and cereals. Other cleared areas to the north were suitable for livestock.

Inevitably a community expected a man like Pythagoras to assume a public role, and he and his associates soon did, either by advising the oligarchical leaders or as part of the oligarchy. They became influential, probably extremely so, not only in the city and its environs but in other communities of the region. Porphyry reported that Pythagoras was so extraordinarily persuasive that Simicus, the tyrant of Centoripa, “heard Pythagoras’s discourse, abdicated his rule, and divided his property
between his sister and the citizens.” Local lore still today agrees with the early historians that Pythagoras inspired a love of liberty in the cities of Magna Graecia and restored their individual independence, and that he and his followers were so successful in rooting out partisanship, discord, and sedition, and in establishing just laws, that the cities flourished in peace for several generations and became models for others before again falling into disputes and warfare. “Love of liberty” may be a later ideal attributed with hindsight to the Pythagoreans. Political thinking during Pythagoras’ period in the Greek world saw good government not in terms of how much liberty was allowed but in terms of order and the well-being of the community.
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Diogenes Laertius had information that Pythagoras gave the Crotonians a constitution, and that he and his followers were an “aristocracy” in the highest, literal sense of the word: “rule by the best.”

In 510
B.C
., twenty years after Pythagoras’ arrival in Croton, Milo, of Olympic wrestling and ox-toting fame and by then a follower of Pythagoras, led Croton’s army against her opulent neighbor Sybaris. Like a latter-day Thales, Milo reputedly exercised his own brand of military hydraulics, diverting the river Crathis to flood the enemy city, and the army of Pythagorean Croton razed Sybaris to the ground. Modern Sibari occupies a different site from Greek Sybaris. Because the more ancient Sybaris perished forever with the defeat by Croton, the archaeological site there, buried beneath a Roman town and part of the Appian Way, has yielded a treasure trove of artifacts. Among them are covered pots from the seventh century
B.C
. the size of modern sugar bowls, whose lids are decorated with what later would be called Pythagorean triangles. It was a super-wealthy, cultured—indeed, “sybaritic,”—city that Milo destroyed, but though archaeologists have done extensive work, the only trace visible to modern visitors is a water-filled hole beneath excavations of the Roman town.

With Sybaris gone, Croton’s influence and power in the region reached a zenith, and historians credit Pythagoras and the teaching and training he initiated with bringing about this rise in Croton’s fortunes. If Diogenes Laertius, Porphyry, and Iamblichus are to be believed—and modern scholarship does not say them nay—he was an ancient example, and arguably the most successful one in history, of Plato’s “philosopher king.”

Or was it all a sham? There is a darker version of the tradition that
has Pythagoras and his followers ruling in an autocratic, repressive way. In this retelling, the war with Sybaris began when Croton, at Pythagoras’ insistence, gave sanctuary to five hundred citizens of Sybaris who had been stripped of their property and banished. A social reform in Sybaris had justifiably confiscated the excessive wealth of these five hundred and distributed it to the poor, and Pythagoras’ sympathy for the formerly rich exiles revealed him in an unfavorable light as a defender of an autocratic and repressive status quo. This story does not actually conflict with the reputed egalitarianism of the Pythagoreans, for there is no evidence that their egalitarianism applied to society in general outside the Pythagorean brotherhood. No one knows what reasons Pythagoras might have had for wishing to restore the status quo in Sybaris, or whether his reforms in Croton were motivated by personal demagoguery, a desire to strengthen the aristocratic class structure, or a wish to transform the communities to conform to higher moral standards. All the early biographers—and fervent revolutionaries of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe—were sure it was the last.