The Music of Pythagoras (16 page)

Some Pythagoreans continued to hold, or rapidly regained, positions of political importance and possibly extended their influence over an
even wider area than before, but as these leaders became influential again in the government of the cities, they courted disaster by ruling more and more autocratically. A revolution unseated them in midcentury, about 454
B.C
. The second century
B.C
. historian Polybius repeated a description he found in earlier accounts: “The Pythagorean meeting places were burned down and general constitutional unrest ensued—a not unlikely event, given that the leading men in each state had been thus unexpectedly killed. The Greek cities in these regions were filled with bloodshed and revolution and turmoil of every kind.” The result this time was a Pythagorean diaspora—to Thebes, to Phlius (near Corinth), to Syracuse, and elsewhere. The curtain fell for the second and final time on the Pythagorean golden age in Magna Graecia. The original community that Pythagoras had taught no longer existed.

In a larger context, the story had only begun. From about this time, there were two discernible contrasting strands of thought in the ancient Mediterranean world: “Ionian,” from mainland Greece and that area of the Mediterranean; and “Pythagorean” or “Italian,” stemming from southern Italy. Through members of Pythagorean refugee communities and their intellectual descendants—and men like Plato who were drawn to their ideas—the remnants of the thinking of an obscure ancient group became a powerful worldview. By late antiquity, no one could claim to be a serious thinker and ignore the “Pythagorean” or “Italian” school.

Meanwhile, the
acusmatici/mathematici
split nevertheless continued to infect the scattered brotherhood, and the disagreement about who reflected the spirit and work of the first Pythagoreans still causes difficulty for anyone trying to discern the truth about that earliest era. Most educated people through the centuries would insist that the
mathematici
were the true Pythagoreans, preserving and extending the great Pythagorean mathematical legacy. The reason for this certainty is that it was the
mathematici
tradition that Plato handed down to the future. He made the choice for Western civilization.

Aristotle, a generation later than Plato, was well acquainted with both Pythagorean varieties and described an
acusmatici
legacy that in addition to the aphorisms included the miraculous legends, the doctrine of reincarnation and Pythagoras’ memory of his past lives. The
mathematici
legacy accepted most of that, too, but emphasized the different approach to the world and the soul through numbers,
mathematics, and music. The
mathematici
had preserved historical information: that Pythagoras came to Croton during the reign of Polycrates on Samos and had a powerful influence on the leaders of his new home city. Aristotle never traced a heritage of knowledge and mathematics to Pythagoras himself by naming names in succeeding generations, but he had no quarrel with the
mathematici
’s claim that this unbroken heritage existed.
²
Plato attributed a sophisticated version of the Pythagorean
mathematici
number theory not just to Pythagoreans but to Pythagoras himself.

T
HE SECOND HALF
of the fifth century
B.C
. (450 to 400) is still much alive in the cultural memory of the modern world. Greek tragedy had blossomed with Aeschylus and was continuing with the plays of Sophocles and Euripides, raising issues that need no modern context to make them relevant today. Aristophanes was scandalizing his delighted audiences, satirizing public affairs and leaders in brilliant, flagrantly indecent comedies. Though these would soon be dubbed “Old Comedy” as newer forms and subjects become fashionable, in the twenty-first century his
The Frogs
became a Broadway musical. The physician Hippocrates was working and writing, and medical school graduates more than two millennia later repeat the oath attributed to him. Athens, in mainland Greece, was picking up the pieces after a long conflict with the Persians and enjoying an interval of peace, growing rich from silver mines and tribute from other members of the Delian League, former allies in the Persian Wars. Unaware how short this respite would be before they became involved in the Peloponnesian Wars, Athenians restored their city, which the Persians had burned, and erected the Parthenon. In this half-century, Plato was born and grew to manhood, and Philolaus the Pythagorean, nearly fifty years Plato’s senior, wrote the first Pythagorean book—or at least the first that was destined to survive.

Philolaus was one of the refugees who left Croton or Tarentum at mid-century. He settled in about 454 in Thebes, a powerful old city northwest of Athens whose ancient origins made her a favorite setting for Greek dramas. She had once been the seat of the real King Oedipus. Politically, Thebes’ only consistent policy was hatred of Athens. She had sided against Athens in the Persian Wars and then collaborated with Sparta against her, an alliance that would last until nearly the end
of the Peloponnesian Wars at the close of the century. Thebes and Sparta would finally part ways when Thebes suggested the defeated Athenians be totally annihilated and Sparta disagreed.

It would appear that Thebes was not a particularly serene location for a fledgling brotherhood to pursue peaceful studies, but Philolaus founded a new exile Pythagorean community there. He had either died or moved elsewhere by the end of the century—information that comes indirectly through Plato, who in his dialogue
Phaedo
had a character named Cebes comment, “I heard Philolaus say, when he was living in our city. . .” Cebes’ city was Thebes, and this conversation was supposed to be taking place the day Socrates died in 399
B.C.
If Philolaus was still alive then somewhere else, he was seventy-five, but that reference to him was the last that has survived.

Some time between 450 and 399
B.C
., probably in Thebes, Philolaus set down an extensive written record of Pythagorean thought, something no Pythagorean had done before as far as anyone has been able to discover. The only traces of it today are fragments, mostly references in the writing of scholars during the first century
A.D
., long removed from his time.
*
In the nineteenth century there was controversy about whether Philolaus wrote a book and whether the fragments are genuine, but in 1893 a papyrus came to light with excerpts from a medical history by Menon, a pupil of Aristotle in the fourth century
B.C
., referring to a book by Philolaus that already existed then. Since that discovery, scholars have analyzed the Philolaus fragments in the context of the fifth century
B.C
., Philolaus’ century, and they largely agree about which are authentic.
³

Though it hardly seems fair to Philolaus, anyone looking for specifics about Pythagoras and what he taught is frustrated by the fact that Philolaus was a splendid thinker in his own right. He was writing his own book, not recording the discoveries or words of another man, and included his own thinking as well as what had evolved in the Pythagorean
mathematici
communities since Pythagoras’ death. Nevertheless, Philolaus definitely considered himself a Pythagorean, and, given the time frame, much of the science and doctrine in his book must have been a direct reflection of Pythagoras and his earliest followers. Philolaus was almost a direct link, for Pythagoras had died or disappeared from public view in 500
B.C
., only twenty-five years before Philolaus’ birth. Philolaus’ teachers and acquaintances as he grew up in Croton or Tarentum must have been almost exclusively Pythagoreans, and some of the older of them would have known Pythagoras.

An anachronistic, late fifteenth-century
A.D
. drawing, from a music theory book by Gaffurio, reveals how scholars of that era envisioned Pythagoras (and Philolaus, who was not actually Pythagoras’s contemporary) studying the ratios of musical harmony.

Unfortunately, Philolaus treated all of his material as a unified body of knowledge, making no distinctions between earlier and later, between the time Pythagoras was alive and the time of Philolaus’ writing, or between himself and others. He was not being careless. For a Pythagorean there was unity to truth, and unity to the search for it. The path to knowledge about the universe and the path to reunion with the divine were one and the same path. Truth about nature, and divine truth, were one and the same truth. In such a context, even if Pythagoras himself had not made a particular discovery, one could assume it had been implicit in his teachings. Furthermore, there was a form of ancient one-upmanship that Pythagoreans like Philolaus shared with their contemporaries. It was de-meaning to an idea or discovery to call it new or original. Knowledge became more credible the older it was and the more it could be attributed
to a great figure. Philolaus would have been loath to identify any source other than Pythagoras, even if it was himself.

Nevertheless, Philolaus was not without an agenda of his own. One of the clues that place his writing in the late fifth century
B.C
. was that he was trying to present Pythagorean ideas in a way that responded to a stalemate arising from “Eleatic” teaching.

The philosopher Parmenides was from Elea (hence “Eleatic”), a Greek colony north of Croton on Italy’s west coast. According to Plato he was born in 515
B.C
., but Greek chronicles say about 540. In either case, he was a younger contemporary of Pythagoras, but remarkably, in spite of the overlap of their lifetimes, the close proximity of Elea to Croton, and a passage in Plutarch that says Parmenides “organized his own country by the best laws,” only one early source gave Parmenides even the remotest link with Pythagoras or the Pythagoreans. The link was indirect, in Diogenes Laertius’ third-century-
A.D
. biography of Pythagoras:

[Parmenides] was also associated (as Sotion said) with Ameinias, son of Diochaites, the Pythagorean, a poor man but of good character. It was rather Ameinias that he followed: when Ameinias died he set up a shrine for him (Parmenides came from a famous, wealthy family); and he was led to calm by Ameinias and not by Zeophanes.

It would seem that if Parmenides “followed” Ameinias, was “led to calm” by him, and thought so highly of him as to set up a shrine, then Parmenides’ own thinking would show traces of Pythagorean ideas. Lured by this clue, scholars have repeatedly attempted to find elements of Pythagoreanism in Parmenides’ writing, with no success.

In a paradoxical twist, history celebrates Parmenides for insights that he did not claim were correct; for example, that the light of the Moon “always gazing at the rays of the Sun” is reflected light.
⁴
He laid out such ideas in Part 2 of a beautiful, enigmatic poem, after he had warned in Part 1—a guide to the Way of Truth—that what he was going to present in Part 2 was “deceitful.” He was not claiming to present “facts” or even opinions, only what human opinion on these matters might plausibly be at best.

He argued that those setting out on a voyage of “inquiry” probably mistakenly believed they had a choice between two subjects, things that existed and things that did not exist. But nonexistent things were unthinkable
and unsayable, and inquiry into them was “a trail of utter ignorance.” As for what existed, certain things had to be true about it: It had always to have existed, and it had to be indestructible. Otherwise there would be a chance it might at some time not exist, which was unthinkable and unsayable. It had also to be continuous in space and time (no gaps), unchanging and unmoving, and finite. Human senses told one otherwise, admitted Parmenides, but they could not be trusted. So much for any possibility of learning about the world by observing and experiencing it!

Melissus, another “Eleatic” philosopher, was an admiral from Samos, though his and Pythagoras’ lives there did not overlap. As Aristotle told the story, in 441
B.C
. Athens declared war on Samos. The Samians defeated Pericles himself in a sea battle, but Pericles survived and hostilities continued. When a stalemate dragged on, Pericles, bored and underestimating the Samians, led some of his ships away on an expedition. Melissus, commanding Samos’ fleet, took this opportunity to attack, “despising the small number of their ships and the inexperience of their commanders.”
⁵
This time the Athenian fleet suffered a devastating defeat. Samos destroyed many enemy ships, captured war supplies, and gained control of the eastern Mediterranean.

Melissus also found the time to write a prose version of Parmenides’
Way of Truth
, introducing new arguments to support Parmenides but disagreeing with him on key points. Melissus argued that whatever existed had to be infinitely extended in all directions, not be finite as Parmenides thought. For that reason, no more than one thing could be in existence. Melissus believed even more strongly than Parmenides that sense perception was an illusion, that reality was completely different from the way it appeared.