The Music of Pythagoras (31 page)

Nicomachus, earlier in Ptolemy’s century, had also assigned notes to each of the planets, but in his scale Earth was silent because it was sitting still.

When Ptolemy worked out his own system, he considered it such a significant accomplishment that he had it engraved on a slab of stone at Canopus near Alexandria.
²⁴
He felt that he had made a connection with ancient knowledge, taking the concept of the music of the spheres back to something close to the Pythagorean original. Venus and Mercury shared a note; the stars were in the chorus, with the highest note; the four elements sounded the two lowest notes. For the first time perhaps since the ancient Pythagoreans, the intervals used were larger than tones, half tones, and one and a half tones. Bruce Stephenson, who wrote that Ptolemy’s Canopic Inscription is so difficult to interpret that no one can claim to understand it completely and decipher it correctly, nevertheless made the following attempt.
²⁵
The notes (on a piano) are rough equivalents of what they would have been in the tuning in late antiquity:

What might have been the most significant part of Ptolemy’s
Harmonics
was lost before the Middle Ages. It is not certain whether some
text recovered in the fourteenth century by the Byzantine Nikephoros Gregoras is really part of what was missing. In the seventeenth century, Kepler translated the
Harmonics
and attempted to re-create the last three chapters, an exercise that helped him find the way to one of his most important discoveries. In spite of how little is left of the details of Ptolemy’s musical theory and the fact that what is left is not fully understood, Stephenson wrote,

What is clear today—and was clear to Kepler at the beginning of the seventeenth century—is that Ptolemy thought that orderly motion, in the heavens as in music, followed only certain kinds of patterns, so that study of the patterns in one field could in theory elucidate those in the other. Rational motion obeyed the same laws everywhere, in the celestial spheres as in the strings of the
lyra
, not for any mystical reason but precisely because those were the laws of rational motion. . . .

The motions of the planetary spheres could similarly be understood more deeply through an awareness of the principles they shared with musical harmony. In Ptolemy’s
Harmonics
, connections such as these were assumed to be rational, although they were not assumed to be understood—yet—in detail.
²⁶

In Ptolemy, the Pythagorean conviction that the universe is rational and that numerical relationships underpin nature, and the belief in an overall harmony binding creation together—all were here. But humans, if Ptolemy can be taken as an example, though no less obsessive about discovering this harmony, had grown more patient about teasing out examples of it, less prone to force the patterns, a little more willing to be taught by nature itself how the numbers play out.

Third–Seventh Centuries
A.D
.

D
IOGENES
L
AERTIUS, THE
earliest author to write a biography of Pythagoras that still survives substantially today, either was born in the town of Laerte in Cilicia—a region that in the days of the Roman Republic was the feared “Pirate Coast” and is now southeastern Turkey—or was a member of a prominent Roman family known as the Laertii and born in Rome. He was probably writing late in the second or early in the third century, during the reigns of the emperors Septimius Severus and his son Caracalla. Not only is nothing biographical known with certainty about him; he also never put his own philosophy in writing.

Reading his
Life of Pythagoras
, however, acquaints one rather well with Diogenes Laertius. His research method set him apart and makes him a delightful writer. Gathering as much information as he could, often in bits and pieces, he put together a rather informally written collection of biographical and bibliographical material, summaries of doctrines, sayings of philosophers, his own poetry about them, and comical and scandalous stories. Most of the time he scrupulously named his sources, and he liked to contrast one piece of information with another, sometimes pausing to try to assess their credibility. The greatest attraction and value of Diogenes Laertius’ writing comes from
his verbatim quoting (sometimes at length) from authors whose works are otherwise lost. Many of his sources are completely unknown except for his mention and the excerpts in his books. Pythagoras was not the only ancient thinker to interest him. The
Life of Pythagoras
was Book VIII of his ten-volume
Lives of the Philosophers
.

Much more can be said about Porphyry and Iamblichus, both of whom were major neo-Platonic philosophers in their own right. Iamblichus was Porphyry’s student, and Porphyry was in turn a disciple of the eminent Roman philosopher Plotinus.

Porphyry lived only a little later than Diogenes Laertius. He was born in about
A.D
. 233 in Tyre, in Phoenicia (now in southern Lebanon, then part of the Roman Empire), which may explain why he was the only one of the three biographers to link Pythagoras’ father with Tyre. “Porphyry” was not the name his parents gave him. He was Malchus, meaning “king,” and changed his name when he was in Athens in his early twenties at the suggestion of his teacher, the philosopher Longinus. Longinus knew that the area of Malchus’ birth was famous for a purple dye made from the crushed shells of sea snails mixed with honey. The color that resulted was porphyry, so highly prized and expensive that it had come to symbolize royalty. The connection—Malchus/king and Porphyry/royalty—suggested the name that may at first have been only Longinus’ nickname for him.

For ten years, Porphyry immersed himself in Platonic and Pythagorean doctrine at the feet of Longinus, whom someone described as “a living library and walking museum,” and during this period he published some unofficial oracles, utterances of mediums put into trances at private séances.
¹
When he moved to Rome to study with the even more eminent Plotinus, who was carrying forward Pythagorean and Platonic themes and the thoughts of other philosophic predecessors in a creative synthesis of his own, his new teacher turned him into a thoroughgoing advocate of a rational, intellectual approach to truth. However, neither Porphyry nor Plotinus ever entirely discounted magic and the supernatural. As the historian E. R. Dodds wrote of the period, “Could any man of the third century deny it?”
²

Romans were looking for encouragement wherever they could find it, in the natural or the supernatural.
³
Civil wars were following one after the other. The news of a new emperor hardly had time to spread before it was outdated. Rome was engaged in ruinously expensive
conflicts on two fronts—with the Persians in the Orient, with the Goths and other Germanic tribes to the northeast on the European river frontiers and the Black Sea. Septimus Severus—Julia Domna’s husband—and his son Caracalla had built the elaborate Baths of Caracalla at the beginning of the century, but most of the decades since had been a period of enforced austerity, with civilians sacrificing nearly all comforts and amenities to make sure the Roman legions could be paid and would remain loyal. Epidemics were rampant; imperial finances a disaster. The government put less and less gold and silver in the coins, and the currency collapsed, with prices rising nearly 1,000 percent between the years 258 and 275. This debacle would have touched Porphyry almost anywhere he might have lived in the Empire, but he was at the center of it, in Rome itself.

In the midst of what for many amounted to sheer misery, Plotinus continued to teach. He led seminars, wrote essays (which Porphyry collected in six books called the
Enneads
) and moved in aristocratic circles that included the court of the emperor Gallienus, who had intellectual and philosophical pretensions of his own and apparently enjoyed the philosopher’s company. Edward Gibbon candidly described Gallienus as

a master of several curious but useless sciences, a ready orator and an elegant poet, a skillful gardener, an excellent cook, and a most contemptible prince. When the great emergencies of the State required his presence and attention, he was engaged in conversation with the philosopher Plotinus, wasting his time in trifling or licentious pleasures, preparing his initiation to the Grecian mysteries, or soliciting a place in the Areopagus of Athens.
⁴

Gallienus became enthusiastic about Plotinus’ plan to create Plato’s Republic in the countryside near Rome. When the emperor’s interest waned, the idea was abandoned, and the city of Platonopolis was never built.

Porphyry’s mentor had a high regard for the Pythagorean and neo-Pythagorean concept of the One. It was, for Plotinus, the First Principle, transcending all else. The One, the Spirit, and the Soul were his trinity. Porphyry heard him teach that it was not possible even to think
about the One, much less to define it. There was no movement or number to it. It was just One, unity, absolute pure reality and goodness, never changed or diminished.
⁵
Plotinus’ One was close to the concept of God in Christianity, except that it never intervened in the world. It remained external, outside all orders of being. Yet, in the words of the historian Michael Grant, Plotinus thought the One “pours itself out in an eternal downward rush of generation which brings into being all the different, ordered levels of the world as we know it, in a majestic, spontaneous surge of living forms.”
⁶
This meant that all levels of the cosmos, all levels of existence, all living beings, were linked. Mortal bodies were base and degraded, but every soul had the potential to rise to reunion with the One by means of intellectual work and discipline, and life itself implied a longing for that reunion. The quest required banishing space, time, and body into a nothingness even more profound than the solitude of Numenius’ little “one-man skiff, all alone.” Plotinus claimed he had experienced this mystic union himself and there was nothing “magic” about it, “except the true magic which is the sum of love and hatred in the universe.”
⁷

This philosophy that Porphyry was studying was not depressing, but—perhaps because of conditions in Rome or for personal reasons—he sank into melancholy and considered taking his own life. Plotinus prescribed travel, so he went to Sicily. In 269 or 270, Plotinus died shortly after retiring to the country and Porphyry returned to become the head of his school.

Perhaps Dodd’s description of Porphyry as “an honest, learned, and lovable man, but no consistent or creative thinker”
⁸
was correct, but he was a prolific writer. In addition to publishing his teacher’s essays, he wrote more than seventy books on metaphysics, literary criticism, history, and the allegorical interpretation of myth, as well as his short
Life of Pythagoras
. He classed Pythagoras with Orpheus, Herakles, and Jesus, as “divine heroes” who led exemplary, devout lives and became immortal, but like many other neo-Platonists of his generation he saw Christianity as a dire threat to the Platonic tradition. Porphyry expressed his fears in a famous, now lost book called
Against the Christians
and in letters to the soon-to-be wife of his old age, Marcella. Though Christianity was still struggling, it was nearing the political triumph that would occur not long after Porphyry’s death, and its adherents thought of Jesus not as a divine hero but as equal to or one with God. Drawing believers and
potential believers away from Jesus was not the only motivation for Porphyry’s biography of Pythagoras—he intended it as a popular introduction to Platonic philosophy—but he did hope that getting it before the public would provide competition for the Christian Gospels. Readers then, like modern ones, were more drawn to a personality than to a collection of philosophical ideas, and, in Khan’s words, “among the Neoplatonists, it was Porphyry who reinstated Pythagoras as the patron saint of Platonic philosophy, in the tradition of Nicomachus and Numenius.”
⁹

Porphyry shared Numenius’ interest in ancient sources of Pythagoras’ knowledge. He concluded that the Egyptians, the Hebrews, and the ancient peoples of India and Mesopotomia had possessed not only invaluable but identical primordial wisdom, and that Pythagoras was the earliest to have this wisdom among the Greeks, with Plato later putting it most fully into words. True to his teacher Plotinus, Porphyry preferred a rational, intellectual approach to truth, but his enthusiasm for the richness and mystery of ancient sources of wisdom, and the fact that he lived in highly superstitious times, prevented him from dismissing miraculous reports about Pythagoras. He also had what Dodds described as “an incurable weakness for oracles,”
¹⁰
for which the rationalism of Plotinus had not succeeded in providing a permanent remedy. Porphyry died in
A.D
. 305, when he was seventy years old, soon after taking Marcella, to whom he had written many eloquent letters having to do with Platonic thought, as his young bride.