by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
The Agenda of the Milesian School
In 1997, William Mullen, Professor of
Classical Studies at Bard College, gave a conference talk entitled: Natural
Catastrophes during Bronze Age Civilisation in which he
outlined what he saw as the Agenda of the Milesian School.
Topics held in common
by the first three pre-Socratic philosophers from Miletos in the Sixth Century
B.C.E., Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, and by Xenophanes from neighbouring Colophon, taken together may
be viewed as constituting the agenda of a "Milesian School".
The agenda included a
survey of the known kosmos (the orderly arrangement of the inhabited world
surrounded by regularly moving heavenly bodies); redefinitions of divinity;
and theories of the natural processes, constantly in operation, by which both
kosmos and divinity are to be understood. It also included explanations of
phenomena most men deemed terrifying: thunder, lightning, earthquakes,
eclipses, and periodic destruction of the kosmos itself. It set about to
explain these phenomena in terms of the same elemental processes
(transformations of water, rarefaction and condensation of air, separating out
of fire, air, water and earth, periodic reabsorption of these elements into a
state of dynamic equilibrium) as it invoked to explain the orderly arrangement
of the earth and the heavenly bodies. In so doing, it implied the
baselessness of the traditional Olympian religion which attributed
lightning and earthquakes to whims of Zeus and Poseidon and world-destructions
to battles of the sky-gods.
The ultimate Milesian
agenda may therefore have been to liberate people from paralysing fear of the
immediate recurrence of celestial disturbances in the recent past. By insisting
that world-destructions occurred only in vast cycles of time (such as a
"great year" whose winter solstice was Deluge and summer solstice
Conflagration) the Milesian School was schematically distorting memories of
recent disturbances, and its activity may be seen as part of a general pattern
of oblivion and psychological distancing common to all cultures after the end
of the Bronze Age catastrophes. But by insisting that these world-destructions
occurred only as the result of unalterable elemental processes, it was also
erecting a proto-scientific bulwark against apocalyptic thinking and behavior.
So, indeed, it may have been a conscious
program to quell the disorder that inevitably arose when comets appeared, which
suggests that comets were, indeed, appearing with some regularity, though they
were no longer as threatening as they had been in the previous era of mass
destruction. Nevertheless, the philosophers of the Milesian school lived in
very interesting times. The period of time during which they philosophized
dated (roughly) from 630-475 BC. Recall our catalogue of historical comet
sightings from above which I’ll repeat here:
633 BC,
China: A broom star comet appeared in Auriga with its tail pointing toward Shhu
State. (Ho, 4)
613 BC,
Autumn, China: A broom star comet entered the constellation of the Great Bear.
(Ho, 5)
532 BC,
Spring, China: A new star was seen in Aquarius. (Ho, 6)
525 BC,
Winter, China: A bushy star comet appeared in the winter near Antares. (Ho, 7)
516 BC,
China: A broom star comet appeared. (Ho, 8)
500 BC,
China: A broom star comet was seen. (Ho, 9)
482 BC,
Winter, China: A bushy star comet appeared in the east. (Ho, 10)
481 BC,
Winter, China: A bushy star comet was seen. (Ho, 11)
480 BC,
Greece: At the time of the Greek battle of Salamis, Pliny noted that a comet,
shaped like a horn (ceratias type), was seen. (Barrett, 1)
So keep
that in mind as you consider the details of these philosophers’ lives.
Thales 624 – 548 BC
The earliest blossoming of Greek science following the Dark Age that prevailed
after the collapse of the Bronze Age is associated with the Ionian or Milesian
school located at Miletus, on the Western
coast of Anatolia, in what is modern day Turkey. During the 6th
century BC, it was considered to be the greatest and wealthiest Greek city even though it was not in
Greece proper. This city, formerly occupied by speakers of an Indo-European
language, Luwian (closely related to Hittite), who disappeared in the collapse
of the Bronze Age, was said to have been resettled by Ionian Greeks around 1000
BC. Please notice that Ionia really isn’t Greece. So it looks like ‘Greek
Civilization’ as we know it actually belongs to Anatolia, and only later did
they colonize Greece, proper. That, of course, doesn’t mean that there weren’t
connections between the Mycenaean Greeks and the Ionians; perhaps some of them
fled Greece to Anatolia during the disruptions. It might even be thought that
the Thracians were the remnant of the Mycenaean Greeks. We do know that there
was intellectual discourse taking place in Greece, proper, i.e. Homer, Hesiod,
Alcman and Pherecydes, and that it was somewhat different from what was going
on in Anatolia.
In any event, Thales founded a school at
Miletus (Diogenes tells us that his parents were Phoenician, so even he was not Greek) around 600 BCE, that was
destined to be the root of ‘Greek art and philosophy’. Thales taught that the
Earth was a flat disc or short cylinder floating on a vast primordial ocean of
sorts. His main agenda seemed to be to explain natural phenomena without
involving mythology. As we will see, almost all of the pre-Socratic
philosophers followed this trend.
Thales is hailed as the first true
mathematician because he used geometry to calculate such things as the height
of pyramids and the distance of ships from the shore. According to Herodotus,
Thales predicted a solar eclipse which has been determined to have occurred on
May 28th, 595 BCE. (The same time Epimenides was heading to Athens
to save them from a plague.) He supposedly wrote works concerning the solstices
and equinoxes, but nothing has survived. Diogenes apparently had some texts to
hand because he quotes letters of Thales to Pherecydes and Solon. In these
letters, he states that the Milesians were actually Athenians, which suggests
that they were refugees from Greece.
Thales was apparently into making weather
predictions based on his studies and utilizing his accuracy in this respect to
make the point that philosophy wasn’t a waste of time. He also engaged in political life. It was in the context of the
military defense of the region against the Persians that he made his solar
eclipse prediction. Apparently, it was so impressive that the two peoples laid
down their arms and made peace sworn with a blood oath!
Thales was counted among the ‘Seven Sages
of Greece’, a list made up (obviously) sometime after all of them were dead.
According to Demetrius Phalereus, the list of honorees was made up about 582/1
BC. Dicaearchus of Messina (350-285 BC) commented that none
of them were either sages or philosophers, but merely shrewd men with a turn
for legislation. That suggests even more strongly that their ideas were
driven by a need for political stability and to change the way the public
perceived the relationship between the leaders and the cosmos. A parallel (and
complementary) perspective is that Thales and his colleagues represented a new
kind of community: one that inquires into the nature of things without recourse
to the ‘old ways and explanations’. They were possessed by the ideal of Truth,
so to say.
Thales profoundly influenced later philosophy,
and we are told that his student was Anaximander, who was alleged to be one of
the teachers of Pythagoras. As we will see, not all of these philosophers
thought the same things. This age is often referred to as the ‘Axial Age’ and
it is notable for the fact that revolutionary thinking arose in widely
separated places at the same time: China, India, Iran, the Near East, and so
on. One really gets the idea that something about the environment had changed
dramatically since the cosmic and environmental cataclysms at the end of the
Bronze Age.
Anaximander 610 – 545 BC
Thales was followed by Anaximander, who is
thought to have introduced the sundial to the Greeks, which he got from the Babylonians. He also
drew a map of the inhabited world. He claimed that nature, like human
societies, is ruled by laws and anything that breaks natural laws suffers
repercussions. Right there we have a hint of his interest in power politics and social control.
Anaximander thought that everything was
derived from some undifferentiated living mass (as opposed to the primordial
ocean). Things just grew out of this ‘cosmic egg’, the first four things being
fire, air, water and earth. This cosmology partly resembles modern cosmological
theories such as the Big Bang.
Anaximander proposed that air or denser
vapors would have burst out of fiery surrounding membranes, and then enveloped
the remaining flames, producing wheels of
fire enclosed in mist. These enveloped wheels of fire then encircled the
Earth. Planets and stars were circular wheels of fire which became visible due
to holes in the enclosing hoops (globes?) that permitted the fire to ‘leak out’.
That is, Anaximander’s cosmic bodies were rather like lighted jets of gas
shooting through a punctured sheet of metal.
Anaximander taught that the world was
transitory and would eventually dissolve back into infinite space (the ‘Big
Crunch’). He also said that there were many worlds, which he identified with
the gods who were also transitory and renewable. He associated this dissolution
and renewal with definite cycles and
this strongly suggests influence from Iranian/Persian cosmology and, possibly, study of comets.
An important point about Anaximander’s cosmology
was his insistence that the hoops-with-holes, that were supposed to be ‘stars’,
all lay beneath the Sun and Moon.
This idea has puzzled many commentators, but it might be understood if
Anaximander was actually talking about comets or even fireballs in the Earth’s
atmosphere. Intense meteor showers associated with a bright comet would easily
give the impression that the stars lay below the Sun and Moon.
We can, of course, ask the question: was
the Greek word for ‘star’ used to describe a single class of objects? The fact
that some stars were described as disappearing
due to their increasing distance from the viewer on Earth suggests that
some of these ‘stars’ were actually comets.
Important to our study is the fact that the
3rd century Roman rhetorician Aelian claims that Anaximander was the leader of the Milesian colony to
Apollonia on the Black Sea coast. Aelian’s Various History tells us that philosophers
often dealt with political matters. Most scholars suppose that leaders of
Miletus sent him there as a legislator to create a constitution or simply to
maintain the colony’s allegiance. But we are reminded of the comment of
Dicaearchus cited above: that these really weren’t philosophers, but shrewd men
with political agendas and I will make note (as I have already) of those who
appear to have had political connections.
If they were, truly, philosophers and, by
some miracle, the powers of the time saw wise men as useful in government, one
is still compelled by the idea that there was a political agenda to giving
philosophers of this orientation such roles so as to establish and maintain
certain ideas in respect of the cosmos for political reasons, as Ballie, Clube
and Napier suggest. Is it even possible that leaders of those times could sit
down and consciously decide that ‘this business about comets being gods needs
to be dealt with since it threatens the control of the rulers’? It would
probably have been clear that it did, in fact, threaten them because the ‘old
way’ had been to sacrifice the leaders if it was perceived that the gods were
angry or hungry.
Pythagoras – The Italian School
Pythagoras of Samos (570-495 BC) was the
founder of the religious movement called Pythagoreanism. Let me first tell you
the briefest outline of the story
about him before we get to the actual facts, as far as we can find them out.
Pythagoras was born on the Greek island
Samos and traveled widely seeking knowledge. He had himself initiated into all
of the mystery schools in Greece and foreign countries. He learned the Egyptian
language and journeyed to the lands of the Chaldeans and Magi. Then, in Crete,
he went into the cave of Ida with
Epimenides where the baby Zeus was said to have been hidden from his
father, Chronos. After all that, he returned to Samos and found his country
under the rule of a tyrant, Polycrates, so he sailed to Croton (about 530 BCE) and there, became a leader who created a
constitution for the Italian Greeks. He and his 300 followers thereby
instituted a ‘true aristocracy’ or government by the best qualified (as
Diogenes puts it). According to other sources, when Polycrates effected his
coup at Samos, members of the old aristocracy were either sent into exile or
voluntarily left. Otherwise, Polycrates was said to have been a very popular
ruler who worked hard to improve the quality of life of the people of Samos. He
was an ally of the Egyptian king Amasis who paid the Samians well to maintain
naval defense in the region.
Diogenes quotes Heraclitus in refutation of the idea that Pythagoras left no
writings:
Pythagoras, son of
Mnesarchus, practiced inquiry beyond all other men, and in this selection of
his writings made himself a wisdom of his own, showing much learning but poor
workmanship.
He then goes on to say that Pythagoras
wrote three books: On Education, On Statesmanship, and On Nature.
Then he mentions that Aristoxenus said that Pythagoras derived his moral doctrines
from the Delphic priestess, Themistoclea. In short, at least one of his
teachers was a woman. Diogenes then enumerates the teachings of Pythagoras from
the three books as follows:
He forbids us to pray
for ourselves, because we do not know what will help us. Drinking he calls, in
a word, a snare, and he discountenances all excess, saying that no one should
go beyond due proportion either in drinking or in eating. Of sexual indulgence,
too, he says, “Keep to the winter for sexual pleasures, in summer abstain; they
are less harmful in autumn and spring, but they are always harmful and not
conducive to health.” Asked once when a man should consort with a woman, he
replied, “when you want to lose what strength you have ...”
The following are excerpts from Diogenes’ Life of Pythagoras.
According to Timaeus, he was first to say “Friends have all things
in common”… indeed, his disciples did put all their possessions into one common
stock …
Indeed, and his
disciples held the opinion about him that he was Apollo come down from the far
north …
This is interesting considering other clues
that Pythagoras’ (and Pherecydes) ideas had a more northern origin.
We are told by
Apollodorus the calculator that he offered a sacrifice of oxen on finding that
in a right-angled triangle the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the squares
on the sides containing the right angle. …
Apollodorus, surnamed Logisticus (the
Calculator), may have been Apollodorus of Seleucis, a Stoic philosopher and
pupil of Diogenes of Babylon. He wrote on ethics and physics and is otherwise
frequently cited by Diogenes Laërtius. Cicero comments on this statement,
saying that he does not question the discovery, but doubts the story of the
sacrifice of the ox.
He is also said to have
been the first to diet athletes on meat, trying first with Eurymenes – so we
learn from Favorinus in the third book of his Memorabilia –
whereas in former times they had trained on dried figs, on butter (cheese), and
even on wheat-meal… some say it was a certain trainer named Pythagoras who
instituted this diet, and not our Pythagoras, who forbade even the killing, let
alone the eating, of animals… as we are told by Aristotle…
Here we have a little difference of opinion
on the dietary matter. I would suggest that, if it is true that Pythagoras was
strongly influenced by northern teachings, he most certainly advocated the
eating of meat strongly and it was only later mythmakers who created the
vegetarian fraud. In fact, it is most likely that the life and doings of
Empedocles, a philosopher cum religious prophet born in Sicily about 490 BCE,
was conflated with Pythagoras.
Like Epimenides, Empedocles was reputed to
have miraculous powers such as the ability to cure disease, avert epidemics,
control storms, etc. He wrote in verse and one of his poems is entitled Purifications
and seems to have promised miraculous powers, rejuvenation, destruction of
evil, etc. He was associated with various Pythagoreans, and his abstinence from
meat was widely known. He also claimed to be a god incarnate. His doctrine of
the four elements remained fundamental for the theory of matter for more than
twenty centuries. In this we see that the dual role of a religious prophet and
a mathematical philosopher that the tradition assigns to Pythagoras is
certainly possible – even a common topos of the time – but not necessarily
historical.
Down to the time of
Philolaus it was not possible to acquire knowledge of any Pythagorean doctrine
and Philolaus alone brought out those three celebrated books which Plato
sent a hundred minas to purchase. Not less than six hundred persons went to his
evening lectures; and those who were privileged to see him wrote to their
friends congratulating themselves on a great piece of good fortune …
Here we discover something crucially
interesting: that the alleged books of Pythagoras were placed into the hands of
none other than Plato! And, we can’t be certain that Philolaus didn’t write
them himself!
The rest of the
Pythagoreans used to say that not all his doctrines were for all men to hear,
our authority for this being Aristoxenus in the tenth book of his Rules of Pedagogy…
This next excerpt is particularly
interesting in light of the diet issue:
Above all, he forbade
as food red mullet and blacktail, and he enjoined abstinence from the hearts
of animals and from beans and sometimes, according to Aristotle, even from
paunch and gurnard (two types of fish) …
Obviously, if his students are warned not
to eat the hearts of animals, that is an explicit acknowledgement that they
were eating the rest of the animal as is confirmed by the following:
He used to practice
divination by sounds or voices and by auguries, never by burnt-offerings,
beyond frankincense … some say that he would offer cocks, sucking goats and porkers…
but lambs, never. However, Aristoxenus has it that he consented to the eating
of all other animals, and only abstained from ploughing oxen and rams …
Diogenes cites Aristotle:
Aristotle says, in his
work On the Pythagoreans, that Pythagoras enjoined abstention from
beans either because they are like the privy parts, or because they are like
the gates of Hades (for this is the only plant that has no joints), or because
they are destructive, or because they are like the nature of the universe, or because
they are oligarchical (being used in the choice of rulers by lot). Things that
fall from the table they were told not to pick up – to accustom them to eating
with moderation, or because such things marked the death of someone. And
Aristophanes, too, says that the things that fall belong to the heroes, when in
his Heroes he urges: ‘Do not taste what falls inside the table.’ They must not
touch a white cock, because this animal is sacred to the Month and is a
suppliant, and supplication is a good thing. The cock was sacred to the Month
because it announces the hours; also, white is of the nature of the good, black
of the nature of the bad. They were not to touch any fish that was sacred,
since it was not right that the same dishes should be served to gods and to
men, any more than they should to freemen and to slaves. They must not break
the loaf (because in old times friends met over a single loaf, as barbarians do
to this day), nor must they divide the loaf which brings them together. Others
explain the rule by reference to the judgment in Hades; others say that
dividing the loaf would produce cowardice in war; others explain that it is
from the loaf that the universe starts.
The first thing to point out is that none
of these rules enjoin vegetarianism. There is, in fact, no 5th
century evidence whatsoever that the Pythagoreans renounced animal sacrifice
and the subsequent eating of the sacrifice. In fact, since the focal point of
the Greek polis, in which Pythagoras and his followers played such a leading
role for several generations, was the regular public sacrifice and feasting, is
a powerful implication that they were not, at all, in any way, vegetarians. The
evidence for Pythagoras being a meat eater are more numerous, and older, than
the evidence for vegetarianism which seems to be both a conflation with
Empedocles and a consequence of the later Platonic myths.
Hieronymus … says that,
when he [Pythagoras] had descended into Hades, he saw the soul of Hesiod bound fast to a
brazen pillar and gibbering, and the soul of Homer hung on a tree with serpents
writhing about it, this being their punishment for what they had said about the
gods; he also saw under torture those who would not remain faithful to their
wives.
According to Diogenes, this is what
Aristotle said about Pythagoras at one point:
But Pythagoras’ great
dignity not even Timon overlooked, who, although he digs at him in
his Silloi, speaks of: Pythagoras, inclined to witching works and ways,
Man-snarer, fond of noble periphrase. …
Further, we are told
that he was the first to call the heaven the universe and the earth spherical
(according to Favorinus), though Theophrastus says it was Parmenides, and Zeno
that it was Hesiod.
The spherical Earth was actually first
asserted in the work of Parmenides and Empedocles while the Ionian school
continued with their flat-earth theories for a rather long time.
Allegedly, Pythagoras followers practiced rites
developed by him based on what he had learned and developed via his travels and
studies. What is more, the Pythagoreans took an active role in the politics of Croton and this is what led to their
downfall, apparently. The Pythagorean meeting places were burned and Pythagoras
and his followers were forced to flee and he is said to have ended his days in
Metapontum, not far from Tarentum, which will figure in our tale shortly.
As we see from this very quick review of a
few of the things Diogenes collected together, Pythagoras is presented in a
vast body of literature as the genius of marvels, the inventor of mathematics,
music theory, heliocentric astronomy, and metaphysical philosophy. The 20th
century philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead sang paeans of praise about
Pythagoras. But the sources closest in
time to the man (who certainly existed) are satirical, mildly insulting, or
completely ambiguous. So why did the figure of Pythagoras accumulate so much
baggage so that, even down to the time of the Renaissance, there were people
claiming to be 'followers of Pythagoras'?
The Pythagoreans are said to have taught
that a release from the wheel of reincarnation was possible but only via a
process of purification of the soul including a vegetarian diet (which was
probably not true). Aristoxenus said that they also used music to purify the
soul just like medicine was used to purge the body, a likely Orphic connection.
Pythagoras was said to have proclaimed that the highest purification of a life
is in pure contemplation. It is the philosopher who contemplates about science and mathematics who is released from the
‘cycle of birth’. The pure mathematician’s life is, according to the tradition
created for Pythagoras, the life at the highest plane of existence. Thus the root of mathematics and scientific pursuits in
Pythagoreanism is also based on a spiritual desire to free oneself from the
cycle of birth and death.
It’s a great story, isn’t it? I didn’t even
include all the miracle parts, including the one telling how Pythagoras had a
golden thigh, could bi-locate, and so forth. So what is true? Well, let’s look
at the evidence, starting with a rather surprising remark made by Heraclitus and
preserved by Diogenes:
The learning of many
things does not teach understanding; if it did, it would have taught Hesiod and
Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hecataeus.
Empedocles wrote, preserved in Porphyry’s Life of Pythagoras,
as follows:
And there was among
them a man of surpassing knowledge, master especially of all kinds of wise
works, who had acquired the utmost wealth of understanding: for whenever he
reached out with all his understanding, easily he saw each of all the
things that are, in ten and even twenty generations of men.
The impression that Empedocles gives is that
Pythagoras’ methods were most definitely not mathematical or scientific! But
that he was widely perceived as a seeker and having a great range of knowledge
and extraordinary influence over people appears to be a secure fact.
Diogenes Laërtius reports that Xenophanes had
this to say about Pythagoras:
Now I will turn to
another tale and show the way… Once they say that he [Pythagoras] was passing
by when a puppy was being whipped, and he took pity and said: “Stop, do not
beat it; for it is the soul of a friend that I recognized when I heard it
giving tongue.”
Obviously, this is a joke made by
Xenophanes with Pythagoras as the butt of it. In any event, that the teaching
of reincarnation by Pythagoras was widely enough known to be the topic of
ordinary conversation – and even jokes – makes that something that we can
securely attach to him.
Additional evidence provides a weak
connection between Pythagoras and the Orphic Mysteries. Orphism appears to have
been mainly a system of purification that was practiced privately at that time,
while the Pythagoreans definitely formed a very secretive sect. The Orphics
taught that the body was a prison, a tomb, in which the soul is buried until it
finds or earns its way out. Their methods were designed to purify and release
men and cities from their errors.
They neither ate nor sacrificed animals and taught complete avoidance of
bloodshed. The later Orphic poems seem to imply that certain behaviors could
forestall, avoid, or end cosmic punishment. (I suspect that Orphism had very
little to do with anyone named Orpheus.) But were Orphic practices and concepts
part of the original Pythagorean ideas, or were they simply connected thanks to
Plato?
Next we have a quote from Porphyry, the 3rd
century CE Neoplatonic philosopher of Phoenician extraction:
What he said to his associates,
nobody can say for certain, for silence with them was of no ordinary kind.
Nonetheless the following became universally known: first, that he maintains
that the soul is immortal; next, that it changes into other kinds of living
things; also that events recur in certain cycles, and that nothing is ever
absolutely new; and finally, that all living things should be regarded as akin.
Pythagoras seems to have been the first to bring these beliefs into Greece.
It could be said that a lot of historically
worthless literature about him began, mainly, with Plato. It seems that he, and
his followers, radically altered not only accounts of the life of Pythagoras,
but actually invented doctrines and assigned them to him. One expert suggests
that “all the discoveries attributed to Pythagoras himself, or to his disciples
by later writers were really the achievement of certain South Italian
mathematicians of Plato’s time.” What is more, it wasn’t until after Plato spent time with Archytas
at Tarentum that his formerly rather cool view of Pythagoras warmed up, and
this can be definitely noted in his dialogues, as analyzed by Charles Kahn in Pythagoras and the
Pythagoreans. There are surviving fragments from the work of Archytas that
strongly suggest that it was he, not Pythagoras, who formulated many of the scientific and mathematical ideas
attributed to Pythagoras by Plato. Perhaps Plato was jealous of Archytas, stole
his ideas, and attributed them to Pythagoras with the idea that, of course,
everyone would know that it was all him, only he was so modest! Or he sought to
attach his ideas to someone who everyone else held in awe which was rather common in ancient times.
The main players in the Phaedo
are represented by Plato as a sort of link between the Pythagoreans and
Socrates. The implication is that Plato set a fashion of presenting his newest theories as age-old wisdom.
While he may have done it more or less playfully, as some suggest, assuming
that everyone would naturally understand that he was being modest, but that in
reality he, of course, thought all this stuff up, it appears that his students
and followers took him literally. Two of his students in particular, Speusippus
and Xenocrates, took him very seriously and treated the cosmology of the Timaeus
as the teaching of Pythagoras, which may have been partly true. Walter Burkert, in a massive monograph on the subject published in
1962 (translated into English in 1972), says that the evidence shows only that
Pythagoras was a shamanistic figure, a charismatic spiritual leader rather like Moses, who was very
influential in the politics of his
day but contributed nothing whatsoever to mathematics or philosophy. All that we know of ‘Pythagoreanism’ was created later by Plato and
others.
Thus it was right there, in Plato’s
Academy, that the twisting and distortion of the work of Pythagoras was
formulated. Aristotle, Plato’s student, vigorously resisted this development
and spent some time carefully studying Philolaus and the pre-Plato Pythagorean
system. Aristotle became the last author to draw a distinction between the two
schools.
At the beginning of the 4th
century there was another refugee from the conflict in Southern Italy who came
to Thebes: Lysis of Tarentum. He became the teacher of the general Epaminondas.
So there were respectable Pythagorean communities from which Plato could both
extract ideas as well as influence with his possession of the inside scoop on
what Pythagoras actually said, since he allegedly had possession of the three
books.
There is another type of Pythagorean
represented by Diodorus of Aspendus in Asia Minor, a 4th century BCE
ascetic vegetarian who was described as having long hair, long beard, worn
cloak, a beggar’s wallet and staff. Also, in Athens at the same time, there were barefoot vegetarians
who were mocked in comedy skits as ‘Pythagorists’. In other words, the barefoot
vegetarian Pythagorean is a post-Plato appearance of half-crazed mendicant
philosophers that were little more than comic figures of the time and were used
to attack Pythagoras. This lifestyle was actually taken over later by the
Cynics, and after their appearance there are no further references to
Pythagoreans in this light; the Cynics are the comic relief! It appears to be a
fairly typical response of social and political power structures to ridicule
and defame their critics. Thus, we should pay attention to whether a particular
philosopher was on the side of the power elite, or a critic thereof. Such an
observation won’t necessarily say anything about their philosophies or
cosmologies, but it could, especially
when we notice whose work has been ‘lost’ and whose has been preserved.
As mentioned, after Plato got hold of a few
ideas, and stole many others from wherever he could get them, the two central
ideas of Pythagoreanism become 1) the destiny of the immortal soul as expounded
by Plato; and 2) mathematics as the key to unlock the secrets of the universe.
This last was, I believe, his own spin and a red herring put out there to keep generations
of seekers spinning in circles trying to work out the right formula. It was in
Plato’s imagination that mathematics enabled a soul to become free and only in
his mind do these ideas reach their culmination.
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Of this massive mess, only three sources
seem to have anything to offer us: Diogenes Laërtius, Porphyry and Iamblichus,
in that order, with each one giving an account that is more fantastic than the
previous one. Eduard Zeller, in his 19th century history of Greek
philosophy, noted that the further a document is from Pythagoras’ own time, the
fuller the account becomes! These histories amount mainly to cut and paste compilations from
the Christianizing era which followed Plato, and contain a lot of nonsense, but
they also include summaries of fairly early traditions about Pythagoras to
which they still had access.
The invented tradition of Plato tells us
that the school of Pythagoras split at some point and one group followed the
more mathematical line, extending the scientific work of Pythagoras. The other
group focused on the more religious aspects, declaring that the ‘scientific’
breakaway group was not really following Pythagoras, but rather the renegade
Hippasus, about whom very little is known. Iamblichus says about Hippasus:
It is related to Hippasus that he was a
Pythagorean, and that, owing to his being the first to publish and describe the
sphere from the twelve pentagons, he perished at sea for his impiety, but he
received credit for the discovery, though really it all belonged to HIM (for in
this way they refer to Pythagoras, and they do not call him by his name).
The more scientific ideas appear to be
those of Philolaus, who developed the work of Anaximander of the Milesian
school who – along with Pherecydes – was also said to be one of the teachers of Pythagoras. Why are we not
surprised? Philolaus argued that at the
foundation of everything is the part played by the limiting and limitless,
which combine in a harmony. He said that the Earth was not the center of the
universe, and thus he is credited with the earliest known discussion of heliocentrism.
Philolaus described a Central Fire as the center of the universe and that
spheres (including the Sun) revolved around it. According to Plato's Phaedo,
he was the instructor of Simmias and Cebes at Thebes, around the time the Phaedo takes place, in 399 BC. That would make him a
contemporary of Socrates, and would agree with the statement that Philolaus and
Democritus were contemporaries.
The idea most central to Pythagorean
mystical teachings was the transmigration of souls which was an idea that was
actually native to India and to the
Celts and related Germanic tribes (all three of which had their origins in the
steppes of central Asia). Much of the Pythagorean mysticism concerning the soul
seems similar to the Orphic tradition. The Orphics included various
purification rites and practices as well as incubatory rites of descent into
the underworld, which bring to mind Central Asian Shamanism. Orphism was said
to have originated in Thrace which brings us to the following story from
Herodotus:
As I have heard from
the Greeks who live on the Hellespont and the Black Sea, this Salmoxis
was a man, who was a slave in Samos, the slave in fact of Pythagoras son of
Mnesarchus… The Thracians lived a miserable life and were not very intelligent,
whereas this Salmoxis knew the Ionian way of life and minds deeper than the
Thracians’, since he had associated with Greeks and among Greeks with
Pythagoras, not the weakest of their wise men. So he [Salmoxis] built a hall in
which he received and entertained the leading citizens, and taught them that
neither he nor his guests nor any of their descendants would die, but that they
would go to a place where they would survive forever and possess every good thing.
This story of Herodotus’ is quite
intriguing since Salmoxis, or Zalmoxis,
is a divinity of the Getae mentioned by Jordanes. He is saying that he heard from Greeks in Western Anatolia that a
certain Salmoxis, who was a former slave of Pythagoras, was hoodwinking the
poor, ignorant Thracians. I’m wondering
if this is a hint of the source of Pythagoras’ ideas about reincarnation: that
he gathered them from Gothic/Alanic tribes to the north or even along the Black
Sea coast?
The archaism of the Salmoxis doctrine
(which I omit here) points to an Indo-European heritage. Diogenes reports in an epitome of Aristotle’s Magicus
that Aristotle compared Zalmoxis with the Phoenician Okhon and the Libyan
Atlas. Anthropologist Andrei Anamenski suggests that Zalmoxis was another name
of Sabazius, the Thracian Dionysus, or Zeus. Sabazius appears in Jordanes as
Gebelezis. Without the suffixes -zius/-zis, the root Saba- is equivalent to Gebele-,
suggesting a relationship to the name of the goddess Cybele, as in ‘Cybele’s
Zeus’. Mnaseas of Patrae identified him with Chronos. Plato mentions Zalmoxis
as skilled in the arts of incantation.
Zalmoxis also gave his name to a particular type of singing and dancing, i.e. ‘Hesych’,
which is a word meaning ‘to be still or quiet’ and is used to describe a
mystical sect of the Greek Orthodox Church of the 14th century. (One
naturally wonders how a person can sing and dance being still and quiet?!) A
curious connection indeed. Salmoxis’ realm as a god is not very clear, as some
considered him to be a sky-god, a god of the dead or a god of the Mysteries. All of this merely suggests a northern version of the same old cosmic
catastrophe stories and myths but possibly with a cleaner transmission.
Lactantius (240-320 CE), referring to the
beliefs of the Getae, quoted the emperor Julian the Apostate, who was quoting
the emperor Trajan (in other words, three removes in the chain of evidence):
We have conquered even
these Getai (Dacians), the most warlike of all people that have ever existed,
not only because of the strength in their bodies, but, also due to the
teachings of Zalmoxis who is among their most hailed. He has told them that in
their hearts they do not die, but change their location and, due to this, they
go to their deaths happier than on any other journey.
Another related item from Herodotus:
Moreover, the Egyptians
are the first to have maintained the doctrine that the soul of man is immortal,
and that, when the body perishes, it enters into another animal that is being
born at the time, and when it has been the complete round of the creatures of
the dry land and of the sea and of the air it enters again into the body of a
man at birth; and its cycle is completed in 3,000 years. There are some Greeks who
have adopted this doctrine, some in former times, and some in later, as if it
were their own invention; their names I know but refrain from writing down.
Herodotus erroneously gives the Egyptians
credit for the idea of reincarnation. Nothing of the kind is attested in
anything Egyptian. In fact, they believed that the body had to be preserved in
order for the dead person to have any afterlife at all; when the body was
destroyed, so was the afterlife ‘life’, which could only be experienced through
a well-preserved physical body. Curiously, Herodotus often ascribes Greek ideas
and practices to Egyptian origins. One wonders if he was even talking about the
Egypt we know as Egypt? (It wasn’t named ‘Egypt’ until after Alexander the
Great.)
Ion of Chios, who we met earlier in the
account of Pherecydes, seems to have expressed doubt about Pythagoras’ ideas of
reincarnation, though he didn’t seem to doubt that he was a learned man. He was
writing in the middle of the 5th century, as was Herodotus, who
presented the former slave of Pythagoras as a rogue selling salvation. These
stories strike me as pejorative but interesting nonetheless for what they
convey in an offhand way.
Nevertheless, Pythagoras was said to have
had full recall of all his past lives, the list being given in Diogenes
Laërtius as follows: First Aethalides, the presumed son of Hermes, who awarded
him the gift of remembering his lives after death. Then he incarnated as
Euphorbus, and after that Hermotimis, who visited the Branchidae, and in whose
temple he recognized the shield that Menelaus had dedicated to Apollo. After
Hermotimus he was Pyrrhus, a fisherman of Delos, and after that he was finally
reincarnated as Pythagoras.
Pythagoras advocating vegeterianism?
The Branchidae were expelled by Darius’
Persians, who burned the temple in 493 BCE, but Alexander the Great undertook
to restore the temple and the oracle. Apparently, this project was never
completed. Pausanias visited Didyma in the later 2nd century AD. Pliny reported the worship of Apollo Didymiae – Apollo of Didymus – in Central
Asia, transported to Sogdiana by a general of Seleucus and Antiochus whose
inscribed altars there were still to be seen by Pliny’s correspondents.
Corroborating inscriptions on amphoras were found by I.R. Pichikyan at
Dilbergin.
Back to Pythagoras: I’ve read some rather
silly explanations here and there saying that the ancient Pythagorean
pentagram, with two legs up, represented the Pentemychos or ‘five sanctuaries’,
derived from the cosmogony of Pherecydes, who is said to have been Pythagoras’
teacher and friend. However, that is rather doubtful. Wikipedia tells us that
the Pentemychos was ‘the island or cave’ where the first pre-cosmic offspring
had to be put in order for the cosmos to appear… the divine products of Chronos’
seed, when disposed in the five recesses, were called Pentemuxos. The source
citations the Wikipedia author gives for this silly claim are Kirk, Raven and
Schofield. Believe me, they say nothing that could be construed in that way. Go
back to Pherecydes and read about Ortygie. If you see anything there that
suggests such a thing (and I quoted the reference pretty much in full, whereas
it was selectively edited on Wikipedia!), I must be blind or nuts. Using Wikipedia is sometimes an iffy
proposition.
Nevertheless, I’ve already suggested that
the five hidden recesses might represent an early attempt to map the sky, and
what we now know as constellations were designated by Pherecydes as ‘recesses’
or ‘caves’ that went below the horizon, and that they were related to the
appearance, and disappearance, of comets from below the horizon or off in
space. If that is the case, then it deprives the Pentemychos of any occult
significance, whether it came from Pherecydes or not, so I’m sure the folks who
are into magick and all that nonsense will not be happy about that.
I’ve skipped over the material from the
sources that talk about Pythagoras’ political activities in Croton. As already
mentioned, he and members of his society attained positions of political power throughout southern Italy. Polybius
reports that, in the middle of the 5th century, when the Pythagorean
meeting places were torched, “the leading men from each city lost their lives.”
That means that pretty much everybody who was anybody around there
was involved with Pythagoras. Considering the overall history of the time, it
appears to me that Pythagoras’ organization may have been one designed to
dominate the political scene but we don’t know if that was to achieve power for
the good of all, not for personal gain. It really sounds as though the common
people were the ones who burned out the Pythagoreans. It also raises questions about what, exactly,
the Pythagoreans were really doing. They
probably were NOT sitting around, listening to music and contemplating
mathematics!
In any event, Pythagoras himself is said to
have died a refugee after a ‘popular revolt’ against him and his companions. This could have been masterminded by the
wealthy seeking power and increase of their wealth, utilizing propaganda and
rabble-rousing techniques that were highly developed at that time; we just don’t
know. After this disaster, we find Pythagoreans in Greece, including Philolaus
in Thebes. And then, the stories began to spread.
It is also entirely possible that Plato’s
famous tale of Atlantis in Timaeus and Critias was one of the main things
stolen from the alleged books of Pythagoras. I’ll expound on this when we come
to our discussion of Plato.
All of this is much more interesting than
the fanciful tales told about the man. One even wonders if the stories were
made up to distract attention away from the truth. And, when that is the case,
it is usually a decent person or a group with high ideals that have been
overthrown by ravening seekers of power for its own sake, and following such
acts, they erect a smoke-screen such as the one created by Plato.
We are oft to blame in
this, tis too much proved - that with devotion's visage and pious action, we do
sugar o'er the devil himself.
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