Pythagorus (27 page)

CHAPTER 12

Through Neo-Pythagorean and Ptolemaic Eyes

First and Second Centuries A.D.

Fascination with Pythagoras
among Roman and Alexandrian philosophers and scholars of the first century B.C. led to a movement in the first and second centuries A.D. called middle-Platonic or neo-Pythagorean. Books and fragments from men powerfully drawn to what they believed were Pythagorean philosophical and mathematical ideas survive from this period. Some of these writers called themselves Pythagoreans. All regarded Pythagoras as a wellspring, in some cases as the unique wellspring, of a precious intellectual and philosophical heritage that had reached them through Plato.
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The association of Pythagoras with magic and the occult also continued. Nigidius Figulus' first-century-B.C. version of Pythagoreanism contributed to a growing popular image of Pythagoras – and, oddly, Archytas – as magicians. Nigidius' desire to bring back Pythagoreanism as a way of life and an ongoing approach to the world would attract others in the centuries to follow.

The most important neo-Pythagorean philosophers were, to a man, not from Rome but from other parts of the Empire – Alexandria, predictably, but also from what is now Turkey, from Syria, and even from the Atlantic coast of Spain. The cultlike groups flourished in Rome itself. Information about one of these came through Lucius Annaeus Seneca, an eminent Roman statesman and orator of the first century A.D. Seneca was a pupil of Sotion, who belonged to a philosophical movement known as the Sextians. The founders, Quintus Sextius and his son, were men of strong moral fibre whose ideal was moral perfection. Theirs was a staunch, Roman approach in which the important thing about a philosophy was how it affected a man's everyday behaviour and practical life. Sextians were hard to distinguish from Stoics, but two of their practices were definitely considered to be ‘Pythagorean': they did not eat the flesh of animals and they performed a self-evaluation at the end of each day, to take stock of personal moral improvement or decline. While no trace of that practice can be found in early Pythagorean communities, it had begun to be associated with ‘Pythagoreans' in the first century B.C., and Cicero called it a ‘Pythagorean custom'. Seneca described it, as he had learned it from Sotion: A Sextian asked himself, ‘What bad habit have I cured today?' ‘What temptation have I resisted?' ‘In what ways am I a better man?' Similar questions had appeared in the pseudo-Pythagorean booklet called the
Pythagorean Golden Verses
:

Never let slumber approach thy wearied eyelids

Ere thrice you review what this day you did:

Wherein have I sinned? What did I? What duty is neglected?

All, from the first to the last, review; and if you have erred, grieve in your spirit, rejoicing for all that was good.
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Sotion had also urged Seneca to adhere to a vegetarian diet, for ‘souls and animals return in regular cycles. Great men have believed this is so. If these things are true, you avoid guilt by abstaining from meat; if false, you gain in self-control.'
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Seneca's father, who abhorred philosophy, frowned on all this, but Seneca ignored him and avoided meat for more than a year, until under the reign of Tiberius it became dangerous to practise what might be interpreted as a foreign cult.

Another cultlike movement in the mid to late first century A.D. was led by the colourful, eccentric Apollonius of Tyana. Claiming to be the reincarnated Pythagoras, he travelled the Mediterranean world as an itinerant pagan missionary and miracle worker during the reigns of Nero and Vespasian. In a Cilician temple, not far from his birthplace in the Cappadocian region of what is now Turkey, Apollonius established his own ‘Academy' and ‘Lyceum', ‘until every type of philosophy echoed in it.'
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He wrote a biography of Pythagoras, which some have quipped must have been an autobiography, but no one could rival his knowledge of Pythagorean legends and lore from earlier centuries.

More than a hundred years after Apollonius died in 97 A.D., the Roman empress Julia Domna discovered him, probably through a book that she found in the imperial library. This powerful second wife of the emperor Septimus Severus surrounded herself with philosophers and intellectuals; at her request, one of them, Philostratus, agreed to write Apollonius' biography. Julia Domna may have been hoping to undermine the influence of Christianity in the Empire by setting up Apollonius as a competitor to Jesus. Others would put his story to that use.

In Philostratus' book
Life of Apollonius of Tyana
, he had Apollonius retracing Pythagoras' journeys in search of wisdom.
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In India – not Egypt or Mesopotamia – Apollonius discovers the source of Pythagorean doctrine, including reincarnation with memory of past lives. In other chapters, he is in touch with sacred wisdom closer to home, wrapping himself in his philosopher's cloak and entering a cave shrine in central Greece, announcing ‘I wish to descend on behalf of philosophy', and emerging after seven days, not there, but at Aulis, clutching a book. He has asked the oracle what is the most complete and pure philosophy and has written down the answer. That book, wrote Philostratus, ‘contained the views of Pythagoras, since the oracle was in agreement with this type of wisdom.' From the time of the emperor Hadrian, the book that Apollonius was supposed to have brought out of the cave was in the imperial library. Many pilgrims and tourists came to look at it in the early third century, around the time of Julia Domna.

According to Philostratus' biography, Apollonius preached abstinence from meat, wine, and sex as necessary for one wishing to draw closer to the spiritual world and see the future. His ‘Pythagorean' doctrine included supernatural wisdom, universal tolerance, and a way of life dedicated to purification that would eventually release the soul from the prison of the physical body, but no suggestion of witchcraft or magic – extraordinary in an age when hardly anyone discounted them. Philostratus emphasised instead that Apollonius' divine nature allowed him to perform supernatural feats, including escaping persecution by two Roman emperors and reviving a dead girl. Many devotees believed what they read and erected shrines to Apollonius. The emperor Caracalla built a temple to him in Tyana, Apollonius' birthplace. Though he was still venerated as late as Byzantine times, Apollonius did not, eventually, have the staying power of his Christian rival.

Popular interest in Pythagoras was not confined to the Sextians and Apollonius. In the second century A.D., the oracles at Delphi, and at Didyma and Claros on the (now) Turkish coast not far from Samos, adopted a distinctly Pythagorean turn of phrase. The holy man Alexander of Abonuteichos mixed quasi-medical beliefs with his Pythagoreanism.

On a more elevated intellectual level, though ‘neo-Pythagoreanism' was never a unified philosophy, two themes bound together most of the thinkers grouped under that banner: the old assumption that Plato's philosophy was derived from Pythagoras, and a growing belief that there was one supreme transcendent god. That trend had begun in the second half of the first century B.C., when Eudorus of Alexandria – considered the first important neo-Pythagorean – broke new ground with his own Pythagorean interpretation of Plato, contending that in Pythagorean doctrine the One, the ‘supreme god', transcended the opposites limited-unlimited and one-plurality. In his table of opposites, One was centred at the very top, not belonging to either column. That alteration would have tremendous importance for philosophy and religion. With Eudorus, ‘Pythagoras' began to be a code word for a way of thinking in which the One transcended all, something beginning to look like monotheism. Eudorus' interpretation of the Pythagoreans had them believing the invisible supreme god and source of harmony was within reach of human minds. The highest human aspiration was ‘becoming like god, but Plato had said it more clearly by adding “as far as possible”.'
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Eudorus was laying the groundwork for many who would follow him.

The Grecian-Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria was younger than Eudorus by about two generations. The Alexandrian Jewish community to which his family belonged was as old as the city, a large, thriving population that had worked hard for more than three centuries to stay on good terms with their Egyptian and Greek neighbours.
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Under Roman rule, their situation was both helped and hindered by the fact that the Romans gave them special privileges. Roman-Jewish relations were, nevertheless, precarious. Philo served on an Alexandrian/Jewish delegation to Rome that floundered when the emperor Caligula, who thought himself a god, insisted his own statue be erected in the temple in Jerusalem.

Philo was a devout man who made pilgrimages to Jerusalem, where the great temple still stood, but his wealthy, influential parents had made sure he received a thoroughly Hellenistic-Greek education. He was both a devout Jew and a Platonist.

Like Eudorus, Philo interpreted Plato as having taught that one supreme god was primary to everything in the universe, and thought Plato got these transcendental leanings from Pythagoras. Philo quoted Philolaus: ‘One god, who is forever, is prince and ruler of all things, stable, unmoved, himself similar to himself, different from others.'
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The soul's journey towards God was the ultimate task of life, and, for Philo, the Hebrew Scriptures exemplified that journey. He saw the lives of Moses and Abraham as the pilgrimage of the soul towards God.
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Adam was intellect; Eve, sensation; Cain and Abel, a soul's being torn in opposite directions of evil and good. Philo's Pythagorean interpretation of Genesis gave special attention to the ‘fourth day', when God completed the creation of the heavens. The number 4 contained the musical ratios found in the structure of the heavens and represented the four stages in the creation of the planets, point–line–surface–solid. The musical ratios also contained the number 3, representing the three dimensions of created bodies – length, breadth, depth. Numbers were the ideas and the tools of God in creation; they also made it possible for humans to understand the heavens.

While mulling over the issue of whether such a thing as ‘time' existed before the creation of the universe, Philo got caught up in the question of whether the Pythagoreans or Aristotle had been the first to suggest that the universe is eternal, and mistakenly cited Occelus of Lucania's
On the Nature of the Universe
as evidence that it had been the Pythagoreans. Anticipating the concept of time set forth by the Christian philosopher St. Augustine of Hippo, Philo insisted that ‘there was no time before the world, but it came to be either with the world or after it.'
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Some have called Philo a Greek philosopher who remained grounded in his religion; others, a Hebrew mystic who used the tools of Greek thought in the service of religion.
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He combined the practice (in both Greek and Hebrew traditions) of drawing lessons from Homer or the Hebrew Scriptures with his fine understanding of Greek philosophy and developed a philosophical interpretation of the Scriptures that he hoped would win respect among Greek intellectuals. But his impact on Greek philosophers was not as great as he hoped. No later pagan philosopher appears to have mentioned him directly.
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Rather, it was the early Christian writers who followed his lead and used the allegorical method as he did for reconciling revealed truth with intellectually worked-out truth. Clement of Alexandria and Origen were admirers (Clement dubbed him Philo the Pythagorean) and generations of early and medieval Christian scholars carefully preserved and copied his work, so that an extraordinary amount of what Philo wrote survives intact.
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The Roman poet Ovid, a contemporary of Philo, captured in his
Metamorphoses
the more popular image of Pythagoras: the all-knowing sage of legendary antiquity with an aura of universal, unworldly wisdom. Ovid revived the old legend about the Roman king Numa and had Pythagoras speak through him, in an oration that stressed the doctrine of reincarnation and abstention from meat, mostly on the grounds of respect and sympathy for animals. Ovid was not attempting to philosophise along Pythagorean lines or argue Pythagorean doctrine. The oration was part of a larger picture he painted in his poem, in which everything is changing, shifting, being transformed, nothing endures, and ‘Nature, the great inventor, ceaselessly contrives'. Hence the title,
Metamorphoses.