Pythagorus (30 page)

The advance of Christianity in the Empire took place on several levels. In at-home, family piety, it replaced the old household gods. House churches, with a few families and individuals (before there were larger Christian communities) competed with pagan cults all over the Empire with steadily increasing success. Among intellectuals, Christian authors co-opted excerpts from pagan books when the wording seemed equally applicable to a Christian context, or when they hoped to undergird Christian teaching by pointing out that the pagan material represented an independent witness to truths now more fully explained. Some of these fragments survived without much change at all. In fifth-century Christian sermons and books, phraseology and imagery appeared that clearly had originally come from a pagan oracle.
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During its first three centuries, Christianity had very little interest in or influence on politics, but that changed with the conversion in 312 of the emperor Constantine, who ruled first in Rome and finally from Byzantium over both the eastern and western halves of the Empire. Christianity became the official religion, and after that the Empire was mostly ruled by Christians, though some of them followed Arian teachings and did not accept the full divinity of Jesus.

Christianity's victory would have been much more difficult had it not been able, to such a large extent, to accept and assimilate the great pagan intellectual and philosophical traditions. It might have been as short-lived and ineffectual as most of the mystery cults if its leaders had listened to men and women who advised complete rejection of pagan Greek and Roman culture and learning. However, beginning with the Apostle Paul, many Christian theologians and writers were educated men with tremendous respect – indeed, great love – for this heritage. When Paul first arrived in Athens, he expected that this city, which felt like his intellectual home and obviously treasured learning and wisdom, would welcome with open arms and minds the new knowledge he brought. At first it seemed he was right, and the Athenians' eventual rejection of his views was one of the lowest points of Paul's life.

To many early Christian intellectuals it seemed, as it had to Paul, that most of the older culture, wisdom, and knowledge of their intellectual world, which had so informed and inspired them, was consistent with the greater truth they believed they now knew. All had been, in a way, an intellectual preparation. They felt compelled to bring the pagan philosophical heritage into the embrace of Christian thought, make it part of Christian education, and show that there was a continuum. The early church became a guardian of the treasures of classical literature, both in its actual preservation of the books and in the way many key ideas were assimilated into Christian writing and thinking. The Gospel of John in the New Testament opens with the words ‘In the beginning was the Word.' In the original Greek, ‘Word' is
logos
, and probably the best translation of
logos
is not ‘word' but ‘reason' or ‘rationality'. With that in mind, it is possible to read John's words with Platonic and Pythagorean eyes:

In the beginning was Reason. And Reason was with God, and Reason
was
God. Reason was with God in the beginning. Through Reason all things were made; without Reason nothing was made that has been made. In Reason was life, and that life was the light of men. . . . Reason became flesh and lived among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
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A Pythagorean mathematical interpretation of nature presented no conflict with Christian doctrine. St. Augustine, one of those who strove most successfully to bring Christian belief and pagan philosophy into harmony, mentioned the importance of numbers in his
City of God
: ‘Not without reason has it been said in praise of God: “Thou hast ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight.”'
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Though the doctrine of reincarnation was discarded in favour of Christian immortality, the image of the body being a tomb or prison for the soul was retained. Clement of Alexandria called it a Pythagorean doctrine conveyed through Philolaus.
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The prodigious efforts of intellectuals like Augustine to seize upon similarities and work through conflicts in hope of finding deeper levels of agreement encouraged the Christian church to undertake a mission to preserve classical Greek and Roman literature in a more deliberate fashion. In Italy at Monte Cassino, a monastic centre of scholarship called St. Benedict's was established in A.D. 529, and other centres soon followed, particularly in the sixth and seventh centuries, when Irish missionaries reached England and then the Rhine, and Gothic missionaries reached the Danube. Because hardly anyone on the mission frontiers spoke Greek, Greek writings failed to spread much beyond the borders of the late Roman Empire, but even remote monasteries were able to preserve some Latin works while one horde of invaders after another swept across Europe – Goths, Vandals, Franks, and later Norsemen. The treasured, scattered works would be the only ancient classical literature known in Latin Europe for centuries. It is difficult in the twenty-first century – because so much ancient literature has been recovered – to realise how dim and fragmentary knowledge of the past became, how pitifully little was remembered, how completely civilisation had to start over in the Middle Ages.

Of the few works that survived, one was a Latin translation by a fourth-century Greek Christian scholar, Chalcidius, of the first fifty-three chapters of Plato's
Timaeus
. Others were a fragment of Cicero's translation of the same dialogue, the works of the ‘encyclopaedist' Macrobius, Nicomachus'
Introduction to Arithmetic
in a slightly revised Latin translation, and
De institutione musica
, possibly also a paraphrase of Nicomachus. The latter two were produced by Boethius, a Roman of the late fifth and early sixth centuries. Why these and not others? Much had to do with the language in which a work was written or into which it was translated. Now we return to Rome as her great empire began to disintegrate.

From the close of the third century and the reign of the emperor Diocletian, the Roman Empire had no longer been ruled by one emperor. Sometimes there had been two, sometimes more. Though the administrative division line between the Empire in the east and the Empire in the west was not deliberately drawn along a language frontier between areas that spoke Greek and those that spoke Latin, over time it began to seem so, as Greek and Latin came to dominate in their respective regions. With the institution of bishoprics, a parallel division took place in the church, with Christians in the East regarding the patriarch of Constantinople as their religious authority while those in the West followed the bishop of Rome, the pope.

It was a dangerous, uncertain time in both parts of the Empire, with barbarian tribes pushing one another around the European map and not stopping when they reached borders that had been secure for centuries, close to Rome and Constantinople. On New Year's Eve of 406, the Rhine froze, rendering the river useless as a natural boundary between Roman Gaul and tribes on the other side. The Roman legions previously guarding the Rhine had been recalled to hold defences against barbarians nearer to home, and Vandals, Alans, and Sueves poured into Gaul, moving inexorably south and west across the countryside, marauding, plundering, and burning, meeting virtually no resistance. Feeling pressure on too many frontiers, and with her former lands in Gaul now ‘like an enormous funeral pyre', Rome was nearing the end of her tether, but, though her Empire was divided, the city herself had remained unconquered for more than a thousand years, and it was unthinkable that this could change.
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Then in A.D. 410 the Visigoths sacked Rome. It would be more than another half century before the last emperor of the western Empire ceased to rule, but this date marked a loss of morale and political identity that would never be recovered. Some thought the Christian God had failed the city.

During this period, a writer named Ambrobius Theodosius Macrobius pulled together, as Pliny had done, a body of knowledge from a vast variety of sources with little or no attempt to discriminate between what was authentic and what legend, forgery, reinterpretation, and inaccurate retelling.
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He said he was not a Roman, though he served Rome in official capacities at home and in Spain and Africa. He also seems not to have been a Christian, in an era when most offices as highly ranked as those he held were filled by Christians. But whatever else he was or wasn't, Macrobius was indeed an ‘encyclopaedist', and prone to expanding on the original. Largely thanks to him, Cicero's ‘Dream of Scipio' would be popular in the Middle Ages, but when Macrobius wrote about the ‘Dream', what Cicero had covered in a few pages took him nearly sixteen times that many, for he added commentary and inserted the opinions of other authors. The result was not very original, but for scholars in the Middle Ages it would be a treasure.

Macrobius preserved, in Latin, much that would otherwise not have survived, particularly from the neo-Pythagoreans and neo-Platonists, whom he knew primarily through the writings of Porphyry. Medieval scholars would learn from him that Pythagoras discovered the ratios of musical harmony, and would read the story that this happened in a blacksmith shop. They would know Macrobius' quotation from Cicero about the harmony of the spheres and would glean from him ideas about connecting the musical ratios and the planetary distances, but nothing of a link between specific notes and specific planets, though both Nicomachus and Ptolemy had worked these out before Macrobius' time. The Pythagorean view of numbers underlying everything in the universe, and the way it was exemplified by linking the harmonic ratios with the arrangement of the cosmic bodies, would become standard in medieval writing on music theory, but not so well formulated as it had been by ancient scholars, getting vaguer and less well understood as time passed.

The Visigoths who sacked Rome in 410 did not consolidate their victory by establishing a new government. For a while the imperial government limped along, sometimes surprisingly effectively, though virtually all of the western part of the Empire was now overrun by Germanic tribes who continued to make and break agreements and alliances with Roman and local authorities and to war among themselves. German settlers in Italy rather quickly converted to Christianity, many of them at first to the form known as Arianism which had been declared a heresy by the Council of Nicaea in 325; but eventually they entered Roman Catholicism.

In 429, the Vandals accomplished an end run through Spain, invaded North Africa, and became a new pirate threat in the Mediterranean. A quarter century later, it was their turn to sack Rome. Again, the invaders did not stay, but when they left they carried a former empress and her daughters back with them to Africa. On August 23, 476, the German troops, who by then actually made up most of the Roman army in Italy, elected their general Odoacer as king and overthrew the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus. The Roman Empire in the West, long in its death throes, at last expired. In theory, the emperor of the eastern Roman Empire, Zeno, now ruled the entire Empire, but Odoacer, though in no position to reestablish anything like the former Empire, was, in effect, an independent ruler, while various German factions in Italy could only war uselessly among themselves and with other tribes who continued to appear on the horizon. In the western Empire, including its former vast holdings to the north in Europe, one might assume that the Dark Ages had begun. They had not, quite.

Boethius, born in 480, after the overthrow of the last Roman emperor, was a Roman aristocrat in an era when conventional wisdom would seem to indicate there should no longer have been such a thing. Roman life as usual had not, however, completely ended in the city and its environs. The Roman civil service continued to operate, courts administered Roman law, Roman and Gothic landholders were paying their taxes, and learning and culture had not disappeared. The Roman Senate was still meeting, and Boethius became a Senator. He was also a philosopher, theologian, poet, mathematician, and astronomer – one of the last generation to study at what was still calling itself the Academy in Athens – and he was deeply troubled to see his contemporaries losing the ability to read Greek, which had for centuries been part of Roman education.
[1]
No longer could they experience Plato, Aristotle, the neo-Platonists, or many of the Christian church fathers in their original language. Boethius vowed to remedy this potentially disastrous loss: ‘I will translate into Latin every work of Aristotle that comes into my hands, and all the dialogues of Plato.'
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Much else also, it turned out.

Boethius accomplished an astounding amount of translation before he made an unfortunate career decision. Rome was far from a dead city, but it was no longer the city from which Italy was ruled. The Ostrogoth leader Theodoric, in Ravenna, had taken over from the Visigoths in 493, when Boethius was thirteen, murdering (some said personally) the king, Odoacer, whom the German army had elected. Having grown up in Constantinople and married a Byzantine princess, Theodoric admired classical culture and liked to surround himself with intellectuals. Boethius was particularly attracted to him because Theodoric hoped to reconcile the Romans and the Goths, and that shared goal also drew Theodoric to Boethius. Boethius decided to attach himself to Theodoric's court in Ravenna.