CHAPTER 11

The Roman Pythagoras

Third, Second, and First Centuries B.C.

In Rome in the second and first centuries B.C. there was a popular legend that Numa, the wisest and most powerful of Rome’s ancient kings, had been a disciple of Pythagoras. This was not possible. Dates in the city’s early history were under debate, but no amount of fuzziness or fudging could change the fact that Numa died at least 140 years before Pythagoras came to Croton. The Roman lawyer and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero made that clear in his Republic:[1]

MANILIUS: It is generally supposed, Africanus, that King Numa himself was a disciple of Pythagoras, or, at least, of the Pythagorean school; we have often heard this from our forebears and we believe it is widely held by the common people, although it does not appear clear from the public annals.

SCIPIO: Indeed Manilius, it is altogether false, not only a fiction, but an ignorant and obscure fiction. Such a lie is not to be endured, for it is not only not a fact, but we may observe that it could not possibly have been so, for Pythagoras reportedly came to Sybaris, Crotona and other cities in that part of Italy in the fourth year of the reign of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus. His arrival was during the 62nd Olympiad, as was the beginning of the reign of Superbus. By numbering the years from the kings, it is possible to calculate that Pythagoras first reached Italy nearly one hundred and forty years after the death of Numa; nor is this left in any doubt by those who have most diligently studied the annals of the times.

MANILIUS: Ye Gods! What a ridiculous mistake is that?1

Nevertheless, Numa’s discipleship made a good story and represented widespread wishful thinking – that Rome could claim a direct link with Pythagoras. Cicero himself liked the idea:

For who can think, when Magna Graecia flourished in Italy with most powerful and populous cities, and when in these the name, first of Pythagoras himself, and then of the Pythagoreans afterwards, sounded so high, that the ears of our own countrymen were closed to the most eloquent voice of wisdom? Indeed I think it was because of their admiration for Pythagoras, that Numa the king was reputed to be a Pythagorean by posterity; for, knowing the system and institutions of Pythagoras and having from their ancestors the renown of that king for wisdom and integrity – but ignorant, through distance, of ages and times – they inferred that, because he excelled in wisdom, he was the disciple of Pythagoras.2

Cicero was avidly interested in Pythagoras. That a great man of mathematics and philosophy had also reputedly been an effective civic leader – though no specifics were known about his leadership methods or activities – was particularly appealing. Cicero was a prolific author but considered writing a poor second to his active public career.

The connection with Numa was by no means the only bit of fiction and semi-fiction about Pythagoras that was current in Cicero’s Rome. The Roman vision of Pythagoras was an amazing mixture of Plato with unfounded legends and assumptions – undergirded by blatant forgeries – and various shades of interpretation and misinterpretation. Pythagoras’ name had been familiar to the Roman public at least since the early years of the third century B.C. In the years 298 to 290 B.C., Rome was struggling for the third time to conquer the Samnite tribes in the central and southern Apennine mountains that form the spine of the Italian peninsula. The Samnites were tough warriors desperately defending brutally rugged terrain that was their familiar home ground. When the conflict was going particularly badly for the Romans, they cunningly adopted the military formation that their enemy were using so successfully, a checkerboard pattern in which solid, tight squares of soldiers alternated with square empty spaces.[2] They also consulted the Oracle at Delphi, which told Rome to honour the wisest and bravest of the Greeks. Responding to this rather insulting order, the Romans chose two figures who were not exactly those a Greek would have chosen: Alcibiades, a notoriously opportunistic military and political genius who had once been a student of Socrates and had often been a thorn in the flesh to the Greeks of his era; and Pythagoras, whom Rome preferred to regard as more Italian than Greek.[3] The oracle must have been satisfied, for Rome subdued the Samnites. The statue of Pythagoras in the Forum stood for two centuries, until the construction of a new Senate necessitated its removal, probably when Cicero was in his late teens.3

By the mid-second century B.C., Rome controlled the entire eastern Mediterranean, and in Greece, Egypt, and Asia Minor, Romans were encountering some of the highest and most ancient cultures in the world. To their credit, for the most part they did not look upon these as the outdated, easily dismissed, quaint cultures of conquered inferiors, but rather chose to regard the older societies as guardians of a valuable legacy to which Rome had now become the heir.

The most significant and long-lasting influence was from the Greeks. The Roman military brought home works of art, slaves who were much better educated than they, and a new thirst for knowledge and ideas. Before long, upper-class Romans were avidly reading Greek works in translation and even in the original, for many were becoming bilingual. Roman parents sought out educated Greek slaves to tutor their children, and young men travelled to Greece for part of their schooling. Cicero studied philosophy and oratory in Athens and Rhodes. Authors, artists, sculptors, philosophers, and architects who could match the standards of Greek achievements, or at least do a fair job of copying them, were in high demand. Though state business continued to be carried on in Latin, hardly any part of Roman life escaped this peaceful, sophisticated counterconquest. In the midst of what was rapidly becoming not a Roman but a Greco-Roman culture, Pythagoras, an almost homegrown ancient intellectual giant, of mythical stature throughout both the Greek and Italian world, was a Roman treasure. This was ‘Italian’ philosophy. Aristotle himself had called it that.

The poet Ennius – whom later generations would call the father of Latin poetry – also helped provide Rome with a much-needed cultural self-image that involved Pythagoras. One of Ennius’ immensely successful poems and dramas was a lengthy historical epic called the Annales, purporting to trace Roman history to the fall of Troy. In it, Ennius presented his credentials as the successor to Homer by describing a dream in which that great Greek poet appeared to him on Mount Parnassus and told him that in a former life he, Ennius, had been Homer himself. This dream was symbolic and symptomatic of Rome’s vision of herself as the heir to Greek culture, but it did not represent orthodox Roman or Greek doctrine regarding the afterlife. It was instead a nod to Pythagoras and the doctrine of reincarnation. In a satirical poem, Epicharmus – the name was that of a Sicilian Pythagorean comic poet – Ennius described another distinctly Pythagorean dream about what would happen after his death, in a place of divine enlightenment.

Ennius was a member of the staff of the Roman consul Marcus Fulvius Nobilior, which gave him yet another Pythagorean connection. Fulvius had returned from military campaigns in the eastern Mediterranean with a passion for Greek culture and laden with captured artistic treasures. He authored a work called De Fastie that was probably the original source of a passage claiming to be ‘what Fulvius reported from Numa’, implying something genuinely Pythagorean since Numa, of course, was the early king who was supposed to have studied with Pythagoras. Fulvius’ book in fact owed a great deal to Plato’s Timaeus, which at the time was almost universally regarded as Pythagorean doctrine.

At the time of Ennius and Fulvius, a cult appears to have existed in Rome and/or Alexandria whose members followed what they believed were the ritual practices and lifestyle of the acusmatici. A book had appeared entitled the Pythagorean Notebooks, prescribing that lifestyle, and the claim was that Pythagoras had written it himself, though in truth it dated from little earlier than the cult. Nonetheless, Diogenes Laertius later quoted from it in his biography:

Virtue is harmony, health, universal good, and god, on which account everything owes its existence and preservation to harmony. Friendship is harmonic equality. Honours to gods and heroes should not be equal; gods should be honoured at all times with pious silence, clothed in white garments, and keeping one’s body chaste; but, to the heroes, such honours should not be paid till after noon. A state of purity is achieved through purifications, washings, ablutions and purifying ones self from all deaths and births and any kind of pollution; by abstaining from all animals that have died, mullet, blacktail fish, eggs and egg-laying animals and from beans and other things forbidden by those who have charge of the mysteries in the sanctuaries.4

In second-century-B.C. Rome and Alexandria, many such ‘pseudo-Pythagorean’ books and writings appeared. The semi-historical tradition regarding Pythagoras, fragmentary and confusing as it was already, would be tainted irretrievably by this large body of fiction pretending to be fact.

Cato the Elder, who brought Ennius to Rome and sponsored his introduction to Roman society, read a book called Pythagoras on the Power of Plants, a work in the genre of natural and supernatural botany in which he found information about a species of cabbages, Brassica pythagorea. Cato included them in his own book De Agricultura, a compendium of practical advice for owners of mid-sized agricultural estates, featuring recipes, prescriptions, religious formulae, and high praise for cabbages, especially the Pythagorean variety, leaving little need to grieve for beans. Pliny the Elder, in the next century, like Cato a man of impressive learning and intelligence, nevertheless also failed to discern that Pythagoras on the Power of Plants was a forgery and alluded to it in his Naturalis Historia, a thirty-seven-volume encyclopaedia of every bit of information available to him about animals, vegetables, minerals, and humans.[4] ‘Nature, which is to say Life, is my subject’, he had declared.5

Some authors were meanwhile more focused on attempting to convey authentic Pythagorean doctrine. When Cicero was in Rhodes for part of his education, he sat at the feet of the Stoic philosopher Posidonius, who lived from about 135 to 51 B.C. Many young enthusiasts were seeking out Posidonius as a teacher and role model. Born in Syria, he had travelled widely, and daringly, to Spain, Africa, Italy, Sicily, and what is today France, into regions that were still frontiers, and his accomplishments and physique had earned him the nickname Posidonius the Athlete. Students and contemporaries respected him as one of the most stimulating and learned men of their time.

Only fragments survive of more than twenty books by Posidonius. He apparently discussed what he believed were Pythagorean ideals of good government in a history of the Roman Republic, arguing that Rome’s decline in public and political morality was linked to her final defeat of the Carthaginians in 146 B.C. With no enemy on the horizon, Rome had degenerated into a morally weak city, rank with unrestrained behaviour and torn by internal political violence and competition for power and wealth.6 Posidonius treasured Plato’s Timaeus and attributed part of his own philosophy to the Pythagoreans. According to one of the Posidonius fragments: ‘Not only Aristotle and Plato held this view about emotion and reason but others even earlier, including Pythagoras, as Posidonius says, who claims that the view was originally that of Pythagoras but Plato developed it and made it more perfect.’

Much that is known about Posidonius comes through the Sceptic philosopher and historian Sextus Empiricus, who lived at the turn of the second to third centuries A.D. He apparently took his information from Posidonius when he explained why the Pythagoreans thought that if you claim something is true, mathematical logic is the only standard by which your claim can be judged. ‘Number’ was the principle underlying the structure of the universe: ‘And this is what the Pythagoreans mean when, in the first place, they are in the habit of saying “all things resemble numbers”, and, in the second place, they swear this most naturalistic oath.’ The oath was the tetractus oath.7 Sextus went on in familiar fashion to point out how the tetractus embodied the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 that were also in the musical ratios. He listed the four steps, point–line–surface (tetractus)–solid (pyramid) – ‘the first form of a solid body’. So ‘both body and what is incorporeal are conceptualised according to the ratios of these four numbers’. To reinforce this idea, Sextus Empiricus gave numerous examples of the ways the numbers and ratios play out in bodily substances, in incorporeal things like time, in everyday life, and in the arts and architecture.

Sextus Empiricus, living at the turn of the second to third centuries A.D., got all this information from an earlier source, but why have scholars concluded it was Posidonius? The clue lies in a sad story set in Posidonius’ adopted home, the island of Rhodes. The sculptor Chares of Lindos was engaged to construct an enormous bronze statue, the Colossus at Rhodes. He submitted his estimate of the cost. Then the citizens decided they wanted a statue twice as large. How much would that add to the cost? Chares merely doubled his original estimate – a fatal error. ‘Twice as large’, he remembered too late, did not only mean twice as tall. He had to increase all the dimensions. Chares realised his mistake when all the money was used up on the first phase of the work, and he committed suicide. Sextus included this story in a discussion of numbers and ratios, and scholars see it as Posidonius’ fingerprint on Sextus’ explanation of Pythagorean theory. The information Sextus preserved was probably what Cicero learned about Pythagoras when he studied with Posidonius.

By the mid-first century B.C., a cultlike group flourished in Rome under the leadership of Nigidius Figulus, a ‘Pythagorean and magus’ in whose Pythagoreanism the line between science and magic grew fuzzy to the point of extinction. Pythagoreanism ‘for Nigidius and his friends meant primarily a belief in magic’, wrote the historian Elizabeth Rawson.8 Nigidius’ reputation for having second sight and occult powers qualified him to work up a birth horoscope of the later-to-be-emperor Augustus, which correctly foretold a brilliant future. Romans of that era did not consider such a scholar out of the mainstream or on the lunatic fringe. Cicero wrote in the introduction to his own translation of Plato’s Timaeus that Nigidius ‘arose to revive the teachings of the Pythagoreans which, after having flourished for several centuries in Italy and Sicily, had in some way been extinguished’, and that he was ‘a particularly acute investigator of those matters which nature has made obscure’.9 Nigidius was an educated, prolific author of books on the planets, the zodiac, grammar, natural philosophy, dreams, and theology, with an extensive knowledge of religions and cults from much of the known world.

Romans often invoked Pythagoras’ name to represent wisdom and integrity. The scholar and satirist Marcus Terentius Varro, considered by many the most learned Roman of the first century B.C., began his book Hebdomades with Pythagorean-sounding praise of the number 7 and a quotation about astronomy from Nigidius. When Varro died he was buried, according to Pliny, in the ‘Pythagorean mode’, in a clay coffin with myrtle, olive, and black poplar leaves.10 Cicero, for his part, attempted to undermine the credibility of one ‘Vatinius’, a supporter of Julius Caesar, by righteously accusing him of impiety: for he ‘calls himself a Pythagorean and, with the name of that most thoroughly learned man, tries to shield his monstrous, barbarous behaviour.’11 Cicero seems never to have joined a Pythagorean cult, but he made a pilgrimage to Metapontum to visit the house where tradition said Pythagoras died.

Pythagoras made appearances in many of Cicero’s works. In a scene from The Republic, set at Scipio Africanus’ country estate, Africanus and his nephew Quintus Tubero, the first of several expected visitors to arrive, recline on couches in the Roman fashion, awaiting another guest, Panaetius, who investigates problems of astronomy ‘with the greatest enthusiasm’. In anticipation of his arrival, Scipio mentions a matter that has come up in the Senate about a ‘second sun’,[5] then remarks,

SCIPIO AFRICANUS: I prefer to be guided by Socrates, who wisely declined all such speculation, saying that the investigation of nature was far above human reason, or would contribute little to the enjoyment of human life.

TUBERO: I know not, Africanus, why it should be reported that Socrates declined all such investigations and confined himself to those which touched on life and manners. For what author is fuller of his praise than Plato, in whose books, in numerous places, Socrates is represented as discoursing not only on morals, on virtue, and on politics, but, as Pythagoras did, on numbers, geometry, and harmony.

SCIPIO: It is as you say; but, I believe, Tubero, you have heard that Plato, after the death of Socrates, in order to acquire information, visited first Egypt, and then Italy and Sicily, that he might make himself acquainted with the theories of Pythagoras; and he appears to have associated very much with Archytas of Tarentum and with Timaeus the Locrian,[[6]] and to have studied the commentaries of Philolaus. Observing at that time that the name of Pythagoras flourished in those parts, he devoted himself to Pythagorean studies and associates. As he had become especially charmed with Socrates, to whom he attributed everything, he managed to mingle a certain subtlety peculiar to Socrates with the mystery of Pythagoras and his profound knowledge of many of the arts.12

Tubero thinks of Pythagoras in connection with arithmetic, geometry, and harmony. Scipio associates him with mysticism and profound, ‘varied lore’. Later in the same conversation, they invoke his authority on the natural foundation of laws protecting life:

No ordinary men, but the ablest and best educated, such as Pythagoras and Empedocles, have declared that there should be only one rule of law for all living animals, and they would condemn to eternal punishment those by whom any animal was injured.13

Cicero even weighed in on the bean issue: Pythagoreans avoided them because they cause ‘considerable flatulence and thus are inimical to those who seek peace of mind’.14

It was in Cicero’s ‘Dream of Scipio’ that he sounded most Pythagorean – and also much like Plato. The ‘Dream’ concluded Cicero’s De republica, and in a graceful parallel, he modelled it on the ‘Myth of Er’ that ended Plato’s Republic. Cicero’s ‘Dream’ takes him to a region accessible only to those who through music, learning, genius, and devotion to divine studies have achieved permanent reunion with the highest level of existence. His ears are filled with a sound ‘strong and sweet’, and he asks Scipio what it is. Scipio replies,

That is caused by the impulse and motion of the orbs themselves, which are separated by precise but unequal intervals, set in exact proportion, high sounds mingling with low, producing a variety of harmonies in equal degree; nor can such rapid movement be excited without noise, for nature has ordained that sound shall be ordered from the extremities of low at one end to high at the other. Hence that star of the heaven whose course is the highest, and whose revolution is very rapid, moves with a sharp and quick sound, whilst the moon, being the lowest, moves with a very low, heavy sound; and the earth, the ninth, remains immovable; always occupying the same seat, fixed in the middle of the universe.15

Because Venus and Mercury ‘are in unison’, there are only seven sounds – matching the number of strings on the seven-stringed lyre – ‘seven distinct sounds with equal intervals’. By imitating this harmony with strings and voices, ‘learned men have endeavoured to win their way back to this place, whilst others, endowed with pre-eminent ability, have, during their whole lives, cultivated these divine studies.’16 Cicero’s metaphor to explain why most humans never hear the celestial music was that their ears are deafened to the sound, ‘like those people on the Nile at the place called Catadupa, who, living where the waters fall from very high mountains, have by its roar lost the sense of hearing.’17 He gave no indication that he knew Pythagoreans had thought the Earth was not the centre of the cosmos. In fact, nowhere in the surviving ancient literature is there a hint of anyone bringing the concept of an audible ‘music of the spheres’ together with the cosmology that included the central fire and the counter-earth, even though the musical ratios had probably played a role in the development of the Pythagorean ten-body model of the cosmos.

In a different realm of scholarship, one extremely successful younger Roman contemporary of Cicero, the architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, authored an overview of architecture of his era, De architectura or Ten Books on Architecture. He recommended Pythagorean ratios and extrapolations on them for the dimensions of rooms, not using any shapes for temples other than one whose length was twice its width (ratio 2:1), or circular. Greek forums were square, but Vitruvius’ had a width 2/3 its length, because an audience for gladiatorial combat was better accommodated in that space. For houses, ‘the length and breadth of courts [atria] are regulated in three ways’, two of which employed Pythagorean ratios: ‘The second, when it is divided into three parts, two are given to the width’. The third: ‘A square being described whose side is equal to the width, a diagonal line is drawn therein, the length of which is to be equal to the length of the atrium’.18

This design was based on Socrates’ lesson in Plato’s Meno. ‘By numbers this cannot be done’, wrote Vitruvius. Socrates had used no numbers. The length of that diagonal was incommensurable; so was the length of one side of Vitruvius’ room. He frequently mentioned Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans. The Pythagorean theorem was a shortcut in designing staircases, and he unhesitatingly attributed it to Pythagoras.

Vitruvius’ books had illustrations, but copies that reached the Renaissance did not. The drawing below, by Cesare Cesariano, is a Renaissance (1521) realisation of Vitruvius, who was not easy to interpret. According to the architect Leon Battista Alberti, ‘Greeks thought he was writing in Latin; Latins thought he was writing in Greek.’ Nevertheless, this drawing probably faithfully represents his instructions:

This proposition is serviceable on many occasions, particularly in measuring [and] setting out the staircases of buildings so that each step has its proper height. If the height from the pavement to the floor be divided into three parts, five of them will be the exact length of the inclined line which regulates the blocks of which the steps are formed. Four parts, each equal to one of the three into which the height from the pavement to the floor was divided, are set off from the perpendicular for the position of the first or lower step. Thus the arrangement and ease of the flight of stairs will be obtained, as the figure shows.19

Drawing by Cesare Cesariano that represents a Renaissance realisation of Vitruvius’ works

Vitruvius’ book referred to an unusual application of musical fourths, fifths, and octaves used in an amplification system in Greek theatres. A Roman theatre, he pointed out, being made of wood, had good acoustics, but in a Greek theatre, made of stone, the voices of the actors needed amplification:

So [the Greeks placed vessels] in certain recesses under the seats of theatres, fixed and arranged with a due regard to the laws of harmony and physics, their tones being fourths, fifths, and octaves; so that when the voice of the actor is in unison with the pitch of these instruments, its power is increased and mellowed by impinging thereon.20

This was by way of demonstrating that an architect must be the master of many subjects – not so difficult as it might seem, thought Vitruvius, for a very Pythagorean reason:

For the whole circle of learning consists in one harmonious system. . . . The astronomer and musician delight in similar proportions, for the positions of the stars answer to a fourth and fifth in harmony. The same analogy holds in other branches of Greek geometry which the Greeks call λóγος πτικòς: indeed, throughout the whole range of art, there are many incidents common to all.

Music, wrote Vitruvius, assists an architect ‘in the use of harmonic and mathematical proportion. He would, moreover, be at a loss in constructing hydraulic and other engines, if ignorant of music.’21

Meanwhile, the insidious trickle of pseudo-Pythagorean works that had begun in the third century B.C. had become a veritable industry by the first, with publishers and authors trying to meet a continuing demand for books supposedly written by Pythagoras or his earliest followers, or by Philolaus or Archytas. Rome and Alexandria were the places to buy, sell, and collect these scrolls, but those who snapped them up were not only Roman and Alexandrian readers. King Juba II of Numidia, who came to Rome for his schooling, was one of the most avid collectors.22 The pseudo-Pythagorean books are no help in discovering the real Pythagoras, and would represent unfortunate pitfalls for Pythagoras’ biographers, but they are time capsules of what scholars and the public in the third through first centuries, and well beyond, thought Pythagoras had taught and who he had been.

The Pythagorean Notebooks were relatively early, from the period when Alexandria was the centre of Hellenistic culture and Greco-Roman culture was still largely a thing of the future, and they did not survive long even in complete copies. Their originals are almost as lost in the past as their supposed author. No one knows who wrote them, but it was not Pythagoras, for the author clearly had read the Timaeus and was familiar with Plato’s unwritten doctrines. In an excerpt preserved by Diogenes Laertius, one of the first sentences mentioned the Indefinite Dyad.[7] Traces of pre-Platonic material received an unintentional Platonic update, while passages that depended on later knowledge appear to have been intentionally reworked with an early-Pythagorean twist. Regarding the gestation period of a human embryo: ‘According to the principles of harmony, it is not perfect till seven, or perhaps nine, or at most ten months’. The ‘harmony’ sounded Pythagorean, and ‘ten months’ like a Pythagorean stretch of nature, but other passages having to do with medical matters seem to have mimicked Hippocrates, for whom there was also a large body of ‘pseudo’ literature. A discussion of the significance of opposites in the cosmos rapidly segued into Aristotle, made to sound more ‘primitive’. Aristotle had written that the region below the orbit of the Moon is impure and changeable, but beyond it, all is pure and unchanging, while the Notebooks told of the ‘mortal’ area near the earth being stale and ‘pregnant with disease’, and the ‘upper air’ ‘immortal and on that account divine’.[8] Modern scholarship dates the Notebooks to the second or third centuries B.C., not earlier, and certainly not to the sixth century.

Another best-selling pseudo-Pythagorean work was Lysis’ Letter to Hipparchus, supposedly authored by the Lysis who moved to Thebes after the dispersal of the Pythagoreans in Magna Graecia. Lysis was a real person, teacher of the general Epaminondas, but he did not write this letter. In it, ‘Lysis’ accuses Hipparchus, another Pythagorean, of ‘philosophising in public, which Pythagoras deemed unworthy’. To prove that Pythagoras frowned on such lack of discretion, the letter writer tells of Damo, ‘daughter of Pythagoras’. Diogenes Laertius quoted:

When he had entrusted his commentaries to his daughter Damo, he charged her not to divulge them to anyone outside of the house. Though she might have sold his discourses for much money, she did not abandon them; for she thought that obedience to her father’s injunctions, even though this entailed poverty, was better than gold, and for all that she was a woman.23

Linguistic analysts place the Letter in the first century B.C., but some scholars prefer to think it was written at the time of the appearance of the Pythagorean Notebooks in order to support their authenticity.24 The claim would have been that the Notebooks were the very discourses that Damo had refused to sell, just recently rediscovered. If the Letter was a concoction to support the Notebooks, then it was written earlier than 100 B.C. and probably earlier than 200 B.C. But no scholar today believes that Lysis’ Letter to Hipparchus was written in the fifth century B.C. by the historical Lysis.

The fate of another book, On the Nature of the Universe by Occelus of Lucania, is an example of the confusion that occurred even when scholars were well-intentioned. Although Occelus probably lived in the second century B.C., in the early half of the first century A.D. his book was mistakenly regarded as an authentic early Pythagorean text. Occelus and his family considered themselves to be Pythagoreans, but the innocent Occelus had apparently been writing for himself, not trying to pass his book off as something written earlier.25 However, no less a scholar than Philo of Alexandria, the first-century Grecian-Jewish philosopher, was fooled. Occelus had insisted that the cosmic order was eternal; there was no need for a doctrine of creation. Philo, unaware that Occelus lived after Aristotle, treated his book as evidence that early Pythagoreans, not Aristotle, were the first to introduce the idea that the world is eternal.26

By the first century B.C., it had become widely accepted that Pythagoras himself had left no writing, though Diogenes Laertius would later claim otherwise. Works like the Notebooks and a three-part book supposedly by Pythagoras (actually from the late third century B.C.) on education, politics, and physics were no longer generally credited, but that did not end the forgeries. It became fashionable to ‘discover’ writings by Pythagoreans like Lysis, the fictional Timaeus, Archytas, and the women Theano and ‘Phyntis, Daughter of Callicrates’. Some offered advice and maxims for daily living. Others claimed to be authentic Pythagorean scientific and philosophical treatises. Many give themselves away today by showing heavy influence from Plato and his pupils, from Aristotle, and from the Stoics, or because their authors made inept attempts to imitate the Doric dialect spoken by the Greeks in Magna Graecia in Pythagoras’ time.27 Even when it was not in ‘Doric’, the writing often had a flowery, pseudo-poetic flavour. (Think of modern attempts to sound like ‘merrye olde England’ and the only slightly more sophisticated efforts of Victorian authors to reproduce medieval speech.) Other Pythagorean forgeries betray themselves simply by their banality; had these been the works of Pythagoras and his followers, the Pythagoreans would hardly have been worth remembering.[9]

According to one count, at the height of the era of Pythagorean forgeries, there were eighty works ‘by Pythagoras’ in circulation and two hundred purporting to be by his early followers.28 How could so many readers have been fooled? Not all were. Callimachus, in the mid-third century B.C., declared that a poem Pythagoras was supposed to have written was not authentic. He worked at the Library of Alexandria, and if anyone could spot a forgery, he could. Most readers cannot, however, be seriously blamed for failing to recognise that the pseudo-Pythagorean books were not genuine. The words from the fragment of Posidonius, to the effect that a certain view ‘was originally that of Pythagoras but Plato developed it and made it more perfect’, reflected the assumption that Pythagorean and Platonic doctrines were virtually one and the same – that Plato’s philosophy derived from Pythagoras. For readers who believed that, and especially for those who were not aware of how different the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle were from each other, it was an easy step to believe that Aristotle also got his ideas from Pythagoras. So when Platonic and Aristotelian ideas showed up in works claiming to come from before the lifetimes of these two philosophers, why wonder? Was it not from these very documents that Plato and Aristotle had learned?

Pseudo-Pythagorean literature continued to appear for several centuries and was immensely popular. You could pick up a knowledge of ‘Pythagorean doctrine’, unaware or ignoring that it combined some genuinely old material with simplified or summarised Plato and Aristotle, mixed with a good dose of Stoicism, and (in the later books) given a neo-Platonic overcast. You could memorise the maxims of the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, or require your children to do so. As was true of The Prophet by Khalil Gibran in the twentieth century, you might not notice, or might not care, that what came in the format of authentic ancient wisdom was mostly a contemporary poetic invention and interpretation. The maxims were wise and some of them beautiful. You could find out what ‘Pythagoras’ had recommended regarding the medicinal and magical powers of plants. If it caused you to feel better, this, rather than any scholarly debate, proved the efficacy and authenticity of the book. You could learn what ‘Archytas’ had contributed to knowledge about architecture, agriculture, flutes, ethics, mechanics, wisdom, prosperity, adversity, and ‘intermediary comfort’ – never mind that he had actually had little or nothing to say about some of these subjects. Roman and Hellenistic readers could devour these works, share them, discuss them, make gifts of them, have them read beautifully at weddings and funerals, find themselves uplifted and improved by their high-minded ideas and sometimes enlightened by information that was helpful or challenging no matter where it came from. Romans could feel that they knew something about – and had derived benefit from – their own, magnificent, nearly home-grown sage.

The pseudo-Pythagorean texts outlasted the Roman Empire. On the World and the Soul, supposedly by ‘Timaeus of Locri’, was still being recopied in the Middle Ages by scholars who believed this was the early Pythagorean work from which Plato got his cosmology. Copernicus translated Lysis’ Letter to Hipparchus. One begins to realise the enormous research difficulties, distinguishing Pythagorean fact from fiction, that would confront Diogenes Laertius, Porphyry, and Iamblichus.

[1]Cicero’s life, and his political life, began when Rome was a republic and ended after the assassination of Julius Caesar and the beginning of the reign of Octavian (Caesar Augustus). He was a strong supporter and defender of the republic and strove on its behalf during the civil wars.

[2]The Romans continued to use this formation effectively through the years of their republic and in the expansion of their Empire.

[3]Alcibiades’ reputation for lack of discipline and unscrupulousness was later used to support the charges brought against Socrates of corrupting the youth of Athens, which resulted in Socrates’ death sentence.

[4]Pliny lost his life when his insatiable curiosity about natural phenomena tempted him too close to the erupting Vesuvius.

[5]Cicero made several references to this celestial phenomenon that had appeared in the year 129 B.C. The scientific name is parhelion, in the vernacular a mock sun or sun dog. The appearance is of two extra suns, one on each side of the Sun. This happens when the Sun is shining through a thin mist of hexagonal ice crystals falling with their principal axes vertical. If the principal axes are arranged randomly in a plane perpendicular to the Sun’s rays, the appearance is of a halo around the Sun.

[6]Timaeus of Locri was the central character in Plato’s Timaeus, but there was no real person by that name. Writings attributed to him cannot be considered examples of Pythagorean doctrine. They are an interpretation of Plato’s Timaeus, from the first century B.C. or the first century A.D.

[7]Diogenes Laertius copied the excerpt not from the original but from an earlier author named Alexander Polyhistor who in turn – this was in the first half of the first century B.C. – copied it from a still older book.

[8]In view of all the other anachronisms in the Notebooks, scholars have ruled out the possibility that they were, after all, authentically early and primitively foreshadowed Aristotle’s cosmos.

[9]One clue has turned out to be a red herring: the suggestion that inclusion of superstition and ‘marvellous’ events in a work represented more ‘primitive’ thinking and dated the material earlier. Tales about a talking river or being in two places at the same time indicated that what you were reading was authentically early, so it was claimed. However, the late fourth century and the third, second, and first centuries B.C. and the early A.D. centuries were as accepting of magic, marvels, and portents as the fifth and sixth centuries B.C. had been – arguably more so. Such elements were expected in the biography of an important leader. Aristotle wrote during this period, when people may have been more ready to believe in a golden thigh than their forebears would have been at the time of Pythagoras. Clement of Alexandria, an eminent Christian scholar of the second and early third centuries A.D., described a ‘standard educational curriculum . . . astrology, mathematics, magic, and wizardry’ – a quadrivium that would seem appropriate for Harry Potter’s Hogwarts School. ‘The whole of Greece’, Clement lamented, ‘prides itself on these as supreme sciences’ (Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 2.1.2. 3–4. Quoted in translation in J. Robert. Wright, ed., Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Old Testament IX [Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press, p. 18]). For Diogenes Laertius, Porphyry, and Iamblichus, the fact that material included the miraculous did not invalidate the information or call the source into question. There was probably a mystical or magical element to the earliest Pythagoreanism, but late Greek, Alexandrian, and Roman writers were eager to report and exaggerate it. It is difficult to see through the veil of a superstitious age and judge how sceptical an earlier era was, but it is clear that one cannot decide that information was more authentically ancient simply because it included more of the ‘marvellous’.