The Music of Pythagoras

by Kitty Ferguson

  Such a relentless pursuit had been recommended in much more ancient wisdom literature, including Proverbs in the Hebrew Scriptures (“Old Testament”). However, nowhere else did the search for the wisdom of God or the gods include so comprehensively the search for knowledge about the physical universe. As the scholar W. K. C. Guthrie put it:

  It is to this idea of assimilation to the divine as the legitimate and essential aim of human life that Pythagoras gave his allegiance, and he supported it with all the force of a philosophical and mathematical, as well as a religious, genius. In this lies the originality of Pythagoreanism.7

  In a less reverent vein, Diogenes Laertius quoted the poet Xenophanes of Colophon, who lived most of his adult life in Sicily and Italy and was probably a contemporary of Pythagoras, though he survived him by many years. Xenophanes wrote satirical poems, and in these lines he made light of Pythagoras’ belief in reincarnation:

  And once when he passed a puppy that was being whipped

  they say he took pity on it and made this remark:

  “Stop, do not beat him; for it is the soul of a dear friend—

  I recognized it when I heard its voice.”*

  This verse is usually taken to mean that Pythagoras claimed to recognize the voice of a friend who had died and been reincarnated as the puppy, but for a Pythagorean it would have had a more profound meaning. A “dear friend” was any member of a vast kinship, embracing all of nature including animals and vegetables and the souls of humans. In no other Greek society was that kinship so celebrated as among the Pythagoreans, or so firmly believed to be not a melting pot but a beautifully ordered unity: in the words of W. K. C. Guthrie, “a kosmos—that untranslatable word which unites, as perhaps only the Greek spirit could, the notion of order, arrangement or structural perfection with that of beauty.”8 Some Pythagoreans extended the unity to time. Aristotle’s pupil Eudemus wrote that “if we are to believe the Pythagoreans and hold that things the same in number recur—that you will be sitting here and I shall talk to you, holding this stick, and so on for everything else—then it is plausible that the same time too recurs.”9

  THE BELIEF THAT souls, at death, pass into other persons, animals, or plants might be expected to have had implications for what Pythagoreans did and did not eat, just as it did for the Orphic cult. However, the particulars of the Pythagorean diet have never been clear to anyone except Pythagoras and his immediate followers and have, since early times, been subject to much speculation, many opinions, and irreverent humor. Any abstention must have been for reasons other than the avoidance of eating another soul, for a human was just as likely to be reincarnated as a vegetable, and you had to eat something. Empedocles is supposed to have remarked that if you could choose your next life, a lion or a laurel bush would be good choices. Iamblichus thought Pythagoras ordained abstinence from animal flesh as “conducive to peaceableness.” A man trained to abominate the slaughter of animals “will think it much more unlawful to kill a man or engage in war.”

  Aristotle felt sure that Pythagoras and his followers did eat the meat of animals except the womb and heart and sea urchins. Possibly they also avoided mullet, added Plutarch. Diogenes Laertius insisted that red mullet, blacktail, and the hearts of animals were forbidden but reported that Aristoxenus said Pythagoreans ate all other animals besides lambs, oxen used in agriculture, and rams. Porphyry, basing his conclusion on an early source from the fourth or early third century B.C., believed Pythagoras held a double standard: Someone not engaged in the lifelong Pythagorean pursuit of wisdom—an athlete or soldier, for instance (recall Pythagoras’ advice to the young Olympians)—could eat meat. But for a member of his own school Pythagoras allowed only a ritual taste of meat being offered as a sacrifice to the gods. According to Porphyry, this abstinence was motivated by reverence for the unity and kinship of all life, and Pythagoras’ preferred diet included honey; bread of millet; barley; and herbs, raw and boiled. Porphyry even provided recipes he said were favorites of Pythagoras:

  He made a mixture of poppy seed and sesame, the skin of a sea-onion, well washed until entirely drained of the outward juices, of the flowers of the daffodil, and the leaves of mallows, of paste of barley and chick peas, taking an equal weight of which, and chopping it small, with honey of Hymettus he made it into a mass. Against thirst he took the seed of cucumbers, and the best dried raisins, extracting the seeds, and coriander flowers, and the seeds of mallows, purslane, scraped cheese, wheat meal and cream, all of which he mixed up with wild honey.

  Porphyry wrote that Pythagoras did not claim to have invented these recipes; they had been taught by Demeter to Hercules when he was sent into the Libyan desert.

  Information about the diet of later Pythagoreans, though not necessarily the diet advised by Pythagoras himself more than a century before, comes from fourth century B.C. comic plays by Antiphanes, Alexis, and Aristophon.10 Their portrayals may have been accurate or perhaps were only commonly accepted stereotypes, but these were all highly respected playwrights. Antiphanes, who was renowned for his parody and astute criticism of literature and philosophy, wrote that “some miserable Pythagorists were in the gully munching purslane and collecting the wretched stuff in sacks.” In his play The Sack, he had a character who “like a Pythagorizer, eats no meat but takes and chews a blackened piece of cheap bread.” In Alexis’ The Men from Tarentum “‘Pythagorisms’ and fine arguments and close-chopped thoughts nourish them” while they eat daily only “one plain loaf each and a cup of water—a prison diet! Do all wise men live like that?” Apparently not, for another character replied that some Pythagoreans “dine every four days on a single cup of bran.” Aristophon, in The Pythagorist, wrote:

  For drinking water [not wine], they are frogs; for enjoying thyme and vegetables, they are caterpillars; for not being washed, they are chamber-pots; for staying out of doors all winter, blackbirds; for standing in the heat and chattering at noon, cicadas; for never oiling themselves, dust-clouds; for walking about at dawn without any shoes, cranes; for not sleeping at all, bats.

  Alexis, in The Men from Tarentum, offered a witticism that became so current it was probably eventually greeted with groans: “The Pythagorizers, as we hear, eat no fish nor anything else alive; and they’re the only ones who don’t drink wine.”—“But Epicharides eats dogs, and he’s a Pythagorean.”—“Ah, but he kills them first and then they’re no longer alive.” Diogenes Laertius took up the same theme centuries later in a “jesting epigram” in his biography of Pythagoras:

  You are not the only man who has abstained

  From living food; for so have we;

  And who, I’d like to know, did ever taste

  Food while alive, most sage Pythagoras?

  When meat is boiled, or roasted well and salted,

  I do not think it well can be called living.

  Which, without scruple therefore then we eat,

  And call it no more living flesh, but meat.

  THE BEST-KNOWN CONTROVERSY about Pythagoras’ diet had to do with his attitude toward beans—not such a trivial question as it might seem, for this attitude may later have contributed to his death.

  The poet Callimachus lived in the third century B.C. and, in addition to much splendid poetry, produced a critical and biographical catalog of the authors whose works were in the collection of the Alexandria Library. He was familiar with much literature that was no longer available to later scholars because it perished when the library burned. Callimachus agreed with an idea that he attributed to Pythagoras himself: that beans are “a painful food.” Cicero wrote, citing Plato, that the Pythagoreans were forbidden to eat them because they cause flatulence and hence are not conducive to peace of mind and a good night’s sleep. Other reports had it that flatulence was an indication beans contained air. Since it was widely held that the soul itself was air, this might have been interpreted to mean that when one ate a bean one was eating a soul. Diogenes Laertius said that avoiding beans made for gentle dreams, “free from a
gitation.” He also reported several reasons given by Aristotle why the Pythagoreans did not eat beans, including that they were “used in elections in oligarchical governments.” Plato’s pupil Heracleides Ponticus connected the avoidance of beans with the discovery that a bean placed in a new tomb, buried in dung, and left for forty days took on the appearance of a human. One tale about Pythagoras’ power to communicate with animals told of an ox that Pythagoras saw eating beans. When the herdsman mockingly refused to follow Pythagoras’ advice to order the ox to abstain, Pythagoras whispered in its ear and the ox never again touched a bean. Pythagoras took it to live many years as the “sacred ox” at Hera’s temple.

  Aulus Gellius, whose second century A.D. writings preserve many fragments of otherwise lost works, vehemently disagreed with the idea that Pythagoras forbade the eating of beans. Aristoxenus, he pointed out, had insisted that Pythagoras ate plenty of them, in fact more than any other vegetable, because “they soothe and gently relieve the bowels.” Aulus Gellius also believed he could explain the unfortunate misunderstanding: It stemmed from an overly naive interpretation of a poem by Empedocles that included the phrase: “Wretches, utter wretches, keep your hands from beans!” Gellius’ scholarly approach revealed that the word “beans” here did not mean the vegetable; it meant “testicles.” Pythagoreans used obscurely symbolic aphorisms that could only be deciphered by other Pythagoreans, and when Empedocles spoke of “beans,” Gellius insisted, he intended them to symbolize the cause of human pregnancy and the impetus to human reproduction. The bean is, after all, a seed, with similar potential. Gellius, then, interpreted Empedocles’ phrase to mean, “Avoid sexual indulgence!”11

  Pythagoras apparently did not encourage celibacy, for several accounts had him urging his followers to beget children so as to leave servants of god to take their place in the next generation. But sex, it seems, stopped there. According to Diogenes Laertius, Pythagoras, “did not indulge in the pleasures of love” and advised others to have sex only “whenever you are willing to be weaker than yourself.” In contrast to all the humor at the Pythagoreans’ expense, Pythagoras himself came across, at least in Diogenes Laertius’ biography, as humorless, though not necessarily joyless. He “abstained wholly from laughter, and from all such indulgences as jests and idle stories,” advising others as well that “modesty and decorum consist in never yielding to laughter, without looking stern”—which, if true, indicates that Pythagoras would not have approved of Diogenes Laertius’ “jesting epigrams.” Porphyry’s description showed Pythagoras not so much humorless as extremely even-tempered, not “elated by pleasure, nor dejected by grief, and no one ever saw him either rejoicing or mourning.” Porphyry attributed this “constancy” to Pythagoras’ careful diet.

  According to the tradition, Pythagoras sired children. After introducing his paragraph concerning Pythagoras’ family with the words “It is said,” Porphyry recorded that Pythagoras’ wife was Theano, from Crete, the daughter of Pythenax. Pythagoras and Theano had a daughter named Myia “who took precedence among the maidens in Croton and, when a wife, among married women,” and also a son, Telauges, and perhaps a second son named Arignota. Iamblichus wrote that Pythagoras’ “acknowledged successor,” Aristaeus, married Pythagoras’s widow Theano after Pythagoras died, “carried on the school,” and educated Pythagoras’ children. Among those children Iamblichus mentioned none of the names that Porphyry listed, but spoke only of another son named after Pythagoras’ father, Mnesarchus, who, in turn, took over “the school” when Aristaeus became too old. Iamblichus confused matters still further by mentioning a “Theano” who was the wife of Brontinus of Croton and one of the “most illustrious Pythagorean women.” Did Brontinus die and Pythagoras marry his widow, or was it the other way around? More likely there were two Theanos, mother and daughter. Diogenes Laertius recorded variously that Theano, the wife of Brontinus, was Pythagoras’ pupil, and that Pythagoras’ wife was probably Theano, daughter of Brontinus of Croton.

  Theano’s name was preserved on a list thought to have come through Aristoxenus of seventeen “most illustrious Pythagorean women” that also included Mya, the wife of the Olympic wrestler Milo. Women apparently played an active part in the Pythagorean “brotherhood.” Diogenes Laertius said Theano had written books that still existed in his lifetime. Though these, sadly, were almost certainly some of the “pseudo-Pythagorean” books that appeared in antiquity, Diogenes Laertius felt confident enough of his source to quote Theano’s outspoken advice: Asked how soon a woman becomes pure again after intercourse, she was supposed to have said, “The moment she leaves her own husband she is pure; but she is never pure at all, after she leaves anyone else.” She advised that a woman going to her husband should “put off her modesty with her clothes”—which seems a great waste if these were indeed the words of Pythagoras’ wife and Pythagoras really did entirely abstain from the pleasures of love!

  PYTHAGOREAN LIFE IN Croton was, it appears, a good life—with the begetting of children who would be new Pythagoreans and could be schooled in a new, wondrous approach to the world and the universe . . . with properly chosen food, whatever it included, appearing on Pythagorean tables . . . with men and women engaging in fascinating studies that also improved their chances in the next life. Within the community, moreover, word got around of some occurrences that were difficult to explain and that indicated their leader was no ordinary man.

  Unlike the ancient miracles in the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian New Testament, the “wonders” attributed to Pythagoras were not associated with any teaching or divine revelation, nor were they examples of Pythagoras’ helping or healing anyone. They were of a more random nature, chance glimpses of existence on a more divine level than that experienced by the men and women around him, a level on which the unity of all being—of all things, places, animals, and gods; of past, present, and future—could easily be seen. Aristotle told of reports that Pythagoras appeared on the same day at the same hour in Croton and in Metapontum, and that on one occasion, getting up from a seat in Olympia, he revealed his thigh, and everyone saw that it was made of gold. In Etruria (Tuscany), a poisonous snake bit him and he bit it back. The snake died; he did not. Several witnesses heard the river Casas greet him by name, and he correctly predicted that a white bear would be sighted in Caulonia. Once, after foretelling serious strife, he disappeared in Croton and appeared in Metapontum. “According to credible historians,” wrote Iamblichus, and “ancient and trustworthy writers,” wrote Porphyry, in each case without naming them, birds and beasts listened to Pythagoras and followed his advice—the same effect that Orpheus had on even the most savage animals.

  Countering the miraculous reports were rumors that Pythagoras was a charlatan. Diogenes Laertius repeated a story from Hermippus, the third century B.C. native of Samos who had said Mnesarchus was a gem engraver. Pythagoras disappeared for a time into a set of subterranean rooms while his mother recorded everything that took place, marking the times and dates on tablets that she sent down to him. Eventually Pythagoras emerged, looking like a cadaver, and announced that he had arrived from Hades below. When he told the assembled people in detail all that had happened to them in his absence, they were awestruck, believed he was divine, wept and lamented, and “entrusted to him their wives,” “who took upon themselves the name of ‘Pythagorean women.’” That same story was told by Herodotus (who was skeptical about it himself) of a man who had been Pythagoras’ slave when he lived on Samos, who was supposed to have used this strategy to create an aura of magical power among gullible people in Thrace. In an interesting turnabout, some scholars have suggested that the miraculous stories, as well as the rumors of charlatanism, were all inventions to discredit Pythagoras in an era when people scoffed at the “miraculous” in a way they no longer would in late antiquity.12

  CHAPTER 5

  “All things known

  have number”

  Sixth Century B.C.

  THE PYTHAGOREAN DISCOVERY that “all
things known have number—for without this, nothing could be thought of or known”—was made in music. It is well established, as so few things are about Pythagoras, that the first natural law ever formulated mathematically was the relationship between musical pitch and the length of a vibrating harp string, and that it was formulated by the earliest Pythagoreans. Ancient scholars such as Plato’s pupil Xenocrates thought that Pythagoras himself, not his followers or associates, made the discovery.

  Musicians had been tuning stringed instruments for centuries by the time of Pythagoras. Nearly everyone was aware that sometimes a lyre or harp made pleasing sounds, and sometimes it did not. Those with skill knew how to manufacture and tune an instrument so that the result would be pleasing. As with many other discoveries, everyday use and familiarity long preceded any deeper understanding.

  What did “pleasing” mean? When the ancient Greeks thought of “harmony,” were they thinking of it in the way later musicians and music lovers would? Lyres, as far as anyone is able to know at this distance in time, were not strummed like a modern guitar or bowed like a violin. Whether notes were sung together at the same time is more difficult to say, but music historians think not. It was the combinations of intervals in melodies and scales—how notes sounded when they followed one another—that was either pleasing or unpleasant. However, anyone who has played an instrument on which strings are plucked or struck knows that unless a string is stopped to silence it, it keeps sounding. Though lyre strings may not have been strummed together in a chord, more than one pitch and often several pitches were heard at the same time, the more so if there was an echo. Even when notes are played in succession and “stopped,” human ears and brains have a pitch memory that causes them to recognize harmony or dissonance. In truth, the ancient Greeks, including Pythagoras, heard harmony both ways, between pitches sounding at the same time and between pitches sounding in succession.