The Music of Pythagoras

by Kitty Ferguson

  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:*

  MANILIUS: Is it an authentic tradition, Africanus, that King Numa, was a pupil of Pythagoras, or at least a Pythagorean? This assertion has often been made by our elders, and one gathers that the opinion is widely held. Yet an inspection of the public records shows that it is not properly documented.

  SCIPIO: No, Manilius. The whole thing is quite wrong, not only a fabrication but a clumsy and absurd fabrication too (it is particularly hard to tolerate the kind of falsehood that is not just untrue but patently impossible). Research has established that it was when Lucius Tarquinius Superbus had been on the throne for over three years that Pythagoras came to Sybaris, Croton and that part of Italy. The Sixty-second Olympiad witnessed both the beginning of Super-bus’ reign and the arrival of Pythagoras. When the years of the kings have been added up it follows that Pythagoras first reached Italy about a hundred and forty years after Numa’s death. No doubt has ever been cast on this conclusion by the experts in chronological research.

  MANILIUS: Ye gods! What a gigantic howler!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.* They also consulted the Oracle at Delphi, which told Rome to honor 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.† 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 traveled 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. Honors to gods and heroes should not be equal; gods should be honored at all times with pious silence, clothed in white garments, and keeping one’s body chaste; but, to
the heroes, such honors 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 encyclopedia of every bit of information available to him about animals, vegetables, minerals, and humans.* “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 traveled 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 behavior 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 Skeptic 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 conceptualized 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 realized 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 behavior.”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 On the Commonwealth, 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.”12 In anticipation of his arrival, Scipio mentions a matter that has come up in the Senate about a “second sun,”* then remarks,

  SCIPIO AFRICANUS: I always feel that Socrates was wiser, since he resigned all interests of this sort and declared that problems of natural philosophy either transcended human reason or in no way concerned human life.

  TUBERO: I cannot understand, Africanus, how the tradition became established that Socrates rejected all such discussions and investigated only the problems of human life and conduct. Indeed, what more trustworthy authority can we cite than Plato? And Plato, in many passages of his works, even where he rep
resents Socrates as discoursing about ethics and politics, makes him eager to introduce arithmetic, geometry, and harmony, after the manner of Pythagoras.

  SCIPIO: What you say is true, but I presume you have heard, Tubero, that after the death of Socrates, Plato went first to Egypt to continue his studies, and later to Italy and Sicily that he might thoroughly master the discoveries of Pythagoras. He was very intimate with Archytas of Tarentum and Timaeus of Locri and acquired the papers of Philolaus.[*] Since at that time the name of Pythagoras was greatly honored in those places, Plato devoted himself to the Pythagoreans and their researches. Thus, as he had been devotedly attached to Socrates and had wished to attribute everything to him, he interwove the charm and argumentative skill of Socrates with the mysticism of Pythagoras and the well-known profundity of his varied lore.

  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:

  Pythagoras and Empedocles, men of no ordinary attainments but scholars of the first rank, assert that there is a single legal status belonging to all living creatures. They proclaim moreover, that everlasting punishment awaits those who have wronged anything that lives.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 modeled 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,