37125849 Pythagoreanism an Early Italic Philosophy

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Pino Blasone

Pythagoreanism

An Early Italic Philosophy

1 Modern Lucanian Jug with theSecret, moulded after ancient models bythe potter Michele Di Lena at Grottole,

Basilicata, Italy

Wisdom and Lore

Aristotle the philosopher wrote specifically on Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans.

Unfortunately,a few relevant fragments remain. In other works though, as respectively On

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Heavenand Metaphysics, not only he treats them quite extensively. Also he defines them as

those in Italy, [who are] called Pythagoreans ( ,

, 293a) or even, more simply, as the Italics ( , 988a). So strong it

was, in the Hellenic culture at those times, the identification of the Pythagorean school of

thought with an Italic location, although that does not mean Italian in a modern sense.

For the ancient Greeks as Aristotle Itala was part of todays southern Italy, with special

reference to the Greek colonies on its coasts, Sicily excluded. Later it come to denote a

larger area, the Megl Hells in Latin, Magna Graecia , and finally the whole peninsula

to as north as the Alps, such as described in PolybiusHistories (II 14; 2ndcentury B.C.).

However, an early idea of Italy was born about and, likely, in southern Italy itself: per ts

Italas and per tn Italan, according to the title of a now lost historical writing byAntiochus of Syracuse(around 420 B.C.), and to the above expression used by Aristotle.

In the Greek doxographists collected by the German philologist Herman A.Diels, we

may meet with this annotation referred to the Pythagoreans and ascribed to the Aristotelian

thinker and doxographer Atius, lived in the 1stor 2ndcentury B.C.: Their sect is called

Italic since Pythagoras emigrated from his fatherland Samos, as dissenting from the tyranny

of Polycrates, and taught in Italy (Atii De Placitis reliquiae, I 3; Dox. Gr. 280; Berlin,

1879). Almost the same information is found in the Philosophoumenacompiled in the first

half of the 3rdcentury A.D. by Hppolytus of Rome (Phil. II;Dox. 555), with the difference

that there the Pythagoreanism is regarded not so much as a sect, but rather as an original

Italic philosophy, despite the Christian authors declared adversity to philosophers.

Philosophical brotherhood or scientific school, sometimes mysterical community and even

political faction, in southern Italy the Pythagoreanism flourished from the age of Pythagoras

to that of Aristoxenusof Tarentumat least, that is from the late 6thto the 4thcentury B.C.

In his De senectute, the Roman Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote ofPythagoram

Pythagoreosque, incolas paene nostros, qui essent Italici philosophi quondam nominati

(Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, our nearly fellow countrymen, once called Italic

philosophers: XXI 78; 44 B.C.). Yet like for other Greek authors, still in the first half of the

3rd century A.D., in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Lartius,

Italic philosophy is a synonym of Pythagorean philosophy, at most including the Eleatic

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school which was derived from albeit somehow in contrast with a Pythagorean

worldview. Moreover Lartius distinguishes that Italic philosophy from an Ionian one, in

practice comprehensive of the rest of Greek thought, probably for unlike the latter the

former had been largely transmitted in a Doric dialect, or because actually the other main

source of Hellenic classical philosophy had sprung in the Ionian colonies of Asia Minor.

Just like the learned dwellers of these colonies had been in touch with an astrological

culture of the Near East, or with a magic one of the Middle East, a familiarity with the

wisdom of the southern Mediterranean Egypt was attributed to Pythagoras, from his young

age at least. Yet in the Greek traditional imagery there was also the mythic perception of a

wilder and quite barbaric north, particularly and extensively the Thrace, as the original land

of a Dionysian worship and Orphic lore. We can dare affirm, wisdom and lore together, the

charm of far older civilizations and a wondering sense of nature, formed a sort of pictorial

composite landscape with incipient ruins. Not merely that was the background for a

development of Pythagoreanism, but of the whole Pre-Socratic philosophy. Was there, in

southern Italy, something similar to Thrace in the imaginary baggage of the Greek settlers?

Although a few clues we may detect about date from much later, they sound some

useful for a phenomenological approach, needing to be supported by philological references.

In his above mentioned biographical history, in the Life of Archytas, Diogenes Lartiusreports an alleged letter from the Pythagorean Archytas to Plato, with related reply:

Archytas wishes Plato good health. We [...] went up to Lucania, where we found the true

progeny of Ocellus. [From them] we did get the works On Law, On Kingship, On Piety, and

On the Origin of the Universe, all of which we have sent on to you; but the rest are, at

present, nowhere to be found; if they should turn up, you shall have them. This is

Archytas letter; and Platos answer is as follows: Plato to Archytas greeting. I was

overjoyed to get the memoirs which you sent, and I am very greatly pleased with the writer

of them; he seems to be a right worthy descendant of his distant forbears. They came, so it is

said, from Myra, and were among those who emigrated from Troy in Laomedons time,

really good men, as the traditional story shows (VIII 79-81; trans. Robert D. Hicks, 1925).

Lucania was and is a mostly mountainous district, lying north of the Gulf of Taranto.

This country was inhabited by Lucanians, a people differing from the town dwellers on the

coast. Not a few of those good men though, so praised and mythologized in Platos letter,

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had learnt the Greek language and the Pythagorean ideas. According to Iamblichus, On the

Pythagoric Life, one Aresas Lucanus directed the school for a while. Ascribed to Ocellus

Lucanus, today we have a fragment ofOn Law, and the brief treatise On the Nature of the

Universe ( ,Per ts tou pants phses), mentioned by Lartius

with a slightly different title:gnesis instead of nature, since this concept of generation is

actually central in that work. With great probability, it was already known to the Roman

antiquary Marcus T. Varro in the first century B.C., the chief source ofDe die natali by the

late Roman polymath Censorinus, where Ocellus is named along with Pythagoras and

Archytas. Another thinker, Aesara of Lucania, was not so much a good man as reliably a

woman. Reliably means that, even if herOn Human Nature is a forgery, a critical effort to

credit its author as female is plausible. Women were well accepted, amid the Pythagoreans.

2 Views of the ruins of the Temples of Juno atMetapontum and of Juno Lucina at

Agrigentum: etchings by Jean Duplessis-Berteauxafter Jean Louis Desprez, for the

Voyage pittoresque ou Description des

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Royaumes de Naples et de Sicileby Jean-Claude Richard de Saint-Non (Paris: Clousier,

1781-1786); and by Agostino Aglio for WilliamWilkins The Antiquities of Magna Graecia

(Cambridge: University Press, 1807)

Macrocosm and Microcosm

What extant ofthe work by Aesara, orPer anthrp phsios,

was preserved in an anthology of excerpts from Greek authors, compiled by Joannes

Stobaeus in the late 5thcentury A.D. (Eclogae physicae et ethicae, I 49, 27). The fragment is

in Doric dialect, once spoken in the Peloponnese or in southern Italy, and seems to be

datable to the 3rd-4th century B.C. On the contrary, On the Nature of the Universeby

Ocellus is in Ionic-Attic dialect, but some relevant fragments in Doric also preserved by

Stobaeus suggest that it was revised in a commoner language whereas the original had

been redacted in Doric. All this implies that both texts might have been composed in the

same place and time, or even by the same author, of course if we agree with the scholarly

prevailing thesis that they are pseudepigraphical. Since this is not so much an academic

study as rather a cultural essay, here we can compare them with each other, by focussing on

their logical contents even more than on their philological history, in order to investigate

what a kind of wisdom was that of those Pythagorean Lucanians or else attributed to them.

A very Pythagorean analogy is that either Aesara and Ocellus sometimes Occelus,

due to a different spelling which betrays some an extraneousness of this name to Greek

language strive to show up a correspondence between a cosmic or natural order and an

auspicable harmony in human society. That is in the subordinate, not seldom arbitrary andconservative sense, that somehow the latter ought to imitate the former. What is quite

evident in the fourth and conclusive part of Ocellus tract at least or in his fragment ofOn

Low , and in such a way in Aesaras fragment, that this almost resembles the continuation

of Ocellus writing, but with some differences which also strive to show or simulate a

female point of view. In a Socratic even better than Pre-Socratic fashion, the natural

philosophy is converted into a human one. Nay, in Aesaras speech such a conversion is an

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inversion, since hers is a human centred worldview, the human nature prevails over the

nature of the universe, or the macrocosm is reflected in the microcosm of human soul.

By a circumstance like that, a historian of philosophy may be easily reminded of

Platos apologue about the earliest philosopher Thales of Miletus, narrated by the character

of Socrates in the dialogue Theaetetus: A witty and attractive Thracian servant-girl is told

to have mocked Thales for falling down into a well, while observing the stars and gazing

upwards. She claimed that he was eager to know the things in the sky, but what just before

him and by his feet escaped his notice (174a). Whether a real or fictional personage she

might have been, and albeit far maturer and less simple, Aesara plays a similar role to that of

the Platonic Thracian maid. Nevertheless, unlike Socrates behind such a mask, the presumed

Lucanian woman philosopher does not devalue the philosophy of nature, mother of modern

sciences. As for her as for Ocellus, natural and human centred philosophies are

complementary, almost specular one of the other. Whereas Ocellus gives a priority to the

former, Aesara seems to grant it to the latter. Necessary to homes as much as to cities, she

says, the principles of low and justice are to be traced inside our souls before of outside. To

paraphrase here St. Augustin,In interiore homine habitat justitia, orjus et justitiatogether.

Which is the nature of human soul, in the auroral psychology outlined by Aesara?

Like Plato indeed, but with more indulgence and sense of depth, she deems that it is a threelayers form, disposed in a hierarchic order. What superior is the reason, which suggests

sound judgement and awareness ( , gnman ki phrnasin). In the

middle there is the spiritedness, which supplies with courage and other emotions or instincts

( , alkn ki hormn). In a lower position, there is the source of passions

and of lovingness at once ( , rta ki philophrosnan). As you can

see, the perception of those which we moderns might even identify with the subconscious

and the unconscious is not so negative, as on the contrary the Platonism and the Neo-

Platonism will often consider. On this point Ocellus, in the last chapter of his tract, is

likewise moralistic. He regards especially the human involvement in sex and generation as a

peculiar completion and contribution to a continuity of the natural world, which for him is

only potentially eternal, that is otherwise liable to undergo corruption and degeneration.

Thus, instinctiveness and eros must be kept under strict control by reason. In fact,

those appetites, which are subservient to copulation, were imparted to men by Divinity not

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for the sake of voluptuousness, but for the sake of the perpetual duration of the human race.

For since it was impossible that man, who is born mortal, should participate of a divine life,

if the immortality of his genus was corrupted, Divinity gave completion to this immortality

through individuals, and made this generation of mankind to be unceasing and continued

(trans. Thomas Taylor, London 1831). This passage is a little, perhaps intentionally,

ambiguous. It sounds like rationalizing a prior, or popularizing, Orphic-Pythagorean belief

in metempsychosis. In that later Pythagorean view, the individuals are rather presented as

transitory forms of a surviving whole, which is mankind or human race and is to preserve

and improve. Such a revision is not an unique, in the pseudepigraphic Pythagoreanism.

Nay it is so frequent, that we might define it as Middle Pythagoreanism, between the

old one and a nostalgic Neo-Pythagorenism. To appear more credible or authoritative, that

Pythagoreanism needed to be Italic or even Lucanian, far better if the pseudonymous

authors were feigned as contemporary with Pythagoras. For instance, a fragment of her

workOn Piety collected by Stobaeus is ascribed to Theano, wife of Pythgoras. There, she

explains: I know, several Greeks deem Pythagoras taught that all descend from number.

[] Indeed, he did not say that all derive from number, but in accordance with this, since in

it there is a primordial order, participating with which every enumerable thing assumes its

own... (I 10, 13). All this does not exclude that, whereas Aesaras development of theDelphic maxim Know thyself sounds quite progressive, some Ocellus eugenic advices

are worse than conformist. Doubtless, his opinion of a male leadership over women

according to nature is an example of abuse of this principle, recurrent in the history of

Western thinking, despite some an emphasis laid by the Pythagoreans on female voices.

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3 Pnax, votive tablet of originally painted terracotta, fromLocri Epizefiri or Locris; Reggio Calabria: National Museum of

the Magna Graecia (5th century B.C.)

Dualism or Monism

Todays Basilicata, the Lucanian land was extending from the Gulf of Taranto at

South, in Latin Tarentum, to the Tyrrhenian Sea at Noth-West. On this coast there was the

Hellenic colony of Elea, in Latin Velia. The small town was the home of a philosophical

school. Its founder and principal exponent was Parmenides, in the early 5th century B.C.

Diogenes Lartius tells he was a pupil of Xenophanes of Colophon but above all of one

Pythagorean Aminias, while the Greek geographer Strabo between the first B.C. and the

first century A.D. mentions him and his follower Zeno as Pytaghoreans. Indeed, the

Eleatism can be considered such, just only as a dissident doctrine. Despite its liking for

monads or triads, as we have seen for Aesaras conception of human soul, Pythagoreanism

was basically a dualistic doctrine, largely argued on contrarieties: limited and unlimited, odd

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and even, one and plurality, right and left, male and female, resting and moving, straight and

curved, light and darkness, good and bad, square and oblong (cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics,

986a; he also attributes a similar doctrine to the Pythagorean physician Alcmaeon of

Croton). On the contrary, Parmenides reduced these appearances to an unitarian monism.

Substance and expression of such an unity was one universal, immutable being.

Instead the number, adopted by the Pythagoreans as a common denominator of the whole

reality, antonomastically and in itself could entail deleterious dichotomies, illusory

pluralism, dangerous alterations. Parmenides seems to have been worried for the possible

consequences, included social and political troubles, which the development of a dialectic

worldview might reflect or produce. All this suggests that, when in his poem On Nature he

polemizes with certain double-headed thinkers, likely he alludes to some Pythagoreans.

Of those unnamed ones, he writes: Indecision moves a wandering mind in their breasts.

They are carried like deaf and blind at once, astonished people with no judgement. For

them, the being or the not being are the same and not the same, about all there is a reversible

path (Diels-Kranz, frg. B6, 4-9). Initially at least, was the Eleatism a sort of heresy, within

the Pythagoreanism? Like for many heresies, the return to an original and purest conception,

in our case to a true albeit metaphysical harmony, could be a more or less declared aim.

Early the Italic Pythagorean clubs had dealt with a crisis, which had been not sotheoretical. Even if it was told that Pythagoras escaped a tyranny in his native island, it is

also true that he and his fellows favoured the establishment of oligarchic governments in the

towns of the Greater Hellas. On the other hand, around the half of the 5 th century B.C. a

recent born democracy reacted in a violent manner. The Greek historian Polybius (II 39) and

others report that a series of revolts expelled or even killed a not few Pythagoreans.

Pythagoras himself fled from Croton to Metapontum. Evidently, the alleged cosmic order

which the Pythagoreans wanted to imitate on earth was somewhat discrepant with human

nature, what will be the subject matter of tracts partly by Ocellus and especially by Aesara,

of whom above. Anyhow, reliably the whole theory was critically discussed in the

Pythagorean milieu, with various and contrasting positions. Among them, the Eleatism does

not appear that with most progressive implications, from a mundane point of view at least.

Incidentally though, Parmenides poem (Per phses) put some

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important metaphysical and logical questions to Western reflection, by conditioning its

terminology at the same time. The question of the Being, or ontological problem, is the most

famous ever debated, even if the translation of the terms employed by Parmenides is rather

and more simply what is and what is not ( and , t enand t m en),

mainly in the extensive sense of all what is and all what is not, according to him a false

contradiction anyway. Approximately the same concepts, in the same epoch or even before,

are expressed with analogous terms in Sanskrit, at the beginnings of the Indian religious and

philosophical speculation: stand ast, in the Rig-VdaHymns, in theBrhadranyakaand

ChndogyaUpanishads. Particularly in the Chndogya the reasoning is so akin to that of

Parmenides, that we cannot aver a strict exclusivity by him, even if the contacts we know

between those civilizations, so remote from each other, date only since the Hellenistic age.

Then, where is the main originality of Parmenides? Undoubtedly, that is in the

disconcerting and a bit enigmatic assertion , the same,

in fact, is to think and to be (DK 28 B3). However it might be interpreted, this apparent

absurdity influenced or conditioned the entire history of Western philosophy until modern

age, so much as to sound emblematic of a civilization responsible to have begot modernity

itself. Amid a few ruins and against a still wild landscape, todays visitors of Elea ought to

keep somewhat present to their minds such a peculiar disclosure of the Being which onceoccurred to the mind of the so called, by Plato, venerable Parmenides, or his assertion

referred to human beings that mostly they are thought (28 B16). On the eastern side of

the antique Greek cultural area, in Asia Minor, we meet with another famed philosophical

and now fragmentary poem of the same period and with the same title: in particular with a

nearly untranslatable expression, which is a further meaningful, flashing synthesis though.

That is a os or lgos en ae (logos which always is; Diels-Kranz,

Fragmente der Vorsokratiker: frg. 22 B1), which the author Heraclitus of Ephesus maintains

that all things come to pass in accordance with. The Greek lgos means word, discourse,

reason, and later much more, so that we might translate such an everlasting lgos en as a

discursive being, or even interpret it as a dialectic reason. Slowly this dynamic concept

begins to flank or replace the static one of Parmenides, his theo-ontology turns into a theo-

phenomenology, or the essence of the world is reconciled with its existence as well as its

being with its becoming. At any rate, for long the Logos beside the Being will form the

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binary mainstream of Western philosophy. Nonetheless, indeed Heraclitus never mentions

Parmenides but twice Pythagoras. His is a different answer to certain questions put by the

Pythagoreans. It is quite evident in those fragments classified as B50 and B10, where we

can read: ...from all [comes] one and from one [come] all. Or else, more poetically, in the

renowned B51: People do not know, how what drawn in different directions harmonizes

with itself. Such a harmony depends on opposite tensions, like that of the bow or the lyre.

4 Gold Orphic tablets, with ritualinscriptions (cf. the Thracian tablets in

Euripides,Alcestis, lines 965-69). Dating fromthe 4th century B.C. or later, several of themhave been found inside graves throughout theancient Magna Graecia, or Greater Hellas

Cosmology as a Psychology

Philolaus of Croton, contemporary of Socrates, and Archytas of Tarentum,

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contemporary of Plato, were late Italic Pythagoreans, although Philolaus went into exile in

Thebes of Greece. In his youth, a Pythagorean had been Aristoxenus of Tarentum, disciple

of Aristotle. He wrote a now lost On the Pythagoric Life, which inspired Iamblichus work

with the same title, where the Pythagoreans are so praised: Their studies filled all Italy, an

unlearned country before, with men fond of learning. Thanks to Pythagoras it was called

Greater Greece. Of there came out several philosophers, poets, legislators, who exported the

art of rhetoric, the demonstrative reasoning and written lows to Greece itself (chap. 29; cf.

a translation by Taylor, London 1818). Also of their works, a few fragments remain. Some

of them may be spurious too, in the sense that they were pseudonymous productions of

Pythagorean groups or even of Platonic sympathizers. Albeit an uncertain historical figure,

to the above names we can add Timaeus of Locris. To him, Plato dedicated his dialogue

Timaeus. As late as in the 5th century A.D., in his Commentary on the Timaeus Proclus

Lycaeus informs us that Ocellus Lucanus was a precursor of Timaeus but that, whereas the

general vision of the former was dualistic, the latter developed a triadic view of the physic

world, with peculiar reference to the characteristics of its primary, constitutive elements.

With the title On the Soul of the World and on Nature , a tract in Doric dialect was

ascribed to Timaeus ( , Per psuchs ksm ki phsios; the

frequent Latin translation De natura mundi et animae may be misleading, since it means

On the Nature of the World and of the Soul). With great probability it is a pseudepigraphal

text, even if late ancient Neoplatonists as Proclus and Iamblichus, as well as early modern

Renaissance humanists, did not doubt of its authenticity. As to its contents, they are on the

same line of Ocellus and Aesaras also supposed pseudepigrapha, albeit a step further.

There too, cosmology joins psychology. Yet an alleged specularity between cosmos and

human soul gets so close and reciprocal, that to the former it is attributed a divine soul, of

which the human one would be a dim reflection or, we can insinuate, vice versa. We have

to admit, this is a very Pythagorean attitude. In LatinAnima Mundi, the idea of a Soul of

the World will gain its own place in the history of Western culture, included an antique

Stoic worldview and not excluded the modern Jungian analytical psychology.

If we consider well, the difference between Ocellus and Timaeus is not so much that

deducible from Proclus, concerning a ternary rather than dualistic worldview. On one hand,

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a fragment selected as 48 A8 by Diels and Kranz tells us of an Ocellus not less fond of triads

than Timaeus. On the other hand, Timaeus speech in On the Soul of the World and on

Nature remains largely dualistic, based as it is on couples of principles as Mind and

Necessity or, above all, Form and Matter. Such a form is mainly the soul, which the mind of

a God demiurge gave to the matter of the world, or as a heritage to the bodies of human

individuals, compatibly with the limits put by the Necessity to their condition and situations.

Like for Ocellus, the universe is eternal and inalterable but in a relative way, for the lower

world as we know it is the fruit of a creation and subject to a changeable nature: the

impassive part of the world and that which is perpetually moved, according to Ocellus

(in a less contradictory way, that is what Parmenides reduces to a deceitful, unreal surface).

With regard to the relation between Form and Matter, not seldom it may sound even

more Aristotelian than Platonic, or like an attempt at reconciling Aristotelian with Platonic

concepts, or else in case of an improbable precedence of our texts like a germinal

synthesis of both of them. All the more this is true in On the Nature of the Universe, where

Ocellus explains the role of contrarieties in a sort of perpetual cosmogony, a complex

confluence of inner and outer essences into the existence of the world. Here, its participation

of higher forms is seen as a latent potentiality inside the matter: In matter all things prior to

generation are in capacity, but they exist in perfection when they are generated and receivetheir proper nature. Hence matter [...] is necessary to the existence of generation. The

second thing which is necessary, is the existence of contrarieties, in order that mutations and

changes in quality may be effected, matter for this purpose receiving passive qualities, and

an aptitude to the participation of forms (chap. 2; trans. Thomas Taylor: see above).

Very curious and misogynous, by the way is the utilitarian justification, which

Timaeus of Locris utters in his writing, about the Orphic-Pythagorean eschatological

credence in the reincarnation or transmigration of souls: Albeit in a transitory way and

founded in a belief as that in metempsychosis, such penalties ought to be devised, that after

their death the souls of cowardly males should migrate into female bodies, so as to be

exposed to contempt and outrages; and the souls of murderers into the bodies of wild beasts,

in order to receive their proper punishment; and those of impudent fellows into pigs or

boars; and those of inconstant or heedless persons into birds flying through the air; and

those of indolent, sluggard, ignorant or foolish people, into aquatic animal forms. It is the

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goddess Nemesis, who judges all that... (V 17). No doubt, this aristocratic minded attitude

went by hand with a political conservatism, such as in a doubtful, fragmentary tract by one

Hippodamus of Thurii preserved by Stobaeus. Hippasus of Metapontum, who advised the

early Pythagoreans to consent democratic instances and was later expelled or even drowned

by them, or Archytas, engaged in a democratic context of his city, were only exceptions.

Notoriously the Pythagoreans pioneered or excelled in mathematics, astronomy,

musicology, medicine and the like. According to Iamblichus after Aristoxenus, any magic

was not lacking. The divorce from humanities, typical of late modernity, was still far to

come. What a kind of science was that, more specifically? Iamblichus of Chalcis offers a

sharp indication about, when he wrote that the Pythagoreans more and more strove to exert

their memories, since nothing is as important for experience and science, as the intent to

increase our capability of memorizing (On the Pythagoric Life, chap. 29). That is not a

matter of mere memorization. Actually memory, in the sense of reminiscence later idealized

by Plato, and experience, if not yet an experimental research, were complementary in the

Pythagorean culture. Just to say so, they were the conservative and the progressive sides of

it. Reminiscence served to preserve or rediscover a traditional wisdom or even lore, also out

of the Hellenic area. Experience was useful, in order to found a science in the modern sense

we give it, where both old knowledge and new discoveries could find an enduringformulation and a possibility of further transmission. Step by step this various notionality,

imputed to Pythagoras by Heraclitus as a dispersive /polumtheia, from a

baggage for initiates makes its extensive and specialized, methodical and critical way.

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5 Hans Leu the Younger, Orpheus and the Animals, Basel,Switzerland: Kunstmuseum; detail, 1519. If compared with otherconventional images of them, indeed this Orphic-Pythagorean

Orpheus resembles more Pythagoras than Orpheus himself

Philanthropy and Ecumenism

In his dialogue Timaeus, Plato introduces Timaeus the Locrian as the character of a

visitor from his then city-state, today in the Italian district of Calabria. Other persons are

Socrates, Critias, Hermocrates. At the beginning the character of Socrates so addresses

them, in particular Timaeus as representative of the Pythagoreans: [You] are the only ones

remaining who are fitted by nature and education to take part at once both in politics and

philosophy. Here is Timaeus, of Locris in Italy, a city which has admirable laws, and who is

himself in wealth and rank the equal of any of his fellow-citizens; he has held the mostimportant and honourable offices in his own state, and, as I believe, has scaled the heights of

all philosophy (trans. Benjamin Jowett, Oxford 1871; cf. DK 49 B1). What here a nostalgic

Plato admires is some a Pythagorean capability to conciliate theory and practice, philosophy

and politics, almost like an anticipation of his own cherished Republic of Philosophers.

Was that a real ability, or a commendable intention? In order to answer this question,

even better than on controversial historical accounts of some political failures we should

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focus on a gist of the political ideology of the Pythagoreans. That is the or mutual

friendship, a version of the cosmic harmony applied to human relationships or to the city-

state, a principle variously idealized in Platonic dialogues as Lysis and The Republic, but

which Aristotle will more realistically and widely develop in his treatise on Politics. Before

all, the phila of the Pythagoreans was prescribed as a norm to their own brotherhood or

communities. In practice it could be so exclusive and elitarian, as to easily work in defence

of group or social class interests, rather than as a generalized feeling of solidarity. Likely,

such was not the less cause of the popular revolts against a Pythagorean hegemony, in the

ancient Greek colonies of southern Italy or Magna Graecia. An anecdote narrated in

Iamblichus On the Pythagoric Life may confirm this impression, although it is proposed by

the Neoplatonic author as an edifying example, nearly like a Christian evangelical parable.

That is so nice, as to be worthy of being fully reported. A certain Pythagorean,

travelling through a long and solitary road on foot, came to an inn; and there, from labor and

other all-various causes, fell into a long and severe disease, so as to be at length in want of

the necessaries of life. The inn-keeper, however, whether from commiseration of the man, or

from benevolence, supplied him with every thing that was requisite, neither sparing for this

purpose any assistance or expense. But the Pythagorean falling a victim to the disease,

wrote a certain symbol, before he died, in a table, and desired the inn-keeper, if he shouldhappen to die, to suspend the table near the road, and observe whether any passenger read

the symbol. For that person, said he, will repay you what you have spent on me, and will

also thank you for your kindness. The inn-keeper, therefore, after the death of the

Pythagorean, having buried, and paid the requisite attention to his body, had neither any

hopes of being repaid, nor of receiving any recompense from some one who might read the

table. At the same time, however, being surprised at the request of the Pythagorean, he was

induced to expose the writing in the public road. A long time after, therefore, a certain

Pythagorean passing that way, having understood the symbol, and learnt who it was that

placed the table there, and having also investigated every particular, paid the inn-keeper a

much greater sum of money than he had disbursed (chap. 33; trans. Th. Taylor: see above).

Already at the times of Iamblichus, an epochal match was played just inside the

Neoplatonism and especially on the ground of ethics, between a Christianized wing and a

pagan one, a Neo-Pythagorean component included. Probably not by chance, the above

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apologue by the heathen Iamblichus may recall the well known parable of the Good

Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke. Yet, in a sort of emulation of the values of the new

religion, the moral focus here is no longer and not so much on the phila among the

Pythagoreans, as rather on the commiseration or benevolence of the inn-keeper. He is

the hero of the story better than both travellers, since these need a symbol as a warranty of

recognition about their belonging to a shared community, whereas the inn-keeper like the

Samaritan in Jesus parable does not need any about his belonging to a wider one which is

mankind itself. It is strange how Iamblichus parable is an unwilling propaganda in favour

of Christianity or, even better, of an ethics which might exceed either Pythagoreanism and

Christianity. Even more than a political event, the end of pagan antiquity will be an ethical

one, which assumed a religious form. Paradoxically, the nostalgic and a little anachronistic

Pythagoreanism of Iamblichus sounds like a very Neoplatonic premonition of that event.

Neither last nor least, a bit of boring philology. Pythagoras was credited to have

invented the wordphilosopha, where the termsphila andsopha got married to each other.

Let us return onto the quotation from On the Pythagoric Life, referred to the Pythagoreans:

Their studies filled all Italy, an unlearned country before, with men fond of learning.

Thanks to Pythagoras it was called Greater Hellas. Of there came out several philosophers,

poets, legislators, who exported the art of rhetoric, the demonstrative reasoning and writtenlows to Greece itself. As to physics, we may also refer to eminent physiologists as

Empedocles and Parmenides of Elea; as to ethics, Epicharmus, whose maxims are used by

most philosophers. In the Greek original, indeed the term philsophoi is used with two

meanings: to designate generically men fond of learning, and in a more specific way. We

may affirm, the specific Pythagorean sense of the word was friends of wisdom. It is also

true, in the above reported or mentioned parables, neither the inn-keeper nor the Samaritan

were philosophers. More simply, they were friends of mankind. Without a feeling of

philanthrpa, in his apologue Iamblichus implied, no philosophy can be Amity of Wisdom.

Or else, here echoing the Stoic ethics, there cannot be real humanity without humaneness.

Before of being Platonic or evangelical, the parabling was a Pythagorean custom.

And, even when the parabler opens the door to the main sense of his speech, a window may

remain open to further interpretations. What invites us to confront the above apologues or

parables by Plato, by Iamblichus, by Luke. All of them are written in Greek, as expressions

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of a Hellenic or Hellenized culture. Yet the characters may be Thracians, Samaritans or

Italics, all minorities with regard not only to a shared civilization but also to their respective

hegemonic ethnic or religious groups. Each of them is immersed in a natural Mediterranean

landscape, might it be set in Southern Italy, in Asia Minor or in Palestine. By paraphrasing

Heraclitus here, rather than to one logos, they act or speak in accordance with nature, close

to a heart of the cosmic enigma. And, by paraphrasing the Stoics, just there was a seminal

orspermatiks logos, even before of being a Pythagorean, a Platonic or a Christian one.

Albeit in a peculiar exclusive fashion, elsewhere in his book Iamblichus strives to

assimilate the Pythagoric way of life to a Stoic ecumenism, susceptible to overcome

national barriers and state borders even in war times. This anecdote is referred to Greek

prisoners, once captured by Carthaginian enemies: When the Carthaginians were about to

send more than five thousand soldiers into a desert island, Miltiades the Carthaginian,

perceiving among them the Argive Possiden (both of them being Pythagoreans), went to

him, and not manifesting what he intended to do, advised him to return to his native country,

with all possible celerity, and having placed him in a ship that was then sailing near the

shore, supplied him with what was necessary for his voyage, and thus saved the man from

the dangers [to which he was exposed] (chap. 27; cf. chap 36; trans. Th. Taylor). At least,

from Iamblichus himself we know that there were Pythagoreans not only in the Greek areas.

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6 The so calledHead of a Philosopher, Reggio Calabria:

National Museum of Magna Graecia; 5th century B.C.Pythagoras was told to have invented the word ksmos, a

beautiful order of the universe opposed to the chos of themythical cosmogony, as well as the cosmic allegory of the

harmony of the spheres. According to Philolaus, neither the

earth nor the sun were at the centre of the space, but an arcanefireplace or fire of Hestia (cf. the Latin goddess Vesta)

Our Nearly Fellow Countrymen

In the scholarly tradition, willingly the two tracts by Ocellus Lucanus and by

Timaeus of Locris have been considered and translated by the same personages. What is

particularly true for the Italian Lodovico Nogarola in the 16th century; for the French Jean-

Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis dArgens, in the 18th century; for the British Thomas Taylor in

the 19th century. Furthermore, their interest seems to have been more philosophical than

erudite. Thanks to these thoughtful researchers, respectively Humanism, Enlightenment and

Romanticism could somewhat appreciate texts like those and find in them an adaptable

congeniality, besides an internal fundamental homogeneity. The causes may be various: a

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fascination exerted by the intuition of a Soul of the World, a theistic or pantheistic feeling of

nature, the perception of an affinity and continuity between Pythagoreanism and Platonism,

even some an indulgence toward occultism. Yet there are also other, more specific motives.

Together with a Latin translation from Ocellus, Nogarola issued an Epistola [...]

super viris illustribus genere Italis, qui Graece scripserunt(Epistle [...] on illustrious Italic

men, who wrote in Greek, Venice 1559). Not only this essay in form of private letter is the

first study, as critical as the late Renaissance culture allowed it to be, about such a subject

matter. Indeed it is also an early, passionate identification of the antique Greek Italic

civilization as an important root and component of a problematic Italian national identity,

then still far from being fully realized. What Nogarola applied to a next Counter-Reformed

Italy, the cosmopolitan Marquis dArgens will cast into a lay idea of modern Europe, which

coincided with a Neoclassic sensitiveness. His laity did not mean atheism though, but rather

an open type of religiosity, such as Platonism and even Pythagoreanism could supply. Of

course, it was a Pythagoreanism filtered through a Platonic or Neoplatonic interpretation,

such as in the presumed pseudepigraphal productions of Ocellus and Timaeus of Locris.

In 1762 the Marquis dArgens published Ocellus Lucanus, and afterwards Timaeus

Locrus, both writers, who [...] had been neglected by universal consent: thus Thomas

Taylor wrote in 1831, introducing his English translation of Ocellus On the Nature of theUniverseand other minor Platonizing or Neoplatonic writings, by one Taurus late Platonic

philosopher and by Proclus. Their respective attributed titles, On the Eternity of the World

and On the Perpetuity of Time, may be indicative of a peculiar selective reading which

Taylor gave of the ancient Pythagoreanism and Platonism. Yet what matters here is that such

an interpretation reliably influenced some English Romantic poets and an American thinker

as Ralph Waldo Emerson. From the Italic Magna Graecia and surroundings to the Italian

Renaissance, from the French Enlightenment to a British and North-American modernity,

actually that Golden Chain of a so called philosophia perennis did work. Albeit in a

roundabout way, it is still working hic et nunc, while we are writing or reading.

After the Roman Cicero once in his Cato Maior de senectute, evidently Lodovico

Nogarola, the Marquis dArgens and Thomas Taylor somehow regarded those Pythagoreans

as their nearly fellow countrymen, respectively in an Italian, European or Western

perspective. All that leads our mind back to shortly consider the consistency of a Latin

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Pythagoreanism, as a possible link in that Golden Chain of transmission of an archaic

wisdom disciplina sapientiae, according to the historians Livy and Valerius Maximus

and as part of a middle or Hellenistic Pythagoreanism. For instance, there are the legend of

the Roman king Numa as a scholar or even a familiar acquaintance of Pythagoras (cf.

Plutarch,Life of Numa Pompilius), and the fact of a Pythagorean ascendancy over the poet

Quintus Ennius (especially in his now fragmentary poem Epicharmus), who was from the

Magna Graecia. In a fabulous way, among Italic peoples not only the Lucanians, but the

early Romans too, would have been learned by the Pythagoreanism or Pythagoras himself.

In the first century B.C. at Rome, a magic Pythagorean was Nigidius Figulus, later

a character in the poemPharsalia by Lucan. An ascetic one had to be Quintus Sextius with

his circle, whose Stoic eclecticism pleased the philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca. What

we know about is too scarce and dubious, even if the eclecticism of the latter seems to have

been a moral synthesis better than a mere juxtaposition of elements. Anyway, it is not to

exclude at all that those influences altogether concurred to inspire Ovid, in the 15th book of

his Metamorphoses. There, the Latin poet imagines Pythagoras himself to speak. His speech

in verse sounds like a theoretical justification of the entire poem. It has been objected, this

quite contradictory Pythagoras argues like Heraclitus rather than as a Pythagorean.

Nonetheless, on one hand this criticism makes less sense, if we share the point of view that

Parmenides and Heraclitus gave different or opposite answers to the main question put by

the Pythagoreans, about the being or becoming of the world. On the other hand, the basic

worldview exposed by Ovids Pythagoras does not differ so much from that emerging from

Ocellus and Timaeus pseudepigrapha: all details must change, for the general picture

could survive in itself. In Ovids poetry, what new is a transparent deal of melancholy. Its

originality is that this is the only antique not fully Platonizant interpretation, which we have.

Yet let us read Pythagoras, such as dramatized by the great poet, who could know the

Pythagorean sources somewhat better than what we can, and at last had also to suffer a lot

of exile like that of his favourite thinker. In the foreground, the consolatory or warning myth

of metempsychosis is kept alive. The precept of vegetarianism grows an appeal against any

superfluous violence, but what recurs is an almost biblical feeling of the vanitas vanitatum:

What we have been,/ What we now are, we shall not be tomorrow./ There was a time when

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we were only seed,/ Only the hope of men, housed in the womb,/ Where Nature shaped us,

brought us forth, exposed us/ To the void air, and there in light we lay,/ Feeble and infant,

and were quadrupeds/ Before too long, and after a little wobbled/ And pulled ourselves

upright, holding a chair,/ The side of the crib, and strength grew into us,/ And swiftness;

youth and middle age went swiftly/ Down the long hill toward age, and all our vigor/ Came

to decline. [...] Time devours all things/ With envious Age, together. The slow gnawing/

Consumes all things, and very, very slowly (lines 214-33; trans. Rolfe Humphries, 1955).

7 Portraits of the German astronomer Friedrich Johannes

Kepler and of the Italian humanist Lodovico Nogarola (16th-17th

century). Jokingly, the former liked to say that he was areincarnation of Pythagoras. He was also a modern fan of thePythagorean musica universalis or harmony of the spheres

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An Archaeological Wondering

When Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, said that philosophy begins in wonder, probably

they were mainly thinking of the Pythagoreans in front of the cosmic enigma, which they

perceived as a mirror of the human inner nature. Sure, today no longer we run the risk of

falling down into a well like Thales while scanning the sky. On the contrary of the character

of the philosopher in the above apologue narrated by Plato, sometimes we seem to pay more

attention to our feet and to what before them, than to gaze upwards or at any witty and

attractive Thracian girl smiling at us. Yet it may occur that it is the presumed figure of a

philosopher to come back to us, neither ascending out of a well nor descending from heaven

but emerging from sea like out of a deep and wide subconscious. A collective and cultural

one, where often a will of representation coincides with a wish of re-presentation.

That is what happened in 1969 and 1970s, off Porticello in Calabria. Together with

other fragmentary bronzes, what casually discovered and recovered from an ancient wreck

was the sculpted head of an elderly long bearded man, with a musing and hieratic

expression. A few draped pieces, part of a right foot and a left hand were supposed to belong

to the same statue, what confirmed by later scientific examinations (cf. In situ Study of

the Porticello Bronzes..., in bibliography). Currently in the Museum of Magna Graecia at

Reggio Calabria, the artwork was dated approximately to the 5th century B.C.

A temptation to identify this so called Head of a Philosopher as that of a local

thinker or even a late portrait of Pythagoras rather than as the image of a generic or mythic

personage, is quite obviously strong, although there are well grounded objections about

among the archaeologists and still now the controversial question remains open. The

Pythagoreans in Rhegion, todays Reggio Calabria, were an eminent group, and there were

also excellent artists as Clearcus and Pythagoras of Rhegion, whose name itself may hint at

an ancient veneration to the figure of the Samian philosopher. Whomever the Porticello

head might be referred to and whoever its sculptor might have been, it is to notice that this

antique culture does not stop baffling us, sometimes so much as to bewilder our relevant

knowledge and consequently to influence our perception of an advanced modernity.

Here just only paraphrasing a modern thinker as Martin Heidegger, a no mean

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wonder of wonder is our recurrent occurrence to wonder at those wondering predecessors.

Even better than any historical identity or remote genealogy, likely what we try to trace and

capture in their alleged texts or figural expressions is the secret of their capability to wonder

at this same old world, even when they were projecting theorems onto it. A capability, which

we may have mostly lost, since disillusioned or distracted by an artificial way of life. Far

better than an ascetic way, the Pythagoric life was an evergreen attitude of the mind.

It is a common place that modern philosophy began with a question put in 1714 by

the German philosopher and scientist Gottfried W. Leibniz, in his Principles of Nature and

Grace, Based on Reason: Why is there something instead of nothing? [] Assuming that

things must exist, we should give a reason why they must be as they are, and not otherwise.

Despite a vaguely Parmenidean formulation of its first part, the wondering spirit of this

argument sounds still Pythagorean: after all, an order enables the world to exist, each one of

us included in his own time and place. May it be a beautiful order, as the Pythagoreans

thought, or the best of possible worlds according to Leibniz himself? If it is not so, how

much does this depend on a bad fatality and how little on our responsibility? There are

things which must be as they are, and other ones we enjoy the rare free chance to change.

Evidently, that is not a matter of mere wonder but of reminiscence too. At the dawn

of our civilization, the Pythagoreanism reflected such a development of memory into anorganic remembrance. In an Orphic tradition, a goddess Mnemosyne was watching over our

memorial consistencies, not excluded an eschatological perspective, as evidenced by some

inscriptions on the so dubbed Orphic tablets largely discovered in southern Italy. Amid her

daughters there were Mneme, muse of memory, and later Clio, muse of history. Indeed, the

complex evolution of the myth of Muses deals with the origins of what we call culture. As

individuals or collectivity, then we may well stop wondering at a cosmic beauty. Yet, after

Timaeus of Locris at least, somewhere a goddess Nemesis prevents us from doing it at the

errors and horrors of history. That is what a thoughtful mythology can still warn us of, and

what re-elaborated in the 18thcentury by a Pre-Romantic thinker as Giambattista Vico, who

also wroteDe antiquissima Italorum sapientia(On the Most Ancient Italic Wisdom).

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8 Supposed Temple of Vesta, the oldestmarble building existing in Rome, from the

late 2nd century B.C. (Square of theBoccadella Verit; old photograph)

An Extensive Bibliography

Aristotle, Metaphysics, translated by Hugh Tredennick, 2 vols.; Cambridge,Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1933-35.

Aristote, Du Ciel, texte tabli et traduit par Paul Moraux, Paris: Les Belles Lettres,

1965.Baltes Matthias, Timaios Lokros. ber die Natur des Kosmos und der Seele (a

commentary), Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972.Blasone P.,I cigni e la luna. Archeologia dellEssere (...Archaeology of the Being),

in the World Wide Web magazine Filosofia in Italia, University of Venice: Department ofPhilosophy, 2001.

Castrizio Daniele, Il ritratto di Pitagora di Samo (The Portrait of Pythagoras ofSamos), video-lecture in Italian at the Web Address http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-c_JhvLYRc; 2008.

Centrone Bruno,I Pitagorici, Rome/Bari: Laterza, 1996.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-c_JhvLYRchttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-c_JhvLYRchttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-c_JhvLYRchttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-c_JhvLYRc


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Bernabe Alberto and Ana Isabel Jimenez San Cristobal, Instructions for theNetherworld: The Orphic Gold Tablets, Leiden: Brill, 2008.

Burkert Walter,Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, translated by Edwin L.Minar Jr.; Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1972.

Diels Hermann,Doxographi Graeci, Berlin: De Gruyter, 1958.Diels Hermann and Kranz Walter, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Dublin and

Zrich: Weidmann, 1952; vol. 1.Diogenes Lartius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, translated by Robert Drew

Hicks, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1925.Evans Frank B. III, Thomas Taylor, Platonist of the Romantic Period, inPMLA, LV

(New York, December 1940), pp. 1067-8.Fairbanks Arthur, editor and translator, The First Philosophers of Greece, London: K.

Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1898.Ferguson Kitty, The Music of Pythagoras, New York: Walker & Company, 2008.Ferguson Kitty, Pythagoras: His Lives and the Legacy of a Rational Universe,

London: Icon Books Ltd, 2010.Fritz, Kurt von, Pythagorean Politics in Southern Italy: An Analysis of the Sources,

New York: Columbia University Press, 1940.Giangiulio Maurizio (edited by; with an introduction by Walter Burkert),Pitagora: le

opere e le testimonianze, 2 vols.; Milan: A. Mondadori, 2000.Guthrie Kenneth Sylvan and Fideler David R., The Pythagorean Sourcebook and

Library: An Anthology of Ancient Writings which Relate to Pythagoras and PythagoreanPhilosophy, Grand Rapids, Minnesota: Phanes Press, 1987.

Huffman Carl A., Philolaus of Croton: Pythagorean and Presocratic, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Huffman Carl A., Architas of Tarentum: Pythagorean, Philosopher andMathematician King, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Iamblichus Life of Pythagoras, or, Pythagoric life (London 1818), translated byThomas Taylor, Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International Ltd, 1986.

Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean Way of Life, text, translation and notes by JohnDillon and Jackson Hershbell, Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1991.

Joannes Stobaeus, Eclogae physicae et ethicae, edited by Curt Wachsmuth, 2 vols.;Berlin: Weidmann, 1884.

Joost-Gaugier Christiane L., Measuring Heaven: Pythagoras and his Influence onArt in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006.

Joost-Gaugier Christiane L., Pythagoras and Renaissance Europe: Finding Heaven,Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2009.Kahn Charles H., Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans: a Brief History, Indianapolis,

Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 2001.Kennedy John Bernard, New Research on Plato and Pythagoras, Manchester, U.K.:

Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicineat the Manchester University, 2010; informative page at the Web addresshttp://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/jay.kennedy/

Kingsley Peter, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles andPythagorean Tradition, Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1996.

Marg Walter, Timaeus Locrus: De Natura Mundi et Animae, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972.

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http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/jay.kennedy/http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/jay.kennedy/


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Menage Gilles, Historia mulierum philosopharum, Lyon: Joan Anissonios, Posueland Claudium Rigaud, 1690.

Mullach Friedrich Wilhelm August, Fragmenta philosophorum Graecorum,particularly the vols. 1 and 2; Paris: Firmin Didot, 1860-81.

OMeara Dominic J., Pythagoras Revived: Mathematics and Philosophy in LateAntiquity, Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Ocelli Lucani... De universi natura libellus, Greek text and Latin translation byLodovico Nogarola, with his essay Epistola [...] super viris illustribus genere Italis, quiGraece scripserunt; Venice: Giovanni Griffio, 1559.

Ocellus Lucanus, en Grec et en Franois, translated and commented by Jean-Baptistede Boyer, Marquis dArgens, Utrecht: Libraires Associs, 1762.

Ocellus Lucanus, On the Nature of the Universe, translated by Thomas Taylor,London: John Bohn, Henry Bohn, Thomas Rodd, 1831.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by Rolfe Humphries, Bloomington, Indiana:Indiana University Press, 1955.

Plant Ian, Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome: An Anthology, London:Equinox Publishing Ltd, 2004.

Plato, Timaeus, translated by Benjamin Jowett in The Dialogues of Plato, vol. 3;Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1871.

Porfirio, Vita di Pitagora (Porphyrys Life of Pythagoras translated into Italian,with Greek and Arabic texts), Milan: Rusconi, 1998.

Pozzoni Ivan,La collocazione della Schola Pythagorica tra essere e dover essereetico/sociali, inInformacin Filosfica vol. VII (Rome, 2010), n. 14, pp. 29-65.

Proclus Commentary on the Timaeus of Plato (first edition 1816), translated byThomas Taylor, 2 vols.; Westbury, Wiltshire, U.K.: The Prometheus Trust, 1998.

Radcliffe G. Edmonds III (edited by), The Orphic Gold Tablets and GreekReligion: Further Along the Path, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Riedweg Christoph, Pythagoras: His Life, Teaching, and Influence, translated by

Steven Rendall, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press; 2ndedition, 2008.Ridgway Brunilde S., The Porticello Bronzes Once Again, inAmerican Journal of

Archaeology, issue 114.2, pp. 331-42; Boston: Archaeological Institute of America, 2010.Sassi Maria Michela, Gli inizi della filosofia in Grecia, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri,

2009.Thesleff Holger, An Introduction to the Pythagorean Writings of the Hellenistic

Period, bo: bo Akademi, 1961.

Thesleff Holger, The Pythagorean Texts of the Hellenistic Period, bo: boAkademi, 1965.Thom Johan C., The Pythagorean Golden Verses, with introduction and commentary,

Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995.Timaei Locri...De mundi anima, & natura libellus, Greek text and Latin translation

by Lodovico Nogarola, Venice: Girolamo Scoto, 1555.Timaios of Locri, On the Nature of the World and the Soul, text, translation and notes

by Thomas H. Tobin, Chico, California: Scholars Press, 1985.Time de Locres, en Grec et en Franois , translated and commented by Jean-Baptiste

de Boyer, Marquis dArgens, Berlin: Haude and Spener, 1763.

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Uzdavinys Algis, The Golden Chain: An Anthology of Pythagorean and PlatonicPhilosophy, Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom, 2004.

Various Authors, In situ Study of the Porticello Bronzes by portable X-rayfluorescence and laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy, in Spectrochimica Acta Part B Atomic Spectroscopy, vol. 62, issue 12, pp. 1512-18; Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2007.

Vico Giambattista,De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (first edition 1710), Latin textand Italian translation edited by Manuela Sanna, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura,2005.

Waithe Mary Ellen, A History of Women Philosophers, vol. 1, Boston/The Hague:Martinus Nijhoff, 1987.

Wolf Johann Christoph, Mulierum Graecarum quae Oratione Prosa usae suntFragmenta et Elogia Graece et Latine (Gttingen 1739), Whitefish, Montana: KessingerPublishing Co., 2009.

9 Greco-Roman marble herma of Pythagoras, Rome:Capitoline Museums (1st century A.D.); and Pythgoras as amathematician, fresco medallion in St. Michaels Abbey,Montescaglioso, Italy (17th century). The iconography of

Pythagoras with an oriental looking turban is attested also by a

fine bronze bust from Herculaneum, in the NationalArchaeological Museum at Naples (1st century B.C.)

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