Pino Blasone
Pythagoreanism An Early Italic Philosophy
1 Modern Lucanian Jug with the Secret, moulded after ancient
models by the 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
1
Heaven and 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 came 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 Polybius Histories (II 14; 2nd century 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 by Antiochus 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 1st or 2nd century 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 Philosophoumena
compiled in the first half of the 3rd century 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 author s 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 Aristoxenus of Tarentum at least, that is
from the late 6th to the 4th century B.C. In his De senectute, the
Roman Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote of Pythagoram 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 Eleatic2
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
Lartius reports 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,3
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 of On 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 of De
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 her On 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 at Metapontum and of
Juno Lucina at Agrigentum: etchings by Jean DuplessisBerteaux after
Jean Louis Desprez, for the Voyage pittoresque ou Description
des
4
Royaumes de Naples et de Sicile by JeanClaude Richard de
Saint-Non (Paris: Clousier, 1781-1786); and by Agostino Aglio for
William Wilkins The Antiquities of Magna Graecia (Cambridge:
University Press, 1807)
Macrocosm and Microcosm What extant of the work by Aesara, or
Per anthrp phsios, was preserved in an anthology of excerpts from
Greek authors, compiled by Joannes Stobaeus in the late 5th century
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 Universe by 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 and conservative 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 of On
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
5
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, or jus et justitia together.
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 three layers 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 NeoPlatonism 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 not6
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 work On 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 the Delphic 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.
7
3 Pnax, votive tablet of originally painted terracotta, from
Locri Epizefiri; 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 5 th 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, odd8
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 so
theoretical. 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
9
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 en and 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: st and ast,
in the Rig-Vda Hymns, in the Brhadranyaka and Chndogya Upanishads.
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 once occurred 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 theophenomenology, 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 the10
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 ritual inscriptions (cf. the
Thracian tablets in Euripides, Alcestis, lines 965-69). Dating from
the 4th century B.C. or later, several of them have been found
inside graves throughout the ancient Magna Graecia, or Greater
Hellas
Cosmology as a Psychology Philolaus of Croton, contemporary of
Socrates, and Archytas of Tarentum,11
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 Locri.
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 Latin Anima 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,
12
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
receive their 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 Locri 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 the13
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 enduring
formulation 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.
14
5 Hans Leu the Younger, Orpheus and the Animals, Basel,
Switzerland: Kunstmuseum; detail, 1519. If compared with other
conventional 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 Locri 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 most important 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
15
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 citystate, 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 should happen 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 above16
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 word philosopha, where the terms phila and sopha 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 written lows 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 expressions17
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 or spermatiks 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.
18
6 The so called Head 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 the mythical 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 arcane fireplace 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 Locri 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 JeanBaptiste
de Boyer, Marquis dArgens, in the 18 th 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
19
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 Locri.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 the Universe and 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
Latin20
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 poem Pharsalia 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 15 th 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
21
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 a reincarnation of
Pythagoras. He was also a modern fan of the Pythagorean musica
universalis or harmony of the spheres
22
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
23
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 an organic 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 Locri
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 18th
century by a Pre-Romantic thinker as Giambattista Vico, who also
wrote De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (On the Most Ancient
Italic Wisdom).
24
8 Supposed Temple of Vesta, the oldest marble building existing
in Rome, from the late 2nd century B.C. (Square of the Bocca della
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 of Philosophy, 2001. Castrizio Daniele, Il ritratto di
Pitagora di Samo (The Portrait of Pythagoras of Samos),
video-lecture in Italian at the Web Address
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc_JhvLYRc; 2008. Centrone Bruno, I
Pitagorici, Rome/Bari: Laterza, 1996.
25
Bernabe Alberto and Ana Isabel Jimenez San Cristobal,
Instructions for the Netherworld: 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,
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Thomas Taylor, Platonist of the Romantic Period, in PMLA, 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 Pythagorean Philosophy,
Grand Rapids, Minnesota: Phanes Press, 1987. Huffman Carl A.,
Philolaus of Croton: Pythagorean and Presocratic, Cambridge:
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Tarentum: Pythagorean, Philosopher and Mathematician King,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Iamblichus Life of
Pythagoras, or, Pythagoric life (London 1818), translated by Thomas
Taylor, Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International Ltd,
1986. Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean Way of Life, text, translation
and notes by John Dillon 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 on Art 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 Medicine at the Manchester University,
2010; informative page at the Web address
http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/jay.kennedy/ Kingsley
Peter, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and
Pythagorean Tradition, Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1996. Marg
Walter, Timaeus Locrus: De Natura Mundi et Animae, Leiden: E. J.
Brill, 1972.26
Menage Gilles, Historia mulierum philosopharum, Lyon: Joan
Anissonios, Posuel and 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 Late Antiquity,
Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1991. Ocelli Lucani... De
universi natura libellus, Greek text and Latin translation by
Lodovico Nogarola, with his essay Epistola [...] super viris
illustribus genere Italis, qui Graece scripserunt; Venice: Giovanni
Griffio, 1559. Ocellus Lucanus, en Grec et en Franois, translated
and commented by Jean-Baptiste de 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 essere etico/sociali, in
Informacin Filosfica vol. VII (Rome, 2010), n. 14, pp. 29-65.
Proclus Commentary on the Timaeus of Plato (first edition 1816),
translated by Thomas Taylor, 2 vols.; Westbury, Wiltshire, U.K.:
The Prometheus Trust, 1998. Radcliffe G. Edmonds III (edited by),
The Orphic Gold Tablets and Greek Religion: 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; 2nd edition, 2008. Ridgway Brunilde S., The Porticello
Bronzes Once Again, in American 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: bo Akademi, 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.
27
Uzdavinys Algis, The Golden Chain: An Anthology of Pythagorean
and Platonic Philosophy, Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom, 2004.
Various Authors, In situ Study of the Porticello Bronzes by
portable X-ray fluorescence 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 text and 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 sunt Fragmenta et Elogia Graece et Latine
(Gttingen 1739), Whitefish, Montana: Kessinger Publishing Co.,
2009.
9 Greco-Roman marble herma of Pythagoras, Rome: Capitoline
Museums (1st century A.D.); and Pythgoras as a mathematician,
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 National Archaeological Museum at Naples (1st century B.C.)
Copyright [email protected] 2010
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