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30 results in A History of Pythagoreanism

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  • Chapter 12 - Pythagoreanism in the Academic tradition: the Early Academy to Numenius

  • Edited by Carl A. Huffman, DePauw University, Indiana
  • Book:
    A History of Pythagoreanism
    Published online:
    05 May 2014
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 250-273

  • Summary

    The influence of Pythagoreanism of one form or another on Platonists from Speusippus in the Old Academy to Numenius of Apamea in the later second century AD can be seen to be pervasive, though never forming more than one element in the mix, along with Aristotelianism and Stoicism. If Speusippus and Xenocrates of Chalcedon established the doctrinal parameters of later Pythagoreanism, it is to another, rather idiosyncratic, member of the Old Academy that must go the honor of contributing significantly to the later life-myth of Pythagoras, namely Heraclides of Pontus. Philo of Alexandria shows in every aspect of philosophy how pervasive Pythagorean influence had become in the emerging amalgam that is Middle Platonism. To see how this influence develops further, one may turn to the major figure in the Platonist tradition from the later part of the first century AD, Plutarch of Chaeronea.

  • Introduction

  • Edited by Carl A. Huffman, DePauw University, Indiana
  • Book:
    A History of Pythagoreanism
    Published online:
    05 May 2014
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 1-23

  • Summary

    In recent years, ancient Pythagoreanism has tended to be a field pursued by a narrow group of specialists and ignored by most scholars of ancient philosophy and ancient civilization. The field can look like a morass that is better not entered at all or bridged by time-worn platitudes about Pythagoras. Many discussions of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism in general works about ancient civilization or Western culture are thus woefully uninformed. For there has been a great deal of important scholarship on Pythagoreanism in the last fifty years, so that the Pythagoras of current scholarship is not your mother's let alone your grandmother's Pythagoras. The crucial moment in modern scholarship on Pythagoreanism was the publication fifty years ago of Walter Burkert's epoch-making study, which appeared ten years later in a revised version translated into English by Edwin Minar with the title Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism (1972). References to Burkert's book in the footnotes of this volume are surely more frequent than those to any other piece of scholarship on Pythagoreanism. Burkert's Pythagoras was a religious leader and founder of a way of life and not the great mathematician to which many general accounts tenaciously cling. Yet even Burkert's view has not won universal acceptance; Pythagoras the mathematician survives among some scholars even in this book, and there has been significant scholarship that both builds on and reacts against Burkert.

  • Chapter 14 - Pythagoras in the historical tradition: from Herodotus to Diodorus Siculus

  • Edited by Carl A. Huffman, DePauw University, Indiana
  • Book:
    A History of Pythagoreanism
    Published online:
    05 May 2014
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 296-314

  • Summary

    Taking a look at the preserved works of classical historiography, which for the most part focus on political and military history, one gets the impression that Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism were of rather marginal interest to historians. The earliest historian who mentions Pythagoras is Herodotus, who refers to him and Pythagorean doctrine in two problematic passages. Neanthes of Cyzicus' crucial role as an intermediary can also be seen in the fragments in Diogenes Laertius that relate to the Pythagorean Empedocles. One can able to see that he systematically quoted, corrected and added to the reports of Timaeus of Tauromenium. Book 10 of Diodorus Siculus' Library contains a long section on the life of Pythagoras and the history of Pythagoreanism as a part of the history of the western Greeks. In addition to the fragments of Book 10, Pythagoras is mentioned occasionally in the preserved books of Diodorus.

  • Chapter 7 - Pythagoreans, Orphism and Greek religion

  • Edited by Carl A. Huffman, DePauw University, Indiana
  • Book:
    A History of Pythagoreanism
    Published online:
    05 May 2014
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 149-166

  • Summary

    Modern assessments of the extent, nature and direction, of the connection between Orphism and Pythagoreanism remain widely divergent. This chapter examines a number of examples and concentrates on individual actors, phenomena, and specific texts. It focuses on those features that are most commonly considered as the principal areas of overlap between Orphism and Pythagoreanism. The chapter suggests that a number of texts coming from Pythagorean and Orphic sources share a general methodology of giving new religious relevance to concepts issuing from and integrated into natural philosophy. Thus, the connection between Orphism and Pythagoreanism might take subtler forms than adherence to metempsychosis and a vegetarian diet. Greek religion is marked by a high degree of variation at the level of local communities and individual conceptions. It turns to the level of literary phenomena, texts written by Pythagoreans and poems attributed to Orpheus, and the more specific doctrinal points expressed in them.

  • Chapter 10 - The Pythagoreans and Plato

  • Edited by Carl A. Huffman, DePauw University, Indiana
  • Book:
    A History of Pythagoreanism
    Published online:
    05 May 2014
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 204-226

  • Summary

    This chapter concentrates on the recognizable uses of Pythagorean material in Plato's own writings. The Socrates of the Gorgias and Republic differs from the Socrates of earlier dialogues in having a definite conception of what is properly beneficial for humans as such and thus of what constitutes human well-being. Earlier in the Gorgias, Callicles had ridiculed Socrates' suggestion that individuals capable of governing their own appetites and pleasures are regarded as superior and worthy of governing others. In the Gorgias Plato had focused on reason's control of the body's irrational desires, while in the Phaedo he emphasizes reason's impulse to fulfill its own proper desire. These two views coalesce in the Republic. The vision of the beautiful order of the cosmos itself as based upon mathematical principles deeply attracted Plato. Although there are intimations of such view in the Republic, it finds its fullest expression in the Philebus and Timaeus.

  • Chapter 5 - The Pythagorean society and politics

  • Edited by Carl A. Huffman, DePauw University, Indiana
  • Book:
    A History of Pythagoreanism
    Published online:
    05 May 2014
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 112-130

  • Summary

    This chapter draws on a variety of evidence about the political life of the period, and the Pythagoreans' involvement in it, some from authors concerned with the Pythagorean heritage, and some from historians interested more generally in the cities of southern Italy. For the period before his emigration from Samos, the ancient biographers mention his birth, parentage, upbringing, higher education and research travels. In Dicaearchus' imagination, Pythagoras' influence flowed from a charismatic personality. It has been suggested that age-group assemblies indicate that Croton was a traditional society organized into age-related clubs. In Iamblichus' account, Pythagoras urges women to avoid animal sacrifice, to offer frugal home-baked goods, and to take their offerings to the sanctuary in person. Most scholars think that these writers are confusing the circumstances of several periods of political opposition, which they combine into a single story of the end of Pythagorean control in the region.

  • Chapter 19 - Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Life in context

  • Edited by Carl A. Huffman, DePauw University, Indiana
  • Book:
    A History of Pythagoreanism
    Published online:
    05 May 2014
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 399-415

  • Summary

    Iamblichus' work On the Pythagorean Life (Vita Pythagorae (VP)) is the most extensive and richest source of information on Pythagoras and his school to have reached one from antiquity. True Platonism is Pythagoreanism, the true legacy of Plato is Pythagorean. To see this more clearly this chapter looks beyond On Pythagoreanism and considers other parts of Iamblichus' philosophical production. The chapter then comments briefly on each of the parts of On Pythagoreanism. It sketches the way in which Iamblichus constructed his patchwork, and also looks at the patches and at the materials used by Iamblichus in composing the VP. A considerable amount of work has been done in more recent studies on the compositional structure of Iamblichus' VP. The chapter summarizes some results of this research, with a view to dealing with the question as what the purpose might be that is intended by this compositional structure.

  • Chapter 6 - The Pythagorean way of life and Pythagorean ethics

  • Edited by Carl A. Huffman, DePauw University, Indiana
  • Book:
    A History of Pythagoreanism
    Published online:
    05 May 2014
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 131-148

  • Summary

    The ethical-religious dimension of ancient Pythagoreanism is complex and has a conservative side linked to tradition, but also a certain "otherness" in comparison to contemporary customs. There is almost universal agreement that the precepts known as acusmata ("things heard"), or symbola ("tokens", "passwords"), short maxims which were handed down orally and put into practice in everyday life, form the original nucleus of the bios pythagorikos. The author dwells in particular on precepts and practices concerning their relationship with the gods, the daimones, the dead, the family, the group and the outside world. The earliest sources consider silence to be the hallmark of the movement. Pythagoreans thought that after gods and daimones one should pay the greatest attention to parents. Friendship (philia) is the cement that holds the group together and is based on "harmonious equality" as defined by the Pythagoreans.

  • Chapter 2 - Philolaus

  • Edited by Carl A. Huffman, DePauw University, Indiana
  • Book:
    A History of Pythagoreanism
    Published online:
    05 May 2014
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 46-68

  • Summary

    This chapter examines Philolaus of Croton the philosopher in an attempt to understand his contributions to fifth-century thought. The phrase "having number" seems to have a set meaning in the Pythagorean tradition. From Anaximander on, philosophy was often understood as the study of nature, and the study of nature began with cosmogony and cosmology. Carl Huffman has done much to rehabilitate Philolaus astronomy as a viable theory in the context of fifth-century knowledge. The chapter attempts to add some support for Huffman's assessment. Philolaus' astronomical scheme is praised on the one hand for anticipating the heliocentric theory, and damned on the other for being based on a priori assumptions. Aristotle describes the development of Greek philosophy in terms of different views about the principles (archai) and causes (aitia) among the early philosophers, and about how many principles and causes there are and of what sort.

  • Chapter 13 - The Peripatetics on the Pythagoreans

  • Edited by Carl A. Huffman, DePauw University, Indiana
  • Book:
    A History of Pythagoreanism
    Published online:
    05 May 2014
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 274-295

  • Summary

    The Peripatetic view of Pythagoras mirrors the split in the tradition that was present in the earliest sources: Aristoxenus of Tarentum follow Empedocles in being overwhelmingly positive, whereas Dicaearchus and Hieronymus are heirs to Heraclitus' bitter critique. In terms of amount of material, the Peripatetics put greatest emphasis on the way of life of Pythagoras and later Pythagoreans. Theophrastus succeeded Aristotle as head of the Lyceum in 322 and remained until 287. He certainly referred to the Pythagoreans in his contribution to the Peripatetic survey of human knowledge, the Physical Opinions, which systematically collected early Greek views about the natural world. A text about the Pythagoreans in the later tradition can, with more or less plausibility, be traced back to Eudemus. Dicaearchus, writing at the same time as Theophrastus, Eudemus and Meno, focuses not on Pythagorean contributions to the sciences but rather on the life of Pythagoras himself.

  • Chapter 8 - The problem of Pythagorean mathematics

  • Edited by Carl A. Huffman, DePauw University, Indiana
  • Book:
    A History of Pythagoreanism
    Published online:
    05 May 2014
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 167-184

  • Summary

    This chapter considers the development of Greek mathematical culture as a whole, and turns specifically to Pythagorean mathematics. A significant part of the Greek creative achievement in pure mathematics may be assigned to two such networks: the one found in Proclus' summary of early Greek mathematics, standardly understood to derive from Eudemus' history of geometry, and the one constituted by Archimedes, his correspondents. Proclus list includes three names from the archaic era: Thales, Mamercus and Pythagoras. Archytas was a major mathematician as well as a "Pythagorean". Some people Aristotle identified as "Pythagoreans" engaged in the systematic analogy between mathematical terms (numerical and musical) and other, cultural and physical phenomena. Certain ideas, or even members, are shared between groups and so the history of culture becomes a network of networks. The group of south Italian "Pythagoreans" was interested in pursuing analogies based on mathematical concepts, especially those of music and number.

  • Chapter 21 - Pythagoras in the Early Renaissance

  • Edited by Carl A. Huffman, DePauw University, Indiana
  • Book:
    A History of Pythagoreanism
    Published online:
    05 May 2014
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 435-453

  • Summary

    The Renaissance story of Pythagoras and Pythagorean wisdom, its religious and its scientific aspects alike, is a complicated one. One of the arresting dimensions of early Renaissance Pythagoreanism is consequent on the rediscovery of certain ancient sources. From Marsilio Ficino's viewpoint, Pythagoras' musical and theological debts were unquestionably to Orpheus. Not only did Ficino confront the twin Pythagorean notions of metensomatosis and metempsychosis, but he was drawn into speculating about the cycle of lives and of deaths, deaths that are inter-lives as lives are inter-deaths. This chapter shows that Ficino specifically identified as Pythagorean in his Platonic Theology 4.1.14-16, one that focuses, on the mystery and the symbolism of 12. It can serve to introduce what the Renaissance saw as Pythagoras'mathematical, though to us it is his arithmological legacy. Iamblichus gives the fullest ancient listing of the Symbola in his Protreptic, but provides long list in On the Pythagorean Life.

  • Chapter 4 - Sixth-, fifth- and fourth-century Pythagoreans

  • Edited by Carl A. Huffman, DePauw University, Indiana
  • Book:
    A History of Pythagoreanism
    Published online:
    05 May 2014
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 88-111

  • Summary

    In the variety of the figures of the sixth-, fifth- and fourth-century Pythagoreans it is possible to perceive partly overlapping categories, but hardly any feature common to all of them. This chapter talks about a "family resemblance". This means that certain Pythagoreans had characteristics in common with some Pythagoreans, but not with others. Thus, Hippasus, Theodorus of Cyrene, Philolaus and Archytas shared an interest in mathematics; Democedes, Alcmaeon and Iccus were engaged in medicine; Alcmaeon, Hippo, Philolaus and Ecphantus wrote on natural philosophy; Milo, Astylus of Croton, Iccus and Dicon of Kaulonia were Olympic victors, whereas Milo, Democedes, Hippasus and Archytas were involved in politics. The Pythagorists of comedy and the real Pythagorizers launched the tradition of the existence (and then the coexistence) within Pythagoreanism of different groups, as a result of which two fictional categories of Pythagoreans appeared, the scientific mathematici and the religious acusmatici.

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