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To understand the life of PYTHAGORAS, it is needful to consider what the problems were which he set himself to solve.
The poems of Homer show us the Hellenic race widely scattered over the coasts and islands of Greece and Asia Minor, leading an active life of war and commerce, fond of athletic exercises, keenly alive to poetry, music, and decorative art. They had received the inheritance of the old theocracies; the rules of right and wrong were closely knit up with the worship of the gods. Priests still bore sway, and could dictate to kings; who yet were impatient of their influence, as the opening lines of the Iliad suffice to prove. In the centuries that followed, the priestly functions became more and more dependent on the regal. Religious beliefs were maintained, and, as an inspiring influence in art and poetry, were still potent. But their restraining influence on political and social life was deeply undermined. The kings, in getting the better of the priests, lost the religious basis of their own ascendency: the aristocracies which followed soon gave way to turbulent and unstable democracies. These had little but the name in common with the democracies of modern Europe: since the Demos was simply an assemblage of tradesmen maintained by the labour of slaves. The brilliant but very fleeting moment, during which the townsfolk of Athens were capable of admiring the poetry of Aeschylus and Sophocles, must not blind us to the fact that the democracies of the Greek world were almost uniformly sterile of good result. Their venality and turbulence alienated the best minds from civic action, and diverted them into channels fruitful for the after life of humanity, but with fatal loss to their country's immediate service.
To this withdrawel of the great thinkers of Greece from the civic life around them there were some exceptions: and the principal exception is Pythagoras, who deliberately set himself to reform it. Great obscurity hangs over the details of his life. That he was born in Samos; that he came into contact with Thales, that by the master's advice he visited Egypt, where he stayed many years, learned the language, and became imbued with the thought and traditions of the priesthood; that he probably extended his travels to Assyria; that on his return to Samos, finding it subject to the despostism of Polycrates, and noting the rapid growth of Persion dominion in Ionia, he established himself in Crotona, a flourishing Greek city on the South Italian coast, -- is all that can be said with approach to certainty of his youth and early manhood. Possibly his choice of Crotona was due to its celebrity for the gymnastic exercises and the arts of Hygiene. Be this as it may, here it was that he founded his brotherhood; a society of which the members were carefully chosen by himself on grounds of moral and intellectual superiority, and whose purpose it was to effect a reformation of public and private life.
Admission to the order was obtained through a long and systematic course of training; and it would seem that there were at least two stages of membership before complete initiation was reached. To each class women as well as men were admitted. Early in the course came a long period of silence, in which the neophyte conformed his life to the rules of physical and moral training laid down for him, without presuming to teach others except by his example. It is probable that a large proportion of the members advanced no further than this stage.
Pythagoras left no writings. Our knowledge of his teaching and his institutions depends on the tradition of his disciples; and, as in the case of the early documents of Christianity, the date of those ancient writers who speak of him must be carefully noted. Among the earliest of these writings are the Golden Words, a sort of religious catechism in verse. Among its precepts are the following:
"Honour the deathless gods, as the law ordains; reverence an oath; reverence great heroes, and do them the rites that are due; honour thy parents and kinsfolk; make the best men thy friends. Be gentle in thy speech, serviceable in deed. Be not angered with thy friend for a slight offense; bear with him while thou canst; the bond will give thee power. Learn to be the master of these four things: greed, sloth, lust, and anger. Do no vile thing either alone, or with others; and, above all things, keep reverent watch over thyself."
"Learn how to save and how to spend. What sorrow may come in the lot that the gods send thee, bear it patiently; healing it if thou canst, and taking thought that the lot of good men cannot be wholly grievous."
Of bodily health thou shouldest take sufficient care; in meat, food, and exercise observing such measure as will not harm thee. Suffer not sleep to fall on thy wearied eyelids before thou hast thrice considered ead deed of the day: when did I transgress? What have I done? What duty have I left undone? And if thou hast played the coward, repent; if otherwise, be glad."
"These things if thou observe, thou wilt reach the track of divine virtue. Ay, by him who gave to our soul the fourfold gift, fountain of ever-living Nature, this is so. Thus wilt thou come to know the order of the deathless gods of men. Thou shalt see, so far as it is permitted thee, law uniform throughout, so that thou mayest neither hope things hopeless, nor yet be blind to what will come. Thou shalt see thus the woes of men are of their own choice; they will not look or listen to the good that lies near them; few are they who know the road of deliverance. A doom is on their reason, warping it; like rolling stones they are borne hither and thither in endless misery. For grievous strife is born within them and follows them through life, and they know it not. This it is we should not tempt to come near us, but keep far away."
Many other wise and deep sayings of Pythagoras have survived. That the slavery of passion was harder than that of despots; the man came nearest God when he was truthful; that it was better to throw a stone at random than scatter an idle tale; that the highest refinement was to put up patiently with vulgarity; that when a man's country went wrong he should behave to her as to his mother in like case;--these may serve as samples of the rest. Enough has been said to indicate the general purpose and scope of his work; it was a purification of moral life, helped by intellectual discipline, and aiming at social renovation. By the intellectual discipline it was distinguished from all previous attempts at reformation, Judaic or Oriental. The abstract sciences of number and of space, as distinguished from the arts of counting and measuring visible quantities, were dawning upon the world. It gave the first conception of a uniform order of Nature, which, if carefully studied, would show to men the full scope of their destiny, while guarding them from unlicensed hope. It would bring resignation; would direct energy into its lawful channels; and thus help the attainment of self-mastery, and of that inward peace in which alone true freedom is to be found. On space-relations, reduced to laws of number, he saw that the whole fabric of Nature rested. His doctrine, that numbers were the formative principle of things, rested on a strong, though doubtless confused, perception of the universality of law. Imperfectly he perceived that, in a given group of phenomena, the variations of each were connected with the variations of the rest in ways which, when perfectly known, could be expressed in number.
Meanwhile, as a social institution, number was, he considered, of very great importance. The first three numbers, corresponding to Synthesis, Combination, and Progression, play, as Comte has shown (Synthèse Subjective, ch. i. 108 et seq.), a far more potent part in the mental processes than is commonly supposed. In the Pythagorean school, the point, the line, the surface, and the solid corresponded respectively to the first four numbers: the addition of these produced the tetractys (quaternion or decade) which was of great importance to their system. Pythagoras is commonly credited with the discovery of the law of the square of the hypotenuse, with the construction of five regular solids, with the dependence of musical tones on the length of vibrating strings, with the law of reflection of light, and with other physical and geometrical truths. These, important as they might be, were with him wholly secondary to his governing purpose, which was to use science as a regulating principle for the discipline of life. This purpose remained unfulfilled; but the school of mathematics developed, on his impulse, by his followers, led to results the importance of which it is impossible to exaggerate.
He was a man of commanding presence, winning speech, and prompt insight into character. His influence was maintained, so far as we can judge, for twenty or thirty years. It is said that, as in Florence when Savonarola taught there, a great moral reformation was effected in Crotona on his arrival; that two thousand persons were converted at his first preaching; that incontinence and luxury were repressed; that women threw away their ornaments and dressed in simple attire. It rests on better evidence that the Supreme Council of the city sought his advice, and invited him to the presidency, which he declined to accept. His wife and daughter are said to have taken precedence of other women in religious processions. These and other stories may be exaggerated; but it is certain that his influence and that of his brotherhood was wide and deep. Branches were established in Sybaris, Metapontum, and other cities of the South Italian and Sicialian coasts.
Whether, like the Jesuits, they gave just offense by unwise interference in political contests, we shall never know; though it is certain that such interference was systematically discouraged by the Master. That offense was given is but too certain. The influence of the brotherhood was in favour of political stability, and against democratic change. It provoked at last a violent reaction, ending in the burning of their meeting-house, the massacre of many members of the order, and the dispersion of the rest. Whether Pythagoras perished with his disciples, or died a few years afterwards in Metapontum, is uncertain. As a political force the brotherhood ceased to exist; but as a religious sect and a philosophical school they held together for two centuries. Even then the memory of them survived; individual thinkers, like Apollonius of Tyana, carried on their tradition; and the revival of the school in the third and fourth centuries of the Christian era is a fact of moment in the controversies of that time.
Pythagoras' scheme of renovation was doomed to failure because his intellectual basis, though real, was insufficient. He was right in his instinct that the scientific study of the order of Nature, so far as man is affected by it, must be the basis of human action. He was right in regarding the new sciences of Gemoetry and Number as the foundations on which that order rested. All the facts of life, physical, biological, social, are, in principle, capable of precise measurement, were only our observing and reasoning powers sufficient, first to put the facts into equation, and, secondly, to solve the equation when formed.
With wonderful prescience, Pythagoras had grasped the principle that a spiritual power should stand apart from practical government, and limit itself to wise counsel. The Catholic Church of the Middle Ages applied this principle afterwards on a larger scale, though without full recognition of its scope. As demonstrated scientifically by Comte, it stands now as one of the corner-stones of Social Statics. But the principle was wholly alien to the ancient world; and the misconception of it by the disciples of Pythagoras was the immediate cause of their destruction. They were drawn into fatal collision with the State; and would have been so even had the State been less intolerant and jealous than the democracy of Crotona.
Thus he failed; but his failure left great results. For, in the first place, it established an ideal of moral and social reform based on philosophical truth which survived the Middle Ages, inspired the Humanists of the Renaissance, and counted for much in the religious renovation instituted by Auguste Comte. How the ideas of Pythagoras worked upon Plato, and, through him and his Alexandrine successors, prepared the way for the Catholic Church.
In the second place, the extreme value attached by Pythagoras to mathematical science as the basis of the order of Nature led to a concentration of energy upon geometrical research, which, by preparing the way for Archimedes and Hipparchus and their modern successors, became a force of the greatest moment in the after history of mankind. The special discoveries of Pythagoras himself have been, perhaps, exaggerated. The well-known equation of the square of the hypotenuse, empirically discovered by the old theocracies, had been included in yet more important discoveries by Thales. But of the manual of geometry compiled by Euclid, it is now recognised that a large part was elaborated between the sixth and fourth century B.C. by the followers of Pythagoras.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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