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Authors: Kitty Ferguson
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advice not to pray for specific things, because you do not know what is good for you.
Iamblichus summed up Pythagoras’ teaching in what he called the “epitome of Pythagoras’s own opinions,” which he would continue to stress in private and in public: one should by all means possibleamputate disease from the body, ignorance from the soul, luxury from the belly, sedition from the city, discord from the household, and excess from all things whatsoever. Iamblichus also praised Pythagoras’ teaching method—not to spout facts and precepts but to teach things (such as the power of remaining silent) that would prepare his listeners to learn the truth in other matters as well.
Porphyry described the splendid physical impression Pythagoras made: “His presence was that of a free man, tall, graceful in speech and in gesture.” He was “endowed with all the advantages of nature and prosperously guided by fortune.” *
Iamblichus numbered the followers who soon gathered around Pythagoras at six hundred. Members of the brotherhood were advised to regard nothing as “exclusively their own,” wrote Diogenes Laertius. Friendship implied equality. They were to own all possessions in common and bring their goods to a common storehouse. Apparently, to judge from an incident later, in Syracuse, a good many Pythagoreans complied with this advice. Because of this “common sharing,” Pythagoras’s followers became known as Cenobites, from the Greek for “common life.”
However, not all Pythagoreans had equal status within the community. The six hundred were Pythagoras’ “students that philosophized,” wrote Iamblichus, Porphry, and their source, Nicomachus. There was a much bigger group, called the Hearers, about two thousand men who along with their wives and children would gather in an auditorium “so great as to resemble a city” and built for the purpose of coming to learn laws and precepts from Pythagoras. It hardly seems a practical possibility that these people, presumably including many of Croton’s most prosperous, influential citizens, all “stopped engaging in any occupation.” However, according to the three biographers they did all live together for a while in peace, they held one another in high esteem, and they shared at least a portion of their possessions. Many, it seems, revered Pythagoras so greatly that they ranked him with the gods as a genial, beneficent divinity, but Iamblichus observed that, contra Nicomachus’ account, they perhaps did not all think of Pythagoras quite as a god. In his treatise
On the Pythagoric Philosophy
, Aristotle wrote that the Pythagoreans made a distinction among“rational animals”: There were gods, and men, and beings in between like Pythagoras.
W HEN P YTHAGORAS first arrived, Croton was at a low ebb of military prestige and clout. The communities of Magna Graecia were in a chronic state of conflict, internal and external, each attempting with varying success to dominate and enslave the next. The latest dismal chapter in this story had been Croton’s embarrassing defeat by the army of the city of Locri at the Sagras river, a few miles to her south. Iamblichus called Croton “the noblest city in Italy,” but in 530 B.C. she was licking her wounds from that disaster, while Sybaris was still a jewel in the crown of Greek colonial cities.
Croton nevertheless controlled considerable territory. Her normally acknowledged
chora
extended at least as far as what are now the river Neto to the north, in the direction of Sybaris, and the river Tacino to the south. The coastal lands between those two river mouths (with the city centered between) were hers, and away from the coast Croton’s territory extended into the mountains, where the tributaries of the two rivers originate among precipitous slopes and deep, narrow valleys * reminiscent of the early colonists’ homeland in Achaea. In the two centuries since Myskellos had brought those settlers, the coastal forests had
Iamblichus summed up Pythagoras’ teaching in what he called the “epitome of Pythagoras’s own opinions,” which he would continue to stress in private and in public: one should by all means possibleamputate disease from the body, ignorance from the soul, luxury from the belly, sedition from the city, discord from the household, and excess from all things whatsoever. Iamblichus also praised Pythagoras’ teaching method—not to spout facts and precepts but to teach things (such as the power of remaining silent) that would prepare his listeners to learn the truth in other matters as well.
Porphyry described the splendid physical impression Pythagoras made: “His presence was that of a free man, tall, graceful in speech and in gesture.” He was “endowed with all the advantages of nature and prosperously guided by fortune.” *
Iamblichus numbered the followers who soon gathered around Pythagoras at six hundred. Members of the brotherhood were advised to regard nothing as “exclusively their own,” wrote Diogenes Laertius. Friendship implied equality. They were to own all possessions in common and bring their goods to a common storehouse. Apparently, to judge from an incident later, in Syracuse, a good many Pythagoreans complied with this advice. Because of this “common sharing,” Pythagoras’s followers became known as Cenobites, from the Greek for “common life.”
However, not all Pythagoreans had equal status within the community. The six hundred were Pythagoras’ “students that philosophized,” wrote Iamblichus, Porphry, and their source, Nicomachus. There was a much bigger group, called the Hearers, about two thousand men who along with their wives and children would gather in an auditorium “so great as to resemble a city” and built for the purpose of coming to learn laws and precepts from Pythagoras. It hardly seems a practical possibility that these people, presumably including many of Croton’s most prosperous, influential citizens, all “stopped engaging in any occupation.” However, according to the three biographers they did all live together for a while in peace, they held one another in high esteem, and they shared at least a portion of their possessions. Many, it seems, revered Pythagoras so greatly that they ranked him with the gods as a genial, beneficent divinity, but Iamblichus observed that, contra Nicomachus’ account, they perhaps did not all think of Pythagoras quite as a god. In his treatise
On the Pythagoric Philosophy
, Aristotle wrote that the Pythagoreans made a distinction among“rational animals”: There were gods, and men, and beings in between like Pythagoras.
W HEN P YTHAGORAS first arrived, Croton was at a low ebb of military prestige and clout. The communities of Magna Graecia were in a chronic state of conflict, internal and external, each attempting with varying success to dominate and enslave the next. The latest dismal chapter in this story had been Croton’s embarrassing defeat by the army of the city of Locri at the Sagras river, a few miles to her south. Iamblichus called Croton “the noblest city in Italy,” but in 530 B.C. she was licking her wounds from that disaster, while Sybaris was still a jewel in the crown of Greek colonial cities.
Croton nevertheless controlled considerable territory. Her normally acknowledged
chora
extended at least as far as what are now the river Neto to the north, in the direction of Sybaris, and the river Tacino to the south. The coastal lands between those two river mouths (with the city centered between) were hers, and away from the coast Croton’s territory extended into the mountains, where the tributaries of the two rivers originate among precipitous slopes and deep, narrow valleys * reminiscent of the early colonists’ homeland in Achaea. In the two centuries since Myskellos had brought those settlers, the coastal forests had
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