Free The Music of Pythagoras by Kitty Ferguson

wrote nothing down, keeping “no ordinary silence.” In great part because of this secrecy, much information about Pythagoras had come down through the centuries in scattered, fragmentary, hearsay form, consisting of what other people
thought
he and his associates taught and what their way of life was.
    Porphyry was not alone in stressing Pythagorean silence. Diogenes Laertius made it clear that there were two kinds: On the one hand, “silence” meant keeping doctrine secret from outsiders; on the other, it meant maintaining personal silence in order to listen and learn—andthat applied especially among followers in “training.” For five years they were silent, listening to discourses. Only after that, if approved, were they allowed to meet Pythagoras himself and be admitted to his house. The advantage to be gained from remaining silent was an ancient theme that also appeared in the Wisdom chapters of the Hebrew Scriptures and was picked up by early Christian church fathers a few generations after Iamblichus.
    Did the first type of silence extend to putting nothing in writing? Of the three third- and fourth-century biographers, Diogenes Laertius was the only one to insist that Pythagoras wrote down some of his doctrines, but the section of his biography titled “Works of Pythagoras” is confusing and unconvincing. He began on shaky ground with the words:
    Some say, mistakenly, that Pythagoras did not leave a single written work behind him. However, Heraclitus the natural scientist pretty well shouts it out when he says: “Pythagoras, son of Mnesarchus, practiced inquiry more than any other man, and selecting from these writings he made a wisdom of his own—a polymathy, a worthless artifice.”
    It would seem, contra Diogenes Laertius, that what Heraclitus “shouted out” was that Pythagoras could read and plagiarize, not that he wrote anything down. Diogenes Laertius was right, however, that Heraclitus’ words were worth careful scrutiny, because his lifetime probably overlapped Pythagoras’ and his comments about him are among the oldest that survive. Though in Heraclitus’ own philosophy he often sounded like a Pythagorean, if he ever had anything good to say about Pythagoras there is no record of it. He had little better to say about anyone else. He was contemptuous of most of humankind, and in particular of polymaths, coming out with such disparaging remarks as “Much learning does not teach thought—or it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hecataeus.” Be that as it may, there is no reason to take Heraclitus’ diatribe as evidence that Pythagoras wrote a book.
    Diogenes Laertius was not equally convinced about all claims for Pythagoras’ authorship, but he believed that Pythagoras had written three books that still existed in his lifetime. If so, they then rapidly disappeared or were discredited, for Porphyry, only a few years later, wrote,“He left no book.” There was plenty of reason to be skeptical about the authorship of the books that Diogenes Laertius listed, considering the number of Pythagorean forgeries that had appeared during the Hellenistic and Roman eras. However, information that Pythagoras wrote poems under the name of Orpheus came from an earlier, more reliable source. Ion of Chios, a scholar, playwright, and biographer born shortly after Pythagoras died, tried to determine the true source of some poems that were widely supposed to have been written by Orpheus. He decided that the author was Pythagoras and that Pythagoras had attributed them to Orpheus.

CHAPTER 4

“My true race is of Heaven”
    Sixth Century B.C
.
    A CHILDHOOD IN A PROSPEROUS agrarian family that was also involved in the mercantile world centered in Samos, with its temple of Hera, had placed Pythagoras at a crossroads of different beliefs about life after death. If there was an orthodox view of the afterlife and immortality in the ancient Greek world, it was that reflected in