PYTHAGOREANISM

philosophical school and religious brotherhood, believed to have been founded by Pythagoras of Samos, who settled in Croton in southern Italy about 525 BC. a philosophical school and religious brotherhood, believed to have been founded by Pythagoras about 525 BC, holding: (1) that at its deepest level, reality is mathematical in nature; (2) that philosophy can be used for spiritual purification; (3) that the soul can rise to union with the divine; (4) that certain symbols have a mystical significance; and (5) that all brothers of the order should observe strict loyalty and secrecy. The organization was, in its origin, a religious brotherhood or an association for the moral reformation of society rather than a philosophical school. The Pythagorean brotherhood had much in common with the Orphic communities that sought by rites and abstinences to purify the believer's soul and enable it to escape from the wheel of birth. The new order held sway for a time over a considerable part of Magna Graecia, but this entanglement with politics led to the suppression of the society. The first reaction against the Pythagoreans, led by Cylon, seems to have taken place in the lifetime of the master. Cylon was able to bring about the retirement of Pythagoras to Metapontum, where he remained until his death. In the middle of the 5th century, the order was violently suppressed. Its meetinghouses were everywhere sacked and burned; mention is made in particular of the house of Milo in Croton, where 50 or 60 Pythagoreans were surprised and slain. Those who survived took refuge at Thebes and other places. As a philosophical school the Pythagoreans became extinct about the middle of the 4th century. To the legacy of Pythagoreanism can be ascribed the following philosophical and ethical teachings: the dictum all is number, meaning that all things can be ultimately reduced to numerical relationships; the dependence of the dynamics of world structure on the interaction of contraries, or pairs of opposites; the viewing of the soul as a self-moving number experiencing a form of metempsychosis, or successive reincarnation in different species until its eventual purification (particularly through the intellectual life of the ethically rigorous Pythagoreans); and the understanding, as in Pre-Socratic tradition, that all existing objects were fundamentally composed of form and not of material substance. Further Pythagorean doctrine applied number relationships to music theory, acoustics, geometry, and astronomy; identified the brain as the locus of the soul; and prescribed certain secret cultic practices. Pythagoreanism deeply influenced the development of classical Greek philosophy and medieval European thought (especially the astrological belief that the number harmony of the universe decidedly affects all human endeavour). Pythagorean astronomical concepts were acknowledged by Copernicus as a forerunner of his hypothesis that the Earth and the other planets rotate in orbits around the Sun. Additional reading The collection of the fragments in Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th ed., vol. 1 (1951), is insufficient; additions are given in Maria Timpanaro Cardini (ed.), Pitagorici: Testimonianze e frammenti, 3 vol. (195864); and in Cornelia J. de Vogel, Pythagoras and Early Pythagoreanism (1966). For the pseudo-Pythagoreans, see Holger Thesleff (ed.), The Pythagorean Texts of the Hellenistic Period (1965).The best comprehensive introduction to Pythagoreanism is the long chapter Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, in W.K.C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 1, pp. 146340 (1962). Somewhat different approaches have been taken by de Vogel (op. cit.); and James A. Philip, Pythagoras and Early Pythagoreanism (1966), works that demand more active criticism by the reader. Fairly full references to the discussion of Pythagoreanism up to 1960 are in Walter Burkert, Weisheit und Wissenschaft: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos, und Platon (1962; Eng. trans., Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, 1972), a highly technical and at times rather overcritical work. Among later technical discussions are the articles Pythagoras and Pythagoreer in Pauly-Wissowa Realencyclopdie, vol. 47, (1963), and suppl. vol. 10 (1965)of the contributors, Kurt von Fritz and H. Dorrie arrive at less controversial conclusions than B.L. van der Waerden.Hellenistic Pythagoreanism is treated in Holger Thesleff, An Introduction to the Pythagorean Writings of the Hellenistic Period (1961); additions and corrections in Entretiens Fondation Hardt, vol. 18 (1972). Neo-Pythagoreanism is treated in Philip Merlan, From Platonism to Neoplatonism (1953).For up-to-date bibliographical accession, see L'Anne philologique (annual), under the subject heading Pythagorica and the various Pythagoreans.