Judaism
The Pythagoreans
Abstract
Contents Updated: Monday, January 24, 2000
The Pythagoreans
After losing their supremacy in the Achaean cities, the Pythagoreans concentrated themselves at Rhegion, but the school founded there did not maintain itself for long, and only Archytas stayed behind in Italy. Philolaus and Lysis, the latter of whom had escaped as a young man from the massacre of Croton, had already found their way to Thebes. Plato says Philolaus was there towards the close of the fifth century, and Lysis was afterwards the teacher of Epaminondas. Some of the Pythagoreans, however, were able to return later. Philolaus certainly did so, and Plato implies that he had left Thebes some time before 399 BC, the year Socrates was put to death.
In the fourth century, the chief seat of the school is the Dorian city of Taras, and we find the Pythagoreans heading the opposition to Dionysius of Syracuse. Archytas was the friend of Plato, and almost realized the ideal of the philosopher king. He ruled Taras for years, and Aristoxenus tells us that he was never defeated in the field of battle. He was also the inventor of mathematical mechanics.
Pythagoreanism had taken root in the East. Lysis remained at Thebes, where Simmias and Cebes had heard Philolaus, while the remnant of the Pythagorean school of Rhegion settled at Phlius. Aristoxenus was personally acquainted with the last generation of this school, and mentioned by name Xenophilus the Chalcidian from Thrace, with Phanton, Echecrates, Diocles, and Polymnastus of Phlius. They were all, he said, disciples of Philolaus and Eurytus, and Plato says Simmias and Cebes of Thebes and Echecrates of Phlius were also associates of Socrates. Xenophilus was the teacher of Aristoxenus, and lived in perfect health at Athens to the age of a hundred and five.
Philolaus
We know little about the teaching of Philolaus. An elaborate theory of the planetary system, Aristotle cites as the theory of “the Pythagoreans” or of “some Pythagoreans.” However, the Pythagorean elements of Plato’s Phaedo and Gorgias might have come from Philolaus. Plato makes Socrates express surprise that Simmias and Cebes had not learnt from him why it is unlawful for a man to take his life, and it seems to be implied that the Pythagoreans at Thebes used the word “philosopher” in the special sense of a man who is seeking to find a way of release from the burden of this life. Philolaus doubtless spoke of the body (sôma) as the tomb (sêma) of the soul. He will then have taught the old Pythagorean religious doctrine in some form, and that he laid special stress on knowledge as a means of release. That is the impression we get from Plato.
Philolaus also wrote on “numbers” for Speusippus followed him in the account he gave of the Pythagorean theories on that subject. He will have busied himself mainly with arithmetic and crude geometry. Eurytus was his disciple, and his views were crude.
Philolaus wrote on medicine and, while apparently influenced by the theories of the Sicilian school, he opposed them from the Pythagorean standpoint. He said that our bodies were composed only of the warm, and did not participate in the cold. Only after birth was the cold introduced by respiration. The connection of this with the old Pythagorean theory is clear. Just as the Fire in the macrocosm draws in and limits the cold dark breath which surrounds the world, so do our bodies inhale cold breath from outside. Philolaus made bile, blood, and phlegm the causes of disease and, in accordance with this theory, he had to deny that the phlegm was cold, as the Sicilian school held. Its etymology proved it to be warm. It was probably this preoccupation with the medicine of the Sicilian school that gave rise to some of the most striking developments of later Pythagoreanism.
Plato and the Pythagoreans
Though this is as much as is known about Philolaus, he has been called a forerunner of Copernicus.
In Plato, Timaeus the Locrian says he is supposed to have visited Athens when Socrates was still in the prime of life and so must have been a contemporary of Philolaus. Plato would not have given him the credit of discoveries which were really due to his better known contemporary. However, Plato had many enemies and detractors, and Aristoxenus was one of them. We know he said most of the Republic was to be found in a work by Protagoras, and he seems also to be the original source of the story that Plato bought “three Pythagorean books” from Philolaus and copied the Timaeus out of them. According to this, the “three books” had come into the possession of Philolaus and, as he had fallen into great poverty, Dion was able to buy them from him, or from his relatives, at Plato’s request, for a hundred minae.
This story was already current in the third century when Timon of Phlius accuses Plato of buying a small book for many pieces of silver and writing Timaeus from it. Hermippus and Satyrus have similar stories. The book seems to have been authentic notes of Pythagoras’s teaching that had come into the hands of Philolaus.
Later, a forgery called The Soul of the World, by Timaeus the Locrian, was thought to have been meant. But this cannot have existed earlier than the first century AD. It is based on Plato’s Timaeus itself and was written to bolster up the story of Plato’s plagiarism. Nor is it in three books, always a feature of that story.
A treatise in three sections, entitled Paideutikon, Politikon, Phusikon, was composed in the Ionic dialect and attributed to Pythagoras, largely based on the Puthagorikai apophaseis of Aristoxenus, but its date is uncertain.
Plato teaches us to regard Pythagoreanism sympathetically not Aristotle who did not favour Pythagorean ways of thinking, though he tried to understand them precisely because they were important in the philosophy of Plato.
According to Aristotle, the Pythagoreans said Things are numbers, though that is not the doctrine of the fragments of “Philolaus.” According to them, things have number, which makes them knowable, while their real essence is something unknowable. Pythagoras himself probably said Things are numbers, and Aristotle says his followers used it in a cosmological sense—the world was made of numbers in the same sense as others had said it was made of “four roots” or “innumerable seeds.” The Pythagoreans of the fifth century were scientific men, and must have meant something quite definite.
Aristotle is clear that Pythagoreanism was a cosmological system:
Though the Pythagoreans made use of less obvious first principles and elements than the rest, seeing that they did not derive them from sensible objects, yet all their discussions and studies had reference to nature alone. They describe the origin of the heavens, and they observe the phenomena of its parts, all that happens to it and all it does.
They apply their first principles entirely to these things…
…agreeing apparently with the other natural philosophers in holding that reality was just what could be perceived by the senses, and is contained within the compass of the heavens, [though] the first principles and causes they made use of were really adequate to explain realities of a higher order than the sensible.
The doctrine is more precisely stated by Aristotle to be that the elements of numbers are the elements of things, and that therefore things are numbers. These “things” are sensible things, and indeed they are bodies, the bodies of which the world is constructed. This construction of the world out of numbers was a real process in time, which the Pythagoreans described in detail.
The numbers were mathematical numbers, though they were not separated from the things of sense. But, they were not mere predicates of something else, having an independent reality of their own.
They did not hold that the limited and the unlimited and the one were certain other substances, such as fire, water, or anything else of that sort;. but that the unlimited itself and the one itself were the reality of the things of which they are predicated, and that is why they said that number was the reality of everything.
Accordingly the numbers are, in Aristotle’s own language, not only the formal, but also the material, cause of things. Aristotle notes that the Pythagoreans agreed with Plato in giving numbers an independent reality of their own, while Plato differed from the Pythagoreans in holding that this reality was distinguishable from that of sensible things.
The Elements of Numbers
Aristotle speaks of certain “elements” (stoicheia) of numbers, which were also the elements of things. The “elements of number” are the Odd and the Even, and the Odd and Even were identified with the Limit and the Unlimited, which were the original principles of the Pythagorean cosmology. Aristotle tells us that the Even gives things their unlimited character when it is contained in them and limited by the Odd, and this means the Even is in some way the cause of infinite divisibility. How can this can be?
Simplicius explains that they called the even number unlimited “because every even is divided into equal parts, and what is divided into equal parts is unlimited in respect of bipartition, for division into equals and halves goes on ad infinitum. But, when the odd is added, it limits it, for it prevents its division into equal parts.” Pythagoreans must not be assumed to have thought even numbers can be halved indefinitely. They must have known that the even numbers 6 and 10 can only be halved once.
A passage in Stobaeus runs:
When the odd is divided into two equal parts, a unit is left over in the middle; but when the even is so divided, an empty field is left, without a master and without a number, showing that it is defective and incomplete.
The division must fall between the “terms” or dots, for, if it meets with an indivisible unit, it is at once arrested.
Pythagoras meant by his Unlimited something spatially extended, for he identified it with air, night or the void. Aristotle argues that, if the Unlimited is itself a reality, and not merely the predicate of some other reality, then every part of it must be unlimited too, just as every part of air is air.
As the Unlimited is spatial, the Limit must be spatial too, and the point, the line and the surface were forms of the Limit. But the characteristic feature of Pythagoreanism is just that the point was not regarded as a limit, but as the first product of the Limit and the Unlimited, and was identified with the arithmetical unit instead of with zero. The point then has one dimension, the line two, the surface three and the solid four—the Pythagorean points have magnitude, their lines breadth, and their surfaces thickness. The theory defines the point as a unit “having position”. Out of such elements a world could be built.
This way of regarding the point, the line, and the surface is closely bound up with the practice of representing numbers by dots arranged in symmetrical patterns. Geometry had already made considerable advances, but the old view of quantity as a sum of units had not been revised, and so the point was identified with 1 instead of with 0. Aristotle:
They construct the whole world out of numbers but they suppose the units have magnitude. As to how the first unit with magnitude arose, they appear to be at a loss.
Other things, such as the Soul and Justice and Opportunity are said to be numbers, yet cannot be regarded as constructed of points, lines, and surfaces. Aristotle criticized the Pythagoreans saying that in one part of the world Opinion prevailed, while a little above it or below it were to be found Injustice or Separation or Mixture, each of which was, according to them, a number. But in the very same regions of the heavens were to be found things having magnitude which were also numbers. How can this be, since Justice has no magnitude? This means surely that the Pythagoreans had failed to give any clear account of the relation between these fanciful analogies and their geometrical construction of the universe.
The tradition is that the Pythagoreans explained the elements as built up of geometrical figures, a theory accesssible in the more developed form it attained in Plato’s Timaeus. If they were to retain their position as the leaders of medical study, they had to account for the elements.
Pythagoreans only knew three of the regular solids, the cube, the pyramid (tetrahedron) and the dodecahedron. Plato makes Timaeus start from fire and earth, and in constructing the elements he proceeds such that the octahedron and the icosahedron can easily be transformed into pyramids, while the cube and the dodecahedron cannot. Thus, while air and water pass readily into fire, earth cannot do so, and the dodecahedron must have another purpose. In the Pythagorean system, it leaves room for a dualism of the kind outlined in Parmenides Second Part. Hippasus made Fire the first principle, and from the Timaeus it is possible to represent air and water as forms of fire. The other element is, however, earth, not air, as it was in early Pythagoreanism. That is a natural result of the discovery of atmospheric air by Empedocles and of his general theory of the elements. And also Parmenides spoke of the two “forms” as Fire and Earth.
The most interesting point in the theory is the use made of the dodecahedron. It was identified with the “hull” of the “sphere of the universe.” This must be taken in close connection with the word “keel” applied to the central fire. The structure of the world was compared to the building of a ship.
Plato, in the Phaedo, which must have been written before the doctrine of the regular solids was fully established, adds that the “true earth,” if looked at from above, is “many-colored like the balls that are made of twelve pieces of leather.” In the Timaeus the same thing is referred to in these words:
Further, as there is still one construction left, the fifth, God made use of it for the universe when he painted it.
The dodecahedron approaches more nearly to the sphere than any other of the regular solids. The twelve pieces of leather used to make a ball would all be regular pentagons; and, if the material were not flexible like leather, we should have a dodecahedron instead of a sphere. That proves that the dodecahedron was well known before Theaetetus, and was regarded as forming the “timbers” on which the spherical hulk of the heavens was built.
The dodecahedron was so important in the Pythagorean system that Hippasus was drowned at sea for revealing “the sphere formed out of the twelve pentagons.” The Pythagoreans threfore adopted the pentagram or pentalpha as their symbol. The use of this figure in later magic is well known and Paracelsus still employed it as a symbol of health—exactly what the Pythagoreans called it.
That the soul is a “harmony,” or rather an attunement, is connected with the theory of the four elements, though it cannot have belonged to the earliest form of Pythagoreanism, for, as Plato shows in Phaedo, it is inconsistent with the soul existing independently of the body. Simmias says:
Our body being, as it were, strung and held together by the warm and the cold, the dry and the moist, and things of that sort, our soul is a sort of temperament and attunement of these, when they are mingled with one another well and in due proportion. If, then, our soul is an attunement, it is clear that, when the body has been relaxed or strung up out of measure by diseases and other ills, the soul must necessarily perish at once.
This is the view of the Sicilian school. It shows that the Pythagoreanism of the end of the fifth century was an adaptation of the old doctrine to the new principles introduced by Empedocles.
If the soul is an attunement in the Pythagorean sense, it must contain the three intervals then recognized, the fourth, the fifth and the octave. Posidonius was probably right in saying that the doctrine of the tripartite soul, as we know it from the Republic of Plato, was really Pythagorean. Plato’s own view of the soul is different.
Planetary System
In the Pythagorean planetary system, the earth is no longer in the middle of the world, its place is taken by a central fire, which is not the sun. Round this fire revolve ten bodies. First comes the Antichthon or Counter-earth, and next the earth, which thus becomes one of the planets. After the earth comes the moon, then the sun, the planets, and the heaven of the fixed stars. The central fire is not directly seen, nor the antickthon because the side of the earth on which we live is always turned away from them, just as the moon always presents the same face to us, so that no one living on the other side of it would ever see the earth. This implies that these bodies rotate on their axes in the same time as they revolve round the central fire, and that the antichthon revolves round the central fire in the same time as the earth, so that it is always in opposition to it.
It is a Pythagorean theory in advance of the Ionian views current at Athens. Socrates states it as something of a novelty that the earth does not require the support of air or anything of the sort to keep it in its place. Even Anaxagoras had not been able to shake himself free of that idea, and Democritus still held it along with the theory of a flat earth.
The theory of the earth’s revolution round the central fire must really originated in the account of the sun’s light given by Empedocles. The two things are brought into close connection by Aetius, who says that Empedocles believed in two suns, while “Philolaus” believed in two or even in three. Theophrastus regarded the theories as akin. Empedocles gave two inconsistent explanations of the alternation of day and night, and the solution of the difficulty might have seemed to be to make the sun shine by reflected light from a central fire.
The central fire received a number of mythological names, such as the “hearth of the world,” the “house,” or “watch-tower” of Zeus, and “the mother of the gods.” Despite these conventional names, this was a scientific hypothesis. Phenomena of light and dark could best be interpreted by a central luminary, with the earth as a revolving sphere like the other planets. The identification of the central fire with the sun was a detail in comparison. This theory started the train of thought which made it possible for Aristarchus of Samos to reach the heliocentric hypothesis, and sadly it was Aristotle’s reassertion of the geocentric theory that required a Copernicus to discover the truth afresh—and tells us himself, he started from what he had read about the Pythagoreans.
An accurate view of the earth’s dimensions would suggest that the alternation of night and day was due to the earth’s rotation on its own axis, and again the earth could be regarded as in the center.
Both theories, that of the earth’s revolution round a central fire and that of its rotation on its own axis, had the effect of making the revolution of the fixed stars, to which the Pythagoreans certainly adhered, very difficult to account for. They must either be stationary or their motion must be something quite different from the diurnal revolution. This might have led to the abandonment of the theory.
The existence of the antichthon was also a hypothesis intended to account for the phenomena of eclipses. Aristotle says the Pythagoreans invented it in order to bring the number of revolving bodies up to ten, but Aristotle knew better. In his work on the Pythagoreans, he said that eclipses of the moon were caused sometimes by the intervention of the earth and sometimes by that of the antichthon. Aristotle tells us that some thought there might be a considerable number of bodies revolving round the center, though invisible to us because of the intervention of the earth, and that they accounted in this way for there being more eclipses of the moon than of the sun. This is mentioned in close connection with the antickthon, so Aristotle clearly regarded the two hypotheses as of the same nature. The history of the theory seems to be this. Anaximenes had assumed the existence of dark planets to account for lunar eclipses, and Anaxagoras had revived that view. Certain Pythagoreans had placed these dark planets between the earth and the central fire in order to account for their invisibility, and the next stage was to reduce them to a single body. The Pythagoreans tried to simplify the hypotheses of their predecessors.
The doctrine incorrectly known as the “harmony of the spheres” may have originated with Pythagoras, but its elaboration belongs to a later generation. Aristotle testifies that the Pythagoreans believed that the heavenly bodies produced musical notes in their courses. Further, the pitch of the notes was determined by the velocities of these bodies, and these in turn by their distances, which were in the same ratios as the consonant intervals of the octave. Aristotle implies that the heaven of the fixed stars takes part in the celestial symphony. The slower bodies give out a deep note and the swifter a high note, and the high note of the octave belongs to the heaven of the fixed stars, which revolves in twenty-four hours. Saturn comes next for, though it has a slow motion of its own in a contrary direction, that is “mastered” by the diurnal revolution. The other view, which gives the highest note to the Moon and the lowest to the fixed stars, is probably due to the theory which substituted an axial rotation of the earth for the diurnal revolution of the heavens.
Aristotle sometimes attributes to the Pythagoreans that things were “like numbers.” He seems not to see this as inconsistent with the doctrine that things are numbers, though they seem irreconcileable. Aristoxenus represented the Pythagoreans as teaching that things as like numbers. A letter purporting to be by Theano, the wife of Pythagoras, says that she hears many of the Hellenes think Pythagoras said things were made of number, whereas he really said they were made according to number.
The use of the words eide and ideai to express ultimate realities is pre-Platonic, and it seems most natural to regard it as of Pythagorean origin. Did any philosopher ever propound a new theory of his own by representing it as already familiar to a number of distinguished living contemporaries? Why should Plato? The doctrine of “forms” (eide, ideai) must have taken shape in Pythagorean circles, though it was further developed by Socrates. Simmias and Cebes were not only Pythagoreans but disciples of Socrates, and there were, no doubt, more “friends of the ideas” than we generally recognize.
Pythagoreanism becomes indistinguishable from the theories which Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates. Aristoxenus is not likely to have been mistaken with regard to the opinions of the men he had known personally, and Aristotle’s statements must have had some foundation.
Plato
Plato has a lot to answer for. It is not surprising that he was adopted as an honorary Christian philosopher by the early bishops who realized Christianity had no philosophy. Christianity came out of Judaism which in turn was Zoroastrian. Even at the time of the birth of Jesus, the sect of Judaism from which Christianity emerged, the Essenes, was markedly Zoroastrian. Plato also took his central ideas from Zoroastrianism, doubtless via Pythagoras. He does not directly acknowledge it but yells it out loud enough by calling the idea of the Great Good, the equivalent of God, Oromazdes.
Zoroastrianism saw the world as being dual. It was material and it was spiritual. It was evil and it was good. This dualism impinged on the Greeks from the time that Cyrus conquered the more advanced of them in Ionia, and ultimately appeared in well reasoned although different forms in Plato.
Plato believed in duality too. He saw a perfect world as the model of the imperfect material one. The real world could only give imperfect knowledge. It took reason to perceive the absolute “forms” (“ideas” or what we would call “ideals”) behind the real world to give genuine knowledge. Ideas or forms were the content of the perfect world and existed there forever independent of the material world. The Good was a major ideal and the Greatest Good equated with God. So it was that Christians and Platonists found common ground. The soul was the ideal of any individual person trapped in the imperfect body of the material world as if imprisoned—“soma sema.”
This is a disastrous system of belief, for that is all it is despite its appeals to reason. The perfect world is a belief and nothing more. Any system that reduces the only world we know to being the shadow of some hypothetical better world invites disdain, neglect and even abuse of what is real. Sadly that is just the situation Christianity and its adopted philosophy, Platonism, has got us into.
Plato sees that the real world is imperfect and hypothesized a perfect one, but the only world he knows is the imperfect one. The perfect one and all of the forms or ideas that constitute it are nothing more than figments of the human mind. It is plain why Christians loved Platonism. Christianity also calls the world imperfect and invites its followers to secure immortality for themselves by believing a tissue of fancy. The similarity of Christianity to Platonism gave it a spurious respectability from an apparently independent source, though it was not really independent. Zoroastrianism is the joint source of both, and this common origin explains the similarities.
Plato himself was not clear about who God was! He had several candidates. One was the Great Good. One was the Demiurgos, meaning craftsman, the Creator of the world. And besides these two, he had several intermediate gods, apparently acting for the senior God in different ways. Anyone familiar with Zoroastrianism will recognize the source of all this. Zoroastrianism has a supreme God who is also supremely good, but he is confronted by an equally powerful evil god. Ahuramazda, called by Plato Oromazdes, has several co-aspects of himself that carry out various duties. Ahuramazda is the prime creator, acting through his emanation, the Holy Spirit called Spenta Mainyu, but the Evil Spirit, by introducing evil into the original static Good Creation, sets it in motion. Today we would say that the Good Creation was made of enthalpy but the Evil Sprit released entropy into the world. Thus the Evil Spirit called Angra Mainyu, is the practical creator of the changing world, and the Demiurgos came to be the Greek and Gnostic Satan.
Thus Platonism can be seen to be an imitation of the Zoroastrian which preceded it by several hundred years at least. The utter neglect of the importance of Zoroastrianism at the source of our philosophical and thological ideas is nothing less than an academic conspiracy by classical and theological scholars. Classicists wanted to depict the Greeks as the archetypical European, unique and original innovators and the founders of modern society. Theologians had to depict the Jews as uniquely blessed by God as the Chosen People, whose duty was to bring God’s revelations of ethical religion and monotheism into the world, even though they themselves chose to ignore the son. Neither were original or unique because both owed their respective philosophical and religious systems to the Persians who introduced Zoroastrianism to the west and imposed a form of it called Judaism on to the guardians of a tiny temple state in Palestine in the fifth century.
Some classical “scholars” try to remove some of Plato’s ideas from the master himself, as if they wanted to remove them as far as possible from their true origins in case anyone might suspect them. The Middle Platonists, they say, invented intermediaries, ugnoring the Amesha Spentas of Zoroastriansim. Frankly, if these people do not know about Zoroastrianism then they are not scholars because they are so sloppy they are not scholarly, and if they do know about Zoroastrianism but chose to ignore it, then they are not scholars at all but are liars and cheats.
The adoption of the Demiurgos as the Evil Spirit by the Gnostics is compatible with Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism does not itself call the material world, as a whole, evil because the Good Spirit created it initially, and so it is intrinsically good. The Evil Spirit only sought to spoil it, but it is an early change or misconception to get to the Gnostic idea that the material world is the creation of the Evil One.
Incidentally, Christians like to say that the Greek dualists uniformly believed in abusing their flesh because it was the prison of the soul. Doubtless some did but, if it were the generality, then people would have been committing suicide everywhere, as the Christians themselves did when they believed that baptism washed them clean of all sins and so an immediate death must take them to heaven. Augustine put a stop to it only by declaring that suicide was a mortal sin in itself. Christians of many descriptions were fond indeed of mortifying their flesh, and not just by wearing hair shirts. It would be an interesting book to read if someone gave us a graphic account of the disgusting habits of these masochists for God.
If the perfect wotld of forms or ideas pre-existed then the Demiurgos was not making the world as a creator but merely modelling it on the underlying or invisible world of forms. This too suggested to the Gnostics that the Demiurgos was not God. In the Zoroastrian scheme, the Good Spirit created a perfect world but it was immobile because what is perfect has no need to change. In modern thought, it rested motionless at an enthalpy minimum. It is the introduction of imperfection by the Evil Spirit that sets the world in motion. In this sense, then, a perfect world preceded the present world, giving Plato the idea which he developed of the world of ideas or perfect forms. Plato’s world of forms depended only on God, just as the original Good Creation was in Zoroastrianism. Later Platonists took the world of forms another level of abstraction further away, and the Christian theologian, Augustine, adopted this development—forms were abstractions in the mind of the abstraction, God! Christian theologians still think that this is profound!
Ahuramazda was able to speak directly to his prophet, Zarathustra, in the Gathas, but he had his other six Amesha Spentas to help him know about the real world and make it known to him. Later the theologiers based on Platoplaced God himself utterly beyond the world, and intermediaries with him were essential.
Aristotle rejected Plato’s dualism because he thought experience not thought was primary. He was thus the founder of the scientific outlook by which postulations have to be checked against experience in the real world to confirm or reject them. Aristotle thought form and substance were associated in this real world in which we exist. The form of a chair exists and by adding substance to it, it manifests as a real chair. There are not two separate worlds. Sense experience can give real knowledge because comprehension of the substance permits appreciation of its form.
Aristotle began to think about how the human mind works. He called it “nous” and saw it distinct from the soul or “psyche.” The mind itself, though, was passive in recovering information from the senses, but active in considering what it had received. The mind receives just an image or a “phantasm” of the perceived object. From this the active mind abstracts its form. This form then is the object of human knowledge.
Stoicism
The spread of Stoicism in the Hellenistic world was remarkable, though it was not a philosophy founded by Greeks. It was influenced by Chaldæan ideas, and therefore by the Magi, as much Greek philosophy was, though less directly. Unlike Epicureanism and the Skeptic New Academy, many Stoic founders came from Asia, from Seleucia and Babylon, not Greece.
In the last years of the fourth century BC Zeno, a swarthy, short, portly Semite, a Phœnician merchant of Citium on the eastern shore of the island of Cyprus, went to Athens on business, heard the Cynics lecturing and set himself up as a philosopher, attracting a large following. Greece was in an economic crisis and was culturally demoralized. Many Greeks were fascinated with exotic and oriental ideas. Zeno taught utopian communism, scarcely distinguished from anarchism. So, a doctrine which inspired the subversive agitations and revolutionary outbreaks of ancient communism became the world view of the most conservative Romans, albeit much changed from the original.
Cleanthes was poor, a professional boxer who came to Athens penniless. Becoming a disciple of Zeno, he supported himself by doing menial tasks. He composed a noble prayer, the Hymn to Zeus, considered the universal mind and a personal god. Cleanthes calls out “Lead me on”, promising to follow willingly wherever the god leads, adding that he would be compelled to follow even if he did not want to. Thus God, Zeus, is destiny, and Seneca restated the idea.
Chrysippus, also a poor man from Soli in Cilicia, was the real creator of Stoicism. Arriving in Athens, he became leader of the Stoics, now a recognized philosophy, but he discarded much of the teachings of Zeno and Cleanthes introducing instead dialectics. His 75 books are now all “lost”. He is said to have remained humble, even when he was prosperous and famous, being content with one slave girl as a concubine!
Panaetius (c 185-109 BC) studied under the head of the Stoic school, a Semite known as Diogenes of Babylon, but he was strongly influenced by the works of Aristotle. Going to Rome, he joined the circle of cultivated young Romans around P Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, “the younger Scipio”, who took him on as a companion. Panaetius favoured adapting Stoic ethics to the creed of the Roman aristocracy, with its insistence on duty and patriotism, and he dropped the earlier emphasis on dialectics. After Scipio was murdered in 129 BC, Panaetius went to Athens and became head of the Stoic school. His treatise on duty is paraphrased in the first two books of Cicero’s De officiis, but other works are “lost”, except for a few fragments. His revision of Stoicism was continued by his pupil, Posidonius.
Posidonius (c 135-50 BC) was born in Syria, at Apamea, founded by Seleucus Nicator. At Rome, he became the teacher and friend of Cicero. He continued Panaetius’s Aristotelean interests and conducted research into such varied problems as the diameter of the earth, the distance and size of the sun, the effect of the moon on the tides of the Atlantic Ocean, and ethnic and racial differences. He elaborated a theory that the universal mind had brought forth the Roman Empire, which was civilization.
Panaetius had endowed Stoicism with the prestige of the Roman aristocracy, and it became one of the important philosophies. Of the three personal philosophic systems, Stoicism was the only one that enjoined patriotism and political action on society’s leaders. The Epicureans were interested only in the content and happiness of individuals, and they abstained from public life. Their maxim was “live obscurely”, or “avoid attracting public attention”, or “stay out of the limelight”. Not all Epicureans did.
The Skeptic New Academy was founded by Carneades (214-128 BC) who liked to show that both sides of any argument could be defended on its own merits. Carneades was concerned with elaborating what is now known as the scientific method and establishing a valid epistemology. His most famous disciple, Clitomachus, was a Phoenician, a Carthaginian properly called Hasdrubal. He wrote 400 books, some in Canaanite, all of which have been “lost”! The members of the New Academy regarded politics, even political philosophy, as vulgar and boring, merely current and ephemeral matters, not comparable with the real truths of Nature and history. Probability, not certainty, was the way to judge matters. To act on the most probable proposal was reasonable, while nothing was ever certain. Both men were skeptics who set themselves against the fashions for astrology, magic and divination that were growing with the spread of the unemployed Magi after the fall of Persia. From Clitomachus onwards, the Academy effectively became Stoic not Skeptic. Stoicism became, for several centuries, the dominant philosophy of the educated, the intelligentsia and the nobility of Hellenistic countries, for good reasons.
• The Stoics considered only the observed realities of the physical world, to “follow nature,” and to reject all superstitions about the supernatural. They were to accept the reality of the visible, tangible world of Nature. This world is the only one, and all things happen according to Nature. The universe—the earth with the sun, moon, and stars that circled about it—was a single living organism of which the animus mundi or God was the brain. Stoic studies of natural phenomena, such as the causes of the tides upheld this claim. As parts of this organism and so equal, everyone is obliged to help each other, particularly those suffering misfortune. The world mind, animus mundi, which controlled everything, was God, Zeus, and Fate, the nexus of cause and effect, was really divine Providence (pronoia). Zeus who looked on the world as the sun, was conscious and had thoughts and purposes incomprehensible to men, who could only conform to them. Zeus was not anthropomorphic, but was the supreme amd only god.
Stoics compromised with popular religion by accepting their gods and goddesses as subordinates of Zeus like the angels of the patriarchal religions, anthropomorphic beings superior to humanity and part of the Divine Plan. Popular beliefs and myths were allegories requiring theological skill and ingenuity to render into acceptable Stoicism. Even so, no one wise could consider the popular gods as anything other than aspects of the animus mundi.
• The Stoics had a simple theodicy—nothing was evil! Nothing naturally occurring could be evil or unjust because the universal mind essentially was Nature. Since all things happen “according to Nature”, no supernatural evil or unjust entity or law could exist in the world. Whatever seemed unjust or wrong is only part of a greater whole. Everyone beautiful or wise had to have ugly organs like their lungs or brain as necessary parts of the living human being. Similarly, human beings saw Nature as good and evil, and their reaction to them as pleasure and pain, but all of it was simply mental. People’s attitude toward events conditioned their happiness. It was wrong and futile to resist the Divine Plan, no matter what it holds for you. So long as you maintain your moral integrity, events had no power over you, and sureness of your moral integrity allowed anyone to be happy, even while being boiled in oil!
• Stoicism claimed to be based strictly on reason, with no concessions to religious mysticism, and this claim was supported by an elaborate system of logic and dialectics by which every proposition could infallibly be deduced from observed phenomena, thus providing certainty and satisfying minds, that could not be content with a high degree of probability, which is all that epistemological limitations permit us to attain.
• It provided social stability by guaranteeing the essentials of the accepted code of morality and stigmatizing all derogations from that code as irrational and unnatural.
• What was most important to the Romans, the Stoicism of Panaetius was the philosophy which encouraged everyone to take an active part in political life, and devote themselves to service of the state and nation. The morality that makes great statesmen and generals was disparaged by some other philosophical systems, especially the Cyrenaic, Cynic, and Epicurean, and virtually disregarded by the New Academy, which anticipated the methodology of modern science as the apex of Graeco-Roman thought. Cicero, in the last paragraph of De natura deorum, opts for Stoicism position, though he was an Academic.
Stoicism had no mysteries, no revelations, no gospels, no temples, no priests, no rituals, no ceremonies, no worship, yet educated and influential people until the time of Marcus Aurelius embraced it. It was a philosophy, not a typical religion, an outlook, a weltanschauung and personal philosophy of living, thus being, in spite of itself, what many people would consider a religion.
The great men, whose creed it was, gave Stoicism immense prestige. It was the creed of many a Roman aristocrat who “lived bravely and died proudly”, meeting their fate with unflinching resolution. Stoicism, in its resignation to Fate, offered psychological consolation and even salvation to people subject to the vicissitudes of life. It promoted “One World” and the ideal of “brotherhood”, not merely human but the brotherhood of all life, yet, despite its appeal to Nature and reason, it was quite unnatural and unreasonable in some ways such as limiting sexual intercourse to the begetting of offspring, the idea also of the Christians. In practice, Stoicism was a personal monotheistic religion, and, as such, deeply influenced Roman Christianity.
