CHAPTER VI

THE PYTHAGOREAN COMMUNITY

The Cenobites were students that philosophized; but the greater part of his followers were called Hearers, of whom, according to Nicomachus there were two thousand that had been captivated by a single oration on his arrival in Italy. These, with their children, gathered into one immense auditory, called Auditorium, which was so great as to resemble a city, thus founding a place universally called Greater Greece. This great multitude of people, receiving from Pythagoras laws and mandates as so many divine precepts, without which they declined to engage in any occupation, dwelt together in the greatest general concord, estimated and celebrated by their neighbors as among the number of the blessed, who, as was already observed, shared all their possessions.

Such was their reverence for Pythagoras, that they ranked him with the Gods, as a genial beneficent divinity, while some celebrated him as the Pythian, others called him the Northern Apollo. Others considered him Paeon, others, one of the divinities that inhabit the moon; yet others considered that he was one of the Olympian Gods, who, in order to correct and improve terrestrial existence appeared to their contemporaries in human form, to extend to them the salutary light of philosophy and felicity. He never indeed came, nor, for that matter of that, ever will come to mankind a greater good than that which was imparted to the Greeks through this Pythagoras. Hence, even now, the nick-name of "long-haired Samian" is still applied to the most venerable among men.

In his treatise on the Pythagoric Philosophy, Aristotle relates that among the principal arcana of the Pythagoreans was preserved this distinction among rational animals: Gods, men, and beings like Pythagoras. Well indeed may they have done so, inasmuch as he introduced so just and apt a generalization as Gods, heroes and demons; of the world, of the manifold notions of the spheres and stars, their oppositions, eclipses, inequalities, eccentricities and epicycles; of all the natures contained in heaven and earth, together with the intermediate ones, whether apparent or occult. Nor was there, in all this variety of information, anything contrary to the phenomena, or to the conceptions of the mind. Besides all this, Pythagoras unfolded to the Greeks all the disciplines, theories and researches that would purify the intellect from the blindness introduced by studies of a different kind, so as to enable it to perceive the true principles and causes of the universe.

In addition, the best polity, popular concord, community of possessions among friends, worship of the Gods, piety to the dead, legislation, erudition, silence, abstinence from eating the flesh of animals, continence, temperance, sagacity, divinity, and in one word, whatever is anxiously desired by the scholarly, was brought to light by Pythagoras. It was, on account of all this, as we have already observed, that Pythagoras was so much admired.