of the gods, not as being indifferent to, but as being interested in, the affairs of men; 24 and exhorted his more intimate disciples to raise themselves as near as possible to the immortals, above the level of their fellow-creatures. 25 The leading feature in his metaphysics was the Harmony by which the world, as a whole and in its various parts, was kept together and preserved; but Harmony itself grew out of Number, the single and the mighty principle of the universe.26 It is true that these were ideas straightway terminating in mysticism; and that the mysteries to which they led, however fair outwardly, were wanting in all inward energies." But the philosophy is all the more capable of being compared with the principles we are seeking to explain in Rome. The Patrician clung to his order as the Pythagorean did to Number, and made it the single principle of the Commonwealth, which, again, may be likened to the Harmony of Pythagoras; yet he fell into errors we have already witnessed or are to witness hereafter. We may follow farther both the philosopher and the Patrician. With the one, the world was unchangeable and indestructible; with the other, his world of Rome was 33. 24 Diog. Laert., VIII. 22, 23, 32, herd was one day watching his flocks, he heard a hollow voice 25 Plut., De Orac. Def., Tom, which seemed to issue from a tomb VII. p. 627, ed. Reisk. 26 Diog. Laert., VIII. 25. So Eschylus, in the Prometheus, calls Number ἔξοχον σοφισμάτων, "the loftiest of inventions." 27 Jamblichus (Vit. Pyth., Cap. XXVIII.) relates, that, as a shep near which he passed, and which asked only what sort of harmony it made! Cf. the story in Cic., Tusc. Quæst., V. 3. 28 Stob., Ecl. Phys., I. p. 418, cited by Ritter and Preller, Hist. Phil. Gr. Rom., Sect. 108. as imperishable. To Pythagoras, the Number of which he discoursed was not only a human, but a Divine Unity, breathing in the soul of man and in the petals of the flower, for ever One, for ever Equal and Steadfast.29 To the Roman, there was a holiness in his Commonwealth that he adored, because there was no other object on earth or in his heathen heaven on which his affections could have any similar hold. Yet the heart of such as Numa dreamed of Egeria, and many a thought which none could know save He who gave it bore up the human spirit towards the then transitory effulgence of Truth.30 Centuries after the times of which we have been reading, Cicero went to see the place at Metapontum where Pythagoras died.31 The authority of the sage and his followers, having lasted in Crotona near twenty years, was finally overthrown, and all the most distinguished of their number were either put to flight or slain. The downfall of the institutions which the philosopher had established, as well as his own exile, was caused by the stubbornness with 32 which the large proportion of the people had been denied admission to his school or to the government of which his disciples had taken possession. Within the interval from the death of Pythagoras to the visit of Cicero to Metapontum, not only had the Patricians been obliged to give way to the Plebeians, but both the estates were falling, with broken spirits and in much diminished numbers, beneath the despotism prepared by years of conquest, corruption, and civil wars. And the Roman, the best, as he was, of all his name, may have asked himself, as he stood where Pythagoras died, whether the principles of the ancient philosopher had not been proved to be better than any which had succeeded or departed through the intervening period. 32 See Müller's Dorians, Vol. II. p. 187, Eng. transl. |