MS 475-476 (1903) - Lowell Lecture VIII

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same. Sundry other authorities support the date by assertions that harmonize well with it. Let us begin the building of our hypothesis, then, by supposing that Pythagoras reached Italy in the summer of 532 B.C. It would necessarily be summer, owing to the conditions of navigation at that time. The most serious contradiction of this date is by the great historian Livy, who seems to say that Pythagoras came during the reign of Servius Tullius who was assassinated two years before. However, on carefully examining the passage of Livy, we remark that the historian only mentions this date in order to refute a statement by another historian that Numa Pompilius, the second king, had been aided by

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Pythagoras. Therefore Livy allows his adversary the earliest date ever assigned for the coming of Pythagoras. Thus the authority of the great historian is not against our date. But it was merely that some author had said something from which it might be inferred that Pythagoras might have come as early as Servius Tullius. We are obliged according to my rules to form some definite conjecture as to what was said. We may therefore suppose that the original authority said that Pythagoras came early in the third century of the city, or that he said he was seen on his arrival by some person of Servius Tullius's time. The assertion that Pythagoras aided Numa unfortunately yields no information because it needs no explanation

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since it was quite inevitable that that assertion should be made, considering the ways of thinking of ancient writers. For Numa, they would say, must have been aided by some great political genius. For unless he was himself a great political sage he could not otherwise have made his laws; and if he was such a sage he certainly would have sought all the counsel he could get. Now no such adviser of Numa is mentioned. He must have been famous. But the only famous political genius of those days except Numa himself was Pythagoras. That is the way some writer of Livy's time would inevitably reason; for that is the very style of their thought. So the assertion was

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bound to get made irrespective of any facts. Consequently, it sheds no light at all on our subject.

All the witnesses are unanimous that Pythagoras having once arrived in Italy, passed all the rest of his life there. That too, then, we must accept, whether it seems likely or not. For we have no facts to go upon but the facts that assertions have been made by those writers; and there is no way of explaining the fact that one and all represent Pythagoras to have passed all the rest of his life in Italy except by supposing he really did so.

In particular Iamblichus expressly says so. But now we meet with a singular, and therefore

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a significant fact. It is that Iamblichus asserts that Pythagoras was taken prisoner by Cambyses in Egypt and was carried off to Babylon. But Cambyses was not in Egypt until 527 B.C., [????] four or five years after Pythagoras had settled in Crotona,— Croton. This, then, is plainly impossible; and the method of the German higher critics,— I do not speak only of such extravagant critics as the very learned Rose, but of such temperate critics as the highly esteemed Zeller,— is, having shown the assertion to be false, to cast it aside as worthless. That is very illogical; for false assertions are frequently far more