Note 12 — Chapter II

The testimony of Cicero and Iamblichus may be received as indicating truly the similarity of spirit between Pythagoras and Plato,—their common endeavour to escape the sensuous, and to realize in contemplative abstraction that tranquillity, superior to desire and passion, which assimilated men to gods. The principles of both degenerated, in the hands of their latest followers, into the mysteries of a theurgic freemasonry. The scattered Pythagoreans were, many of them, incorporated in the Orphic associations, and their descendants were those itinerant vendors of expiations and of charms—the ἀγύρται of whom Plato speaks (Repub. ii. p. 70)—the Grecian prototypes of Chaucer’s Pardonere. Similarly, in the days of Iamblichus, the charlatans glorified themselves as the offspring of Plato.