Note 50 — Chapter XI · THE PHILOSOPHERS

The withdrawal of the soul from the κύκλος ἀνάγκης and its return to an emancipated existence as a bodiless spirit was never so clearly held in view for the “Pure” by the older Pythagorean tradition as it was among the Orphics (and Empedokles). It is, however, hardly thinkable that a system which regarded every incarnation of the soul as a punishment and the body as its prison or its tomb should never have held out to the true βάκχοι of its mysteries the prospect of a full and permanent liberation of the soul, at last, from corporeality and the earthly life. Only so could the long chain of deaths and rebirths reach a final and satisfactory conclusion. Eternally detained in the cycle of births the soul would be eternally punished (this is e.g. the idea of Empedokles: 455 f., fr. 145 D.); and this cannot have been the real conclusion of the Pythagorean doctrine of salvation. Claud. Mamertus, de An. 2, 7 [Vors. 320, 12], gives it as a doctrine of Philolaos [fr. 22] that the (pure) soul after its separation from the body leads a “bodiless” life in the “Universe” (the κόσμος situated above the οὐρανός): see Böckh, Philol. 177. Apart from this the only evidence for the withdrawal of the soul is late: Carm. Aur. 70 f. (making use of the Empedok. verses, fr. 112, 4 f. = 400 Mull.), Alex. Polyh. ap. D.L. viii, 31 (ἄγεσθαι τὰς καθαρὰς [ψυχὰς] ἐπὶ τὸν ὕψιστον “in altissimum locum” Cobet: but an ellipse of τόπον is hardly admissible. ὁ ὕψιστος = the highest God would be a Hebraic form of expression, nor can it be a possible one here for Alex. Polyh.—we should also, with this meaning of ὕψιστος, expect πρὸς τ. ὕ. ad superiores circulos bene viventium animae, secundum philosophorum altam scientiam, Serv., A. vi, 127—should we then supply ἐπὶ τὸν ὕψιστον <κύκλον>? Or perh. ἐπὶ τὸ ὕψιστον?)—An escape of the souls after the expiry of their περίοδοι must have been known as a Pythagorean belief to Luc., VH. ii, 21. (Vergil, too, is speaking in a Pythagorean sense, A. vi, 744, pauci laeta arva [Elysii] tenemus.—i.e. for ever without renewed ἐνσωμάτωσις—see Serv., A. vi, 404, 426, 713. It is true the line is out of its right place, but there can be no doubt that it reproduces the words and the—in this section Pythagorean—opinion of Vergil.) The idea that the cycle of births is never to be broken cannot be regarded as Pythagorean nor even as Neopythagorean. (A few isolated later accounts of Pythag. doctrine; e.g. D.L. viii, 14 (from Favorinus), Porph., VP. 19, and also the cursory description in Ov., M. xv—with a good deal of foreign matter added—speak of the Pyth. doctrine of soul-transmigration without also referring to the possibility of κύκλου λῆξαι; but they are not meant to deny that possibility but merely leave it unmentioned as unnecessary in the context.) There seems to be no example of a Greek doctrine of transmigration that did not also include a promise to the ὅσιοι or the φιλόσοφοι that they would be able to escape from the cycle of births (at least for a world-period: as Syrian. took it, though probably not Porph.). Such a promise, as the consummation of the promises of salvation therein made, could only be dispensed with in the case of a doctrine of transmigration in which being born again was itself regarded as a reward for the pious (as in the teaching which Jos., BJ. 2, 8, 14, attributes to the Pharisees). By Greek partisans of the doctrine of Metempsychosis rebirth upon earth is always regarded as a punishment or at any rate a burden, not as a desirable goal for the life of the soul. We must therefore presume that the promise of escape from the cycle of rebirth was made also by the oldest Pythagorean teaching as the final benefit of its message of salvation. Without this completing touch Pythagoreanism would be like Buddhism without the promise of a final attainment of Nirvâna.