Burning Library: Intepretation of the Pythagorean Sayings April 23, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Ancient , trackback
Before we get to the lost book, wait and reflect on its author, the younger Anaximander of Miletus. ‘Our’ Anixmander must not be confused with Anixmander the Elder, arguably the first recorded philosopher who, in the sixth century BC, put down the some lines about the origin of the universe that have, against all the odds, survived. ‘Our’ Anixmander doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, and the best guide to his life and chronology gives the cruelly vague ‘probably 400 B.C.E.’ (Beach adores this.) However, Anixmander the Younger does have one claim to fame, c. 400 BC, he wrote a very promising book Interpretation of the Pythagorean Sayings [Symbola], which, along with much of the rest of material about Pythagoras, has not come down to us. To those who do not know Pythagoras this may sound unexciting. But we have, in a number of different authors, a handful of these sayings that have survived. Beach offers here ten of the best. Stop, take a deep breath and feel the chill run down your spine: here is a voice from the fount of the western tradition, the bearded Godhead of our philosophical system.
Don’t eat in your chariot.
Do not urinate against the sun.
Wine and meat harm the mind.
Do not eat beans.
Do not bury folk in woollen clothes.
Do not cut the fire with iron.
Look not in a mirror by lamp-light.
Don’t step over a pair of weighing scales.
Worship the sound of the wind.
Do not receive a swallow into your house.
Beach had several reactions on reading these. One was ‘so that’s why everything has gone so horribly wrong for the last thirty years…’ The second was ‘what is he getting at’; and the third was supplied by a student as ‘what was he on’. Now consider this. About a hundred of these symbola or sayings survive. If we had only Anixmander we would have not a hundred but a thousand nail clippings from the wisdom of Pythagoras…. And on that subject Pythagoras tells us to spit on any nail or hair clippings. What, o Cassiopeia, have we lost?!
But not only would we have more Pythagoras, we would have Anixmander the Younger interpreting the sayings. Beach at first split these sayings into two categories: those that were straightforward and those that were metaphorical (where presumably Anixmander let loose the full artillery of his intellect).
But as Beach read and reread he came to the conclusion that they were all straightforward. For example, ‘do not urinate against the sun’ might be a clever metaphorical line about meeting genius with inadequate criticism, but knowing the Pythagoreans it is more likely to mean something like don’t urinate in the direction of the sun. Ditto ‘Do not receive a swallow into your house’ probably does mean, ‘don’t let a bird fly into your sitting room because you’ll have a lot of bird droppings and blood to clear up after’.
Perhaps Anixmander’s job was not then to unpick the sayings, but rather to explain why there were certain rules. For example, why was it that Pythagoras in one of his other symbola objected to disciples eating white roosters? It is very unlikely that Anixmander had a convincing answer: but reading his attempt would have been entertaining.
Beach finishes this brief memorial to what we have lost with a flash from the underworld. A man with five Phd.’s has just died and finds himself in Hades with Anixmander. Tears well up in the shade’s eyes. ‘Oh, Anixmander, you don’t know…’ ‘No, no,’ says the irate shade ‘I’m the expert on the bleeding obvious. You need to go back a couple of centuries down that road and look for the man with the crowd around him.’
Other lost books: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
