NEOPYTHAGOREANISM. - A philosophical-mystical current tracing its origin back to Pythagoras and remaining alive, after the violent destruction of the Pythagorean community in 450 B.C., as an orientation of life according to what had been the philosopher's ideal, wholly imbued with Orphic elements. These ideals found concrete expression in respect for the Monad, for the One considered as the principle of the universe; in belief in the survival of the soul through the wheel of rebirths (metempsychosis); in the observance of ritual prohibitions (the ban on eating meat and beans); in the tendency toward associated life; in profound respect for the person and the teaching of the founder (ipse dixit).
This ideal, never extinguished in Magna Graecia, which was the principal theater of Pythagoreanism, penetrated, like so many other spiritual currents, into Rome, where already in the 2nd century B.C. there is record of a pious fraud aimed at lending credit to Neopythagorean teaching, by simulating the discovery of two stone chests, one containing the body of Numa, whom tradition made a disciple of Pythagoras, the other two rolls of recent writing, one in Latin containing seven books of pontifical law, the other in Greek containing seven books of philosophical subject matter; books which, after examination, were ordered burned before the people by the praetor Q. Petilius, who found in them new ideas capable of undermining the religion of the State (Livy, XL, 29). But this auto da fé did not succeed in preventing the spread of the Neopythagorean current, of which a very lofty echo is found in the "Dream of Scipio," in Book VI of Cicero's Republic; in the deference shown to it by the theologian Varro, who wished to be buried according to the funerary ritual of the Pythagoreans: a clay coffin with a bed of myrtle, olive and black poplar leaves (Pliny, Nat. hist., XXXV, 50); in the propaganda of the senator Nigidius Figulus, founder of the first Pythagorean chapel in Rome, branded as a magician and Pythagorean; in the criteria that dictated the decoration of the Neopythagorean basilica of Porta Maggiore, of the mid-1st century A.D., and, at the end of that same century, in the legendary figure of Apollonius of Tyana, whose life was written by the philosopher Philostratus at the beginning of the 3rd century, drawn from the notes taken by Damis, a disciple of Apollonius.
The greatest flourishing of N. in Rome runs from the mid-1st century B.C. to the mid-1st century A.D. It is easy to understand how, in such a troubled age, the Neopythagorean ideal was capable of offering a refuge and of making a radiant hope flash before the eyes of so many anguished spirits, for whom neither the official religion, solicitous only of the collectivity and not of individuals, nor the materialism of the Epicureans, nor the grandiose but cold vision of the Stoics sufficed to fill the void of the spirit. But precisely because it was reduced to a conventicle movement communicable to a few initiates, N. did not win the trust of the people, nor did it enjoy that of the State, which distrusted the mantic and thaumaturgic powers vaunted by the adepts, while by unprejudiced minds it was branded as charlatanism (cf. the Pseudomantis of Lucian against Alexander of Abonoteichus). The hostility, which later became persecution, against N. manifested itself in the second quarter of the 1st century A.D. during the reign of Claudius, under whom took place the trial against Statilius Taurus accused of magica superstitio (Tacitus, Ann., XII, 59). The Statilian family, as F. Fornari, the first illustrator of the monument, demonstrated, possessed at 100 meters east of the present Porta Maggiore (on the Via Prenestina) a plot of land beneath which, at 13.50 meters, in 1917 was discovered a hall with a basilical plan, with three naves divided by two pillars with a barrel vault and with an apse at the end, in which traces of a chair are discernible. The entire basilica is decorated with stuccoes on subjects taken from Greek mythology, while those of Oriental subject (Mithras, Attis, Osiris) are lacking; the conch of the apse represents Sappho descending with her lyre from a cliff toward the sea, where a triton holds out a cloth to receive her, while above, on the left, stands Apollo with his bow. The stuccoes of the vault and the walls: palaestra, school, signify life understood as salutary exercise in view of salvation; this, which is the ultimate goal of Pythagorean discipline, is represented by scenes of rapture: the Dioscuri and the Leucippides, Ganymede and the eagle; and then Dionysus making wine (celestial intoxication), Demeter giving bread (nourish-
(nourishment of immortality), Hercules receiving the apples of the Hesperides (rest in beatitude). The liturgy that took place in this basilica, whose Neopythagorean character, already intuited by F. Cumont, J. Carcopino (La basilique pythagoricienne de la Porte Majeure, Paris 1927) definitively demonstrated, was deduced by him especially from the life of Pythagoras written by the Neoplatonist Iamblichus. Ablutions (amphorae of which the sockets in the ground and the depictions on the stuccoes of the side naves remain); the banquet of bread, wine and flat cakes held around small tables (of which four sockets remain in the basilica between the arches); exercises and practices of spiritual elevation concluded by an exhortation delivered from the chair by the president of the assembly (the socket of the seat remains at the base of the apse). The conch of the apse is the synthesis of Pythagorean life, inasmuch as Sappho descending into the sea is not the poetess who killed herself for love, but an idealized Sappho, symbol of the soul which, intoxicated by the harmony of the spheres symbolized by the lyre, moves toward its divine Phaon, Apollo, who for the Pythagoreans is the supreme divinity (Plutarch, De Jude, 10; 75), leaving behind the anxieties of earthly life to enter into the divine life. This spiritualization of Sappho had already occurred in a Pythagorean milieu: "et Phaonem Lesbium dilectum a Sappho: multa circa hoc, non magorum solum vanitate sed etiam Pythagoricorum" (Pliny, Nat. hist., XXII, 20).
This distinguished monument of N., which illuminates and is illuminated by the tradition that the Neoplatonists preserved concerning Pythagoras, reveals no traces of decay or of slow tampering; it therefore seems to have been put out of use suddenly, following a prohibition or confiscation, which may go back to the condemnation of the Statilian family mentioned at the beginning.
From this time onward the mystical and devotional element of N. continued to live on in Neoplatonism (v.).