NEOPYTHAGOREANISM. — A philosophical-mystical current whose origins go back to Pythagoras and which remained 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 were concretized in reverence for the Monad, for the One considered as the principle of the universe; in faith in the survival of the soul through the wheel of rebirths (metempsychosis); in the observance of ritual prohibitions (the prohibition against eating meat and beans); in the tendency toward communal life; in profound respect for the person and teaching of the founder (ipse dixit).
This ideal, which never died out in Magna Graecia, the principal theater of Pythagoreanism, penetrated, like so many other spiritual currents, into Rome, where as early as the 2nd century B.C. there is mention of a pious fraud intended to lend credibility to Neopythagorean teaching, by feigning the discovery of two stone chests, one containing the body of Numa, whom tradition made a disciple of Pythagoras, the other two scrolls of recent writing, one Latin, containing seven books of pontifical law, the other Greek, containing seven books on philosophical subjects; these books, after examination, were 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 prevent the spread of the Neopythagorean current, of which a 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 Pythagorean funeral ritual: a clay chest with a bed of leaves of myrtle, olive, and black poplar (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 principles that inspired the decoration of the Neopythagorean basilica of Porta Maggiore, from the middle of the 1st century A.D.; and, at the end of that same century, in the legendary figure of Apollonius of Tyana, whose life the philosopher Philostratus wrote at the beginning of the 3rd century, drawing on notes taken by Demades, a disciple of Apollonius.
The greatest flourishing of n. in Rome extends from the middle of the 1st century B.C. to the middle of the 1st century A.D. It is easy to understand how, in so troubled an age, the Neopythagorean ideal could offer refuge and cause a radiant hope to flash before the eyes of so many anguished spirits, for whom neither the official religion, concerned only with the collective and not with 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 had been reduced to a conventicle movement communicable to a few initiates, n. did not win the confidence of the people, nor that of the State, which distrusted the mantic and thaumaturgical powers claimed by its adherents, while free-thinking spirits branded it as charlatanism (cf. the Pseudomantis of Lucian against Alexander of Abonoteichus). The hostility, which later became persecution, toward n. became evident in the second quarter of the 1st century A.D., during the reign of Claudius, under whom the trial of Statilius Taurus took place, accused of magica superstitio (Tacitus, Ann., XII, 59). The gens Statilia, as F. Fornari, the first interpreter of the monument, demonstrated, possessed land 100 meters east of the present Porta Maggiore (on the Via Prenestina), beneath which, at a depth of 13.50 meters, a basilica-plan hall was discovered in 1917, with three naves divided by two pillars, with a barrel vault and an apse at the rear, in which traces of a cathedra can be discerned. The entire basilica is decorated with stucco work depicting subjects taken from Greek mythology, while subjects of Oriental origin (Mithra, Attis, Osiris) are absent; the apse basin 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, Apollo stands with his bow. The stucco work of the vault and walls—gymnasium, school—signifies life understood as salutary exercise directed toward salvation; this, which is the ultimate end of Pythagorean discipline, is represented by scenes of abduction: the Dioscuri and Leucippides, Ganymede and the eagle; and then Dionysus making wine (celestial intoxication), Demeter giving bread (nourishment of immortality), Hercules receiving the apples of the Hesperides (rest in blessedness). The liturgy celebrated in this basilica, whose Neopythagorean character, already perceived by F. Cumont, was definitively demonstrated by J. Carcopino (La basilique pythagoricienne de la Porte Majeure, Paris 1927), was reconstructed by him chiefly from the life of Pythagoras written by the Neoplatonist Iamblichus. Ablutions (amphorae, whose recesses remain in the floor, and representations of which appear on the stucco work of the side naves); the banquet of bread, wine, and cakes held around small tables (of which four recesses remain in the basilica between the arches); exercises and practices of spiritual elevation, concluded by an exhortation delivered from the cathedra by the president of the assembly (the recess for the seat remains at the base of the apse). The apse basin is a synthesis of Pythagorean life, insofar as Sappho descending into the sea is not the poetess who committed suicide for love, but an idealized Sappho, symbol of the soul which, intoxicated by the harmony of the spheres symbolized by the lyre, moves toward her divine Phaon, Apollo, who for the Pythagoreans is the supreme divinity (Plutarch, De Jude, 10; 75), leaving behind the cares of earthly life in order to enter divine life. This spiritualization of Sappho had already taken place 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 sheds light on and is itself illuminated by the tradition that the Neoplatonists preserved concerning Pythagoras, reveals no traces of decline or gradual alteration; it therefore seems to have been taken out of use suddenly, following a prohibition or confiscation, which may go back to the condemnation of the gens Statilia mentioned at the beginning.
From this time onward, the mystical and devotional element of n. Neoplatonism (v.).