Chapter 19 - Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Life in context

Summary

Introduction

Iamblichus’ work On the Pythagorean Life is the most extensive and richest source of information on Pythagoras and his school to have reached us from antiquity. The work itself is based, directly or indirectly, on a wide range of earlier sources, themselves no longer surviving, and presents us with a generous mix of clearly fictional tales attached to the legend of Pythagoras and information which seems to be more reliable. This mix has been the object of philological research which began in earnest with a major article published in 1871–1872 by Erwin Rohde, research which has tended to approach Iamblichus’ work as if it were little better than a jumble of materials of varying value which need to be sorted out in order to get to what might be of use in reconstructing early Pythagoreanism. In the process, Iamblichus himself, his intentions as author of the work and his stature as a philosopher have been eclipsed and ignored. The contempt shown for him as the author of the text (Rohde spoke of the text as a “piteous patchwork”) was matched by the contempt shown in histories of philosophy for the later Neoplatonic philosophy of which Iamblichus was a major figure, a philosophy believed to have capitulated to irrationality and magic, a decadent ending to Greek philosophy.

In more recent times, however, beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, new approaches have emerged. A considerable amount of work has been done on Iamblichus and on later Neoplatonic philosophy, which allows us to see beyond the attitude of ignorant prejudice of earlier accounts. And Iamblichus’ work On the Pythagorean Life, beginning with an essay published by Michael von Albrecht in 1966, has been taken seriously as a text in its own right, with specific philosophical purposes, a structure corresponding to these purposes and a context, that of Iamblichus’ ambitions as a philosopher at the turn of the third century AD. In what follows I would like to review some of the results of these new approaches, coming back later to the question of Iamblichus’ use of earlier sources, as seen in the light of a new approach.