Conceiving, however, that the first attention which should be paid to
men, is that which takes place through the senses; as when some one
perceives beautiful figures and forms, or hears beautiful rythms and
melodies, he established that to be the first erudition which subsists
through music, and also through certain melodies and rythms, from which
the remedies of human manners and passions are obtained, together with
those harmonies of the powers of the soul which it possessed from the
first. He likewise devised medicines calculated to repress and expel the
diseases both of bodies and souls. And by Jupiter that which deserves to
be mentioned above all these particulars is this, that he arranged and
adapted for his disciples what are called apparatus and contrectations,
divinely contriving mixtures of certain diatonic, chromatic, and
euharmonic melodies, through which he easily transferred and circularly
led the passions of the soul into a contrary direction, when they had
recently and in an irrational and clandestine manner been formed; such
as sorrow, rage, and pity, absurd emulation and fear, all-various
desires, angers, and appetites, pride, supineness, and vehemence. For he
corrected each of these by the rule of virtue, attempering them through
appropriate melodies, as through certain salutary medicines. In the
evening, likewise, when his disciples were retiring to sleep, he
liberated them by these means from diurnal perturbations and tumults,
and purified their intellective power from the influxive and effluxive
waves of a corporeal nature; rendered their sleep quiet, and their
dreams pleasing and prophetic. But when they again rose from their bed,
he freed them from nocturnal heaviness, relaxation and torpor, through
certain peculiar songs and modulations, produced either by simply
striking the lyre, or employing the voice. Pythagoras, however, did not
procure for himself a thing of this kind through instruments or the
voice, but employing a certain ineffable divinity, and which it is
difficult to apprehend, he extended his ears, and fixed his intellect in
the sublime symphonies of the world, he alone hearing and understanding,
as it appears, the universal harmony and consonance of the spheres, and
the stars that are moved through them, and which produce a fuller and
more intense melody than any thing effected by mortal sounds.[17] This
melody also was the result of dissimilar and variously differing sounds,
celerities, magnitudes, and intervals, arranged with reference to each
other in a certain most musical ratio, and thus producing a most gentle,
and at the same time variously beautiful motion and convolution. Being
therefore irrigated as it were with this melody, having the reason of
his intellect well arranged through it, and as I may say, exercised, he
determined to exhibit certain images of these things to his disciples as
much as possible, especially producing an imitation of them through
instruments, and through the mere voice alone. For he conceived that by
him alone, of all the inhabitants of the earth, the mundane sounds were
understood and heard, and this from a natural fountain itself and root.
He therefore thought himself worthy to be taught, and to learn something
about the celestial orbs, and to be assimilated to them by desire and
imitation, as being the only one on the earth adapted to this by the
conformation of his body, through the dæmoniacal power that inspired
him. But he apprehended that other men ought to be satisfied in looking
to him, and the gifts he possessed, and in being benefited and corrected
through images and examples, in consequence of their inability to
comprehend truly the first and genuine archetypes of things. Just,
indeed, as to those who are incapable of looking intently at the sun,
through the transcendent splendor of his rays, we contrive to exhibit
the eclipses of that luminary, either in the profundity of still water,
or through melted pitch, or through some darkly-splendid mirror; sparing
the imbecility of their eyes, and devising a method of representing a
certain repercussive light, though less intense than its archetype, to
those who are delighted with a thing of this kind. Empedocles also
appears to have obscurely signified this about Pythagoras, and the
illustrious and divinely-gifted conformation of his body above that of
other men, when he says:
“There was a man among them [i. e. among the Pythagoreans] who was
transcendent in knowledge, who possessed the most ample stores of
intellectual wealth, and who was in the most eminent degree the adjutor
of the works of the wise. For when he extended all the powers of his
intellect, he easily beheld every thing, as far as to ten or twenty ages
of the human race.”
For the words _transcendent_, and _he beheld every thing_, and _the
wealth of intellect_, and the like, especially exhibit the illustrious
nature of the conformation of his mind and body, and its superior
accuracy in seeing, and hearing, and in intellectual perception.