Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Plato and Pythagoreanism by Phillip Sidney HorkyGabriele CornelliPhillip Sidney Horky. Plato and Pythagoreanism. Oxford University Press, 2013. xxi + 305 pp. Cloth, $74.Ceci n’est pas un livre sur Pythagore. With these clever and rather playful words, Horky’s book starts its literary journey through a wide range of Pythagorean sources, including Epicharmus, Empedocles, Philolaus, Eurytus and Arquitas, and Pythagorean themes, like numbers, immortality of the soul, limitness/unlimitness, among others.From this explosive incipit, one would think that Horky agrees with Kahn’s almost forty-year-old observation about the fact that new theories of Pythagoreanism are not necessary in our present day and age (1974, 163, n. 6):It’s hard enough to satisfy minimal standards of historical rigor in discussing the Pythagoreans, without introducing arbitrary guesswork of this sort where no two students can come to the same conclusion on the basis of the same evidence. In fact, the direct testimony for Pythagorean doctrines is all too abundant. The task for a serious scholarship is not to enrich these data by inventing new theories or unattested stages of development but to sift the evidence so as to determine which items are most worthy (or least unworthy) of belief.On the contrary, however, Horky’s approach seems surprisingly to direct the reader towards a fundamentally historiographical rather than philological brand of work, that is, one devoted neither exclusively to the exegesis of Pythagorean sources nor even to the theoretical approach of one of the themes that received specific contributions from Pythagoreanism, such as mathematics, cosmology, politics, or the theory of the immortal soul. This is mainly true when one recognizes, from the title on, that the main goal of the book is to try to determine, once and for all, what is the extent of Pythagorean influence on Plato’s thought. Rather an historiographical problem, I would say. And a good one.In order to do so, Horky needs to trace down a sort of history of mathematical Pythagoreanism from a huge variety of informed ancient sources and perspectives. Horky’s approach to the sources is well-grounded, not only in Burkert’s fundamental works, but also in the recent revival in Pythagorean studies which took over ancient philosophy scholarship in the last two decades: Huffmann’s works on Philolaus (1993) and Arquitas (2005); Zhmud (1997) and Kahn (2001) on early Pythagoreans; Riedweg on Pythagoras (2002), among many others. After the publishing of Horky’s book, two sorts of Companions to Pythagoreanism confirm the trend of the revival: Cornelli, McKirahan, and Macris (2013), acts of the On Pythagoreanism seminar held in Brasilia by Archai [End Page 353] UNESCO Chair, and Huffman (2014). Luckily, Pythagorean scholarship has now gotten rid of that old-fashioned scepticism, starting from Zeller’s famous statement that the relevant sources are a “mixture of fables and poetry.” As Horky’s book seems to suggest, the job can be done. And he has definitely proved to be able to force his way through, with both clear philological arguments and refined historiographical hypotheses.Not surprisingly, a work on Plato and Pythagoreanism starts with a chapter on Aristotle: “Aristotle on Mathematical Pythagoreanism in the Fourth Century BCE” (chap. 1). The idea of the chapter is to rely on Aristotle’s distinction between the mathematical and acousmatic branches of Pythagoreanism. While acousmatic Pythagoreans supposedly did not engage in demonstration, the so-called mathematical Pythagoreans engaged in investigations based on mathemata in order to give an account (the reason why of the world they perceived). Horky seems to drive Aristotle’s account to a specific goal: mathematical Pythagoreans would have established some kind of correspondence between numbers and sensibles, and their ontology would have a direct relation to social and political organization.Chapter 2, “Hippasus of Metapontum and Mathematical Pythagoreanism,” is entirely dedicated to the account of the later doxographical tradition on Hippasus, the alleged progenitor of mathematical Pythagoreanism. Avoiding the risk of falling into the “bottomless pit” of research on the Pythagoreans—in Guthrie’s famous words (1962, 146, n. 1)—Horky manages his inquiry boldly and in a quite elegant way. Between the peripatetic systematization and the platonic derivation of Hippasus’ philosophy, Hippasus...