Iamblichus' Life of Pythagoras, or Pythagoric Life: Accompanied by Fragments of the Ethical Writings of certain Pythagoreans in the Doric dialect; and a collection of Pythagoric Sentences from Stobaeus and others, which are omitted by Gale in his Opuscula Mythologica, and have not been noticed by any editorIamblichus
Philosophy
Iamblichus' Life of Pythagoras, or Pythagoric Life: Accompanied by Fragments of the Ethical Writings of certain Pythagoreans in the Doric dialect; and a collection of Pythagoric Sentences from Stobaeus and others, which are omitted by Gale in his Opuscula Mythologica, and have not been noticed by any editor
Iamblichus
Ethics, Ancient; Philosophers -- Greece -- Biography; Philosophy, Ancient; Pythagoras; Pythagoras and Pythagorean school
“The shining circlets of his golden hair,
Which ev’n the Graces might be proud to wear,
Instarr’d with gems and gold, bestrow the shore
With dust dishonor’d, and deform’d with gore.
As the young olive in some sylvan scene,
Crown’d by fresh fountains with eternal green,
Lifts the gay head, in snowy flowrets fair,
And plays and dances to the gentle air;
When lo! a whirlwind from high heav’n invades
The tender plant, and withers all its shades;
It lies uprooted from its genial bed,
A lovely ruin now defac’d and dead.
Thus young, thus beautiful, Euphorbus lay,
While the fierce Spartan tore his arms away.”[16]
But what is related about the shield of this Phrygian Euphorbus, being
dedicated among other Trojan spoils to Argive Juno, we shall omit, as
being of a very popular nature. That, however, which he wished to
indicate through all these particulars is this, that he knew the former
lives which he had lived, and that from hence he commenced his
providential attention to others, reminding them of their former life.
CHAP. XV.
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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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