Life of Pythagoras — Iamblichus, trans. Thomas Taylor (1818)

31 praised the following funeral Homeric verses pertaining to himself, sung them most elegantly to the lyre, and frequently repeated them.

‘* 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.” 1

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.

Concervinc, 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 rhythms and melodies, he established that to be the first erudition which subsists through music, and also through certain

1 Tliad, lib. 17. The translation by Pope.

32 melodies and rhythms, 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 tule 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

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melody than any thing effected by mortal sounds.? 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