Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

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Carl Huffman
these Greeks but will not record them. 20 Given the early and persistent
association of Pythagoras with the doctrine, however, it is overwhelmingly
likely that he is one of the people meant. Herodotus may be thinking
of him as the earlier figure and Empedocles as the later or perhaps he
means Pythagoreans and Orphics.
Before turning to Pythagoras though, there is still a lingering question
regarding fragment 13 of Philolaus. The parallel with Herodotean
usage suggests that Philolaus thought of the psychÞ as a center of emotions.
Did he also think that it was the transmigrating soul? Scholars
have been divided on whether he believed in transmigration at all,
and the evidence does not permit a definite answer. 21 There are two
reasons for thinking that he did believe in transmigration. First, the prohibition
on suicide ascribed to him in Plato’s Phaedo might reasonably be
explained on the grounds that suicide illegitimately interferes with the
workings of the cycle of transmigrations. Second, Philolaus is consistently
called a Pythagorean and, since there is little evidence that his cosmology
and metaphysical principles were derived from Pythagoras, it is
likely that he was called a Pythagorean because he lived a Pythagorean
way of life and that way of life is likely to have been grounded in a belief
20 Why does Herodotus refuse to name the Greeks who claimed the Egyptian
doctrine of metempsychôsis as their own? Some suggest that he does not want
to glorify such malefactors by citing their name (Harrison 2000, 184, n. 8),
but it could also be that he does not explicitly name them in order to make
his remarks less offensive to the followers of those accused. Since there is no
independent evidence for a belief in metempsychôsis in Egypt, most scholars,
e.g., Lloyd 1993, 59, assume that Herodotus is mistaken in thinking that the
Greeks borrowed it from Egypt, but we are not in a position to know all the
variants of Egyptian religious belief, and West (1971, 62) argues that we should
accept Herodotus’ testimony.
21 Nothing in the fragments of his book provides us with evidence that Philolaus
believed in transmigration but, in the Phaedo (61d), Plato presents him as forbidding
suicide, which might suggest that he did. As to Philolaus’ reasons for
this prohibition, however, Cebes simply says that he had heard nothing clear
from Philolaus on the topic. Socrates’ explanation of what he has heard in secret
about the matter, that our lives are a sort of prison sentence from which we
must not run away without the approval of the gods, is certainly not ascribed
to Philolaus, as Guthrie suggested it was (1962, 310). Indeed, if this was
known to be Philolaus’ view, it is inexplicable that Plato would instead leave
us with Cebes’ assertion that he had heard nothing clear from him on the
issue. Still Guthrie (1962, 310 – 311) reasonably asks why Philolaus should prohibit
suicide if not for something like “the characteristically Orphico-Pythagorean
reasons which follow in the dialogue”?