Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

34
Carl Huffman
of the body, but those arguments would not tell against a commandcenter
psychÞ, which was a harmony of its own physical elements. 34 It
appears, then, that we can assign to Philolaus a view of the soul that allows
us to reconcile what is said about psychÞ in fragment 13 with the
doctrine of a soul as a harmony, while still allowing the psychÞ to be a
transmigrating soul. I now want to go back and show that an earlier version
of this conception of soul can be found in the testimonia for Pythagoras
himself.
There are three testimonia about Pythagoras’ conception of the soul
dating to the sixth and fifth century. 35 One of these is the passage in
Herodotus discussed above, in which psychÞ seems to refer particularly
to the seat of emotions and desires, which transmigrates from body to
body. The unnamed Greeks who, according to Herodotus, borrowed
this idea from the Egyptians are likely to include Pythagoras. That Pythagoras
specifically used the word psychÞ to pick out this conception of
soul is suggested both by his successor Philolaus’ use of the word in this
way and also by a second testimonium, the oldest testimonium we have, a
famous fragment of Pythagoras’ contemporary, Xenophanes of Colophon.
The fragment does not mention Pythagoras by name, but Diogenes
Laertius (8.36) tells us that he was indeed the subject of the
lines and modern scholars have generally agreed. The fragment reads:
“They say that once, when a puppy was being beaten as he was passing,
he pitied it and spoke the following words: ‘stop and do not keep hitting,
since it is certainly the soul (psychÞ) of a friend, which I recognized
when I heard it yelp’.” (Xenophanes, fr. 7) There are obvious perils in
trying to reconstruct Pythagoras’ conception of the soul from a hostile
presentation of it such as this. Still, Claus goes too far when he argues
that “it is frankly absurd to imagine that we can penetrate [the] satirical
style to find the actual substance or language of an underlying philosophical
or religious doctrine” 36 . Certainty cannot be achieved given
such evidence, but some possibilities can be identified, which can
34 Guthrie (1962, 316) views the Pythagorean soul as “a harmony of its own parts”
but for Guthrie its parts are numbers rather than physical elements as I have suggested.
35 Because of the unreliability of the later tradition regarding Pythagoras, it is necessary
to start from evidence that is prior to and independent of the distortions
that first arose in the early Academy and only admit later evidence to the extent
to which it is of a piece with the early evidence (Burkert 1972).
36 Claus 1981, 5.