Chapter 18 - Porphyry's Life of Pythagoras

Summary

Introduction

For centuries, Porphyry's Life of Pythagoras (Πυθαγόρου βίος, Vita Pythagorae = VP) and Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Way of Life have conveyed idealized pictures of Pythagoras that continued to be “canonic” down to the nineteenth century. These two works remain, along with Book 8, §§1–50 of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives and Doctrines of the Eminent Philosophers, the three main sources for scholarly efforts to establish, with great pains and little certitude, a few basic historical facts pertaining to Pythagoras’ life, and, more confidently, to reconstruct the process of the creation of his legend.

It is not a coincidence that, like the two other fully preserved lives of Pythagoras, Porphyry's text comes from the third century AD, a period of (Neo)-Pythagorean revival when interest in Pythagoras was at its peak. Given Porphyry's dates (234 – c. 305 AD), the VP should be placed somewhere between Diogenes (first half of the third century) and Iamblichus (end of the century or early fourth, a few years before or after Porphyry's edition of Plotinus’ Enneads, c. 301), and more precisely after Porphyry's joining the school of Plotinus in Rome in 264 (see below n. 14).