The Golden Verses of Pythagoras

The order here is the argument. Worship comes first, then the given Oath, then the heroes and the local dæmons (the word means guiding spirits, not devils, and the Greek countryside was thick with them), and only then, in the fourth line, do parents arrive. A modern reader might expect family loyalty to open a moral code; this one opens with cosmic order and treats devotion to the household as continuous with devotion to the gods, not competing with it. The Oath gets its own line before the heroes do, an odd emphasis until you remember this was a school famous for swearing by numbers, the tetractys among them, and for treating a broken word as close to blasphemy.

Friendship, in this code, is not sentimental so much as selective. Make your friend the person distinguished by virtue, the verses say, then actually listen when he corrects you. The warning that follows is the more interesting line: do not let one fault turn you against a friend, because affection that cannot survive a single failing was never sturdy to begin with. The closing note, that power is a near neighbour to necessity, reads like a stray proverb dropped into an argument about loyalty, and maybe it is one. The school built its ethics partly from just such inherited fragments, not always welded smooth at the seams.

Four passions are named outright: gluttony, sloth, sensuality, anger. The list is old enough to sit somewhere in the family tree of the later Christian catalogue of deadly sins, though the lineage runs through many hands and is not a straight line. What follows is less about willpower than about witnesses, or the lack of them: do nothing shameful whether watched or alone, because the self that watches you in private is the one this whole practice is training. Justice gets named next, in action and in word both, a small but deliberate pairing. A life kept honest only in deed while the mouth ran loose was not, to this school, a just life at all.

Two hard facts are set down without softening: everyone dies, and fortune's gifts were never really owned, so their loss is not really theft. The counsel that follows is not resignation, though it can sound like it. Bear what happens with patience, yes, but also do what can be done to fix it, the verses add, refusing to let patience curdle into passivity. The closing line is the most quietly comforting one: fate does not aim its worst at good people specifically. Bad luck, in other words, is not a verdict on character, whatever the sufferer's own fear might whisper at three in the morning.

Good reasoning and bad both circulate freely among people, the verses note, so neither swallow an argument whole nor dismiss it out of hand, a harder discipline than it sounds. The heart of the section is procedural: consult and deliberate before acting, because the miserable man, in this school's blunt phrase, is simply the one who speaks and acts without reflection first. Regret is treated here as a symptom of a skipped step, not bad luck. The last line is the strictest: never do anything you do not understand. It is aimed as much at borrowed opinions, taken up because a persuasive person offered them, as at reckless deeds.

The body gets its own short code, and it is notably free of asceticism. Feed it and exercise it, the verses say, in a measure that will not incommode you, a plainer standard than most ancient rules for the flesh manage. Live neatly and decently, without luxury, without envy of what others have, without being showy on one hand or stingy on the other. The word this school reached for again and again was measure, and it shows up here doing quiet work: not renunciation, not indulgence, just a due amount, judged case by case rather than fixed by a rule that could be recited without thinking.

These five lines are the most travelled road out of this text. Do not sleep, they say, until the day has been walked back three times: where did I go wrong, what did I get right, what was left undone. Seneca was still keeping this exact appointment five centuries later, learned from his teacher Sextius and practiced nightly by lamplight, and this library keeps a whole page for it, the Evening Review, built on this root. Notice the order: the fault comes first, and the good deed still gets its own line and its own instruction to rejoice. A review built only to catalogue failure was never what this school had in mind.

The oath here is sworn on the Sacred Quaternion, better known as the tetractys, ten dots arranged in a triangle of one, two, three, and four, which this school treated as close to a cosmic signature and used in its most solemn vows. Praying before beginning any task follows naturally from that reverence; work done without first acknowledging its source was, to this mind, work begun on the wrong foot. The promise attached is large: knowing the constitution of gods and men both, how far the different kinds of being extend and what binds them. It is a claim to a total picture of the universe, offered as the fruit of a moral habit rather than a course of study.

The tone turns bleak for a moment. People bring their own ruin on themselves, by free choice, and then fail to notice that the remedy was near at hand the whole time; the verses call this blindness, not bad luck. The image that follows is startling for so plain a text: unhappy people rolling like huge cylinders, tossed everywhere by an innate strife they never perceive, when yielding to it would let it pass. It is close kin to ideas that would later be called karma, in traditions this school never met, the conviction that suffering is mostly self-authored and the way out is release rather than more struggle.

The verses turn to prayer, and to a word worth pausing on: dæmon, meaning something closer to an indwelling guide or portion of spirit than the devil its English cognate now suggests. Jupiter stands here for Zeus, the Roman name inherited through the French and English translators who carried this text forward. Show men what dæmon they use, the plea runs, as though the trouble were never a lack of divinity but a lack of introduction to the divinity already present. The line that follows is the boldest claim in the text: the race of man is divine, and sacred nature is said to give up her hidden workings to whoever earns her trust.

The dietary rule in the middle, abstaining from meats forbidden in the purifications, belonged to a school with genuine and disputed food taboos; Pythagoreans were famous even in antiquity for arguing over what could be eaten, and this line is a fossil of that history more than a universal instruction. What the text is actually building toward is its last sentence, and it earns the buildup. Strip away the mortal body, arrive at the purest air, and become a god, deathless, incorruptible, no longer under death's rule. It is an extraordinary promise to end on, offered as a description of what the practice, kept faithfully, was for.