bantes,[1] and will serve to explain the Pythagorean interest in Harmonics. But there is more than this. If we can trust Herakleides, it was Pythagoras who first distinguished the "three lives," the Theoretic, the Practical, and the Apolaustic, which Aristotle made use of in the Ethics. The doctrine is to this effect. We are strangers in this world, and the body is the tomb of the soul, and yet we must not seek to escape by self-murder; for we are the chattels of God who is our herdsman, and without his command we have no right to make our escape.[2] In this life there are three kinds of men, just as there are three sorts of people who come to the Olympic Games. The lowest class is made up of those who come to buy and sell, and next above them are those who come to compete. Best of all, however, are those who come to look on (θεωρεῖν). The greatest purification of all is, therefore, science, and it is the man who devotes himself to that, the true philosopher, who has most effectually released himself from the "wheel of birth." It would be rash to say that Pythagoras expressed himself exactly in this manner; but all these ideas are genuinely Pythagorean, and it is only in some such way that we can bridge the gulf which separates Pythagoras the man of science from Pythagoras the religious teacher.[3] It is easy to understand that most of his followers would rest content with the humbler kinds of purification, and this will account for the sect of the Akousmatics. A few would rise to the higher doctrine, and we have now to ask how much of the
- ↑ These are mentioned in Plato, Laws, 790 d, a passage which is the origin of Aristotle's doctrine of κάθαρσις. For a full account see Rohde, Psyche, ii. 48, n. 1.
- ↑ Plato gives this as the Pythagorean view in Phaed. 62 b. The passage distinctly implies that it was not merely the theory of Philolaos, but something older.
- ↑ See Döring in Arch. v. pp. 505 sqq. There seems to be a reference to the theory of the "three lives" in Herakleitos, fr. 111. It was apparently taught in the Pythagorean Society of Phleious; for Herakleides made Pythagoras expound it in a conversation with the tyrant of Phleious (Cic. Tusc. v. 3; Diog. pr. 12, viii. 8), and Plato makes Sokrates argue from it in the Phaedo (see my note on 68 c 2).
