How Late Antiquity Rebuilt Pythagoras

By the time Neopythagoreanism emerged in the first century BCE, direct knowledge of the historical Pythagoras and his sixth century BCE community at Croton had faded into legend, and Neopythagorean writers were working less from surviving Pythagorean texts, which were scarce and of doubtful authenticity, than from a composite image built up over centuries and increasingly blended with Platonism. The movement's central conviction was that number is not merely a tool for counting but the actual structural principle underlying reality, so that mathematical relationships, ratios, proportions, the properties of specific numbers, were treated as clues to the order of the divine and the cosmos alike, an idea inherited from earlier Pythagorean number mysticism but developed into a more systematic metaphysics. Nicomachus of Gerasa, writing an influential handbook of arithmetic in the first or second century CE, treated numbers almost as living principles standing behind the physical world rather than abstractions drawn from it, while Numenius of Apamea combined Pythagorean number theory with Platonic metaphysics to describe a hierarchy of divine principles that closely anticipated the emanation scheme later developed by Plotinus and formalized as Neoplatonism. Because Neopythagoreanism supplied so much of the philosophical vocabulary and hierarchy that Neoplatonism later systematized, historians of philosophy generally treat it as an essential bridge rather than an independent destination in its own right.