Neopythagoreanism

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.

Alongside its more technical mathematical and metaphysical writers, Neopythagoreanism also produced a distinctive figure absent from the classical Pythagorean tradition, the itinerant holy man who combined philosophy with claimed miracle working and ascetic discipline. Apollonius of Tyana, active in the first century CE, is the best known example, remembered through a later biography by Philostratus as a wandering teacher who traveled from Spain to India, practiced vegetarianism and silence in the old Pythagorean manner, and was credited by admirers with prophecy and healing. Whether Philostratus' account reflects a historical figure accurately or is substantially legendary is disputed by modern scholars, and the text was written under imperial patronage roughly a century after Apollonius' death, which historians treat as a reason for caution about its more extraordinary claims. The image mattered regardless of its accuracy, since later antiquity, including some pagan critics of early Christianity, held Apollonius up as a rival holy man whose life paralleled and, in their argument, rivaled that of Jesus, a comparison that shows how thoroughly Neopythagorean asceticism and reputed wonder working had become entangled with the wider religious currents of the Greco-Roman world in which the movement operated.