Pythagorean Discipline

Pythagoras believed that music contributed greatly to health, if it were used appropriately.

He was accustomed to employ a purification of this kind, but not in a careless way.

d he called the medicine which is obtained through music by the name of purification. But he employed such a melody as this about the vernal season.

For he placed in the middle a certain person who played on the lyre, and seated in a circle round him those who were able to sing. And thus, when the person in the centre struck the lyre, those that surrounded him sung certain pæans, through which they were seen to be delighted, and to become elegant and orderly in their manners. But at another time they used music in the place of medicine.

There are 81 certain melodies devised as remedies against the passions of the soul, and also against despondency and lamentation,[26] which Pythagoras invented as things that afford the greatest assistance in these maladies. And again, he employed other melodies against rage and anger, and against every aberration of the soul.

He also used dancing to remedy against the desires, using the lyre for this purpose.

He believed that the pipe:

• excited insolence
• was a theatrical instrument and
• did not have a liberal sound

Select verses also of Homer and Hesiod were used by him, for the purpose of correcting the soul.

Pythagoras was said to the extinguished the rage of a Tauromenian man through a spondaic song of a piper.

The man had been feasting at night and saw his mistress coming from the house of his rival. A Phrygian song then made him so inflamed and angry that it prompted him to burn her.

At that time, Pythagoras was astronomizing. He met with the Phrygian piper at an unseasonable time of night, and persuaded him to change his Phrygian for a spondaic song.

This most rapidly suppressed the fury of the man. He returned home in an orderly manner, though a little before this, he could not be restrained, nor bear any admonition and even stupidly insulted Pythagoras when he met him.

Anchitus was a judge and the host of Empedocles. Anchitus had publicly condemned a young man’s father to death. The young man rushed with a drawn sword on Anchitus. But Empedocles changed the intention of the youth, by singing to his lyre that verse of Homer:

Nepenthe, without gall, o’er every ill Oblivion spreads;——[28]

Thus he snatched his host Anchitus from death, and the youth from the crime of homicide. The youth from that time became the most celebrated of the disciples of Pythagoras.

The whole Pythagoric school produced by certain appropriate songs, what they called exartysis or adaptation, synarmoge or elegance of manners, and epaphe or contact, usefully conducting the dispositions of the soul to passions contrary to those which it before possessed.

When they went to bed they purified the reasoning power from the perturbations and noises to which it had been exposed during the day, by certain odes and peculiar songs, and by this means procured for themselves tranquil sleep, and few and good dreams.

But when they rose from bed, they again liberated themselves from the torpor and heaviness of sleep, by songs of another kind.

Sometimes, also, by musical sounds alone, unaccompanied with words, they healed the passions of the soul and certain diseases, enchanting, as they say, in reality. And it is probable that from hence this name epode, i. e. enchantment, came to be generally used.

In this way, Pythagoras produced the most beneficial correction of human manners and lives through music.