Shifts focus to the most extensive and contentious passage of natural philosophy in the Ovidian corpus, the Speech of Pythagoras from book 15 of the Metamorphoses. Ovid’s representation of the transmigration of souls has a number of important precedents in Plato’s dialogues, including that from the end of the Timaeus. Recollection forms an important component of the theories of transmigration from the dialogues, with the soul’s access to wisdom being the result of its ability to remember the knowledge that it gained when travelling beyond its incarnate existence. For Ovid’s Pythagoras, however, there is no eternal world beyond that of embodied existence, with the ability to remember past lives being as much a form of intertextual recollection as a precise philosophical theory. The Speech of Pythagoras provides a further opportunity for Ovid to underscore the fluid ontologies of the Metamorphoses, while disturbing the notion of metamorphosis as a unifying principle for the text. The illusion of a regular cycle of transmigration governing the lives and afterlives of the soul is disrupted by the inability for such a cycle to ever be fully integrated with the accounts of metamorphoses that precede it.

Further investigation of the foundation traditions of Metapontium, focusing on the persistence of much more ancient Indo-European mythic traditions and time-reckoning traditions and the presence of those elements in the bricolage that constitutes the Aeolian mythic system of Metapontium foundation narratives and their relationship to Anatolian Aeolian tradition.

Chapter 3 focuses on δαίμων and its significance in Empedocles’ concept of rebirth. I show that the demonological fragments and the term δαίμων, in particular, emphasize Empedocles’ divine nature in contrast to the rest of humankind and cannot represent, as is generally believed, the place where his personal vicissitude becomes exemplary of every soul’s destiny, thus grounding his doctrine of rebirth. To define what Empedocles intended when he called himself a reincarnated δαίμων, I analyze Plato’s myths of the soul’s otherworldly journeys and some fragments attesting to Pythagoras’ demonology. While Plato, in his concept of rebirth, conceptualized the δαίμονες as deities who guide souls during and beyond this life, Pythagoras articulated the idea that a god could exceptionally undergo rebirths, but these are usually reserved for ordinary souls. Following Pythagoras and anticipating Plato, Empedocles constructs his demonology which is linked, but does not overlap, with his doctrine of rebirth. Finally, addressing the issue of the ‘physical’ δαίμων in B 59 I argue that δαίμων is a predicative notion which, in all Empedoclean occurrences, is still intimately connected to the traditional sense of ‘god’.

This chapter traces philosophy of music from its origins until the end of the classical period. Four major questions dominated ancient philosophy of music. Ancient philosophers asked about the nature of music, and they debated whether music is a mimetic (imitative) art. The second question concerned the relationship between musical harmony and the world. Many ancient philosophers believed that musical harmony provides the key to understanding reality, including the human soul and the motions of celestial bodies. The third question concerned the value of music. Some philosophers held that music is valuable as a source of pleasure, while others believed that music could improve or corrupt the characters of listeners, and still others talked about the beauty of music. The final question concerned musical genius and the Platonic and Longinian accounts of genius emerged. Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Aristides Quintilianus, Lucretius, the Epicureans, Augustine, Quintilian, Boethius, Sextus Empiricus, Ptolemy and Longinus are among the writers discussed.

Ancient Greece provided the setting for the first detailed, recorded hypotheses about the causes of human activity. In the search for first principles of life, tentative explanations included: The naturalistic orientation of the Ionian physicists Democritus, Heraclitus, and Parmenides looked to some basic physical element in nature as this first principle. A biological orientation, developed by Alcmaeon, Hippocrates, and Empedocles, held that bodily physiology is the key. Pythagoras held that life is transcendent of the material world and found in the essential coherence of mathematical relationships. The Sophists posited a pragmatic orientation that denied the value of trying to seek out first principles, relying instead on observations of life as it is lived. Finally, Anaxagoras and Socrates, rejecting the Sophists, proposed the existence of a soul that defines humanity. This humanistic orientation developed the notion of the spiritual soul that possesses the unique human capabilities of the intellect and the will. The soul was elaborated as the central element in the interpretation of life offered by Plato and Aristotle. By the end of the Greek era the critical themes and issues of psychology as well as the methodological approaches were well identified and structured.

This short book review discusses the philosophical appropriation by Plato and Aristotle of the Greek institution, at once social, political, and religious, of theoria, ‘spectating’. Pythagoras was alleged to have classified those who travelled to the Olympic Games as competitors, traders, or spectators: symbolising the pursuit in human life of honour, economic gain, and wisdom. Plato and Aristotle are often taken accordingly to be committed to what is sometimes labelled ‘the spectator theory of knowledge’, with knowledge of ultimate principles construed as non-discursive intuition or ‘instant ocularity’. But the vision they have in mind is actually the ‘seeing’ constituted by grasp of an explanation of how a whole complex of things hangs together, achieved only after much preparatory, exploratory thought.

It is a commonplace among scholars that the early Pythagoreans posited an immortal soul. The earliest source to associate immortality of the soul to the Pythagoreans unequivocally, Dicaearchus of Messana, stipulates that they held that (a) the soul is immortal; (b) it changes into other kinds of animals; (c) there is eternal recurrence; and (d) embodied animate creatures are of the same genus. A problem with Dicaearchus' account is that each of these doctrines can also be found in the dialogues of Plato. Given Dicaearchus' penchant for conflating Platonic with Pythagorean philosophy, we cannot employ this account for a historical understanding of Pythagorean psychology in a straightforward way. This chapter instead investigates Pythagorean psychology through analysis of two passages of Aristotle’s De anima that are often not brought to bear on the question. One passage draws important comparisons between the psychology of the Pythagoreans and Democritean and Ecphantic atomism, suggesting that the early Pythagoreans held a material theory of soul; by reference to arguments similar to Cebes' in Plato's Phaedo (87b-e), the other explains how a transmigratory soul could nevertheless be mortal. The early Pythagoreans are thus likely to have held that the soul is material, mortal, and transmigratory.

The fourth chapter is focused on reconfigurations of cosmography within the expanding, contested archive of the Classical period. It looks at successive rewritings of Hyperborea in the changing epistemological landscape of different Classical genres. The stakes at play in identifying Hyperborea as an object of knowledge are considered from the perspective of the great upheavals in the cultures of wisdom of the Classical city. This chapter is interested in situating Classical rewritings of Hyperborea within the ongoing effort of scholarship to move away from the old evolutionary ‘From Myth to Reason’ narrative. A first section looks at cosmographical usages of the distant North in Attic tragedy. The second section reconsiders the question of Xenophanes' reception of Aristeas of Proconnesus. The monumentalisation of Aristeas in the agora of early-fifth century BCE Metapontum is the focus of the third section, with a review of the evidence for Pythagorean appropriations of Hyperborea in southern Italy, and the early circulation of the Abaris legend. The fourth section deals with some usages of Hyperborea in early prose. This opens the way for the final section, which looks anew at the cosmography at stake in Herodotus' extensive deconstruction of Hyperborea in Book 4 of the Histories.

Chapter 1 treats Hesiod (early seventh century BCE), who envisioned the daimonification of the primal (golden) generation of humans. The golden generation was already close to the gods, the “model A” type of human. For Hesiod, it was important that the golden generation was righteous and good. After death, they became guardian daimones that granted gifts to humans. Hesiod also presented the daimonification of an individual, Phaethon. Phaethon represents a type of figure who obtained daimonic status owing to his beauty. Later, however, daimonification was linked with moral forms of excellence. Alcestis, a maiden from Thessaly, became a daimon by her supreme sacrifice, and Pythagoras was venerated as a daimon for his wisdom.

In the present paper I explore the Annals looking for demonstrations of historiographical authority. More specifically, I look for traces of a historiographical response to the crisis of authority created by the existence of conflicting stories about the past. I begin by reviewing the the poem’s expressions of dubiety, to see whether any of them reflects narrative uncertainty. I then turn to the intractable historiographical uncertainties involved in recounting the reign of Numa, an episode of Rome’s long history made newly topical by an event contemporary with the composition of the Annals: the discovery, investigation, and destruction of books purporting to have been written by Numa. I ask whether the poet made use of historiographical dubiety to bolster his authority in the face of the unknowable, and if not, how else he might have validated his material, concluding that if Ennius’ Annals counted as Roman history for Cicero or Lucretius or even Livy, it was because his version of the maxima facta patrum was useful to them, not because it was taken to be a reliable guide to what could be known about the past.

Chapters 10 and 11 form the final part of the book. They address the concepts of artistic immortality – Ovid asserts his own at the end of the Metamorphoses – and the survival, or eternal returns, of works of art. Chapter 10 examines Ovid’s portrayal of Pythagoras, whose philosophy included reincarnation: the continuation of life after death. Pythagoras, who is often seen as Ovid’s analogue, declares: “everything changes, nothing perishes.” The same idea underlies the Italian film Four Times, one of the most emotionally involving disquisitions on nature and on the nature of life and death. Today, the cinema and related media preserve images of actors and others well beyond their natural lifespans. Screen images, we may say, are freed from time and space. Ovid’s Pythagoras had spoken of the wandering image (or appearance). Ovid, and specifically his praise of Roman ladies, is therefore rightly adduced in Roberto Rossellini’s film The Age of the Medici, one of the most beautiful films ever made on the greatness of the Italian Renaissance and, by extension, of classical and later civilization at large.

When did kosmos come to mean ‘world-order’? This chapter ventures a new answer by examining evidence in late doxographies and commentaries often underutilized or dismissed by scholars. Two late doxographical accounts in which Pythagoras is said to be first to call the heavens kosmos (in the anonymous Life of Pythagoras and the fragments of Favorinus) exhibit heurematographical tendencies that place their claims in a dialectic with the early Peripatetics about the first discoverers of the mathematical structure of the universe. Xenophon and Plato refer to ‘wise men’ who nominate kosmos as the object of scientific inquiry into nature as a whole and the cosmic ‘communion’ (koinônia) between all living beings, respectively. But Empedocles is the earliest surviving source to use kosmos to refer to a harmonic ‘world-order’ and to illustrate cosmic ‘communities’ between oppositional pairs, realizing the mutual correspondence in the cycle of love and strife. Thus, if later figures posited Pythagoras as the first to refer to the universal ‘world-order’ as the kosmos, they did so because they believed Empedocles to have been a Pythagorean natural scientist, whose combined focus on cosmology and ethics was thought to exemplify a distinctively Pythagorean approach to philosophy.