The Presocratics: Pythagoras and Pythagoreans
Richard Bukowski
Pythagoras of Samos One of the most influential, and ironically, one of the most enigmatic Greek philosophers was Pythagoras. Why he was so influential was partly the large following that existed after his era. In A History Of Pythagoreanism, Carl A. Huffman says that “the historical Pythagoras may not be as important as the reactions […]
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Pythagoras of Samos

One of the most influential, and ironically, one of the most enigmatic Greek philosophers was Pythagoras. Why he was so influential was partly the large following that existed after his era. In A History Of Pythagoreanism, Carl A. Huffman says that “the historical Pythagoras may not be as important as the reactions to him.”

As typical of pre-Socratic philosophers, there is little concrete evidence about the man himself. One is forced to focus on a mixture of truth and legend to get the full impact. For example, the Pythagorean theorem:

“(The square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the sides enclosing the right angle.)” – Theo Smyrnaeus

Pythagorean theorem, addition of volumes as an animation with alternating twist By Petrus3743 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62590831

Historians debate on its origination and either conclude that it was used as far back as ancient Babylonia, 1,000 years before Pythagoras, or that it was discovered in many places independently. This isn’t a new phenomenon for pre-Socratics, to have many discoveries attributed to them, and even more so for Pythagoras.

In McKirahan’s works, Huffman, and also Kirk and Raven, Pythagoras was born on the island of Samos around the 6th century B.C. Tradition describes his father as a gemcutter or an engraver. He may have made travels to Egypt and learned astronomy and geometry there. In Babylonia he learned of mathematics and music. Eventually, he moved from Samos to Croton in southern Italy after escaping a tyrant named Polycrates. As legends of Pythagoras developed over centuries, his descriptions elevated to that of a charismatic leader or a deity. “When he disembarked in Italy and arrived in Croton…they were struck by his appearance: he had the look of a gentleman of liberal birth, with a gracious and orderly manner, voice and everything, and he seemed like someone well-travelled, naturally blessed by fortune and remarkably gifted in every way. Such an effect did he have on the city of Crotonians that when he had inspired the council of elder statesmen that was in charge of the city, by presenting a range of admirable ideas to them, the rulers then appointed him to deliver a youth mission program to the adolescents. And after that he was asked to address the children from the schools all congregated together, and then the women.” Legends arose about Pythagoras in Croton including:

Killing a poisonous snake by biting it

A river hailed him by name

He made earthquake predictions

He could appear in two different places at the same time

He had a golden thigh

The people of Croton addressed him as Apollo from Beyond the North Wind

Around the time of his arrival in Croton, the people there had suffered a defeat in battle and were looking for a leader. Pythagoras influenced them and founded an influential cult that was philosophical, religious, but also political. He created a religious aristocracy based on a proto-communism where followers would have to give up their private property to join them. A form of tithing. The followers had duties based on their age group. Women were identified based on age, marriage, and if they had children. Men were classified based on the seasons. Penalties, fines, and if the story of Hippasus is correct, death would await those who divulged important Pythagorean principles. Worship of the Gods, moderation, silence, and purification were emphasized. As you can see, the modern-day doxing that people brandish everywhere in politics has always existed in one form or another.

The problem here, and even the problem today, is what is good leadership? The ancient Greeks had to feed just like we do, but populations are full of leaders and followers. Not everyone has the same energy or motivation to guide themselves. When leaders take charge, a lot of our feeding comes from them. Like a pet, an animal could do the difficult thing and provide its own feeding, or look to an owner to provide the feeding for free. The animal is freer, but also has more responsibilities in the wild. Conversely, the animal is less responsible, less free if its only source of feeding comes from an owner. Then how can it live if there are threats of abandonment? When the animal is finally domesticated, the skills to be able to live in the wild fade. Yet if there’s still a little wildness left to direct one’s own life, one can rebel against social controls and escape.

Philosopher Kings and Queens Today [Globalism vs Nationalism]:

Johnny Rotten ‘Let me Finish!’: https://youtu.be/v1uOwz_UrQ0

Nigel Farage – U.S. Election: https://youtu.be/fHiIQkDzqnQ

Trump YMCA Dancing Compilation: https://youtu.be/FBvoU-UiW84

“China ate your lunch Joe!” – 2020 Debate: https://youtu.be/KKwbWmWJ-ck

Justin Trudeau – Opportunity for a reset: https://youtu.be/n2fp0Jeyjvw

Prince Charles Says Pandemic a Chance to ‘Think Big and Act Now’: https://youtu.be/BucTwPegW5k

China offers world its COVID QR code – The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/23/g20_leaders_meeting_tech_emphases/

Hillary Clinton “This would be a terrible crisis to waste”: https://youtu.be/BMT05bpPb10

Tapper asks Gates when he thinks we’ll be back to ‘normal.’ [2022]: https://youtu.be/dCt23D8VXpc

Humans are no different. Those at the top can easily exploit the production of others, regardless of whether one calls the system a “commune” or something else. If the leverage a leader has i.e. skills, advantages, and connections, it can make people tolerate their servitude. Then that friction from the power differential yields an abundance of goods for the leader. In the modern-day of representative democracies and lingering totalitarian states, the question is how accountable and responsible are our governments to the people? The debate involves many leaders in local, regional, and national governments. The next level beyond those is continental or global governances.

One of the two arguments is that governments that are close to the concerns of the governed work much more fairly than governments that are distant from sources of problems. The other argument is that there are people with a Philosopher King level of knowledge, that are capable of seeing the forest without getting lost in the trees in parochial concerns. Ultimately, the weak areas in any argument will be the level of corruption that discloses itself to the populace at any given time. The battle continues on how to live well along with others.

Despite the cult’s attempts at being secretive, Pythagoras became famous and what is a common pattern throughout history is that when power shifts and consolidates, the public want to know more about you, and there’s often a strong push back against inequities or claims of unfairness. What historians think is a conflation of many events into legend, tell the story of a Cylon who was rejected by the Pythagoreans, and who enlisted anti-Pythagorean support to destroy their community and end their influence. The sources vary wildly on how Pythagoras died. He was either killed, escaped and committed suicide, or starved to death.

Transmigration of the souls

According to tradition, Pythagorean principles were kept secret within the community and were never written down, but after Pythagoras died his ideas spread and likely went through many modifications. Pythagoras also left behind an impression on other pre-Socratic philosophers, and these were often negative in tone. Both Heraclitus and Xenophanes ridiculed his ideas.

“Pythagoras…practiced historical inquiry more than all other men, and making a selection of these writings constructed his own wisdom, polymathy, evil trickery.” – Heraclitus.

“Now I will turn to another tale and show the way…Once they said that he was passing by when a puppy was being whipped, and he took pity and said: ‘Stop, do not beat it; for it is the soul of a friend that I recognized when I heard its cry.'” – Xenophanes

“Much learning does not teach understanding, otherwise it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and also Xenophanes and Hecataeus.” – Heraclitus

This provides clues to Pythagorean culture and their penchant for mixing mathematics with moral philosophy based on the transmigration of the souls, an idea possibly influenced by Pherecydes of Syros. Porphyrius described this transcendent belief. “…First, that he maintains that the soul is immortal; next, that it changes into other kinds of living things; also that events recur in certain cycles, and that nothing is ever absolutely new; and finally, that all living things should be regarded as akin. Pythagoras seems to have been the first to bring these beliefs into Greece.”

Diogenes Laertius, in Lives of the Philosophers, recounts Pythagoras’s purported past lives:

“Once he had been born Aethalides and was believed to be the son of Hermes. When Hermes told him to choose whatever he wanted except immortality, he asked to retain both alive and dead the memory of what happened to him…Afterwards he entered into Euphorbus and was wounded by Menelaus. Euphorbus [remembered] he had been born as Aethalides and received the gift from Hermes, and told of the migration of his soul and what plants and animals it had belonged to and all it had experienced in Hades. When Euphorbus died his soul entered Hermotimus, who, wishing to provide evidence, went to Branchidae, entered the sanctuary of Apollo, and showed the shield Menelaus had dedicated. (He said that when Menelaus was sailing away from Troy he dedicated the shield to Apollo.) The shield had already rotted away and only the ivory facing was preserved. When Hermotimus died, [the soul] became Pyrrhus the Delia fisherman, and again [he] remembered everything…When Pyrrhus died [the soul] became Pythagoras and remembered all that has been said.”

The effect of these beliefs on followers was to create an ethical austerity based on the fear of harming reincarnated lives. Are you eating an animal that is a distant relative? How would you like being eaten? Increasing your purity, or decreasing it, could conceivably lead to better or worse future lives. “By contemplating the principle of order revealed in the universe – and especially in the regular movements of the heavenly bodies – and by assimilating himself to that orderliness, man himself was progressively purified until he eventually escaped from the cycle of birth and attained immortality.”

Many superstitions developed from this belief in the transmigration of souls and added up to an ethical code of conduct. Here’s a sample:

Vegetarianism.

Avoid butchers and huntsmen.

Do not eat beans. [This may have been due to people becoming ill with fava beans from southern Italy in particular.]

Sacrifice only inanimate things.

Sacrifice and worship without shoes on.

Cut not your finger-nails at a sacrifice.

Turn aside from highways and walk by footpaths.

Help a man who is loading freight, but not one who is unloading.

Speak not of Pythagorean matters without light.

Never step over a cross-bar.

When you are out from home, look not back, for the Furies come after you…

Do not wear a ring…

Disbelieve nothing strange about the gods or about religious beliefs.

Be not possessed by irrepressible mirth.

Like the Egyptians, do not bury the dead in woolen clothing.

Make your bed.

Mathematics

We can’t attribute a unifying Pythagorean theory that encompasses mathematics and morality, but his later influences wrestled with both and broke into different groups. Kirk and Raven said that “after the death of Pythagoras, his school apparently split into two sects, one of which, the so-called ‘Acousmatics’ or ‘Pythagorists’, preserved the mystical side of his teaching, while the other, the ‘Mathematicians’, concentrated on the scientific side…Central notions, which held together the two strands that were later to fall apart, seem to have been those of contemplation, an orderliness found in the arrangement of the universe and purification.”

With these rituals involving an element of measurement and music, it was possible to imagine limited notes on an unlimited scale, similar to Anaximander’s bound and boundless. “The two most fundamental and universal of Pythagorean scientific doctrines are, first, the ultimate dualism between Limit and Unlimited, and second, the equation of things with numbers. What is required, therefore, is a plausible explanation of how these two doctrines, by no means obviously interdependent, should have occurred to Pythagoras or his followers. There seems no reason to doubt the tradition that Pythagoras himself discovered – probably by measuring the appropriate lengths of string on a monochord – that the chief musical intervals are expressible in simple numerical ratios between the first four integers. This single discovery would account naturally for all the most characteristic of Pythagorean doctrines. If the musical scale depends simply upon the imposition of definite proportions on the indefinite continuum of sound between high and low, might not the same principles, Limit and the Unlimited, underlie the whole universe? If numbers alone are sufficient to explain the ‘consonances’, might not everything else be likewise expressible as a number or a proportion? Moreover, since the first four integers contain the whole secret of the musical scale, their sum, the number 10 or the Decad, might well ‘seem to embrace’, as Aristotle puts it, ‘whole nature of number’ and so come to be regarded, as it certainly was, with veneration. It is not surprising, therefore, that both mathematics and music should have played from the outset so vital a part in Pythagoreanism.”

Ten connected with the number four also being significant for Pythagoreans. Aetisus was quoted as saying that, “ten is the very nature of number. All Greeks and all barbarians alike count up to ten, and having reached ten revert again to the unit. And again, Pythagoras maintains, the power of the number ten lies in the number four, the tetrad. This is the reason: if one starts at the unit and adds the successive numbers up to four, one will make up the number ten; and if one exceeds the tetrad, one will exceed ten too. If, that is, one takes the unit two, then three and then four, one will make up the number ten. So that number by the unit resides in the number ten, but potentially in the number four. And so the Pythagoreans used to invoke the tetrad as their most binding oath: ‘Nay, by him that gave to our generation the tetractys, which contains the fount and root of eternal nature.'”

What they swore binding oaths to is to this triangle of dots, The Tetractys of the Decad. Each equilateral side is 4 dots, and if it is filled in equally, there are a total of 10 dots. Having dots at equal distances to each other could also be used in other shapes, like the square or rectangle. Due to so many circular influences within the Pythagorean community, reliance on Aristotle’s summary of them becomes a necessity. Measurement as he describes Pythagorean beliefs is based not only on bound and boundless but also on odd and even.

As we can see, geometry also fits into the concept of bound and boundless by having limited objects in an unlimited space. The triangle could be used for counting, but the square or rectangle could be used to analyze odds and evens. The rectangle starting with an even number could predict successive even numbers. The square starting with one unit could predict the next series of odd numbers. Very easily, these unit-points could be used as measurements for physical matter. Kirk and Raven said that “these unit-points functioned also as the basis of physical matter: they were regarded in fact as a primitive form of atom. When, therefore, Aristotle speaks of number as, ‘functioning as the material element in things’, or when, as he often does, he asserts that the Pythagoreans regarded the universe as consisting of numbers, he means that concrete objects were literally composed of aggregations of unit-point atoms…[or] each object consisted of a definite number of unit-point-atoms.”

The universe’s beginning is tantalizingly described in the same way. “The Even was said to be ‘taken in and limited by the Odd’, so in ‘the nearest part of the Unlimited was drawn in and limited by the first unit functioning as Limit.”

Aristotle described the general Pythagorean view of the building blocks of the universe. “[They] thought that the limited and the unlimited and the number one were not some different natures, like fire or earth or anything else of this kind, but that the unlimited and number one for itself were the substance of the things of which they are predicated, and that for this reason also number is the substance of all things.”

Using measurement, ritual, and purification influenced later Pythagoreans. Like in Zoroastrianism, it’s quite easy to look at good measurements versus bad and to create mathematical ethics based on proportionality.

Alcmaeon

Pythagoras’s influence of measurement and ethics continued with Alcmaeon of Croton who was born around the early 5th century B.C. Focusing on early biology and medicine, Alcmaeon looked at perception through the understanding of dualism.

“The majority of human affairs are in pairs.”

This extended into his method of diagnosis. “Alcmaeon maintains that the bond of health is the ‘equal balance’ of the powers, moist and dry, cold and hot, bitter and sweet, and the rest, while the ‘supremacy’ of one of them is the cause of disease; for the supremacy of either is destructive. Illness comes about directly through excess of heat or cold, indirectly through [too much] or [too little] nourishment…Health on the other hand is the proportionate admixture of the qualities.”

Pythagoreans and Aristotle

The difficulty with delineating what Pythagoras believed, since we have no original writings, is how reverence for him allowed followers to slip in their own beliefs, and by attributing these discoveries to Pythagoras, one could appeal to authority to gain followers. This was already a problem for Aristotle in his time, who did a review of Pythagorean beliefs which conflated different ideas that were probably associated with many different individuals. His survey is still helpful to see what these beliefs were even if attribution is impossible to determine.

One of the developments in mathematics was increasing the significance of the number one. Going from a breath of limit coming out of unlimited space was criticized by followers of Parmenides. The significance of the number one as an odd number increases when it is treated as a facilitator of both even and odd numbers, leaving the number three as the actual starting point of odd numbers.

“The first division of numbers that they make is into two classes, calling some even, some odd. Even numbers are those which can be divided into equal parts (e.g. 2 or 4), odd those which can be divided only into unequal parts (e.g. 5 or 7). Some held that the first of the odd numbers is 1. For even is the contrary of odd; [The number one] cannot be divided at all…If you add even to even, the whole is even; but add 1 to an even number and it makes the whole odd; whence it follows that 1 is not even but odd. Aristotle, however, in his work on the Pythagoreans, says that 1 partakes of the nature of both; for when added to an even number it makes it odd, when added to an odd, even – which would be impossible if it did not partake of the nature of both; and so, he says, it is called even-odd.” For Kirk and Raven, finding a bridge between even and odd with the number 1 helps to counter Parmenidian criticisms of a limit coming out of an unlimited.

The value of number for the Pythagorean Philolaus is such that we cannot think or understand without it. “And all things that can be known contain number; without this nothing could be thought or known.” Using numbers connected with abstract pictures Philolaus would map out the most basic perceptions of shapes that would register for us what kind of object is being displayed, almost like an early game of charades. “For the sake of argument let the definition of man be the number 250 and that of plant 360. Having settled that, he used to take 250 pebbles, some green, some black, others red and, in short, a variety of colours. Then he would smear the wall with unslaked lime and make a shaded drawing of a man or a plant; some pebbles he fixed in the drawing of the face, others in the hands, and others elsewhere, until he had completed the drawing of a man in the number of pebbles equal to the number of units which he claimed to define man.”

Pythagoreans were also interested in astronomy and naturally used numbers to explain harmony. Part of the understanding of harmony for Pythagoreans came from harmonious musical intervals. Musical intervals involve proportion and for the cosmos to maintain harmony, planets would also need to retain harmonious proportions. For example on a musical scale, letters separate one octave (or 8 notes). Eg. On a C major scale: C D E F G A B C. On the same scale, a perfect 4th would be from C D E F G A B C, and a perfect 5th from C D E F G A B C. In mathematical proportions, the frequency ratios are 2:1 for an octave, 4:3 for a fourth, and 3:2 for a fifth. If you add 1 plus 2 for the octave plus 3 for a fifth and four for a fourth, you get the mystical 10.

Kirk and Raven connect both musical measurements with planetary ones by asking, “if numbers alone are sufficient to explain the ‘consonances’, might not everything else be likewise expressible as a number or a proportion?”

Octave intervals – Liberty Park Music: https://youtu.be/fV-p9n7upMc

The Very Best Explanation of Perfect 4th’s and Augmented 4th’s – Taylor Dietz: https://youtu.be/5Xm8qKMiWOQ

Perfect fifths – Piano Wallaby: https://youtu.be/x4Ah37OU9ps

When looking at the cosmos Pythagoreans like Philoaus would return to the mystical number 10, and try to fit it into the theory. “Philolaus places fire around the centre of the universe, and calls it the ‘Hearth of the world’, the ‘House of Zeus’, ‘Mother of the Gods’, ‘altar, bond and measure of nature.’ Then again there is another fire enveloping the universe at the circumference. But he says that the centre is by nature primary, and around the centre ten divine bodies dance, first the sphere of the fixed stars, then the five planets, next the sun, then the moon, then the earth, then the counter-earth…” Here we have a strange hearth-centred universe that everything orbits, including the sun, with a counter-earth to provide explanations for eclipses and also to provide the sacred number ten. The hearth here represents the important number one of limit versus unlimited.

Music and proportion complete their value in the cosmos and also within the body and mind. “The Pythagoreans, according to Aristoxenus, practised the purification of the body by medicine, that of the soul by music.”

Later influences

Proportionality, mathematics, measurement, architecture, and lifestyle changes continued their influences throughout late-antiquity and into the renaissance. At these later stages of influence, one can see people picking and choosing which principles they wanted and mixing them with contemporary beliefs. For example, Milo of Croton, an athlete who styled himself as Heracles, led the battle of Crotonites against the Sybarites, wore a lion skin, and carried a club. Instead of being vegetarian, he was called by Aristotle “Big Eater” who ate 9 kg of meat and bread per day and drank ten litres of wine. Iccus of Tarentum, an Olympian victor, and teacher of gymnastics, instead led a life of moderation and sexual abstinence. His type of frugal meal was called by Greeks “an Iccus meal.” The Pythagorean Archytas was an army commander and mathematician. He was also suspected of being an influence on Plato, so you can add philosophy to his resumé. Pythagoras’s influences even include Copernicus, Newton, and writers such as Dante and Ovid. The ultimate influence of Pythagoras is for those who learn about the world but also go one step further to find the harmony that is being signaled to us, and to live according to those signals. If there are limits that come out of an unlimited, which limits are good for us and which are not?

Plato’s test for leadership

Coming back to the question of what makes a good leader I think would naturally be answered by most people that a good leader is a catalyst for group success. Plato believed in a Philosopher King that had this ability to see the ultimate good and would himself refrain from what he called “appetitiveness.” Appetites, cravings, and desires make for the cause of corruption, and any individual who has cravings, when they finally gain enormous power, will have strong impulses aiming to indulge. This was a concern for Plato, and one of his Pythagorean influences on his work may have come from Archytas, as described above.

A Pythagorean could be like a proto-Philosopher King for someone like Plato. A person who follows principles with a mathematical lens. To Plato, this leader would have a superior view of the whole of the city-state. Mathematical principles, principles that are harmonious with the universe would dictate that to the populace and make for a flourishing society. The problem he had was getting concepts into the soul of a learner. If it did not reach the stage of Understanding, meaning that quick flash of knowing that happens to people when they know many angles of a subject. They really know it. Plato listed those angles in 5 stages; stages that would be typical of someone learning mathematics.

“Everything that exists has three elements through which one must approach the knowledge of that thing; the fourth element is knowledge itself, and the fifth, one must posit, is that which is in fact knowable and true. The first of these is ‘name,’ the second is ‘definition,’ the third is ‘image,’ and the fourth is ‘knowledge’…Eg. There is something called a circle, the name of which is the same thing I have just pronounced. Its definition is the second thing, and it is composed of nouns and verbs: ‘that which is completely equal from every extremity to the middle’ would be the definition of that thing that is called ’round,’ ‘spherical,’ and ‘circle.’ The third element (the image) may be painted and expunged, lathed and destroyed, but the circle itself, which all these things represent, undergoes none of these changes, since it is something other than these things. The fourth element is knowledge and understanding and a true conception of these things. And since we must establish that these are all a single thing – something that resides not in sounds or shapes of bodies but within souls – it is clear that it differs both from the nature of the circle itself and from the three elements mentioned above. And of these, understanding comes closest to the fifth in likeness and affinity, while all the others remain quite far off…”

“And if we force someone to distinguish and explain the fifth, whoever is willing and able to upend the argument wins, and he makes the one who is offering a full interpretation through speech, writing, or actual answers appear, to most of his audience, to know nothing of the things about which he is trying to write or speak, since the audience is sometimes unaware that it is not the soul of the writer or speaker that is being refuted, but rather the nature of each of the four things, which is inherently flawed. Nevertheless, the thorough examination of all these problems, going up and down and over each one with great effort, imparts knowledge of a good thing unto a person of a good nature. If one’s nature is bad, however, as is the condition of most souls with respect both to learning and to what are called ‘morals,’ all these things wither and die…Whenever we look at a written composition, whether it be the laws of a lawmaker or anything else whatsoever, we must recognize that the author’s most serious ideas do not reside within this text, even if the author himself is serious, but that those ideas remain lodged in the most beautiful part of his soul.”

The problem with theory is that it has to be tested by reality. In the controversial Seventh Letter, Plato recounted his disillusionment when he was requested to help free Sicily from a tyrannical government. “When I came I was in no wise pleased at all with ‘the blissful life,’ as it is there termed, replete as it is with Italian and Syracusan banquetings; for thus one’s existence is spent in gorging food twice a day and never sleeping alone at night, and all the practices which accompany this mode of living. For not a single man of all who lives beneath the heavens could ever become wise if these were his practices from his youth, since none will be found to possess a nature so admirably compounded; nor would he ever be likely to become temperate; and the same may truly be said of all other forms of virtue. And no State would remain stable under laws of any kind if its citizens while supposing that they ought to spend everywhere to excess, yet believed that they ought to cease from all exertion except feastings and drinkings and the vigorous pursuit of their amours. Of necessity, these States never cease changing into tyrannies, oligarchies, and democracies, and the men who hold power in them cannot endure so much as the mention of the name of a just government with equal laws.”

Plato worked with an ardent follower Dion to train the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius, to follow just laws instead of appetites, but at every turn his friend Dion would be accused of trying to usurp the throne. The problem that Plato had was that desires are also with the subjects of the tyrant and they benefit from the appetites of the leader, and in turn they benefit by how the leader provides for their appetites. Partly people can look at the motivations of others through the lens of their own desires with projection. If Dion was advising Dionysius, in the same manner as his followers, it would be a great temptation to usurp his power in their perspective and gain all the spoils. Also, any threat of self-discipline would be an immediate threat for those followers who love pleasure above all. On the other hand, with wisdom, many people learn to enjoy making decisions for oneself and hate dependency on tyrants. It’s an acquired taste as Plato found out.

“Dion was an astute student of all things, including the arguments that I presented at the time, and he listened with such extraordinary acumen, like no other young man I’ve ever met, and he desired to live the remainder of his life differently from the majority of Italians and Sicilians, loving virtue more than pleasure or any other extravagance. As a result, he began to pass his time in a way that was obnoxious to those who were living according to the customs of the tyranny up until the death of Dionysius.”

The accusations against Dion were believed and ultimately he was exiled and his property was sold to others. Plato was in a back and forth between himself and Dionysius, and after Dionysius cut the pay of his infantry, Plato was also made into a target of blame by them along with the tyrant. Plato eventually escaped with the help of Archytas. After all his trials and tribulations, he recommended what most advice-givers recommend, which is to not give advice to people who don’t want to hear it. Unless leaders are able to govern themselves by crystallizing principles up to Plato’s 5th level, they would have to put laws above themselves and role-model the correct behaviors for the rest of the population. Of course, any double-standards chip away at the motivation for anyone else to follow the rules.

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy confronted while having dinner with his maskless family: https://dailycaller.com/2020/11/22/phil-murphy-new-jersey-covid-coronavirus-mask/

Whether there is a constitution to hold leaders accountable or not, Philosopher Kings ultimately have to internalize those behaviors against temptation. What people have to worry about is why people want power in the first place? That motivation there is often where the double-standards begin and conflict thereafter. Leaders love exclusivity and it’s a major motivation for applying to powerful positions. Why take on more responsibility without more rewards? What hasn’t changed since ancient times is the terror that people feel when acquiring money and positions. Personal political or philosophical opinions are often based on self-interest, and those who hold the purse strings have the freedom to disobey laws, and the power to make those dependent on them to obey under threat of coercion.

Plato said: “Neither Sicily, nor yet any other State—such is my doctrine—should be enslaved to human despots but rather to laws; for such slavery is good neither for those who enslave nor those who are enslaved…If the victors yield to the laws more than the vanquished do, then a refuge from all evil and a full share of salvation and happiness will be provided.”

The Presocratic Philosophers – G.S. Kirk: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780521274555/

A History of Pythagoreanism – Carl Huffman: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781316648476/

Philosophy before Socrates – Richard McKirahan: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781603841825/

A Presocratic Reader – Richard McKirahan: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781603843058/

The Complete Pythagoras – Mohamed Amer: https://ia800704.us.archive.org/31/items/CompletePythagoras/CompletePythagoras.pdf

Plato at Syracuse – Various authors: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781316648476/

Plato, Epistles: Letter 7: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0164:letter=7