Italic Pythagoreanism in the Hellenistic Age

Abstract

This chapter seeks to elucidate the nature of “Italic” philosophy as a correlate to Pythagorean philosophy in the Hellenistic era. It starts from a claim made in Cicero’s On Old Age (77–78), in which Cato the Elder refers to Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans as “practically our own countrymen,” who were once called “Italian philosophers.” It aims to complicate Cato’s claim by evaluating what “Italian” meant in the writings of Cicero and his contemporaries, considering issues of ethnicity, language, geography, and political ideology. It then turns to the surviving evidence of “Italian” philosophy after the second century BCE, in the fragments ascribed to the Lucanians Aesara/Aresas (On the Nature of the Human), Occelus (On Law, On the Nature of the Universe) and Eccelus (On Justice), as well as those of the Oscan/Messapian poet Ennius of Rudiae (Epicharmus). The chapter concludes by considering the dissolution of Pythagorean philosophy in Italy, and its replacement by Epicureanism, in the late second century BCE.