Cambios de postura

Now I will examine Noctes 4.11, which takes the vagaries of intellectual tradition as a central topic. Gellius here participates in a long tradition of interpretive debate, exploring one of the more notorious of the many cryptic sayings by which the wisdom of Pythagoras was transmitted.58 _{The Pythagoreans regularly attempted to discern the}

hidden meaning behind such sayings.59 _{This would have appealed to Gellius’s interest}

in interpretation; also of interest, in his treatment in 4.11, is the way that an erroneous interpretation can enter the tradition, as earlier readers’ failed encounters with the cryptic primary text are repeated by later, even less skeptical readers. That Pythagoras forbade his followers to eat beans was a popular target of those seeking to discredit the sect, but the saying also prompted serious interpretive effort as early as Aristotle.60

Gellius’s eye would have been caught by the inherent problem of textual interpretation, as the views of Pythagoras — legitimately of interest to Gellius elsewhere, as at 1.9 — were accessible only through the writings of his immediate followers like Empedocles.61 As I will show, Gellius sketches out a diachronic ecosystem of individuals responding to texts in ways that illustrate their abilities and affect their own later readers.

The opening lines of Gellius’s assault feature strong language. Two common ideas, Pythagoras’s abstention from beans and from animals, are condemned as fallacies, and he proceeds to illustrate the auspicious pages in which the error lives on:

opinio uetus falsa occupauit et conualuit Pythagoram philosophum non esitauisse ex animalibus item abstinuisse fabulo, quem Graeci κύαμον appellant. ex hac

opinione Callimachus poeta scripsit: [. . . ] ex eadem item opinione M. Cicero in libro de Divinatione primo haec uerba posuit: [. . . ]

An ancient and false opinion has taken root and thrived, that the philosopher Pythagoras did not partake of animals and likewise abstained from the bean, which Greeks callκύαμον. As a result of this opinion the poet Callimachus wrote:

58_{Johansen 1998: 37.} 59_{Burkert 1972: 174.} 60_{Burkert 1972: 183-4.} 61_{Huffman 1999: 76-7.}

[. . . ] As a result of the same opinion Marcus Cicero in his first bookOn Divination

wrote these words: [. . . ] (4.11.1-3)

Pythagorean anti-legumism is framed as anopinio, a sort of subjective idea that is often open to examination and, when expressed, may require the citation of an authority. Authorial compositional choices are a direct result of opiniones — Callimachus and Cicero, great antique scholars of their respective cultures, both accepted the idea, and their work is evidence of it. But Gellius has not yet proven his assertion of the idea’s falseness; unlike the case of the lions in Homer and Herodotos, it is these well-known authorities’ word against a less prominent source, whom Gellius accordingly introduces by commending both his individual intellectual character and the tradition to which he belonged:62

sed Aristoxenus musicus, uir litterarum ueterum diligentissimus, Aristoteli philo- sophi auditor, in libro, quem de Pythagora reliquit, nullo saepius legumento Py- thagoram dicit usum quam fabis, quoniam is cibus et subduceret sensim aluum et leuigaret.

But Aristoxenus the musician, a man most attentive to ancient letters, a student of Aristotle the philosopher, in the book he left behind On Pythagoras, said that Pythagoras used no legume more often than the bean, because that dish both slowly lifts up and smooths the belly. (4.11.4)

Gellius quotes Aristoxenus’s assertion that Pythagoras specifically recommended beans. Aristoxenus, with what Gellius casts as the authority of antique proximity, also contra- dicts the claims of vegetarianism (.6-7).

Contradictions must be reconciled, and for Gellius this means (as in the case of the lions) understanding not just which is correct but the origins of the error.63 _Gellius

makes the recognition of the original error a matter of personal observation on his part, in which he looks at what turns out to be the original primary material and imagines erroneous and correct readings alike.

62_{Gunderson 2009: 66.} 63_{As in 7.8.6. Cf 7.12.1.}

uidetur autem de κὐαμῳ non esitato causam erroris fuisse, quia in Empedocli

carmine, qui disciplinas Pythagorae secutus est, uersus hic invenitur:

δειλοί, πάνδειλοι, κυάμων ἄπο χεῖρας ἔχεσθαι.

opinati enim sunt plerique κυάμους legumentum dici, ut a uulgo dicitur. sed qui

diligentius scitiusque carmina Empedocli arbitrati sunt,κυάμουςhoc in loco testic-

ulos significare dicunt, eosque more Pythagorae operte atque symbolice κυάμους

appellatos, quod sint αἴτιοι τοῦ κυεῖν et geniturae humanae uim praebeant; idcir-

coque Empedoclen uersu isto non a fabulo edendo, sed a rei ueneriae proluuio uoluisse homines deducere.

However, it seems that the cause of the error about not eating the bean is that in a poem of Empedocles, who was a student of the Pythagorean teachings, this verse is found:

Miserable ones, wholly miserable ones, keep your hands off the beans. Many supposed that “beans” meant the legume, as it is commonly used. But those who have considered the poems of Empedocles more diligently and know- ledgeably say that here, “beans” signify testicles, which were called “beans” in the obscure and symbolic way of Pythagoras, because they are the “origin of con- ception” and supply the force of human reproduction; and therefore that Empe- docles by that verse wished to dissuade men not from eating beans but from an abundance of sexual activity. (4.11.9-10)

Opinati... plerique recalls 4.11’s opening lines and answers the question of how the opinio uetus falsa occupauit et conualuit (4.11.1). Opiniones do not exist in a vacuum: they are the result of interpretive acts by readers. Gellius shows himself seeing individual pieces of knowledge as products of dynamic processes. It is only at this point, having established that were are good and bad original readers of Empedocles (the primary source for Pythagorean eating habits, as Gellius would have it) and, consequently, good and bad traditions on the question, that Gellius clears up the meat- eating question with an assertion from Plutarch (homo in disciplinis graui auctoritate, 4.11.11).

4.11 models a skeptical response to received wisdom that can be effectively deployed against the standard elements of philosophical tradition. It shows how established au- thority may be wrong, and how counterintuitive material might nevertheless be author- itative. It sketches out a model for the transmission of knowledge and demonstrates

how to focus on and critically examine different stages of it. Its conclusions may be improbable, but its conclusions and priorities are typical of Gellius’s understanding of intellectual tradition. As in 4.5, Gellius has destabilised a piece of common received knowledge in terms that focus his reader’s attention on the mechanisms of intellectual tradition and point out how he or she can find his or her own way — with the right guides — to an understanding of the antique past.