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Pliny recounts in the Naturalis historia 34, 26 that the Romans were ordered during the Samnite wars by Apollo's oracle in Delphi to erect two statues in a public place, one in honour of the bravest and the second in honour of the wisest man of the Greek nation. They fulfilled this order by placing Alcibiades' and Pythagoras' statues on the comitium in front of the curia. They stood there until Sulla's times when the curia was rebuilt and extended; then they were removed.¹ Pliny is surprised that the senate when choosing the most distinguished man of Greece preferred Pythagoras to Socrates and Alcibiades to Themistocles. It is less easy to say why Alcibiades was honoured than to explain why Pythagoras was then considered the wisest of Greeks. What Pliny marvelled at in the 1st century A. D. was not surprising in the second half of the 4th or at the beginning of the 3rd century B. C. — we do not know during which Samnite war this oracle was pronounced. Already before the great influx of Greek culture into Rome, which began in the middle of the 3rd century B. C. and gathered a new impetus a century later, the Romans had business and political contacts with the Greek towns in Southern Italy and they might have heard of Pythagoras there. At that time Pythagoras was already a legend, but the activities of the Pythagoreans who connected philosophic theory with practical political life were, even though no longer a living reality, at least vividly remembered in Croto, Rhegium and especially in Tarentum, once the town of Archias. Thus it is more than probable that to the Rome of the year 300 B. C., until then untouched by Greek literature, the representative of Greek wisdom appeared to be Pythagoras, not Socrates — and not even Plato.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-9704-2_6

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