(6th century BC)

ancient Greek philosopher, religious and political figure, founder of Pythagoreanism, mathematician. Pythagoras is credited with studying the properties of integers and proportions, proving the Pythagorean theorem, etc.

Pythagoras was born on the island of Samos, one of the most flourishing islands of Ionia, in the family of a wealthy jeweler. Even before birth, he was dedicated by his parents to the light of Apollo. He was very handsome and from childhood he was distinguished by reason and justice. From a young age, Pythagoras sought to penetrate the secrets of Eternal Nature, to comprehend the meaning of Being. The knowledge he received in the temples of Greece did not give answers to all his questions, and he went in search of wisdom to Egypt. For 22 years he studied in the temples of Memphis and received the highest degree of initiation. Here he deeply studied mathematics, "the science of numbers or universal principles," from which he later made the center of his system. From Memphis, on the orders of Cambyses, who invaded Egypt, Pythagoras, together with the Egyptian priests, ends up in Babylon, where he spends another 12 years. Here he has the opportunity to study many religions and cults, to penetrate the mysteries of the ancient magic of the heirs of Zoroaster.

Around 530, Pythagoras finally returned to Greece and soon moved to southern Italy, in the city of Croton. In Croton he founded the Pythagorean Union, which was at the same time a philosophical school, a political party and a religious brotherhood. Here, philosophy was combined with life practice, showing a person a worthy path to the fate that awaits him after death. The school lived in communities with a strict discipline of morals, chastity and abstinence were required from students. However, asceticism was not the ideal of the Pythagoreans; marriage was sacred to them. Girls were admitted to the school along with the boys. The training was multi-stage and not everyone was given sacred knowledge. Only those who successfully passed all the tests were allowed into the courtyard of the Master's house. Here Pythagoras instructed his closest students. This is where the names esoteric (i.e., what is inside) and exoteric (i.e., what is outside) originate. The strict way of life of the Pythagoreans, their contemplative philosophy, benevolence towards man and the desire to do good, to help, attracted many people to them. The union soon became the center of the political and spiritual life of all Croton.

The school of Pythagoras gave Greece a galaxy of talented philosophers, physicists and mathematicians. Their name is associated in mathematics with the systematic introduction of proofs into geometry, its consideration as an abstract science, the creation of the doctrine of similarity, the proof of the theorem that bears the name of Pythagoras, the construction of some regular polygons and polyhedra, as well as the doctrine of even and odd, prime and compound, about curly and perfect numbers, arithmetic, geometric and harmonic proportions and averages. In acoustics, the Pythagoreans discovered the dependence of the laws of sound harmony on the numerical ratio of the lengths of the strings that emit sounds. Quite definitely, the Pythagoreans recognized the earth as a ball and taught about the rotation of the earth, as well as other luminaries around the central fire, “the altar of the universe, invisible due to the fact that between it and the earth is a dark celestial body. Later in Efkant we find the doctrine of the rotation of the earth around its axis, and in Aristarchus of Samos (280 BC) a well-defined heliocentric system.

Pythagoras first introduced the term “philosopher” when, when asked who he was, he answered: I am not a sage (sophos), I am a lover of wisdom (philosophos), that is, a philosopher. The main thing in the teachings of Pythagoras is the doctrine of number, as the essence of the whole world. The diversity of physical phenomena will obey the law, which is unity, the cosmos (the use of this name is attributed to Pythagoras), i.e. order, and the basis of this order is number. Not an arithmetic number, but a number as a metaphysical reality, a connection, a law of the world, in relation to which an arithmetic number is only a form of knowledge. The basis of numbers is the unit, the embodiment of the unity and harmony of the universe. God, as an indivisible entity, has one as its number. From the moment of manifestation, God is dual (matter and spirit, male and female). The whole manifested world is symbolized by the number three: for just as a person consists of a body, soul and spirit, so the Universe is divided into three spheres: the natural world, the human world and the divine world. Just as the world trinity is concentrated in the unity of God, so the human trinity is concentrated in consciousness and will, thus forming. tetrad.

In each number, Pythagoras determined this or that principle, law, this or that active force. The opposition between odd (higher) and even (lower, generated from higher by doubling) numbers manifests itself in nature in the form of a number of other opposites: light and darkness, boundless and limited, good and evil, moving and resting, male and female, etc. . The natural world is really built from numbers: the body is limited by planes, the plane - by lines, the line - by points. The point - the last element of the Universe - is identical to the unit. That. there is a correspondence between the spatial world and numbers: the line - "2", the plane - "3", the body - "4". The world of the spirit is also reduced to a number: love and friendship are identified with the figure eight, justice - with multiples. Pythagoras attached particular importance to the numbers "7" and "10". Consisting of three and four, seven means the connection of man with the deity. The number ten, formed from the first four numbers, containing the number seven, is a perfect number, a unit of a higher order, for it expresses all the principles of the Godhead, which first developed and then merged into a new unity.

The teachings of Pythagoras continue the teachings of Orpheus about the immortality of the soul, about reincarnations, about the means of saving and purifying the soul, bringing it into a coherent scientifically based system. Pythagoras defines the task of the earthly life of a person as bringing order, “number”, harmony into the inner world. The family of Pythagoras also personified divine harmony.

At the age of 60, Pythagoras married his student Theano, a girl of amazing beauty who won the heart of the wise philosopher with her pure and fiery love, boundless devotion and faith. Theano gave Pythagoras two sons and a daughter, all of whom were faithful followers of their Great Father. One of the sons of Pythagoras later became the teacher of Empidocles and initiated him into the secrets of the Pythagorean teachings. Pythagoras entrusted the custody of his manuscripts to his daughter Dano. After the death of her father and the collapse of the union, Dano lived in the greatest poverty, she was offered large sums for manuscripts, but true to the will of her father, she refused to give them to strangers.

Pythagoras lived in Croton for 30 years. During this time, he managed to realize what remained the dream of many initiates: he created, on top of political power, a wise power of higher knowledge, similar to the ancient Egyptian priesthood. The Council of Three Hundred, created and headed by Pythagoras, was the regulator of the political life of Croton and extended its influence to other cities of Greece for a quarter of a century. But nothing irritates mediocrity so much, causes envy and hatred, as the dominion of a great mind. The rebellion against the rule of the aristocratic party that broke out in Sybaris was the beginning of the persecution of the Pythagorean alliance. Many of the students died under the rubble of the flaming school building, others died of starvation in temples. There is no reliable information about the time and place of the death of Pythagoras himself. The memories of the Great Teacher and his teachings were preserved by those few who managed to escape to Greece. We find it in the Golden Verses of Lysias, in the commentaries of Heraclitus, in passages by Philolaus and Archytas, and also in Plato's Timaeus. The beautiful harmonious system given to the world by Pythagoras has never been forgotten. It became the basis of Plato's metaphysics, was revived in the Alexandrian school, in the works of many later ancient philosophers.

2. 3rd - 6th century AD

The long crisis that shook the empire in the 3rd century brings with it complete desolation in the field of fiction in Latin. It revives only when the crisis is overcome, but the conditions for its development have already changed dramatically. The absolute monarchy, which was created at the end of the 3rd century, transferred the center from Rome to Constantinople, Christianity soon became the dominant religion. In literary development, the leading role also belongs to Christian literature. "Late Empire" IV - V centuries. - the time of the birth of medieval Latin literature. Ancient literature is in the process of dying.

The old literary forms nevertheless continue to exist until the final collapse of the western part of the empire and its destruction by the "barbarians". The conservative force that supported the old literary culture was the school, grammatical and rhetorical teaching. The school taught mastery of the old "classical" language, from which the living language development had already departed far; she taught the old versification, based on the distinction between long and short syllables, which had already disappeared in the living language. The old language remains the class language of the top, regardless of its religious affiliation; Christian prose writers [Minutius Felix (II - III centuries), Lactantius (III - IV centuries), Jerome (about 348 - 420), Augustine (354 - 430)] use the same rhetorical style as the pagans, and Christian poets retell biblical stories in the manner of Virgil or follow Horatian forms in their lyrics (a prominent poet is Prudentius, about 348 - 410).

Christian literature, which prepares the further development of the Middle Ages, lies outside the scope of our consideration. Here we confine ourselves to a brief indication of a few of the most important phenomena connected with the old literature.

So, the task of reviving Roman literature sets itself in the second half of the 4th century. a circle of aristocrats, grouped around the orator Symmachus (about 350 - 410). Kruzho "to this one, remaining" faithful to the ancient religion, opposes the traditions of the old Roman culture to Christianity, on the one hand, and "barbarism", on the other. The preservation of carefully verified texts by many Roman writers, the creation of comments on them, is one of the results of this mug. But the own literary work of conservative circles is distinguished by ideological hopelessness. Speeches and letters of Symmachus himself, beautifully finished stylistically, are extremely poor in content. Retellings of old authors, pretentious form and verse tricks, school pedantry and symbolic-allegorical fantasy are characteristic features of this literature. Special a type of literary curiosity is represented by “centons” (patchwork dresses): a new work is created by combining poems pulled from different places by a poet (most often Virgil).

From the poets of the IV century. the most significant is Decim Magnus Ausonius (about 310-395), a teacher of grammar and rhetoric in Burdigal (modern Bordeaux) and educator of Emperor Gratian. This master of poetic plaything, who loved to compose “one-line” and “two-line” (or “quatrain”) on the same theme, left several works that are of more than just formal stylistic interest. These include Mose11a, a description of a journey along the Rhine and Moselle with various sketches of pictures of nature, and "Ephemeris", a description of a daytime pastime. Roman patriotism is combined in Ausonius with love for his native province, and in his numerous poems the cultural life of the top of the Gallo-Roman society of the 4th century. receives a variety of reflections. The poet manages to depict family feelings, friendships, secular virtues; more deeply his interests do not penetrate. Ausonius is a Christian, but his eyes are turned mainly to the past, and his works are loaded with all kinds of grammatical, mythological and historical-geographical "scholarship". He knows classical poetry well and tries to directly join the poetic traditions of the 1st - 2nd centuries. n. e. (Martial, poets of Hadrian's time).

Separation of the western part of the empire at the end of the 4th century. returned to Italy its lost political importance. Court poetry with political themes reappears, glorifying the successes of Rome in the fight against the "barbarians". The most talented representative of this poetry on the verge of the 4th and 5th centuries. - Claudius Claudian (died 404), an Alexandrian Greek by birth, a brilliant master of verse, who wrote poems in both languages. Claudian composes poems in honor of the western emperor Honorius and the de facto ruler of the West, Stilicho, and lashes out with sharp mockery against the favorites of the eastern emperor; a passionate invective against the eunuchs and intriguers of the court of Constantinople alternates with excessive praise for the poet's patrons. The unity of the Latin world in its opposition to the Greek empire found in the person of Claudian an eloquent and pathetic spokesman: he glorifies the Roman past and proclaims the eternity of Rome. In terms of pictorial lyricism and richness in the use of the mythological apparatus, Claudian often approaches the manner of Statius. His mythological epic "The Abduction of Proserpina" is distinguished by great grace. Enthusiastic praise of Rome, as the center of world domination, is contained in the poem of Rutilius Namatian, who describes in elegiac verses the author's return from Rome to Gaul in 416.

Many later poems have come down to us in a collection commonly called the Latin Anthology. The collection was apparently compiled in Africa in the 6th century, but contains works from different times. Among them, Venus' All-Night Vigil stands out for its artistic merits: the onset of spring and the feast of the birth of Venus are glorified by the author, for whom personal spring has not yet come. The poem is divided into unequal parts, bordered by the refrain: “Tomorrow, let him love who never loved, and who loved, let him love tomorrow.” Neither the author nor the time of the poem. unknown (maybe 4th century).

Non-church prose also feeds on old traditions. Compiled "panegyrics" on the model of Pliny, biographies of emperors on the model of Suetonius. Of the late prose writers, besides the already named Symmachus, the most interesting are Ammian Marcellinus (about 330 - 400), the last major Roman historian, the successor of Tacitus, and the philosopher Boethius, who was executed in 524 by Theodoric, the author of the treatise “On the consolation delivered by philosophy ".

The development of narrative literature is characteristic. "Acts of Alexander", "Diktis", "Daret" receive Latin processing, which became the source of acquaintance of medieval Europe with these works. Another Latin adventure novel, The History of Apollonius, King of Tyre, was also very popular in the Middle Ages, developing a story about a family scattered around the world and reunited. Apollonius is haunted by misfortune. He has to save himself from King Antiochus, whose incestuous relationship with his daughter he guessed from her riddles; the wife of Apollonius, the Cyrenian princess, dies during a sea voyage, and the box with her body is immersed in water; a newborn daughter, left to be brought up by unworthy people, is in mortal danger and is considered dead, but in reality ends up in the house of a pimp. Everything ends happily, of course. The kingdom of Antiochus passes after his death to Apollonius; the box with the body of his wife washed up on land, her death turned out to be imaginary, and the doctor brought her back to life; the daughter remained pure, and Apollonius, having already reached a state of complete despair, recognizes his daughter in the singer who was rudely repulsed by him and then finds his wife in the position of priestess of Diana of Ephesus. Vice is punished, and all virtuous characters are rewarded. The plot of the "History of Apollonius" served as material for the tragedy "Pericles, Prince of Tyre" attributed to Shakespeare.

The collapse of the Western Empire, the barbarian conquests and the transition of ancient society into feudal society complete the process of fading old Roman literature. On the verge of VI - VII centuries. it is already dead, and its literary forms are only partially transformed into the genres of medieval Latin literature. But the needs of the school and technology required the preservation of ancient monuments. In the monasteries, which are now becoming centers of education, work is underway to rewrite the texts of old Roman writers; especially significant in this regard is the initiative of Cassiodorus (born about 480), a prominent statesman of Theodoric's time. Entering into the everyday life of school and monastic life, especially from the time of the Carolingians, the correspondence of Roman texts preserved them until the time when they again became powerful factors in the cultural life of Europe, until the Renaissance.

Scientists have found in the Byzantine chronicles for 536-540 years of our era references to the closing of the Sun by a "black cloud". This "blackout", according to the chronicler Procopius of Caesarea and other chroniclers, lasted several months. It was with this celestial phenomenon that other cataclysms of that time were associated, such as crop failures, famine, political unrest and the epidemic of the Justinian plague.

Death "black" and "red"

The so-called Plague of Justinian was the world's first recorded plague pandemic. It got its name because it began during the reign of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I and covered almost the entire civilized world. However, separate plague epidemics broke out after that for centuries - from 541 to 750.

Researchers believe that the source of the plague appeared in Ethiopia or Egypt, from where, through trade channels, along with a cargo of grain, infected rats and fleas “arrived” in Constantinople. From there, the epidemic spread throughout Byzantium, and then spread to neighboring countries ... By the end of 654, it reached North Africa, covered all of Europe, Central and South Asia and Arabia.

In Byzantium, the pandemic reached its peak by 544. If you believe the chronicles, only in Constantinople, up to 5 thousand people died from the plague every day, and sometimes the death rate reached 10 thousand people a day ... 40 percent of the city's population was destroyed.

In the East, about 100 million people died from the plague, in Europe - about 25 million. Irish sources speak of the crom conaill ("Red Death"), which in 549-550 caused the death of many saints and monarchs. So, it was from her that the Welsh king Gwynedd Maelgun and Saint Finnian of Clonard died ...

If desired, the prophecy of these events can be found in the Bible. Here is what is said in the ninth chapter of the Revelation of John the Theologian:

“She opened the well of the abyss, and the smoke from the well came out like smoke from a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened because of the smoke from the well…

Thus I saw in a vision horses and on them riders, who had armor of fire, hyacinth and brimstone on them; the heads of the horses are like the heads of lions, and fire, smoke and brimstone came out of their mouths ... From these three ulcers, from the fire, smoke and sulfur coming out of their mouths, a third of the people died ... "

Volcanic Horror

What happened? Scientists believe that the cause of the solar dimming was volcanic eruptions, traces of which were found in the ice of Greenland and Antarctica.

“Each of these eruptions, which took place in 536 and 540, must have had a profound effect on the life of civilizations at that time, and their effect was enhanced by the fact that they occurred with an interval of only four years,” comments Kruger. “Until we we know which volcanoes were responsible for this, but we have several candidates for this role in Central and North America, as well as Indonesia."

Presumably, the volcanoes threw a large amount of ash into the atmosphere, which caused the so-called "volcanic winter". Something similar, only on a local scale, happened in 1815 after the explosion of the Indonesian Mount Tambora.

Ice and sulfur

Krueger and her colleagues found support for the "volcanic" hypothesis by analyzing the records of the sixth century and examining samples of Greenland and Antarctic ice that formed in that era.

It turned out that these ice fragments contain sulfur and other compounds that are present in large quantities in volcanic gases and ash. Thus, scientists managed to build a climate model that made it possible to reconstruct the events of the late 530s.

It turned out that the consequences of the climate cataclysm were much more serious than expected. The combined force of the eruptions of the two volcanoes was the highest in the last 1200 years.

As a result, the average temperature on Earth dropped by two degrees Celsius for several years, but the northern hemisphere was most affected by climate change. Scandinavia, the Mediterranean coast, the Middle East and North Africa were "affected".

Both the events described in the chronicles and the data of excavations in the north of Europe and Africa fit quite well into this theory. According to researchers from the Kruger group, the "apocalypse" of the sixth century was "provoked" by volcanoes. And there is no guarantee that it won't happen again...