An ethical treatise that travelled under the name of Tarentum’s Pythagorean statesman
A Pythagorean Text Under a Borrowed Name
On Moral Education is a Greek prose treatise belonging to the body of writings that circulated in antiquity under the name of Archytas of Tarentum, the Pythagorean philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and civic leader. It is not the work of the historical Archytas. Like the other treatises attached to his name, it is pseudepigraphic: Pythagorean in doctrine, but composed well after the philosopher’s own lifetime. It is among the texts collected in modern scholarship as the writings of “Pseudo-Archytas.”
The date of this literature is genuinely unsettled. Scholarly proposals for the various Pseudo-Archytas treatises range across several centuries — from as early as the fourth century BC in one reckoning to the first century BC in others — and different investigators date individual works differently. No single date can be assigned to the group as a whole, and the treatise on moral education shares in that general uncertainty.
The Ethical Pair Within the Corpus
On Moral Education does not stand alone. The corpus transmitted under Archytas’s name divides broadly into works on logic and on cosmology, on the one hand, and ethical works on the other, and this treatise belongs to the ethical side, where it is paired with a companion piece On the Good and Happy Man. The two are treated together as a unit, and were edited together in Holger Thesleff’s collection of Hellenistic Pythagorean texts.
The company the treatise keeps is instructive. The logical work in the corpus engages Aristotle’s ten categories and offers a definition of time as the number of a certain motion, or more broadly as the interval of the nature of the Whole. The cosmological work interprets the two Philolaic principles, the Limit and the Unlimited, in Aristotelian terms as Form and Matter, joined by a third principle, God. Against this background the ethical pair stands apart as practical rather than doctrinal: one treatise takes up the end of human life, the good and happy man, and the other takes up the formation that leads to it. The titles mark out the two halves of a single concern — the goal, and the education by which character is shaped toward it.
The Reputation Behind the Attribution
The choice of Archytas as the name to write under was not incidental to the subject. The historical Archytas was remembered in antiquity above all for the ethical side of his Pythagoreanism. Cicero, in the Tusculan Disputations, reports an exposition attributed to him holding that no gift has been given to humankind more ruinous than pleasure, toward which appetite moves without measure or reflection. Other testimony to his life stresses his command over his passions, anger in particular.
A related strand of the tradition treats calculation itself as an ethical instrument: Archytas is reported to have held that the art of reckoning, once discovered, put an end to discord and increased concord, replacing rivalry with equality and settling men’s dealings with one another. Ethical teaching of this kind, Practical and concerned with conduct, is exactly the territory the treatises on the good man and on moral education occupy.
Transmission of the Text
A work bearing this title is recorded among the spurious treatises quoted by Stobaeus, the anthologist to whom much of the surviving evidence for these writings is owed. It should not be confused with the separate treatise On the Education of Children, which is cited by Philostratus in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana and belongs to a different entry in the same list of apocryphal works. The text of On Moral Education, together with On the Good and Happy Man, is available in Thesleff’s edition of the Pythagorean texts of the Hellenistic period.
