under it, changing drastically several times between emanationist religion and
skepticism. The epistemological sharpness of the Platonic dialogues which
moderns admire is a selective interpretation, and by no means the dominant
one in the networks that succeeded Plato.
It is crucial to pursue these networks throughout antiquity, and not only
for the sake of contrast, of highlighting the peaks against the valleys, and
because of the premonition that the Hellenistic era better holds up the mirror
to our own times than does the Golden Age of the founders. The essence of
philosophical creativity lies not in the genius of individuals but in the structural
realignments which take place under the law of small numbers. Here we
confront an unanswered question: If expansion and contraction in the number
of intellectual lineages structure the pattern of creativity, what explains the
existence of the lineages themselves?
Schools of thought, grounded in intergenerational network lineages, are
best able to reproduce themselves when they are based in organizations with
material property and a hierarchy of offices. Shifts in this hard organizational
backbone set off the realignments which in turn structure intellectual space
under the law of small numbers. To demonstrate, let us take an overview of
the pattern of organized schools across the entire Greco-Roman period (see
Figure 3.3).
The first organized school in Greece was the Pythagorean brotherhood.
This was a secret society, with internal ranks and religious practices (DSB,
1981: 11:219–220; Guthrie, 1961–1982: 1:173–181; Burkert, 1972). It also
had a material reality, with its own buildings, such as the citadels in Crotona,
Metapontum, and Locri in southern Italy (see Map 1). In this early phase,
Pythagoras’ own active lifetime (around 530–520 b.c.e.) and the next two
generations, the brotherhood was explicitly political, ruling with the support
of, and probably drawing membership from, the local aristocracy. The demo-
cratic rebellion which swept Magna Graecia around 450 b.c.e. burned their
meetinghouses. The Pythagoreans withdrew to Tarentum, which was still held
under Archytas’ leadership when Plato visited him around 390 and again in
365 (DSB, 1981: 11:24–29). Others returned to the Greek mainland, where
in Plato’s day there was a Pythagorean center in Phlius, a small town in the
Peloponnesus. In the late 400s Pythagoreans were out of politics and circulating
in general intellectual life; Philolaus at Thebes was reputed to have published
their secret doctrines (Guthrie, 1961–1982: 1:155).^7 The major intellectual
innovations of the school, especially its discoveries in mathematics, apparently
took place during this generation. By 350 the school had disappeared.
Around 470 another organized school seems to have existed in Abdera,
comprising a succession of teachers from Leucippus and Democritus onwards
(Guthrie, 1961–1982: 2:382). This too seems to have been more of a ritual90 •^ The Skeleton of Theory