98 PHILO'S POLITICSThe notion that the king was the chief priest is founded in Pythago
rean thought upon the king's divinity. The term divinity had of course
a great range of meaning in antiquity, and certainly no one thought, in
calling the king "god," that he was actually the supreme Being. To the
Pythagoreans the king's divinity consisted in his being a sort of demi
god, or as one ancient statement puts it:The Pythagoreans posited between God and the human race a distinct third
class, his august majesty the king, or the Sage, since Homer first put the king
between gods and men, and represented the Sage as preceding the king in
honor.^66
Delatte is certainly right in saying that this is an expansion of a concep
tion which Iamblichus^67 reports from Aristotle:
Aristode records in the treatise on the Pythagoreans that, in their very secret
teachings, they observed some such distinctions as follow: of the reasoning
animal there is God as one sort, man as another, and a third which is of the
sort represented by Pythagoras.
The following quotation from Ecphantus, which I have hitherto
overlooked, is an excellent statement of what the divinity of the king
meant to Pythagoreans:
Upon earth men are something exiled, a type of existence much inferior to
the purer nature and made heavy with much earth. Accordingly men would
scarcely have been elevated from the mother [Earth?] unless a divine form,
something breathed into the pitiable animal, had bound it with the more
exalted part, indicating the holy aspect of the begetter, since it is impossible
for that aspect itself to be seen. Man has the highest nature of anything on
earth, but more godlike is the king who claims the lion's share in that more
exalted part of our common nature. He is like the others with respect to his
tabernacle (CKCCVOC), since he has come into being out of the same material;
but he was made by the supreme Craftsman, who, in fabricating the king,
used Himself as the archetype.^68... Oh that it had been possible to take
from human nature the necessity of any obedience. For this [necessity] is a
remnant of that earthly meanness according to which anything animate is
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- Schol. in Homer, II. A, 340: b. From Delatte, ttudes sur la litterature Pythagoricienne,
120 f. (See Dindorf, Scholia Graeca in Horn. II., Ill, 55.) - De Pythagorica Vita, VI, 31. 68. There is certainly a hiatus in the text here.