UC Davis

In early modern Spain, the ancient philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras became a potent symbol of desire for harmony in a state coming to grips with its identity, values, and limitations. This Spanish Pythagoras was more than a geometrician associated with the hypotenuse of a triangle, and not simply the cult leader he had been in antiquity: Spanish Pythagoras was a figure both political and moral. In Spanish literature, Pythagoreanism constituted a language with which to challenge systems of oppression. This dissertation examines the Pythagoreanism—from politics to the picaresque—of two books written about a century apart: El diálogo de las transformaciones de Pitágoras (1530) and El siglo pitagórico (1644), books that serve as conceptual bookends of a period of concentrated humanist and philosophical interest in Pythagoras. While Spanish Pythagoras evidences the profound influence of Lucian of Samosata’s The Rooster or the Dream and Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, in the Diálogo and the Siglo he takes on many guises and speaks to a range of controversial subjects. Spanish Pythagoras: denounces the violent expansion of the Hapsburg Monarchy in the Americas and suggests that evangelization is only a pretext for the seizure of precious metals; he calls human beings to live in greater harmony with animals; and insists on the reform of governmental institutions such as the Inquisition. Bad governance, oppression, corruption, and exploitation were cyclical in nature; they moved from person to person and place to place just as Pythagoreanism imagined that the soul transmigrated from body to body. This pervasive movement of evil was a “transmigración de los vicios,” a trasmigration of vices, that could be combatted through the harmoniousness and compassion that the anonymous author of the Diálogos and Enríquez Gómez attributed to Pythagoreanism (Enríquez Gómez 61). The anonymous author of the Diálogo and Enríquez Gómez, in Siglo pitagórico, found in their representations of Pythagoreanism ways to wrestle with the failures of Spanish society and empire, as well as to imagine a different future. This dissertation demonstrates that the Pythagoreanism of the Diálogo and the Siglo pitagórico proposed tools, framed in the language of the transmigration of the soul, to break this cycle. The Pythagoreanism of the Diálogo and the is flexible and mutable, rather than strict and doctrinaire. Theirs is a protean Pythagoreanism.