This recollection of previous lives, with all their faults and defilements, does more than simply justify the rules of the ascetic life, which, according to the doctrine of the Purifications, ensure the soul's salvation and its escape from the cycle of births. The very effort involved in remembering is itself a "purification," an ascetic discipline. It constitutes a truly spiritual exercise, and there is one indication in Empedocles that allows us to glimpse the form it took and the scope of its effect. This man who pro-claims himself a god among mor.tals pays homage to the excep-tional wisdom of one of his predecessors, a man whose thought, instead of confining itself to the present existep.ce, "encompasses with ease things that are met with in ten, or twenty, lives of men." 55 This is most probably an allusion to Pythagoras, whose sequence of previous lives was legendary. 56The story went that Pythagoras could remember having lived during the Trojan War, in the person of Euphorbos, who was killed by Menelaus. The list of his previous incarnations also included Aithalides, mentioned above, who retained an unwavering memory through life and death. It was claimed that, starting from Aithalides, the gift of anamnesis had been passed on to all the members of the s.eries, right down to Pythagoras. 57 These accounts should be set along-side the regular "memory exercises" of the Pythagorean life. 58 The requirement that all the members of the fraternity recall in the evening all the events of the day had more than the moral value of an examination of conscience .. The effort of remember-ing, if undertaken in an attempt to follow the example of the sect's founder and encompass the soul's story throughout ten or even twenty different lives, would make it possible for the person remembering to learn who he was and to know his own psuche - the daemon that has become incarnate in us.59 According to·Pro-clus, the anamnesis of previous lives constitutes a purification of the soul: to recapture the whole web of its past lives, the soul must liberate itself from the body that fetters it to the present.
— Jean-Pierre Vernant
Vernant is tracking something the Pythagoreans understood with unusual precision: that memory, extended far enough backward, stops being a catalog of events and becomes an encounter with what you actually are. The evening discipline — recall every act of the day, then push further, through previous lives, through the whole span of the soul's incarnate career — is not nostalgia and not therapy. It is the effort to make the daemon visible by tracing the thread it has left through matter.
What is worth sitting with is the directionality. Purification here moves *through* the body's accumulations, not around them. The faults and defilements are not obstacles to be bypassed by ascent; they are the very material the memory must pass through. You cannot know the soul by skipping its degradations. Empedocles' praise of the man who "encompasses with ease things that are met with in ten or twenty lives" is not praise for transcendence — it is praise for comprehensiveness, for the capacity to hold the whole filthy record without flinching.
The modern reader tends to hear "purification" and reach for something cleaner, lighter. But what Vernant's Pythagorean sources describe is a purification that requires maximum contact with the past, not minimum. The soul is learned by recollection, not by escape from what the recollection contains.
Jean-Pierre Vernant·Myth and Thought Among the Greeks·1983