Chapter 1.
PYTHAGORAS (c. 582-500 B.C.)
Having now completed our
account of the philosophy of Ionia starting with Thales, as well
as of its chief representatives, let us proceed to examine the
philosophy of Italy, which was started by Pythagoras,
1 son of the gem-engraver Mnesarchus, and according to
Hermippus, a Samian, or, according to Aristoxenus, a Tyrrhenian from
one of those islands which the Athenians held after clearing them of
their Tyrrhenian inhabitants. Some indeed say that he was descended
through Euthyphro, Hippasus and Marmacus from Cleonymus, who was
exiled from Phlius, and that, as Marmacus lived in Samos, so
Pythagoras was called a Samian.
[
2]
From Samos he went, it is said, to
Lesbos with an introduction to Pherecydes from his uncle Zoïlus. He
had three silver flagons made and took them as presents to each of
the priests of Egypt. He had brothers, of whom Eunomus was the elder
and Tyrrhenus the second ; he also had a slave, Zamolxis, who is
worshipped, so says Herodotus,
2 by the Getans,
as
Cronos. He was a pupil, as already stated, of Pherecydes of Syros,
after whose death he went to Samos to be the pupil of Hermodamas,
Creophylus's descendant, a man already advanced in years. While
still young, so eager was he for knowledge, he left his own country
and had himself initiated into all the mysteries and rites not only
of Greece but also of foreign countries.
[
3]
Now he was in Egypt when
Polycrates sent him a letter of introduction to Amasis ; he learnt
the Egyptian language, so we learn from Antiphon in his book
On Men of Outstanding Merit, and he also
journeyed among the Chaldaeans and Magi. Then while in Crete he went
down into the cave of Ida with Epimenides ; he also entered the
Egyptian sanctuaries,
3 and
was told their secret lore concerning the gods. After that he
returned to Samos to find his country under the tyranny of
Polycrates ; so he sailed away to Croton in Italy, and there he laid
down a constitution for the Italian Greeks, and he and his followers
were held in great estimation ; for, being nearly three hundred in
number, so well did they govern the state that its constitution was
in effect a true aristocracy (government by the best).
[
4]
This
is what Heraclides of Pontus tells us he used to say about himself :
that he had once been Aethalides and was accounted to be Hermes'
son, and Hermes told him he might choose any gift he liked except
immortality ; so he asked to retain through life and through death a
memory of his experiences. Hence in life he could recall everything,
and when he died he still kept the
same
memories. Afterwards in course of time his soul entered into
Euphorbus and he was wounded by Menelaus. Now Euphorbus used to say
that he had once been Aethalides and obtained this gift from Hermes,
and then he told of the wanderings of his soul, how it migrated
hither and thither, into how many plants and animals it had come,
and all that it underwent in Hades, and all that the other souls
there have to endure.
[
5]
When Euphorbus died, his soul passed into
Hermotimus, and he also, wishing to authenticate the story, went up
to the temple of Apollo at Branchidae, where he identified the
shield which Menelaus, on his voyage home from Troy, had dedicated
to Apollo, so he said : the shield being now so rotten through and
through that the ivory facing only was left. When Hermotimus died,
he became Pyrrhus, a fisherman of Delos, and again he remembered
everything, how he was first Aethalides, then Euphorbus, then
Hermotimus, and then Pyrrhus. But when Pyrrhus died, he became
Pythagoras, and still remembered all the facts mentioned.
[
6]
There are some who insist, absurdly enough, that Pythagoras left
no writings whatever. At all events Heraclitus, the physicist,
4 almost shouts in our ear,
"Pythagoras, son of Mnesarchus, practised inquiry beyond all other
men, and in this selection of his writings made himself a wisdom of
his own, showing much learning but poor workmanship." The occasion
of this remark was the opening words of Pythagoras's treatise
On Nature, namely, "Nay, I swear by the air I
breathe, I swear by the water I drink, I will never suffer censure
on account of this
work." Pythagoras in fact
wrote three books.
On Education, On
Statesmanship, and
On Nature.
[
7]
But the book
which passes as the work of Pythagoras is by Lysis of Tarentum, a
Pythagorean, who fled to Thebes and taught Epaminondas.
5 Heraclides, the son of
Serapion, in his
Epitome of Sotion, says that
he also wrote a poem
On the Universe, and
secondly the
Sacred Poem which begins :
Young men, come reverence in quietude
All these my words
;
thirdly
On the Soul, fourthly
Of Piety, fifthly
Helothales the
Father of Epicharmus of Cos, sixthly
Croton, and other works as well. The same authority
says that the poem
On the Mysteries was written
by Hippasus to defame Pythagoras, and that many others written by
Aston of Croton were ascribed to Pythagoras.
[
8]
Aristoxenus says that
Pythagoras got most of his moral doctrines from the Delphic
priestess Themistoclea. According to Ion of Chios in his
Triagmi he ascribed some poems of his own making to
Orpheus.
6 They further
attribute to him the
Scopiads which begins thus
:
Be not shameless, before any
man.
Sosicrates in his
Successions of
Philosophers says that, when Leon the tyrant of Phlius asked
him who he was, he said, "A philosopher,"
7
and that he compared life to the Great Games, where some went
to
compete for the prize and others went with
wares to sell, but the best as spectators ; for similarly, in life,
some grow up with servile natures, greedy for fame and gain, but the
philosopher seeks for truth. Thus much for this part of the
subject.
[
9]
The contents in general of the aforesaid three
treatises of Pythagoras are as follows. He forbids us to pray for
ourselves, because we do not know what will help us. Drinking he
calls, in a word, a snare, and he discountenances all excess, saying
that no one should go beyond due proportion either in drinking or in
eating. Of sexual indulgence, too, he says, "Keep to the winter for
sexual pleasures, in summer abstain ; they are less harmful in
autumn and spring, but they are always harmful and not conducive to
health." Asked once when a man should consort with a woman, he
replied, "When you want to lose what strength you have."
[
10]
He
divides man's life into four quarters thus : "Twenty years a boy,
twenty years a youth, twenty years a young man, twenty years an old
man ; and these four periods correspond to the four seasons, the boy
to spring, the youth to summer, the young man to autumn, and the old
man to winter," meaning by youth one not yet grown up and by a young
man a man of mature age. According to Timaeus, he was the first to
say, "Friends have all things in common" and "Friendship is
equality" ; indeed, his disciples did put all their possessions into
one common stock. For five whole years they had to keep silence,
merely listening to his discourses without seeing him,
8 until they passed an examination, and
thenceforward they were admitted to his house and allowed to see
him. They would never
use coffins of cypress,
because the sceptre of Zeus was made from it, so we are informed by
Hermippus in his second book
On Pythagoras.
[
11]
Indeed, his bearing is said to have been most dignified, and his
disciples held the opinion about him that he was Apollo come down
from the far north. There is a story that once, when he was
disrobed, his thigh was seen to be of gold ; and when he crossed the
river Nessus, quite a number of people said they heard it welcome
him. According to Timaeus in the tenth book of his
History, he remarked that the consorts of men bore
divine names, being called first Virgins, then Brides, and then
Mothers.
9 He it was
who brought geometry to perfection, while it was Moeris who first
discovered the beginnings of the elements of geometry : Anticlides
in his second book
On Alexander10 affirms
this,
[
12]
and further that Pythagoras spent most of his time upon the
arithmetical aspect of geometry ; he also discovered the musical
intervals on the monochord. Nor did he neglect even medicine. We are
told by Apollodorus the calculator that he offered a sacrifice of
oxen on finding that in a right-angled triangle the square on the
hypotenuse is equal to the squares on the sides containing the right
angle. And there is an epigram running as follows
11 :
What time
Pythagoras that famed figure found,
For which the noble
offering he brought.
He is also said to have been the first
to diet athletes on meat, trying first with Eurymenes
12-- so we learn
from Favorinus in the third book of his
Memorabilia--whereas in former times they had
trained on dried figs, on butter,
13 and even on wheatmeal, as we are told by the same
Favorinus in the eighth book of his
Miscellaneous
History.
[
13]
Some say it was a certain trainer named Pythagoras who
instituted this diet,
14 and not our
Pythagoras, who forbade even the killing, let alone the eating, of
animals which share with us the privilege of having a soul. This was
the excuse put forward ; but his real reason for forbidding animal
diet was to practise people and accustom them to simplicity of life,
so that they could live on things easily procurable, spreading their
tables with uncooked foods and drinking pure water only, for this
was the way to a healthy body and a keen mind. Of course the only
altar at which he worshipped was that of Apollo the Giver of Life,
behind the Altar of Horns at Delos, for thereon were placed flour
and meal and cakes, without the use of fire, and there was no animal
victim, as we are told by Aristotle in his
Constitution of Delos.
[
14]
He was the first,
they say, to declare that the soul, bound now in this creature, now
in that, thus goes on a round ordained of necessity. He too,
according to Aristoxenus the musician, was the first to introduce
weights and measures into Greece. It was he who first declared that
the Evening and Morning Stars are the same, as Parmenides maintains.
15 So
greatly was he admired that his disciples used to be called
"prophets to declare the voice of God," besides which he himself
says in a written work that "after two hundred and seven years in
Hades he has returned to the land of the living." Thus it was that
they remained his staunch adherents,
and men
came to hear his words from afar, among them Lucanians, Peucetians,
Messapians and Romans.
[
15]
Down to the time of Philolaus it was
not possible to acquire knowledge of any Pythagorean doctrine, and
Philolaus alone brought out those three celebrated books which Plato
sent a hundred minas to purchase. Not less than six hundred persons
went to his evening lectures ; and those who were privileged to see
him wrote to their friends congratulating themselves on a great
piece of good fortune. Moreover, the Metapontines named his house
the Temple of Demeter and his porch the Museum, so we learn from
Favorinus in his
Miscellaneous History.16 And the rest of the
Pythagoreans used to say that not all his doctrines were for all men
to hear, our authority for this being Aristoxenus in the tenth book
of his
Rules of Pedagogy,
[
16]
where we are also
told that one of the school, Xenophilus by name, asked by some one
how he could best educate his son, replied, "By making him the
citizen of a well-governed state." Throughout Italy Pythagoras made
many into good men and true, men too of note like the lawgivers
Zaleucus and Charondas ; for he had a great gift for friendship, and
especially, when he found his own watchwords adopted by anyone, he
would immediately take to that man and make a friend of him.
[
17]
The following were his watchwords or precepts : don't stir the
fire with a knife, don't step over the beam of a balance, don't sit
down on your bushel,
17 don't eat your heart, don't help a man off with a
load but help him on, always roll your bed-clothes up, don't put
God's image on the circle of a ring, don't leave the pan's imprint
on the ashes, don't wipe up
a mess with a
torch, don't commit a nuisance towards the sun, don't walk the
highway, don't shake hands too eagerly, don't have swallows under
your own roof, don't keep birds with hooked claws, don't make water
on nor stand upon your nail-and hair-trimmings, turn the sharp blade
away, when you go abroad don't turn round at the frontier.
[
18]
This is what they meant. Don't stir the fire with a knife : don't
stir the passions or the swelling pride of the great. Don't step
over the beam of a balance : don't overstep the bounds of equity and
justice. Don't sit down on your bushel : have the same care of
to-day and the future, a bushel being the day's ration. By not
eating your heart he meant not wasting your life in troubles and
pains. By saying do not turn round when you go abroad, he meant to
advise those who are departing this life not to set their hearts'
desire on living nor to be too much attracted by the pleasures of
this life. The explanations of the rest are similar and would take
too long to set out.
[
19]
Above all, he forbade as food red mullet
and blacktail, and he enjoined abstinence from the hearts of animals
and from beans, and sometimes, according to Aristotle, even from
paunch and gurnard. Some say that he contented himself with just
some honey or a honeycomb or bread, never touching wine in the
daytime, and with greens boiled or raw for dainties, and fish but
rarely. His robe was white and spotless, his quilts of white wool,
for linen had not yet reached those parts. He was never known to
over-eat, to behave loosely, or to be drunk.
[
20]
He would avoid laughter
and all pandering to tastes such as in-
sulting
jests and vulgar tales. He would punish neither slave nor free man
in anger. Admonition he used to call "setting right." He used to
practise divination by sounds or voices and by auguries, never by
burnt-offerings, beyond frankincense. The offerings he made were
always inanimate ; though some say that he would offer cocks,
sucking goats and porkers, as they are called, but lambs never. However, Aristoxenus has it that he consented to the eating of all
other animals, and only abstained from ploughing oxen and rams.
[
21]
The same authority, as we have seen, asserts that Pythagoras took
his doctrines from the Delphic priestess Themistoclea. Hieronymus,
however, says that, when he had descended into Hades, he saw the
soul of Hesiod bound fast to a brazen pillar and gibbering, and the
soul of Homer hung on a tree with serpents writhing about it, this
being their punishment for what they had said about the gods ; he
also saw under torture those who would not remain faithful to their
wives. This, says our authority, is why he was honoured by the
people of Croton. Aristippus of Cyrene affirms in his work
On the Physicists that he was named Pythagoras
because he uttered the truth as infallibly as did the Pythian
oracle.
18
[
22]
He is said to have advised his
disciples as follows : Always to say on entering their own doors
:
Where did I trespass? What did I achieve?
And
unfulfilled what duties did I leave?
Not to let victims be
brought for sacrifice to the gods, and to worship only at the altar
unstained with blood. Not to call the gods to witness, man's duty
being rather to strive to make his own word carry
conviction. To honour their elders, on the principle that
precedence in time gives a greater title to respect ; for as in the
world sunrise comes before sunset, so in human life the beginning
before the end, and in all organic life birth precedes death.
[
23]
And he
further bade them to honour gods before demi-gods, heroes before
men, and first among men their parents ; and so to behave one to
another as not to make friends into enemies, but to turn enemies
into friends. To deem nothing their own. To support the law, to wage
war on lawlessness. Never to kill or injure trees that are not wild,
nor even any animal that does not injure man. That it is seemly and
advisable neither to give way to unbridled laughter nor to wear
sullen looks. To avoid excess of flesh, on a journey to let exertion
and slackening alternate, to train the memory, in wrath to restrain
hand and tongue, to respect all divination,
[
24]
to sing to the lyre and
by hymns to show due gratitude to gods and to good men. To abstain
from beans because they are flatulent and partake most of the breath
of life ; and besides, it is better for the stomach if they are not
taken, and this again will make our dreams in sleep smooth and
untroubled.
Alexander in his
Successions of
Philosophers says that he found in the Pythagorean memoirs the
following tenets as well.
19
[
25]
The principle of all things is the
monad or unit ; arising from this monad the
undefined dyad or two serves as material substratum to the monad,
which is cause ; from the monad and the undefined dyad spring
numbers ; from numbers, points ; from points, lines ; from lines,
plane figures ; from plane figures, solid figures ; from solid
figures, sensible bodies, the elements of which are four, fire,
water, earth and air; these elements interchange and turn into one
another completely, and combine to produce a universe animate,
intelligent, spherical, with the earth at its centre, the earth
itself too being spherical and inhabited round about.
[
26]
There are also
antipodes, and our "down" is their "up." Light and darkness have
equal part
20 in the universe, so have hot and cold, and dry
and moist ; and of these, if hot preponderates, we have summer; if
cold, winter; if dry, spring; if moist, late autumn. If all are in
equilibrium, we have the best periods of the year, of which the
freshness of spring constitutes the healthy season, and the decay of
late autumn the unhealthy. So too, in the day, freshness belongs to
the morning, and decay to the evening, which is therefore more
unhealthy. The air about the earth is stagnant and unwholesome, and
all within it is mortal; but the uppermost air is ever-moved and
pure and healthy, and all within it is immortal and consequently
divine.
[
27]
The sun, the moon, and the other stars are gods; for, in
them, there is a preponderance of heat, and heat is the cause of
life. The moon is illumined by the sun. Gods and men are akin,
inasmuch as man partakes of heat ; therefore God takes thought for
man. Fate is the cause of things being thus ordered both as a whole
and separately. The sun's ray penetrates through the
aether, whether cold or dense--the air they call cold
aether, and the sea and moisture dense aether --and this ray
descends even to the depths and for this reason quickens all things.
[
28]
All things live which partake of heat--this is why plants are living
things --but all have not soul, which is a detached part of aether,
partly the hot and partly the cold, for it partakes of cold aether
too. Soul is distinct from life; it is immortal, since that from
which it is detached is immortal. Living creatures are reproduced
from one another by germination; there is no such thing as
spontaneous generation from earth. The germ is a clot of brain
containing hot vapour within it; and this, when brought to the womb,
throws out, from the brain, ichor, fluid and blood, whence are
formed flesh, sinews, bones, hairs, and the whole of the body, while
soul and sense come from the vapour within.
[
29]
First congealing in
about forty days, it receives form and, according to the ratios of
"harmony," in seven, nine, or at the most ten, months, the mature
child is brought forth. It has in it all the relations constituting
life, and these, forming a continuous series, keep it together
according to the ratios of harmony, each appearing at regulated
intervals. Sense generally, and sight in particular, is a certain
unusually hot vapour. This is why it is said to see through air and
water, because the hot aether is resisted by the cold; for, if the
vapour in the eyes had been cold, it would have been dissipated on
meeting the air, its like. As it is, in certain [lines] he calls the
eyes the portals of
the sun. His conclusion is
the same with regard to hearing and the other senses.
[
30]
The
soul of man, he says, is divided into three parts, intelligence,
reason, and passion. Intelligence and passion are possessed by other
animals as well, but reason by man alone. The seat of the soul
extends from the heart to the brain; the part of it which is in the
heart is passion, while the parts located in the brain are reason
and intelligence. The senses are distillations from these. Reason is
immortal, all else mortal. The soul draws nourishment from the
blood; the faculties
21 of the
soul are winds, for they as well as the soul are invisible, just as
the aether is invisible.
[
31]
The veins, arteries, and sinews are the
bonds of the soul. But when it is strong and settled down into
itself, reasonings and deeds become its bonds. When cast out upon
the earth, it wanders in the air like the body. Hermes is the
steward of souls, and for that reason is called Hermes the Escorter,
Hermes the Keeper of the Gate, and Hermes of the Underworld, since
it is he who brings in the souls from their bodies both by land and
sea ; and the pure are taken into the uppermost region, but the
impure are not permitted to approach the pure or each other, but are
bound by the Furies in bonds unbreakable.
[
32]
The whole air is full of
souls which are called genii
22 or heroes; these are they who send men dreams and
signs of future disease and health, and not to men alone, but to
sheep also and cattle as well; and it is to them
that purifications and lustrations, all divination, omens and the
like, have reference. The most momentous thing in human life is the
art of winning the soul to good or to evil. Blest are the men who
acquire a good soul; [if it be bad] they can never be at rest, nor
ever keep the same course two days together.
[
33]
Right has the
force of an oath, and that is why Zeus is called the God of Oaths.
Virtue is harmony, and so are health and all good and God himself;
this is why they say that all things are constructed according to
the laws of harmony. The love of friends is just concord and
equality. We should not pay equal worship to gods and heroes, but to
the gods always, with reverent silence, in white robes, and after
purification, to the heroes only from midday onwards. Purification
is by cleansing, baptism and lustration, and by keeping clean from
all deaths and births and all pollution, and abstaining from meat
and flesh of animals that have died, mullets, gurnards, eggs and
egg-sprung animals, beans, and the other abstinences prescribed by
those who perform mystic rites in the temples.
[
34]
According to
Aristotle in his work
On the Pythagoreans,
Pythagoras counselled abstinence from beans either because they are
like the genitals, or because they are like the gates of Hades . . .
as being alone unjointed, or because they are injurious, or because
they are like the form of the universe, or because they belong to
oligarchy, since they are used in election by lot. He bade his
disciples not to pick up fallen crumbs, either in order to accustom
them not to eat immoderately, or because connected with a person's
death; nay, even, according to Aristo-
phanes,
crumbs belong to the heroes, for in his
Heroes
he says
23:
Nor taste ye of what falls
beneath the board !
Another of his precepts was not to
eat white cocks, as being sacred to the Month and wearing suppliant
garb--now supplication ranked with things good-- sacred to the Month
because they announce the time of day ; and again white represents
the nature of the good, black the nature of evil. Not to touch such
fish as were sacred; for it is not right that gods and men should be
allotted the same things, any more than free men and slaves. Not to
break bread ; for once friends used to meet over one loaf,
[
35]
as the
barbarians do even to this day ; and you should not divide bread
which brings them together; some give as the explanation of this
that it has reference to the judgement of the dead in Hades, others
that bread makes cowards in war, others again that it is from it
that the whole world begins.
24
He held that the
most beautiful figure is the sphere among solids, and the circle
among plane figures. Old age may be compared to everything that is
decreasing, while youth is one with increase. Health means
retention of the form, disease its destruction. Of salt he said it
should be brought to table to remind us of what is right; for salt
preserves whatever it finds, and it arises from the purest sources,
sun and sea.
[
36]
This is what Alexander says that he found in the
Pythagorean memoirs.
25 What follows is
Aristotle's.
But Pythagoras's great dignity not even
Timon
overlooked, who, although he digs at him
in his
Silli,26
speaks of
Pythagoras, inclined to witching works and
ways,
Man-snarer, fond of noble periphrase.
Xenophanes
27 confirms the statement
about his having been different people at different times in the
elegiacs beginning :
Now other thoughts,
another path, I show.
What he says of him is as follows
:
They say that, passing a belaboured whelp,
He, full
of pity, spake these words of dole :
"Stay, smite not ! 'Tis
a friend, a human soul ;
I knew him straight whenas I heard
him yelp !"
[
37]
Thus Xenophanes. But Cratinus also lampooned him
both in the
Pythagorizing Woman and also in
The Tarentines, where we read
28:
They are wont,
If haply they a foreigner do find,
To hold a cross-examination
Of doctrines' worth, to
trouble and confound him
With terms, equations, and
antitheses
Brain-bung'd with magnitudes and periphrases.
Again, Mnesimachus in the
Alcmaeon29:
To Loxias we sacrifice : Pythagoras his rite,
Of nothing
that is animate we ever take a bite.
[
38]
And Aristophon in the
Pythagorist30:
a. He told how he
travelled in Hades and looked on the dwellers below,
How each
of them lives, but how different by far from the lives of the
dead
Were the lives of the Pythagoreans, for these alone, so
he said,
Were suffered to dine with King Pluto,
which was for their piety's sake.
b. What an ill-tempered god
for whom such swine, such creatures good company make ;
and
in the same later :
Their food is just greens, and to wet it
pure water is all that they drink ;
And the want of a bath,
and the vermin, and their old threadbare coats so do stink
That none of the rest will come near them.
[
39]
Pythagoras met
his death in this wise.
31 As he sat one day among his acquaintances at the
house of Milo, it chanced that the house was set ablaze out of
jealousy by one of the people who were not accounted worthy of
admittance to his presence, though some say it was the work of the
inhabitants of Croton anxious to safeguard themselves against the
setting-up of a tyranny. Pythagoras was caught as he tried to
escape; he got as far as a certain field of beans, where he stopped,
saying he would be captured rather than cross it, and be killed
rather than prate about his doctrines; and so his pursuers cut his
throat.
32 So also
were murdered
more than half of his disciples,
to the number of forty or thereabouts; but a very few escaped,
including Archippus of Tarentum and Lysis, already mentioned.
[
40]
Dicaearchus, however, says that Pythagoras died a fugitive in the
temple of the Muses at Metapontum after forty days' starvation.
Heraclides, in his
Epitome of the Lives of
Satyrus, says that, after burying Pherecydes at Delos, he
returned to Italy and, when he found Cylon of Croton giving a
luxurious banquet to all and sundry, retired to Metapontum to end
his days there by starvation, having no wish to live longer. On the
other hand, Hermippus relates that, when the men of Agrigentum and
Syracuse were at war, Pythagoras and his disciples went out and
fought in the van of the army of the Agrigentines, and, their line
being turned, he was killed by the Syracusans as he was trying to
avoid the beanfield; the rest, about thirty-five in number, were
burned at the stake in Tarentum for trying to set up a government in
opposition to those in power.
[
41]
Hermippus gives another
anecdote. Pythagoras, on coming to Italy, made a subterranean
dwelling and enjoined on his mother to mark and record all that
passed, and at what hour, and to send her notes down to him until he
should ascend. She did so. Pythagoras some time afterwards came up
withered and looking like a skeleton, then went into the assembly
and declared he had been down to Hades, and even read out his
experiences to them. They were so affected that they wept and wailed
and looked upon him as divine, going so far as to send
their wives to him in hopes that they would learn some
of his doctrines; and so they were called Pythagorean women. Thus
far Hermippus.
[
42]
Pythagoras had a wife, Theano by name,
daughter of Brontinus of Croton, though some call her Brontinus's
wife and Pythagoras's pupil. He had a daughter Damo, according to
the letter of Lysis to Hippasus, which says of him, "I am told by
many that you discourse publicly, a thing which Pythagoras deemed
unworthy, for certain it is that, when he entrusted his daughter
Damo with the custody of his memoirs, he solemnly charged her never
to give them to anyone outside his house. And, although she could
have sold the writings for a large sum of money, she would not, but
reckoned poverty and her father's solemn injunctions more precious
than gold, for all that she was a woman."
[
43]
They also had a son
Telauges, who succeeded his father and, according to some, was
Empedocles' instructor. At all events Hippobotus makes Empedocles
say
33:
Telauges, famed
Son
of Theano and Pythagoras.
Telauges wrote nothing, so far as
we know, but his mother Theano wrote a few things. Further, a story
is told that being asked how many days it was before a woman becomes
pure after intercourse, she replied, "With her own husband at once,
with another man never." And she advised a woman going in to her own
husband to put off her shame with her clothes, and on leaving him to
put it on
again along with them. Asked "Put on
what?" she replied, "What makes me to be called a woman."
[
44]
To
return to Pythagoras. According to Heraclides, the son of Serapion,
he was eighty years old when he died, and this agrees with his own
description of the life of man, though most authorities say he was
ninety. And there are jesting lines of my own upon him as
follows
34:
Not thou alone from all things animate Didst
keep, Pythagoras. All food is dead When boil'd and bak'd and
salt-besprinkle-èd;
For then it surely is inanimate.
Again
35:
So wise was wise Pythagoras that he Would touch
no meats, but called it impious, Bade others eat. Good wisdom : not
for us
To do the wrong; let others impious be.
[
45]
And
again
36:
If thou wouldst know the mind of old Pythagoras, Look on
Euphorbus' buckler and its boss.
He says "I've lived before."
If, when he says he was, He was not, he was no-one when he was.
And again, of the manner of his death
37:
Woe! Woe!
Whence, Pythagoras, this deep reverence for beans? Why did he fall
in the midst of his disciples? A bean-field there was he durst not
cross; sooner than trample on it, he endured to be slain at the
cross-roads by the men of Acragas.
He flourished in the 60th
Olympiad
38 and his
school
lasted until the ninth or tenth generation.
[
46]
For the last of the
Pythagoreans, whom Aristoxenus in his time saw, were Xenophilus from
the Thracian Chalcidice, Phanton of Phlius, and Echecrates, Diocles
and Polymnastus, also of Phlius, who were pupils of Philolaus and
Eurytus of Tarentum.
There were four men of the name of
Pythagoras living about the same time and at no great distance from
one another : (1) of Croton, a man with tyrannical leanings ; (2) of
Phlius, an athlete, some say a trainer ; (3) of Zacynthus ; (4) our
subject, who discovered the secrets of philosophy [and taught them],
and to whom was applied the phrase, "The Master said" (
Ipse dixit), which passed into a proverb of
ordinary life.
[
47]
Some say there was also another Pythagoras, a
sculptor of Rhegium, who is thought to have been the first to aim at
rhythm and symmetry ; another a sculptor of Samos ; another a bad
orator ; another a doctor who wrote on hernia and also compiled some
things about Homer ; and yet another who, so we are told by
Dionysius, wrote a history of the Dorian race. Eratosthenes says,
according to what we learn from Favorinus in the eighth book of his
Miscellaneous History, that the last-named was
the first to box scientifically, in the 48th Olympiad,
39 keeping his hair long and wearing a purple
robe ; and that when he was excluded with ridicule from the boys'
contest, he went at once to the men's and won that ;
[
48]
this is
declared by Theaetetus's epigram
40:
Know'st one
Pythagoras, long-haired Pythagoras,
The far-fam'd boxer of
the Samians?
I am Pythagoras ; ask the Elians
What
were my feats, thou'lt not believe the tale.
Favorinus says
that our philosopher used definitions throughout the subject matter
of mathematics ; their use was extended by Socrates and his
disciples, and afterwards by Aristotle and the Stoics.
Further, we are told that he was the first to call the heaven the
universe and the earth spherical,
41 though
Theophrastus says it was Parmenides, and Zeno that it was Hesiod.
[
49]
It is said that Cylon was a rival of Pythagoras, as Antilochus
42 was of Socrates.
Pythagoras the athlete was also the subject of another epigram as
follows
43:
Gone to box with other lads
Is the lad
Pythagoras,
Gone to the games Olympian
Crates' son the
Samian.
The philosopher also wrote the following letter :
Pythagoras to
Anaximenes.
"Even you, O most excellent of men,
were you no better born and famed than Pythagoras, would have risen
and departed from Miletus. But now your ancestral glory has detained
you as it had detained me were I Anaximenes's peer. But if you, the
best men, abandon your cities, then will their good order perish,
and the peril from the Medes will increase.
[
50]
For always to scan the
heavens is not well, but more seemly is it to be provident for
one's
mother country. For I too am not
altogether in my discourses but am found no less in the wars which
the Italians wage with one another."
Having now finished our
account of Pythagoras, we have next to speak of the noteworthy Pythagoreans ; after them will come the philosophers whom some
denominate "sporadic" [
i.e. belonging to no
particular school]; and then, in the next place, we will append the
succession of all those worthy of notice as far as Epicurus, in the
way that we promised. We have already treated of Theano and Telauges
: so now we have first to speak of Empedocles, for some say he was a
pupil of Pythagoras.